There seems to be quite an assumption about people who enjoy sexual contact with both men and women. That assumption is that we identify with the political and social queer community. Surprisingly the effort to put all non-monosexuals into a gay/lesbian box is mostly the effort of the gay/lesbian activists, rather than the social conservatives. It is the supposed champions of sexual rights who try to control people via the LGBT label assignment.
This effort is not new. For years the gay/lesbian lobby has been putting out lists of famous “gay” people, yet many of the people they list were not gay or lesbian at all, but rather they were not monosexual and so they are given the gay/label. This is particularly dishonest because when the list includes people from the Hellenistic/Roman world like Julius Cesar and Socrates the concept of ones identity being defined by your choice of sexual partners was not part of their culture. The Hellenistic/Roman assumption was that normal people had sex with both males and females. Sexuality wasn’t defined by the genitals of the person with whom you enjoy having sex, rather by the social status of one’s partner. The preference for one set of genitals or the other was no more important than the preference for one hair color or body type.
The concept of people being “homosexual” is a very recent phenomenon. Even through most of the Middle Ages, homosexual behavior was considered a behavior, not an identity. Why? Because the Catholic Church came out of Rome, and their prohibition on homosexual behavior came not from the position that there are “gay” men out there that need to be quashed, but that all men will fuck just about anything that moves. That position runs counter to the message the gay/lesbian activist want to present, but it is supported by history and science.
When Alfred Kinsey spent a decade with his team doing in-depth interviews with men, he kept revising his estimate at the percentage of men who had sex to the point of orgasm with another man as his team build up their methods of conducting interview to get the most honest answer. He found right off that a majority of men reported that when they were adolescents they’d had sex with other boys; but, only by the end of his research did he conclude that adult male-on-male sex is so common as to not be considered an outlier, but a normal behavior. It is astounding to consider that he made this conclusion at the end of the 1950’s when homosexual sex was a serious crime in most US states, and he was interviewing men as much as 80 years old. So his report that 47% of men interviewed having consensual adult sex with other men to the point of orgasm is actually a snap-shot of the entire time period from the late 1880’s to the late 1950’s.
If you take that the way some want to present it that would be evidence that half of the male population in those 60 years had been born homosexual. Of course, that would be a misuse of the data so blatant as to fool no one, and since deception is the point; you rarely hear that figure mentioned. The honest interpretation is that half of men interviewed had, at least once, overcome the social and legal pressure not to do so, and acted on a desire to have sex with another man. I would suggest if the same kind of huge anonymous survey process had been done in the late 1970’s, before the advent of AIDS, that the figure would have been much higher. Anecdotal evidence suggests by the late 70’s in the swinger and other free love communities that male-on-male sex was as common in group settings as female-on-female. The taboo against men who were married or otherwise identified as heterosexual having occasional sex with other men grew as a direct result of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980’s, not because of some moral objection.
What is lost in much of the discussion on bisexuality is that being sexually attracted to someone is not the same thing as having a desire to have a romantic relationship with them. Conversely, having a deep emotional bond with someone does not necessarily mean a sexual attraction. Many men have close bonds with other men, but that does not mean they want to fuck each other. In my case, I have never bonded with other men, my close relationships have always been with women, yet I very much enjoy having sex with men. So, to equate emotional love and sexual attraction is a false premise. This desexualizing gay and lesbian relationships comes as a direct result of LGBT activists who have sought to make the issue of gay marriage more palatable to the general public. I’m not saying they are wrong. In fact, they are quite right that the defining characteristic of gays & lesbians is not that they enjoy sex with people with their set of genitals, but the fact they only have romantic love for people who have the same genitals as do they. Perhaps we should redefine gay & lesbian in purely romantic terms and just assume (like the ancients did) that most people are capable of enjoying sex with both men and women.
All this is prologue to an objection to the notion that because I can (and do) enjoy sex with other men on occasion, that I am part of the socio-political LGBT community. Just like the self-appointed leaders of the Christian Right have worked very hard to make the word Christian synonymous with right wing Republican, the self-appointed leaders of the LGBT community have worked to make the word bisexual mean a person buys into their socio-political world view. I know why both groups do this, but it does not make it right. Both my wife and I identify with both the term Christian and the term bisexual. We don’t buy in to either the rightist or leftist world view and we resent anyone who attempts to use our Christian beliefs or our bisexual desires to force us into their group. Sometimes I object to the word bisexual because it is used as to assume the person is part of the socio-political queer community.
I am inclined to take the position of lumping all the mono-sexuals into a single group and then tell people “I am not a mono-sexual.” Thus I am not saying I belong to any group, but rather I am rejecting membership in the mono-sexual group. Given the research, I would suggest that there are many people who feel just like I do. I suspect there are far more who are like us, than there are who identify with the LGBT label. As long as non-monosexuals are kept in the LGBT box, we will remain a tiny minority in the public arena. Only by kicking the walls off that box will the fact that bisexuality is, if not the majority, is certainly close to a plurality of people.