Bixexuality

BISEXUAL, CURIOUS, AND QUESTIONING

I frequently work with people who are trying to make sense of their sexual orientation. For some people, it can be confusing and cause great stress in their intimate relationships. For others, it can be uncomfortable because they don’t feel as if they fit in with either the gay community or the straight community. Others wonder if they will ever be able to be happy with just one partner.

The truth is, more than ever we know that sexual orientation is a spectrum.

Whatever your concern, my goal is to help you find the path that works for you. For those who are in the early stages of exploration, you may find the information below to be helpful.

Bisexuality is when a person is sexually or romantically attracted to both men and women. These attractions may evolve, come to life, or change over a person’s life span. Sexual orientation is a continuum ranging from pure heterosexuality to pure homosexuality. Being somewhere on the continuum is perfectly normal.  Men who have sex with men is also an important form of sexual expression, and different from being bisexual.  Finding where you fit matters.

The Kinsey Scale helps to explain the sexual continuum with zero as completely heterosexual and six being completely homosexual. In Kinsey’s research, where he studied approximately 18,000 people in the 1930s and 1940s, he found that a very small percentage of people are either a zero or a six, and that most people fall somewhere in between.

Here is one of my favorite quotes by Dr. Alfred Kinsey from his book published in 1948:

“Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black, nor are all things white. . . . [O]nly the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separate pigeonholes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”