Quotes on Bisexuality
Quotes on Bisexuality
"Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality."
Kate Millett, Flying
"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 hetersexuals 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
"It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as hetereosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds."
Alfred Kinsey
"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
"the reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about."
Gore Vidal
"We're trained to see only male or female and to plot people into those categories when they actually don't fit neatly at all. But if we pause, watch and listen closely we'll see the multiplicity of ways in which people are sexed and gendered. There exists a range of personal identifications around woman, man, in-between--we don't even have names or pronouns that reflect that in between place but people certainly live in it."
Minnie Bruce Pratt
"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)
"Insistence on having a sexual orientation in sex is about defending the status quo, maintaining sex differences and the sexual hierarchy; whereas resistance to sexual orientation, regimentation is more about where we need to be going."
John Stoltenberg (1989)
"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)
"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
Oh! I want to put my arms arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me or I wouldn't be wearing it!
Eleanor Roosevelt, in a letter to Lorena Hickok, March 7, 1933
”Some people move in lesbian circles. I move in bisexual dodecahedrons.”
o Anonymous, posted on the Internet
"I don't understand why so many people must limit themselves to only half of the people around them."
Anonymous Internet Post
“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
”Oh my GOD. You are NOT bisexual. Don't be stupid. I mean, I went to a bah mitzpah once, that doesn't make me Jewish.”
The Opposite of Sex
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 sheeps 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)
"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
"From the perspective of scripting theory, same-gender erotic preferences are elicited and shaped by the systems of meaning offered for conduct in a culture. What is usually construed as culture against "man" or culture against nature is thus actually conflict among differently enculturated individuals or groups.
What is required is a constant recognition that acts of usage and explanation are acts of social control in the strong sense, that "homosexual" and "homosexuality" are names that have been imposed on some persons and their conduct by other persons - and that this imposition has carried the right of the latter to tell the former the origins, meaning, and virtue of their conduct."
John Gagnon
"I'm strictly heterosexual. But bisexuality does double your chances for a date on Saturday night."
Woody Allen
"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 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
"I'm glad I'm not bisexual. I couldn't stand being rejected by men as well as women."
Bernard Manni
"Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality."
Kate Millett, Flying
"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 hetersexuals 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
"It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as hetereosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds."
Alfred Kinsey
"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
"the reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about."
Gore Vidal
"We're trained to see only male or female and to plot people into those categories when they actually don't fit neatly at all. But if we pause, watch and listen closely we'll see the multiplicity of ways in which people are sexed and gendered. There exists a range of personal identifications around woman, man, in-between--we don't even have names or pronouns that reflect that in between place but people certainly live in it."
Minnie Bruce Pratt
"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)
"Insistence on having a sexual orientation in sex is about defending the status quo, maintaining sex differences and the sexual hierarchy; whereas resistance to sexual orientation, regimentation is more about where we need to be going."
John Stoltenberg (1989)
"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)
"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
Oh! I want to put my arms arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me or I wouldn't be wearing it!
Eleanor Roosevelt, in a letter to Lorena Hickok, March 7, 1933
”Some people move in lesbian circles. I move in bisexual dodecahedrons.”
o Anonymous, posted on the Internet
"I don't understand why so many people must limit themselves to only half of the people around them."
Anonymous Internet Post
“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
”Oh my GOD. You are NOT bisexual. Don't be stupid. I mean, I went to a bah mitzpah once, that doesn't make me Jewish.”
The Opposite of Sex
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 sheeps 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)
"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
"From the perspective of scripting theory, same-gender erotic preferences are elicited and shaped by the systems of meaning offered for conduct in a culture. What is usually construed as culture against "man" or culture against nature is thus actually conflict among differently enculturated individuals or groups.
What is required is a constant recognition that acts of usage and explanation are acts of social control in the strong sense, that "homosexual" and "homosexuality" are names that have been imposed on some persons and their conduct by other persons - and that this imposition has carried the right of the latter to tell the former the origins, meaning, and virtue of their conduct."
John Gagnon
"I'm strictly heterosexual. But bisexuality does double your chances for a date on Saturday night."
Woody Allen
"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 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
"I'm glad I'm not bisexual. I couldn't stand being rejected by men as well as women."
Bernard Manni