Is bisexuality becoming more of a thing?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Actually, that’s not a very good thread title; allow me to paraphrase:

It appears to me that bisexual behaviour is becoming more mainstream, visible and accepted; albeit still behind both ‘straightness’ and ‘gayness’ by quite a margin. Do you agree?

I don’t have any data to back this up, just anecdotes by the dozen. Not so long ago, when someone who was ostensibly heterosexual indicated (or implied) a same-sex attraction, it would invoke a strong, automatic and (often) quite vindictive accusation of being gay deep down, being a closeted homosexual or whatever. The concepts of bisexuality, ‘occasional’ homosexual attraction, or people changing sexual orientations throughout their lives were not seriously entertained. Perhaps they are still not hugely to this day, but I think they are more so.

  • An old boss of mine had been married for many year and had two kids. His marriage broke up, and he started a relationship with a guy. It wasn’t like he had been gay the whole time and had only just plucked up the courage to act on it; he just realised one day that he liked this guy and that was that. Around work this was treated with shrugs and 'whatever’s.

  • My (psuedo-)aunt was in an on-off relationship with my uncle for several years. Every now and then she would dump him and run off with a girl, only to return later. At the moment they are separated. It’s an awkward situation, but the fact that she runs off with *girls *was never really an issue for anyone in my family, including the older (and more religious) generations.

  • In a similar vein, a friend of mine’s wife left him and hooked up with a girl. It sucked for him, sure, but the fact that it was with a girl was not really an issue for anyone. She went from ‘married to [him]’ to ‘in a relationship with [her]’ on Facebook without so much as the batting of an online eyelid from anyone.

  • Howard and Raj and Lily and Robinboth have homoerotic elements to their relationships. This is played up for minor comic effect, but is not ‘made a big deal out of’. There is no suggestion that their characters are gay deep down, though; it is more like they have occasional flirtations with homo-eroticism.

  • Come to think of it, there are tonnes of bisexual characters in TV shows.

  • In anonymous corners of the internet, guys seem to identify as ‘bi’ quite often - and can talk quite admiringly and flatteringly of the…uh…masculine form as well as the feminine.

  • I’ve known lots of people, men and women, who - normally in moments of alcohol or other-drug-induced sincerity - have said that they’ve experienced homosexual moments or fantasies in their lives. It seems like such confessions come more freely and with less baggage attached these days - and, crucially, with fewer implications that such things make you ‘gay really’.

Perhaps I am wrong, though. I live in a liberal part of the world, and I have associated with pretty liberal people for most of my life. Maybe what I am seeing is not at all representative of broader social trends.

Maybe I am kidding myself. Perhaps all those people listed above really are gay, and their supposed bisexuality is all an elaborate ruse of semi-disguising their gayness.

Or, maybe we’re heading towards a kind of post-modern sexuality era, where people are open about being attracted to whoever and whatever they feel like at the time, and labels become less important.

Any thoughts?

2

I believe it is more your last point. The more accepted type of relationship becomes accepted the more people will be willing to take part in that type of relationship.

Some people don’t want to ‘buck the system’ and don’t want to be seen as making waves or standing out. However if they don’t stand out when they make a decision they may be more ready to make their decision.

Like you, I have no data or cites, just going off my Truthiness.

3

I think that until about 15 years ago, the only people who were gay were people who had no heterosexual feelings at all. I think most people are somewhere on a continuum, but that includes people on both ends. If you happened to be on the very gay end, you really couldn’t pretend, and you had to come out. One the other hand, anyone with any heterosexuality could live that, even if they also had homosexual feelings. There was so much homophobia-- actually, I need a stronger word than that until the late 70s, being gay really was taboo, the way being a pedophile is, and someone born after 1980 may have trouble understanding just how taboo it was. In the 1970s, the cool, very liberal position was that it was OK to be gay as long as it wasn’t on display.

