Julia Shaw is a psychologist at University College London and part of Queer Politics at Princeton University, a thinktank engaged in the research of LGBTQ+ equality and rights. Her new book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, draws on her experiences of being bisexual and her background in the psychological sciences to explore and celebrate a sexual identity she says remains marginalised and forgotten.
What led you to begin researching bisexuality and write this book?
I was writing my second book, Making Evil, which is about criminal psychology and what we associate with the word “evil”. I was writing about the villainisation of LGBTQ+ individuals as evil around the world and how important visibility is. I realised I was still invisible myself, so I came out as bi in that book, because I felt like a hypocrite for telling other people to be out and not being out myself in public.
I had so many questions about bisexuality. I figured I’d read a couple of books and I’d be done. But those books with the answers that I wanted didn’t exist, so I decided to write a book instead. I figured if I was struggling to find those answers, other people were as well.
Your book discusses one of the first measures of bisexuality, the Kinsey scale, first published in 1948 by the biologist Dr Alfred Kinsey. How did that tool change the field of study?
The Kinsey scale is a way to see sexuality on a spectrum from 100% heterosexual desires to 100% homosexual desires. Kinsey found that about half of men and about a quarter of women allocated themselves as not 100% heterosexual, which effectively meant that a lot of people were queer. When people talk about sexuality as a spectrum, they’re usually indirectly referencing the Kinsey scale.
The book refers to the invisibility of bi people in research on sexuality; why is that?
The default is still to ask people their identity, which is a problem for bisexual people. Most people who would fall in the middle of the Kinsey scale aren’t captured by labels – they often refer to themselves as gay or straight. Asking questions about how people behave, and who they find attractive, is going to get you a much more accurate picture than asking people what their labels are most of the time. Research, for some reason, is really reluctant to accept that. Probably because it introduces complexity and complexity is bad for data analysis.
A fascinating section of the book examines bisexuality in the animal kingdom and the struggle of evolutionary biologists to explain the “Darwinian paradox”: why animals engage in homosexual behaviour if it doesn’t lead to reproduction. You propose the idea that bisexuality is perhaps “the originary state in the evolution of sexuality” – how did you reach this conclusion?
There’s this assumption that heterosexuality is the norm, because heterosexual sex results in offspring. But looking at the literature on animal behaviour and sexual interactions, I found there are a number of researchers, including in the evolutionary sciences, saying we’ve misinterpreted animal behaviour for a very long time by imposing our sense of decency and our heterosexual bias on to animals, rather than observing and describing what animals actually do.
Research has found there’s a lot of sexual behaviour between animals of multiple sexes in the animal kingdom. The explanation for that is: as long as you’re also at least occasionally having sex with the other sex and you’re able to reproduce, then it doesn’t really matter if you also have sex with the same sex. I found it really interesting, because I assumed that I was a deviation, rather than that most animals seem to behave this way.
You contrast this positive reading of the “original state” of sexuality with Freud’s negative view that everyone starts off bisexual as a child and matures into monosexuality as an adult. Why do associations between bisexuality and immaturity persist?
I get told a lot that Freud thought everyone was bi and I have to correct this so often. Freud did say that, but he didn’t mean it in a good way. He very much saw it as a negative thing to be bisexual as an adult.
There are a couple of assumptions that are thrown at you when you say you’re bisexual. One is that you’re greedy; the other is that you want to be the centre of attention, that it’s some sort of performance, especially as a woman, the expectation is that it’s performative for men. Then there’s the idea that it’s a phase. This idea isn’t just held by heterosexual people; it’s also very much held by homosexual and queer people and that is a huge problem. It has led to many bi people feeling excluded or pushed out of queer spaces.
We’ve seen people become more comfortable talking about a range of sexual identities in recent years, with the word “queer” gaining particular prominence. You’re saying that due to negative connotations, the term “bisexual” hasn’t been embraced in the same way?
It hasn’t. People cringe when they say it, or don’t say it, about themselves, because they’re worried about the reaction, including me. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the word “queer” instead of “bi”, because I don’t want the reaction that comes with saying “bi” and “queer” is a bit more vague, frankly. It’s fascinating that because of internalised biphobia in so many people, we shy away from that word. I mean, it’s LGBT and it has been since the 90s. Yet the “B” has been invisible or berated. Lesbian and gay people, I think, need to make space and be more inclusive and conscious of bi people.
You discuss how bisexual people are more likely to experience sexual violence, poor mental health and substance abuse than other sexual minorities. What explains this?
Bisexual women, compared with lesbian and heterosexual women, are the most likely to be raped and to experience various forms of sexual assault. There’s a layering of stigma that happens with bi women in particular, where there’s the sexualisation of women and the hypersexualisation of bisexuality on top. It makes people take more liberties with how they touch you, how they talk to you, how they sexualise you and whether they’re likely to assault you. This is something we see in research on the treatment of bisexual kids in schools and universities. Until we break down the stereotypes about bisexuality, we are not going to tackle this problem.
What can the study of history tell us about the evolution of attitudes towards sexuality?
Sexual desires and behaviours have only really been seen as identities since the 1800s. The idea that it’s something you are rather than something you do – that is a relatively new concept. If you look at how historians try to make queer people visible in history, they often jump too far. If there’s any evidence of homosexual attractions, they say: “Look, there’s a gay person.” I can see why that’s something people want to do. But what it does, in effect, is erase bi people. Because most of those people will also have had wives, or husbands, and heterosexual interactions. That makes it really hard, and often inaccurate, to say that they are exclusively homosexual.
You discuss the relationship between “compulsory heterosexuality” and “compulsory monogamy”. How could more acceptance and understanding of bisexuality help challenge norms around both?
One of the most toxic stereotypes is that bisexual people can’t be monogamous and that bisexual people can’t be trusted in relationships. If you think about it for more than 10 seconds, you understand why that’s an absurd thing to say. I wanted to end the book on the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, because it’s something a lot of bisexual people think about a lot and they get asked about often. If heterosexual people and monosexual people ask themselves the questions they often put to bi people – “How can you be monogamous? Why is one person enough for you?” – the world would be a better place. Having that conversation in a way that is more about deconstructing heterosexual norms and expectations is a really useful thing to do.
• Bi by Julia Shaw is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
