up that should be conceptually, or statistically, thought of as bisexual? In other words, does "bisexual" here denote a category of persons who have at one time or another loved, and made love with, members of both sexes? . . . Bisexuality marks the spot where all our questions about eroticism, repression, and social arrangements come to crisis (1995, pp. 367-368).
Newsweek said in a recent cover story, "Bisexuality is the hidden wild card of our erotic culture. It is what disappears when we divide desire into gay and straight, just as millions of Americans of various ethnic origin disappear when we discuss race in terms of black and white" (Leland, 1995, p. 46).
One of the most regularly used attempts to categorize sexuality is what is referred to as the Kinsey scale, published in 1948 by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. It is a seven-point continuum which asks respondents to rate themselves from 0 to 6, according to whether they view themselves as exclusively heterosexual (0), exclusively homosexual (6), or somewhere in between. Leland writes that on this scale "bisexuality was the bridge that held the poles together" (1995, p. 47). Garber sums up the criticism of the scale, which, though it provides a nonjudgmental approach to the subject, "completely ignores questions of social context, cultural practice, . . . erotic intensity, physical activity and emotional involvement, and sexual fantasy. It flattens all sexual encounters (or emotional relationships) into two dimensions" (1995, p. 29). It also assumes that bisexuality belongs somewhere between heterosexuality and homosexuality, which may not necessarily be the case. As Garber observes, "When an interviewer asked Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, coauthor of the Kinsey report, what made someone bisexual, he replied that it was the wrong question. 'You should ask, "Why isn't everybody?"'" (1995, p. 249).
Don Clark writes of the way society and science sometimes look at bi...