Anyway, we are finally to the point that it’s OK to admit to gay feelings even if you don’t “have” to. In other words, even people who are capable of functioning as heterosexual are now free to experience their whole sexuality with very little judgment-- yes, there is still some, but compared to twenty-five years ago, it’s a walk in the park.

I don’t think there has been an increase in bisexuality, I just think that people are freer to act on their whole feelings.

4

This is something that has confused me about the change in agenda for the gay rights people… they shifted to the idea that being gay is not a choice, immutable and absolute; the gay people are absolutely gay and the straight people are absolutely straight, and there’s no gray area.

Until you consider all. that. experimentation… there has to be a gray area, or a continuum.

5

Well, Kinsey proposed a continuum a long time ago; I’m not sure how long ago, but it was well before the current acceptability of any kind of expression of gayness, or ideas of homosexuality being inborn.

Also, I think that the people who made up the gay community for the 20th century, when gay rights first became a civil rights issue, being gay was an all-or-nothing proposition. They were people who had to be gay, because they were on the end of the spectrum, and their own experience was that there was no element of choice at all. In fact, one of the breakdowns in communication may have been the fact that for a lot of people in the straight “camp,” there was an element of choice in that there were plenty of people who had chosen to deny a portion of themselves. If it was a small portion, it wasn’t a big deal, and they were at a loss to understand why it was a big deal for other people. If it was a large portion, and they struggled with denying it, yet it was still a portion, and they were able to enjoy heterosexual sex, they may have been resentful of the people who gave up altogether, or afraid of them, because maybe they worried their tenuous grip of heterosexuality could go away.

While I do think that we are all born somewhere on the spectrum, and can choose to an extent how much we embrace or deny fully what we are, I don’t think we can actually change. If you are way toward one end, you can’t slide all the way to the other end.

I’m bisexual. I think I’m pretty near the middle, but the fact is that I’ve had more relationships with men than with women, although I did have one kind of long one with a woman (more than a year, but I was young, so it wasn’t terribly serious, and I wouldn’t have married her if I could). I married a man. That doesn’t make me heterosexual, but I am committed to him, and frankly, not interested in anyone else. No one, man or woman, looks as good to me as he does; otherwise I would not have married him. Sometimes he and I both find a particular actress or something attractive, and we talk about it. When I find a man attractive, he doesn’t like to hear about it, though not because it stirs up any sort of jealousy, but just because he doesn’t think men are attractive, with the exception of once finding a drag queen attractive when he was in drag. I like it about him that he can admit that.

The fact that I made a commitment to behave as heterosexual for essentially the rest of my life (depending on who dies first, I guess), does not mean I became heterosexual, nor, in my mind, that I “chose” heterosexuality. Now, I could have decided at some point that I would only date men, and at that point met my husband; I suppose then you could say I “chose” heterosexuality, but when he and I started going out, I was still open to people of either gender, I just happened to find him.

6

Until recently bi people have described themselves by the relationship they are currently in because of shit they got from both the hetero and homosexual communities if they called themselves bi. If Tom was with Bill then Tom would go along with the gay label and if Tom was with Judy then he would go along with the straight label. Its was just easier than trying to argue about whether bi actually existed.

It’s getting more acceptable in both the gay and straight community to identify as bi so more people are doing so.

7

It was a line of attack directed against the religious arguments. If homosexuality is an innate and immutable trait than discriminating against me on religious grounds is tantamount to saying your god makes broken people and if god makes broken people, what kind of a god is he anyway? Once the cultural shift moved more toward it’s socially unacceptable on an etiquette level to discriminate against gay people, bisexuals have started feeling more free to be visible.
To add onto Rivkah’s comments, if you feel like you could be happy in a straight or gay relationship, it’s easier to not fight the tide and simply find a straight person to marry while those who are 6s had to fight because they had no other choice and I think that sometimes leads to feelings of resentment. Which is not to say that I think bisexuals are freeloaders but historically, I think the gay community has seen them that way and that’s part of why bisexual erasure is considered a thing.