So mid-last week, Gallup released the results of its 2022 LGBT identification poll. This is something Gallup does annually, and the 2022 results were not particularly striking — indeed, by Gallup’s own admission, they were functionally identical to the results from 2021 (which themselves had been striking insomuch as they saw a 2% jump in the number of Americans identifying as LGBT). Another thing that was not particularly surprising about the 2022 Gallup numbers? They showed that more than half of American LGBT folks are bisexual —something that the 2021 Gallup numbers, and other researchers’ data from even earlier, had consistently shown. (Notably, Gallup did not start asking LGBT Americans what kind of LGBT they were until 2020, which kind of stuns me except that it’s generally been par for the course for researchers to do this. Bisexual erasure in action!)
Anyway. I didn’t really pay attention to the 2022 numbers because, as I just said, they were not really news to me. But apparently they were news to a lot of other people, because I’ve been seeing quite a few headlines taking note of the fact that an estimated 7.2% of Americans are LGBT and 4.2% — or 58% of that 7.2% — are bisexual. Here’s one from the Bay Area Reporter, here’s one from The Hill, which contains the absolutely unhinged line “Young Americans, and young women in particular, have widely rejected the notion of sexuality as a binary choice — straight versus gay — just as they have largely abandoned the either-or, boy-girl system of fixed gender.” (Later it notes that “The concept of “bisexual erasure” has a long and growing Wikipedia page.”)
[About that “young women in particular” line: for some reason the Gallup poll summary does not break bisexuals down by gender, despite listing lesbians and gays as their own separate categories, but given what we generally know about queer self-identification it is safe to assume that the majority of that 4.2% is women — or, in other words, bi cis women are the most populous group residing beneath the LGBTQ umbrella. How about that.]
The thing about these numbers is that they are, for the most part, just confirmation of things that have long been known. For as long as researchers have been researching human sexuality, there have been obvious indications that — regardless of how many people openly identified as LGBT — a sizable chunk of the population experiences same gender attraction, either exclusively or in addition to other attractions. When I was growing up, the going line (pulled from Kinsey’s research) was that about 10% of people were queer; while that’s been heavily disputed, I gotta say that 7.2% is not so far off (also, notably, nearly 20% of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ, blowing that 10% number way out of the water). While social shifts may affect the numbers of people claiming the LGBTQ labels… people have been doing queer sex and experiencing same gender attractions since time eternal. And the majority of those people have not been monosexual.
And yet even as bisexuality has been common for eons, even as we’ve been a solid majority of the LGBTQ contingent for so very very long, so much so that none of this data should come as a surprise to anyone — it’s still a surprise for some reason! And bisexuals are still struggling! And I don’t fully know what to make of that except to say that sheer numbers are clearly not enough, that while I sincerely hope that a full 13% of Gen Z identifying as bisexual is a sign that things might be shifting, I’m far more inclined to believe that that number is just part and parcel of all LGBTQ identification rising among that generation rather than any indication of improvements for bisexuals specifically.
My thinking lately is that while the strategies that have helped normalize queerness broadly make it easier for bisexuals to recognize our attractions and make sense of our identities and come out, those strategies don’t actually do much to combat biphobia specifically. Recognizing our attractions, naming our attractions — it’s all important, but it’s not enough. As long as we live in a society that’s structured on the assumption of monosexuality, that, yes, erases bisexuality at the structural level, then it doesn't really matter how many people know that they are bi. The problems created by biphobia — the isolation, the lack of access to resources, the resulting poverty and poor health, even the continued shock and surprise at how many people are bi — are going to persist. We need more than just numbers, friends. We need a full on strategy.
One time I had a full blown panic attack about attending a queer event and potentially alienating my crush, who was part of a friend group of mostly queer femmes, with my corrupting presence as a woman-passing bisexual. I skipped the event out of anxiety, only to find out later to find out that
a) everyone in the queer femme friend group was bisexual
b) the queer event was was hosted by a woman-passing nonbinary bisexual person in a relationship with a man.
A real flock of wolves moment, that feels like a metaphor for the relationship of bisexuals to queerness writ large.