Bisexuality

Bisexuality is the romantic attraction, sexual attraction or behavior toward more than one gender. The term is mainly used in the context of human attraction to denote romantic or sexual feelings toward two or more genders.

Bisexuality is one of the three main classifications of sexual orientation, along with a heterosexual and a homosexual orientation, all a part of the heterosexual–homosexual continuum. People who have a distinct but not exclusive sexual preference for one sex over the other may identify themselves as bisexual.

• Heard she bisexual; she fuck what that girl. But boy, oh boy, fucking with me is a whole 'nother world.
  • 50 Cent, "A Baltimore Love Thing" (2005), The Massacre

• Could you imagine wanting to fuck everybody you meet? Think of all the phone numbers you'd accumulate! You might as well just walk around the White Pages under your arm.
  • George Carlin, Playin' With Your Head

• Even though adult homosexuals have fought hard to win rights and liberties... too many people are still scandalized by the mere idea that youth discovering their gay orientation could be given the same liberties and possibilities as straight ones. Whereas the discovery of heterosexual desire is celebrated as the sign that "he's becoming a man" and therefore largely encouraged, without anyone seeing any sort of proselytizing in it, it's a completely different story when it's homosexual desire that's surfacing. Everything happens as if gays and bisexuals under 18 didn't exist, or at least shouldn't exist.’
  • Dr. Michel Dorais, Mort ou fif

• I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality. . . I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
  • Letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (25 March 1898)

• And now, the main thing! As far as I can see, my next work will be called "Human Bisexuality." It will go to the root of the problem and say the last word it may be granted to say--the last and the most profound.
  • Letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (7 August 1901)

• Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts... There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error.
  • John Gagnon, "The Eplicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", 1990

• The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestiongly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors. . . The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artefact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heteorsexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual contiuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.
  • Rolf Gindorf, "Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event, 1977

• Nick Nelson: Mum.
  Sarah Nelson: Mm-hm?
  Nick Nelson: You know Charlie's like my best friend.
  Sarah Nelson: If you're going to ask if he can come along on holiday this year, the answer's no, 'cause I've already booked the ticket.
  Nick Nelson: No, that's, um, that's not what I was gonna say. [stops, hesitates] He's my boyfriend. Charlie's my boyfriend. I... I still like girls, but, um... We... I like boys too. And me and Charlie, we're... We're going out. And I just... wanted you to know.
  Sarah Nelson: Oh, baby. [hugs Nick] Oh, thank you for telling me. I'm sorry if I ever made you feel like you couldn't tell me that. You don't have to say you like girls if you don't.
  Nick Nelson: No, I, um... It's definitely not just girls. It-it's called bisexuality, if you've heard of that.
  Sarah Nelson: [laughs] I have heard of that. I wasn't born in the 18th century. How long've you known?
  Nick Nelson: Well, um, me and Charlie started going out, couple months ago. But I started liking him way before that.
  Sarah Nelson: [hugs Nick] Oh, I love you.
  • Heartstopper (TV series), Season 1, Episode 8 "Boyfriend." Directed by Euros Lyn, written and created by Alice Oseman and based on her webcomic and graphic novel of the same name.

• A decade and a half on, I know the certainty of myself. Bisexual. Sometimes a partner, often a lover, always a friend, refusing to discriminate along gender lines. It keeps my brain ticking over. I'll never get bored. If this is a phase, I don't want it to end.
  • Yasmin Greenhalgh, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World (2009) by Robyn Ochs (editor) & Sarah E. Rowley (editor), Boston: Bisexual Resource Center, paperback 2nd edition, p. 89-90

• *The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species.
  • Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

• Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
  • Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

• It is my opinion that while the word bisexual may have its uses as an adjective, . . . it is not only useless but mendacious when used as a noun.
  • John Malone, Straight Women/Gay Men (1980)

• When you lie with a woman, at least so girls say,
    You shit the same moment you come.
  But what do you do, Polycharmus, I pray,
    When a lovers stiff prick stops your bum?
  • Martial, Epigrams, 9, 67 ("To Polycharmus")
  • The Index Expurgatorius of Martial (1868), p. 67

• The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior. . . we shall not really succeed in discarding the straitjacket of our cultural beliefs about sexual choice if we fail to come to terms with the well-documented, normal human capacity to love members of both sexes.
  • Margaret Mead, Redbook (1975)

• Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality.
  • Kate Millett, Flying (1974)

• I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.
  • Robyn Ochs, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World

• Oh my GOD, you are NOT bisexual! Don't be stupid! I mean, I went to a bar mitzvah once, that doesn't make me Jewish!
  • Lucia, The Opposite of Sex (1998)

• "I have a dick and it gets hard then that's good. I walk down the street and if I see a girl and my dick gets hard that's good and if I see a boy that's good too and same with seeing a chicken. If my dick gets hard and I want to fuck it then that's good. People like to attach labels to themselves, straight, gay, S&M, it's just so simple. It doesn't matter what you do whether its horrible or mainstream or boring, you know what turns you on. So why the big brouhaha?"
  • Jimmy Urine of Mindless Self Indulgence on his sexuality, SuicideGirls Interview

• He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain.
  • Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

• Sex
• Gender
• Heterosexuality
• Homosexuality
• Sexuality

• Encyclopedic article on Bisexuality on Wikipedia
• The dictionary definition of bisexuality on Wiktionary
• Media related to Bisexuality on Wikimedia Commons