Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics. Paula C Rust
with each other when they do. In this model, the true bisexual person is either nonexistent or engaged in a constant struggle between conflicting desires for people of the same sex and people of the other sex.4
The first major challenge to the dichotomous conflict model of sexuality in the history of U.S. sexology came in 1948 and 1953 when Alfred Kinsey and his associates published two groundbreaking studies of sexual behavior, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female . On the basis of national studies of women and men in the United States, Kinsey and his associates announced that 28% of women had experienced erotic responses to other women, 37% of men had had postadolescent sexual experience with another man to the point of orgasm, and an additional 13% of men had responded erotically to another man although they had never actually had sex with another man.5 These findings shocked both scientists and the public, who had assumed that homosexuality was exceedingly rare. People who were attracted to members of their own sex found out that they were not alone at all. They began looking for each other, and organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society were founded shortly thereafter.
Perhaps even more surprising was the prevalence of bisexual behavior among Kinsey et al.’s respondents. Only 0.3 to 3% of women (between ages 20 and 35, and depending on marital status) and 4% of men (after the onset of adolescence) were exclusively homosexual, leading to the conclusion that 25 to 28% of women and 46% of men had been erotically responsive to or sexually active with both women and men. Among unmarried women, 4 to 8% reported more than incidental sexual experiences with or erotic responses to both women and men—more than the percentage who were exclusively homosexual. Kinsey and his associates developed the Kinsey scale to describe the variety they had found in their respondents’ physical and psychic lives. On this seven-point scale, a “0” indicates a person whose erotic experiences and responses are entirely heterosexual, a “6” indicates a person whose erotic experiences and responses are entirely homosexual, and the scores “1” through “5” represent varying degrees of responsiveness to people of both sexes. This model of sexuality is considered an improvement over the conflict model of sexuality, because it is able to accommodate the variety in human sexual behavior and erotic response discovered by Kinsey and his associates.
A few years after the Kinsey studies, Evelyn Hooker demonstrated that trained clinicians could not differentiate the results of projective tests of heterosexuals from those of homosexuals, thus providing evidence that homosexuals display no more signs of psychopathology than heterosexuals (1957, 1958). Nevertheless, for the next fifteen years, psychiatrists continued to consider homosexuality a mental illness, and scientists motivated by the desire to prevent homosexuality tried to find out what causes it. Homosexual women and men remained hidden in a twilight world of bars and secretive homophile organizations.
The riots at the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village, New York City, in June 1969, marked the symbolic beginning of a new lesbian and gay liberation consciousness. Lesbians and gay men were no longer willing to appease heterosexual society and avoid harassment by hiding themselves; they began openly demanding social acceptance and civil rights. Faced with vocal and visible lesbians and gay men, social scientists—some of whom were lesbian or gay themselves—rejected the pathological view of homosexuality and produced a virtual explosion of research on lesbians and gay men. Prior to 1969, the record number of articles listed under the topic heading “homosexuality” in any given year of the Sociological Abstracts was five. This number increased to thirteen in 1973, twenty-eight in 1977, thirty-nine in 1979, and topped forty in the 1980s. Most of these articles reported research on gay men, and those that included lesbians often did so as a comparison to gay men. The topic heading “lesbianism” did not appear until 1968,6 and the number of articles under this heading did not reach thirteen until 1983.7
Researchers in the 1970s asked very different questions than researchers in earlier decades had asked. Instead of asking what causes homosexuality, social scientists began asking questions like “What is homophobia and what causes it?” “How does heterosexism affect the lives of gay and lesbian people?” “What is the process of coming out?” and “What are the gay and lesbian communities like, how do people meet each other, and what kinds of social structures exist?” In other words, researchers shifted their attention away from lesbians and gay men as the “problem” and began defining homophobia and hetero-sexism as the problem. They began asking questions that lesbians and gay men themselves would ask, rather than questions that homophobes wanted answered. They began studying lesbians and gay men as people who live in social worlds, rather than as laboratory specimens. In the 1980s, many social scientists turned their attention toward AIDS.
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, it became increasingly evident that both the conventional conflict model of sexuality and the Kinsey scale were inadequate to describe the complexity of human sexuality. New research affirmed Kinsey et al.’s finding that bisexual behavior is more prevalent than homosexual behavior, especially when lifetime cumulative sexual behavior is considered (e.g., Diamond 1993; Hunt 1974; Janus and Janus 1993; Laumann et al. 1994; Rogers and Turner 1991; Smith 1991), and that bisexual erotic capacity is even more common than overt bisexual behavior (e.g., Bell and Weinberg 1978). Blumstein and Schwartz (1974, 1976a, 1976b, 1977a, 1977b) found that sexual behavior often does not correspond with sexual identity, and that individuals display considerable variation in their sexual behaviors and identities over their lifetimes, producing behavior that would be labeled bisexual when lifelong behavior or feelings are considered.
The need for a more sophisticated scientific model of sexuality was dramatically illustrated by the “blood supply scare” of the mid-1980s. The Centers for Disease Control, acting on early reports that most cases of AIDS were homosexual men, concluded that “gays” were at highest risk of contracting the disease and launched educational efforts aimed at gay men. What officials had failed to take into account, however, was the fact that behavior and identity do not always coincide, and it is one’s behavior, not one’s sexual identity, that determines one’s risk for HIV infection. They also failed to take into account the prevalence of bisexual behavior. Many men who were having sex with other men were married and considered themselves heterosexual or bisexual, not gay. Messages about safe sex aimed at the gay male community failed to reach these men. This potentially fatal miscommunication occurred because scientists failed to question the simplistic model of sexuality in which there are only two uncomplicated types of people, homosexuals and heterosexuals.
New Models of Sexuality
Social scientists worked to develop improved models of sexual orientation that would reflect their growing understanding of sexuality. Many modified the seven-point Kinsey scale. For example, Bell and Weinberg (1978) used two seven-point scales, one representing sexual feelings and one representing sexual behaviors. The most complex modification to the Kinsey scale is the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG), on which subjects rate themselves on 21 seven-point scales (Klein, Sepekoff, and Wolf 1985). The scales measure the subjects’ past, present, and ideal ratings on seven components of sexual orientation: sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, self-identification, and lifestyle.
Other theorists proposed categorical models of sexual orientation in which homosexuality and heterosexuality are joined by a third distinct form of sexuality. An early categorical alternative to the simple dichotomous model was suggested by Feldman and MacCulloch (1971), who distinguished between primary and secondary homosexual preference. They defined primary homosexuals as people who have never experienced heterosexual arousal at any point in their lives, although they might have engaged in heterosexual behavior for the sake of social appearance. Secondary homosexuals, on the other hand, have experienced heterosexual arousal and activity. Traces of the concept of the Kinsey scale are evident in this model with its implication that primary homosexuals are “more homosexual” than secondary homosexuals. Later, Feldman (1984) suggested that primary homosexuals and primary heterosexuals correspond closely to Kinsey 6’s and O’s, whereas secondary