Concept of Bisexaulity

Defining bisexuality is a relatively simple exercise: it is a sexual attraction for members of both the same and the opposite sex. Defining the bisexual individual, however, is a much more difficult matter. Marjorie Garber, in her exhaustive study of the subject, Vice Versa, begins by quoting the two best-known pieces of "common wisdom": "Everyone is bisexual" and "There is no such thing as bisexuality" (1995, p. 16). The difficulty lies in how such attraction is measured and over what period of time. If "bisexual" includes all individuals who have experienced sexual desires for or responses to at least one member of each sex over the course of a lifetime, then this encompasses most human beings and "everyone is bisexual" indeed. If, however, it is limited to those who are currently sexually involved with members of both sexes or to individuals who, given the choice of the labels "heterosexual," "bisexual," or "homosexual," would describe themselves as bisexual, then the group would be extremely small. John Leland reports, "Nobody knows how many bisexuals there are in the coun

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d one of his last writings to be an in-depth rumination on the subject, though he did not get to it before his death. As Leland puts it, "Freud called bisexuality a universal 'disposition': he believed that we all have male and female sides, each heterosexually attracted to people of the opposite gender, but that most of us repress one side. For him, it was exclusive heterosexuality that was 'a problem that needs elucidating'" (1995, p. 47). Wainwright Churchill, writing at the same time at Socarides, expresses a much more open-minded perspective, far more in keeping with Freud's actual thinking, especially on the subject of bisexuality. Churchill discusses "the undisputed fact that from birth on we possess the capacity to respond sexually to any sufficient stimulus, and that therefore we are all potentially bisexual" (1967, p. 50) and later observes, "Complete reversals [of homosexual behavior to heterosexual behavior and vice versa] . . . are far less common later in life than movement toward a bisexual pattern of preferences" (1967, p. 107). Bisexual behavior has been a part of every recorded society in history. John Boswell, in his academically rigorous but controversial study, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, observ
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