Sex Beyond Labels
In my decades of work as an LGBT+ activist, I’ve watched the world change around me. Homosexuality, once an almost unspeakable taboo, has become widely accepted in much of the Western world, and the trend toward acceptance is still growing. Since 2001, when the Netherlands became the first country to grant marriage equality to same-sex couples, 30 countries have followed suit. Many more have decriminalised homosexuality, introduced civil unions, and extended civil rights protections to more and more LGBT+ people. There are of course, still frightening examples of intensified homophobic repression in some parts of the world, but taking the long view, in world-historical terms, anti-LGBT+ attitudes and laws are on the wane.
What does this mean for the LGBT+ community and issues around sexual orientation? I’ve long predicted that we would begin to see a decrease in the number of people who feel they can be defined as strictly hetero- or strictly homo-sexual. The fight for our rights had to start with us non-straight people defining and defending our sexuality. We needed to create an identity, language, and narrative for the world to understand. Building an LGB identity was about defining ourselves as something unique and wonderful that is not straight. We needed that identity to claim our place in society, and to rally behind for change. A specific identity was a prerequisite to form a community and fight for our rights. It was also needed to help others understand who we are and that our sexuality isn’t an afterthought, a flaw, or a phase. It is a fundamental part of who we are.
And much of the world listened.
Yet now, perhaps, we are at a place where these labels may be holding us back. There is something truly freeing about the concept of a sexuality that no longer requires a label; where individuals can live and be accepted without defining their sexuality. If homophobia is increasingly vanquished, the need for specific communities based on sexual orientation and the need to advocate for our specific legal rights look set to decline. When we reach a stage of human evolution where we are no longer being denied and abused because of our sexuality and the world becomes more accepting, it seems likely that people will become less fixated on “gay” or “straight” and instead identify (if at all) somewhere in the middle. When the taboos, both cultural and legal, are removed from same-sex desire, what will the world look like? I predict it will look a lot more bisexual.
We already know that bisexuality is a fact of life and that even in very narrow-minded, homophobic cultures, many people are, in the right circumstances, capable of both heterosexual and homosexual attraction. Sexual experimentation and exploration is a growing trend among young people. We also know that same-sex relations flourish, albeit often temporarily, in single-sex institutions such as boarding schools, prisons, and the armed forces. Bisexuality, of one kind or another, is in fact, much, much more common than we often assume.
In Patterns of Sexual Behaviour (1951), anthropologist Clellan S. Ford and ethologist Frank A. Beach noted that certain forms of homosexuality were considered normal and acceptable in 49 (nearly two-thirds) of 76 tribal societies surveyed from the 1920s to the 1950s. They also recorded that in some aboriginal cultures, such as the Keraki and Sambia peoples of Papua New Guinea, all young men entered into a relationship with an unmarried male warrior, sometimes lasting several years, as part of their rites of passage to manhood. Once completed, they ceased all homosexual contact and assumed sexual desires for women. If sexual orientation was totally biologically pre-programmed at birth, these men would have never been able to switch from homosexuality to heterosexuality with such apparent ease.
This led Ford and Beach to deduce that homosexuality is fundamental to the human species and that its practice is substantially influenced by social mores and cultural expectations.
Research by Dr. Alfred Kinsey in the USA during the mid-20th century was the first major statistical evidence that gay and straight are not watertight, irreconcilable and mutually exclusive sexual orientations. He found that human sexuality is, in fact, often a continuum of desires and behaviours, ranging from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. A substantial proportion of the population shares an amalgam of same-sex and opposite-sex feelings — even if they do not act on them.
In Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), Kinsey found that 18% of the men he surveyed were either mostly or exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. 25% percent had more than incidental gay reactions or experience, amounting to clear and continuing same-sex desires. Altogether, 37% of the men Kinsey questioned had experienced sex with other males to the point of orgasm, and half had experienced mental attraction or erotic arousal towards other men (often transient and not physically expressed).
He also found that same-sex experiences between women were much more common than previously thought; though only about half as common as among men. This lower incidence probably reflects women’s second-class status and the repression of their sexuality in that era.
Kinsey’s statistics on same-sex behaviour have since been criticised as outdated, exaggerated, and unrepresentative. But his idea of a spectrum of human sexuality has been reinforced by subsequent surveys showing that a significant proportion of the population has had sexual relations with both men and women. Indeed, since Kinsey’s time, we’ve seen more and more research showing that bisexuality is in fact fairly common — and becoming more so.
