Jay's home page · Sexuality

What I mean by `bi'

`Bi', short for `bisexual', means (roughly) capable of having romantic or sexual feelings for members of both sexes.

Bi people come in lots of different flavours. (Personally, I prefer mint. :-) Some bi folk don't really care about gender - they feel like they're attracted to people just as people, rather than particularly as men or women (or some other gender). Some bi folk are very conscious of the gender of the people they're attracted to - they do care about gender, they just can be attracted to members of both genders.

I'm not sure where I fall on this spectrum; I certainly react differently to men and women in social situations, but I think a lot of that has to do my expectations about different ways men and women are socialised to behave. In general I think that what I'm attracted to about people doesn't have much to do with biological sex.

Although there are behaviours associated with being bi, it's kind of a fuzzy definition. There are people who love or have sex with members of their own sex who identify as straight, and there are people who love or have sex with members of another sex who identify as lesbian or gay. And of course there are celibate people who identify as bi.

Bisexuality and monogamy

Bisexuality and monogamy are not incompatible; I know lots of monogamous bi people. I also know poly bi people. And once I met a couple of bi people who called themselves `gender-monogamous' - they only had one male and one female partner, and the four people involved where in a stable long-term relationship.

(Monogamy and this particular bisexual, however, are not compatible. :-)

For more information

If your site gets it, you can check out the soc.bi newsgroup, which has a periodic FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) about bisexuality.

BISEXU-L is a LISTSERV mailing list about bisexuality. It's fairly high-volume and has a lot of social fluff as well as discussion of issues (not that I think this is necessarily a bad thing, mind you!) To subscribe, send an email message to listserv@brownvm.brown.edu containing the single line ``SUBSCRIBE BISEXU-L Jane Doe'', replacing Jane Doe with your (real, not login) name.

For information on Boston-area bi events (such as the bi brunches), you can subscribe to the biversity mailing list by sending a request to <biversity-request@blank.org>. The Bisexual Resource Center in Boston can also be reached by phone at 617/338-9595 and by email at <brc@biresource.org>; when no one's staffing the phone, they have an answering machine message with times and places of current events.

Among the announcements posted to the biversity mailing list is the current Biversity Boston calendar of events.


Jay's home page · Sexuality
Jay Sekora <js@aq.org>
last modified 1998.10.11