🏳️🌈🏺Kinsey and Bi-Erasure
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
In January 1948, a bomb was dropped into the conception of traditional masculinity, called ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.’
Written by Alfred Kinsey, a buttoned-up Indiana entomologist who spent his early career obsessively cataloguing gall wasps. It was meticulously written as an academic professional book during the height of the Lavender Scare, when the government was firing people for being gay. It became the fourth-best-selling nonfiction book in America that year.
The findings were seismic. His Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale — 0 to 6, with X for asexuality — argued that “the world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Only the human mind invents categories to force facts into separate pigeonholes.” 37% of men & 13% of women reported at least some same-sex experience to orgasm. 11.6% of men rated themselves a 3 — equally attracted to both sexes — for significant periods of their lives. A massive percentage of Americans were bisexual.
The backlash was immediate. The Catholic University of America called it “the most anti-religious book of the time.” Congress pressured the Rockefeller Foundation to pull its funding. The right called it communist.
To be fair, the methodology had real problems — Kinsey’s sample over-relied on prison populations, volunteers, & self-selected groups, which influenced his numbers. Some of his methods, especially early-life numbers, were ethically indefensible & have rightly never been repeated. The American Statistical Association condemned his sampling the same year the book came out.
But the core finding has held. Of the 9% of Americans who now identify as LGBTQ+, more than half are bisexual — the largest single identity in our community, bigger than gay/lesbian, or trans combined, a trend that shows up worldwide, & the Gen Z the numbers are even larger.
And yet bi people often have more issues with mental health & community than either straight or gay people. Experts link this directly to erasure — from straight society AND from within our own community. Bi people are the majority of us, yet many choose not to be open about it.
Kinsey himself suffered from it. Biographers later documented that he was actively bisexual — he fell in love with a graduate student in 1924, & later with a member of his own research team, while remaining genuinely devoted to his wife Mac, who knew everything & even formed a throuple.
He never used the word ‘bisexual’ to describe himself. Instead he studied what he couldn’t quite name in himself.
