Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. Not all things are black nor all things white. 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.
So in his famous book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey explained why it is that some men —perhaps 18% of them—engage about equally in homosexual and heterosexual activities for at least three years during their adult lives. Women, he later explained, could also be rated on a scale from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. To people in the middle of the scale, however, Kinsey disliked applying the term bisexual. Biologically, he noted, it refers to organisms that include the anatomy of both sexes.
Today the word is commonly used to describe adults who have sexual relations with both males and females. And it is increasingly heard, for though there has been little research on the subject since Kinsey's in the late '40s, bisexuals, like homosexuals before them, are boldly coming out of their closets, forming clubs, having parties and staking out discotheques.
"Very Fashionable." When Kate Millett, author of the bestselling Sexual Politics, acknowledged to a meeting of feminists and Gay Liberationists in 1970 that although married, she also enjoyed lesbian relationships, the news caused a sensation both within and without the women's movement. Millett's latest book, Flying, to be published in June, will tell all about her bisex life to an audience not so shockable. They have by now seen movies like Sunday, Bloody Sunday, in which a male lover is shared by Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch. They have read books like the bestseller. Portrait of a Marriage, in which Nigel Nicolson tells about the affairs that his happily married mother, Poet Vita Sackville-West, had with Novelists Violet Trefusis and Virginia Woolf. Other women, living and dead, whose bisexuality has recently been made known include Singer Janis Joplin, Writer Dorothy Thompson and Actresses Tallulah Bankhead and Maria (Last Tango) Schneider. "It has become very fashionable in elite and artistically creative subgroups to be intrigued by the notion of bisexuality," says Psychiatrist Norman Fisk of the Gender Dysphoria Program at Stanford University Medical School. It may very well be, he added, "a sociopolitical phenomenon as much as it is a real psychiatric one."