Bisexual people have existed in every era, in every culture. The evidence for this is abundant if you look at literature, history, and the biographies of people who loved across gender lines without feeling the need to resolve that into a single orientation. The word "bisexual" is more recent — coined in the late nineteenth century in the same sexological tradition that was busy classifying and pathologizing human sexuality — but the experience is old. What has been persistently modern, at least in American LGBTQ+ organizing, is the systematic erasure of bisexual people from their own history.

The Early History That Excluded Bisexual People

The Stonewall Riots involved people of multiple sexual orientations and gender identities. The participants were not neatly categorizable by contemporary identity labels, and several figures whose lives were more complex than a single orientation allow — including some who would today identify as bisexual — were present. But the movement that emerged from Stonewall increasingly organized around gay and lesbian identity, with bisexual people treated as a kind of awkward third category: not quite gay enough to belong, not straight enough to be comfortable in heterosexual spaces. This positioning was not incidental. It reflected active choices within the movement. Early gay liberation organizations sometimes explicitly excluded bisexual people from membership or leadership. The argument, stated plainly, was that bisexual people had the option of "passing" as straight and therefore were not sufficiently committed to the cause.

The Bisexual Movement That Almost Wasn't Recorded

Bisexual organizing developed largely in parallel to gay and lesbian organizing, often invisible to both. The Bisexual Center opened in San Francisco in 1976. BiNet USA was founded in 1990. The first National Bisexual Conference was held in 1990. These organizations and events happened; they were not, for the most part, recorded in the histories being written about LGBTQ+ liberation. When those histories named the people who had done the work, bisexual organizers were frequently identified as gay or lesbian — erasing the specific bisexual identity that had shaped their politics. Research from the Williams Institute has documented that bisexual adults report higher rates of anxiety, depression, and poverty than both gay/lesbian adults and heterosexual adults. One explanation is the experience of dual rejection — not fully accepted in straight spaces or in gay and lesbian spaces — combined with lower rates of community connection. Erasure from one's own movement has real consequences for whether people find support.

The Tangent About Bisexuality and Monogamy

One of the most persistent stereotypes about bisexual people is that they are inherently nonmonogamous or incapable of fidelity — that attraction to more than one gender must mean constant pursuit of multiple partners. This conflates sexual orientation with relationship structure in a way that would be immediately recognized as nonsense if applied to straight or gay people. A bisexual person in a monogamous relationship is still bisexual. The orientation is not defined by how many people someone is dating at any given moment. The persistence of this stereotype, including within LGBTQ+ communities, has contributed to bisexual people feeling unwelcome in spaces that ostensibly exist for them.

What Bisexual Erasure Looks Like in Practice

Erasure operates through a series of small moves, each individually deniable. A historical figure's same-sex relationships are described while their opposite-sex relationships are minimized. A bisexual character in a television show ends up in a same-sex relationship and is thereafter referred to as gay. A bisexual public figure who comes out is celebrated — until they form a relationship with someone of a different gender and are assumed to have been straight all along. The Bisexual Resource Center has documented these patterns across media for years.

Why the History Matters

The recovery of bisexual history is not merely a matter of completeness. It changes what LGBTQ+ organizing looks like — who was present, who did the work, who paid the costs. It challenges the gay-straight binary that has shaped both mainstream and movement understandings of sexuality. And for bisexual people currently navigating spaces that are often hostile or indifferent to them, knowing that there is a history, that others did this before and built something, matters in the way that all community history matters: it makes the present feel less like solitary endurance.