But Jen Yockney, who convenes the U.K.’s longest-running bisexual support organization, BiPhoria, admits that resources can be thin on the ground. That’s not to say there isn’t any support for the bisexual community. In Europe, only 27 percent of bisexual women and 14 percent of bi men say they’re “out” in their workplaces, but that number jumps to 50 percent for gay men and lesbians. Gorman’s hunch is that bisexuals suffer from a lack of social support - the structures of friends, family and community just aren’t statistically as strong as they are for heterosexual or gay and lesbian populations, and emotional support is key to health. This, experts say, contributes to the erasure of bisexuality - and helps perpetuate the stereotypes about it. “We know there’s double discrimination,” she says, meaning discrimination about bi people from both the gay and straight communities, or even the ever-popular assertion that bisexuality doesn’t exist.įor now, some bisexual people seem to get caught in a vicious circle: the phenomenon of bi invisibility, where they get treated as heterosexuals while they’re dating someone not of their gender and homosexuals when they’re in a same-sex relationship. Yet Schick’s work may get us closer to answering that question.
And while studies like those from Gorman can tell us what’s going on, they can’t tell us why. In the past, studies tended to group all LGBT people together and draw conclusions from that - which is how something like a bisexual health crisis goes undiagnosed. “In bisexual adults we saw a lot of evidence of health risk, of factors that are factors of poor health,” Gorman says.īisexuals suffer from a lack of social support - the structures of friends, family and community just aren’t statistically as strong as they are for heterosexual or gay and lesbian populations. Nearly 20 percent say they’re in poor or fair health, while it’s about half that for people who identify as gay or lesbian. Bisexuals are more likely to be smokers, less likely to go to the doctor and more likely to be poor. Turns out, it’s a significant difference. Rice University sociology professor Bridget Gorman and her team were some of the first to look at extant data from the Institute of Medicine on race, gender and sexuality as well as health and class, and to tease out how gay Americans and bisexual Americans differ - statistically speaking. What’s more surprising, though, is how that attitude might be affecting the health of bisexual Americans. Women, white people and those who identified as gay showed less bias - but it was still there. So it wasn’t the biggest surprise when Schick, a faculty member at the School of Public Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and her colleagues polled 1,500 adults and found that negative attitudes toward bisexuals span every race, gender and sexual orientation. That type of thinking, called internalized biphobia, means that even bisexuals often have negative stereotypes about themselves.
You’ve probably heard the stereotypes about bi people: They’re hypersexual, they can’t stay monogamous, they transmit sexually transmitted infections between straight and gay populations. But many say they specifically don’t want to identify as bisexual because of stigma. Bottom line, there are countless shades of identity on the spectrum between totally straight and totally gay - if either thing even exists, which is debatable. But ask them if they’re bisexual and the answer isn’t always the same. When Vanessa Schick asks certain subjects in her studies if they’re sexually attracted to both men and women, they often tell her yes.