A 2008 British sex survey, conducted by ICM for The Observer, found that 16% of women reported having sexual contact with a woman, and 10% of men said they’ve had sexual contact with another man. The survey revealed a trend toward greater sexual experimentation, with 23% of 16- to 24-year-olds indicating that they had a same-sex experience. A group of social scientists used data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults, and found that the number of men reporting male sexual partners had jumped from 4.5% to 8.2% between 1990 and 2014. Women saw an even greater increase in reporting same-sex behaviour over that time, going from 3.6% to 8.7%.
As acceptance of non-heterosexual attraction, identity, and behaviour has grown, so have the number of people openly identifying as neither exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. A 2019 YouGov survey showed a significant increase (from 2% to 16%) in the number of 18- to 24-year-olds identifying as bisexual compared to a 2015 poll. The same survey predicted that one in four Britons place themselves between completely homosexual and completely heterosexual. A 2021 Gallup poll found that 3.1% of U.S. adults identify as bisexual, which is significantly more than identify as exclusively homosexual — a reported 54.6% of the LGBT+ population in the United States identify as bisexual or have had sexual experiences with both men and women.
Considering how rapidly these numbers are growing and how many more people seem comfortable openly expressing bisexual behaviours, it seems probable that openness around non-heterosexual identities has made more people comfortable exploring and expressing their bisexual desires.
Although scientific evidence shows that human sexuality is significantly affected by biological predispositions (such as genes and hormones in the womb), other influences appear to be cultural. Social expectations, peer pressure, the availability and opportunity for sexual release, along with other external factors, channel erotic impulses in certain directions and not others. An individual’s sexual orientation is thus influenced culturally as well as biologically. Still, whether desire is repressed or simply never awakened due to societal expectation and mores, it is clear that more and more people are embracing a more fluid understanding of their own sexuality. As culture continues to evolve on these issues, it seems likely that manifestations of sexuality will change with it.
This conception of human sexuality is much more complex, diverse, and blurred than the traditional simplistic binary image of “hetero” and “homo” so loved by straight moralists and — often — by many lesbians and gay men.
As homosexuality has lost its previously forbidden status, bisexuality has also become more acceptable — so much so that even “mostly straight” individuals with moderate homosexual desires feel more comfortable acknowledging or even celebrating that aspect of themselves. According to Gallup, approval of same sex marriage in the United States went from 27% in 1997 to 70% in 2021. It’s hardly surprising that in the midst of this enormous cultural shift, more and more people are open to expressing the non-heterosexual sides of their sexuality.
In a non-homophobic society, a future toward which we are making real progress as the taboos concerning same-sex relations continue to recede, more people are likely to have gay sex — even if only experimentally or for a few years. In this future, the vast majority of people will be open to the possibility of both opposite-sex and same-sex desires, regardless of whether they act upon them. They won’t feel the need to label themselves (or others) as LGB or straight because, in a future non-homophobic civilisation, no one will care who loves whom. Love and desire will transcend sexual orientation. The demise of homophobia is likely to make the need to assert and affirm gayness (and straightness) redundant — or at least much less common.
Although this is a future I’ve imagined and written about for decades, reflecting on my 50+ years of activism, and parallel social changes, has made it clear to me that we are actually moving toward that future. There are still many hurdles to overcome, and homophobia has by no means been erased from the world, but it is difficult to think of another movement that has made so many changes so rapidly.
When I was born in Australia in 1952, sex between two consenting adults of the same sex was illegal. When I came out aged 17 in 1969, my relationships were still criminal. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Australia began to decriminalize homosexuality and not until 2017 that same-sex marriage became law. Over the course of my life, I’ve seen many countries go through equally radical shifts in their attitudes and laws regarding homosexuality. It’s easy to imagine that, another 55 years into the future, we will no longer feel the same need to define our sexuality so rigidly and exclusively. Bravo!
The story of Peter Tatchell’s 55 years of LGBT+ and other human rights campaigning is told in the new Netflix documentary Hating Peter Tatchell. For the Peter Tatchell Foundation's free weekly campaign e-bulletin, sign up here.
Published Jan 5, 2022
Updated Apr 17, 2024
Published in Issue X: Clash of Ideologies
