For my entire life, one thing has always been true: the young people, they’re going gay.
You can see it in the stats. With every generation, a greater percentage of folks wind up identifying as queer, with bisexuals gaining the most ground. According to Gallup numbers from last year, a full 15% of Gen Z is bi, compared to just 0.2% of Traditionalists, the oldest generation profiled. In contrast, 4.5% of Gen Z and 0.5% of Traditionalists are gay or lesbian.
There are some obvious things worth noting here. People my mother’s age (she’d be a Traditionalist, though I’ve always thought of her as Silent Generation) came of age at a time when being queer or trans was far more stigmatized, and bisexuals especially would have had added incentive to simply not see themselves as bi. And any queers from Gen X or older would have been coming of age, or well into adulthood, during the deadliest peak of the HIV epidemic. To put it bluntly, we cannot truly know how many queers there were or weren’t in older generations, because queers of older generations were disproportionately likely to die young. As one of the oldest Millennials, I’m also at the bleeding edge of queers who came of age at a time when HIV was becoming a manageable chronic illness rather than an automatic death sentence. Queers who were older than me didn’t have that privilege.
So it seems safe to say that these are… complicated, to say the least. Not necessarily the purest and most accurate representation of how many people of every generation have ever had a queer thought, have ever experienced bisexual attractions. It’s also worth noting, by the way, that independent of the Gallup numbers, several studies going back decades — including the research of famed sexologists Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson — have found bisexuals existing in numbers either comparable to or exceeding the numbers of gays and lesbians of their generations. And Kinsey was doing his research when Baby Boomers were still being baby boomed.
But this idea of queerness, and bisexuality in particular, as an affectation of the youth, as an emerging identity, still persists. Earlier this week I was venting about the paucity of bisexual representation in Congress, and a colleague — who, notably, is bisexual herself and generally agreed with me — pointed out that members of Congress skew older and older people are more likely to identify as gay and lesbian rather than bi. And on the one hand, yes, but also queer rep in Congress is predominantly clustered among Gen Xers, so, you know, it still seems worth asking why those Gen Xers are so much more likely to be gay or lesbian than bi, even as the number of Gen Xers who are bisexual is roughly comparable to those who are gay or lesbian.
And what I’m really getting at here, the thing that I think is worth considering when we constantly talk about bisexuality as an affectation of the young is that there’s an implication in there that bisexuality is something you grow out of. Sure, it’s cute that the Gen Zers all think they’re bi, but they’ll settle into monosexuality as they get older and sort themselves out, right? It’s like the common wisdom that you get more politically conservative as you age, except, you know, about sex. Once you’ve gotten married, once you’ve settled into a committed monogamous partnership, you’re not really bi anymore. You don’t really get to call yourself that. Which is, of course, one of the oldest biphobic beliefs in the book.
Look there are a lot of reasons why young people might be more likely to identify as bisexual — and it’s always possible that young people are more bi because, I dunno, hormones in the water or BPAs or some Alex Jones conspiracy. But I think there’s a real danger to conflating bisexuality with youth, with newness, with novelty. I think there’s a real danger to conflating who feels safe coming out as bi, who feels entitled to be out as bi, with who is actually bi. I think we should be more aware of that.
Love the B+ Squad? Consider joining the book club on Patreon!