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Statistics on the number of bisexuals are unreliable since people who engage in such behavior often do not call themselves bisexual. But the ability to respond erotically to both sexes seems to be a common human trait. Bisexuality frequently occurs among male and female adolescents in many cultures and is an entrenched though unspoken practice among men in some Latin and Muslim societies. Alfred Kinsey's classic surveys in the '40s and '50s of American middle-class sexual mores found that about 46% of the men that were interviewed and 12% of the women admitted to sexual experiences with both sexes.
Despite its prevalence, bisexuality traditionally has not been granted independent status as a category of sexuality. Instead, the behavior has been explained away as a phase. For instance, teenagers sometimes experiment with both male and female partners on the way to establishing their sexual identity. Among Sambia Highlanders in Papua New Guinea, boys practice oral sex with one another as a formal rite of passage toward manhood and adult heterosexuality. Dual sexuality has also been seen as a pragmatic response, a way to fill a sexual need when passion is thwarted by culture and circumstance, such as imprisonment. Mixing between men and women before marriage is strictly limited in some Muslim societies.
The most common perception is that bisexuals are basically straights with a taste for exotic adventure or essentially gays who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge their true orientation. To growing numbers of bisexuals, however, as well as therapists and researchers, this is nonsense. They insist that bisexuality is not a walk on the wild side or a run from reality but has a legitimate identity of its own. Explains John Craig, a 40-year-old writer in Amherst, Mass., who organizes weekend retreats for bisexual men: "I want to experience contact with a man's body and with a woman's body. That's just a basic part of who I am."
Because of society's reluctance to recognize their existence, bisexuals often face an even more torturous struggle than gays in coming to terms with their identity. Unlike gays, bisexuals lack an established community or culture to help ease the process. For men, the confusion seems to surface during adolescence and early adulthood. Al, 38, of Chicago, recalls that during his troubled college years "there was almost no place I could go where bisexuality was part of the norm." Having "bought into the myth that bisexuality was a political cop-out," he swung between describing himself as straight and gay. But his distress was so great that "I went though a period of a year or two where I called myself 'unlabeled.' "