Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of sexuality is also one of the least known. For nearly a century, studies have indicated that bisexuality is widespread. Only most of society never got the memo. The gulf between how bi we are and how bi we think we are has been so massive that many people with bisexual attractions think of themselves as straight. Recent research is shedding new light and adding additional color to our developing image of human sexuality. Together with prior data, a picture emerges with potentially paradigm-shifting implications: bisexuality may not only be more prevalent than popularly believed — it may, in fact, be the norm.

In a study aptly named “What Does Heterosexuality Mean?” and published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers in Spain surveyed 2,900 young adults who self-identified as heterosexual. They were given a questionnaire about their attractions and openness to engaging in various sexual behaviors with people of the same sex. The findings grabbing most headlines are that 31.5% of women and 13.2% of men reported feeling bisexual attractions. Again, these are people who identify as straight — and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

When asked about their intentions to engage in sexual behavior with people of the same sex, these numbers rise even further. 15.7% of men and 34.2% of women said they were open to receiving oral sex from someone of the same sex. 16.3% of men and 36.7% of women were open to being masturbated. 15.5% of men and 42.1% of women were open to “nude caressing and hugging.” And an astounding 38.8% of men and 81.6% of women were open to a same-sex kiss on the lips. When asked whether they’ve ever had same-sex intercourse, 6.1% of these “straight” men and 7.4% of these “straight” women said that they had. What’s going on here? As surprising as these results might seem, they are in line with decades of survey, polling, and research data.

As early as the 1930s and 40s, Li Shiu Tong’s sex research found that 40% of his respondents were bisexual in their behavior — a plurality (exclusive heterosexuality was only 30%) — prompting Li to audaciously declare that strictly straight people “Should be classified as an endangered species.” In the late-40s and 50s, Alfred Kinsey’s reports found that 37% of males had “At least some overt homosexual experience to orgasm.” In the 1951 book Patterns of Sexual Behavior, anthropologist Clellan S. Ford and ethologist Frank A. Beach documented that certain forms of same-sex behavior were considered commonplace in nearly two-thirds of the 76 tribal societies they examined from the 1920s to the 50s. Using data from the General Social Survey, social scientists discovered that self-reported same-sex behavior nearly doubled between 1990 and 2014 for men, and more than doubled for women.

One pattern that recurs throughout sex research is that there are nearly always more people who exhibit bisexual attractions or behaviors than those who identify as bi. Much of this has historically been a result of homophobia and biphobia (anti-bi prejudice), but even as bigotry wanes and acceptance grows, this gap persists in large part because of widespread confusion over what bisexuality even is. Those outside the LGBT community — and even many within it — tend to conceive of sexuality only in terms of gay or straight. For such people, bisexuality is usually an afterthought, despite accounting for about 60% of self-identified LGBT people. When it is included in the conversation, it’s often included clumsily, with the assumption that one must have roughly a 50/50 attraction to men and women, as though bisexuality could only exist on the razor-thin knife’s edge between the hetero/homo binary. Biological sex may be a binary, but sexuality isn’t — it’s a spectrum.

The Kinsey scale, created by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, remains one of the most useful tools, along with psychiatrist Fritz Klein’s eponymous grid, for understanding the continuum of sexual attractions. The Kinsey scale is represented as a score from 0 to 6, where 0 is completely heterosexual, 6 is completely homosexual, and 1-5 is bisexual. This means that “mostly straight” 1’s and “homoflexible” 5’s are not only both bi — but equally bi. If the Kinsey scale were a person, it would have been collecting social security checks for years at this point, and yet it’s only just now finally beginning to take root in society, most notably in the younger generations. Accordingly, it’s among young people that we see the chasm between bisexual attractions/behavior and identification beginning to close.

12.5% of Harvard’s Class of 2025 identifies as bi, as do 29.7% of Cambridge undergraduates and 33% of Oxford students. Lest you think this is just a social accessory of trust fund kids, a 2022 Gallup poll of US adults found that 15% of Generation Z identify as bisexual. Not 15% of the children of doctors and lawyers — 15% of all Gen Z respondents. When YouGov asked people in 2018 to place themselves on the Kinsey scale, 20% of adults placed themselves in the bisexual category, and 34% of young people in particular. Another recurring pattern is that each successive generation has higher levels of bi identification than its predecessor.

Crunching the comparatively conservative numbers of Gallup’s 2022 LGBT survey with the study out of Spain referenced earlier, we might visualize a series of concentric circles. The smallest of which are people who self-identify as bi — 10.5% of young adults (ages 18-40, roughly Gens Y and Z). Around it is a larger circle of young adults who identify as bi plus those who identify as straight but report bisexual attractions — 28.1%. Beyond this cohort is a larger circle still, consisting of young people who identify as bi plus those who report being open to engaging in bisexual behavior — up to 58.1%, depending on the behavior in question.

Source: Gallup & Archives of Sexual Behavior

Granted, mixing data from different countries should be taken with a grain of salt, but this simple extrapolation offers a glimpse at what the future may look like as people continue to feel freer both in exploring the spectrum of sexuality and in identifying with that exploration. Whereas in decades past, people might have had same-sex fantasies or the occasional encounter, usually in secret, while maintaining an outward front of straight exclusivity, they now feel more comfortable simply saying they are bi. Given the persisting gap between openly bi people and those either still in the closet, in denial, or unaware that their attractions/behaviors qualify as bisexual, we still have more room to grow, but the progress has been encouraging. The day may come, in the not-too-distant future, when humanity realizes it was bi all along, and when the default question we’ll all be asking is, “why not both?”

Published Feb 20, 2023
Updated Mar 12, 2023