“Not totally gay, I suppose”: Bisexuality and Multiple-Gender-Attraction in the Archives
- Martha Robinson Rhodes
- Jun 20
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 2
In 1984, Britain’s first bisexual newsletter, Bi-Monthly, launched a competition to design a “Bisexual Pride” symbol. This would serve the practical purpose of acting as the newsletter’s logo, but also the more abstract goal of representing bisexuality and promoting bisexual visibility. Readers submitted twenty-six images, ranging from the straightforward to the more obscure. The winning logo was ultimately one of the simplest – a modified yin-yang symbol with combined Venus and Mars symbols in the center (Fig. 3).
Collectively, the competition entries demonstrate the challenges faced by a nascent bisexual community seeking to define and represent itself. Many of the entries consisted of more than one image, the artists apparently finding a single symbol too limiting. The repeated use of Venus and Mars symbols invoke binary ideas of gender, but designers combined these in complex ways. The competition, and the newsletter that hosted it, were part of an effort to establish an independent bisexual identity, but artists’ incorporation of the pink triangle (Figs. 6 and 7) shows the pervading influence of gay liberation imagery.
These tensions were not resolved when Bi-Monthly chose the competition winner. Scholars and activists continue to struggle to define and represent bisexuality. The 1996 edited collection RePresenting Bisexualities argued that “BISEXUALITY cannot be definitively REPRESENTED.” In 2013, bisexual theorist and activist Shiri Eisner introduced her chapter titled :What is Bisexuality?” in Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by stating “I have no idea what bisexuality means.” Although nearly half of LGB people in England and Wales identify as bisexual or pansexual (approximately 1.4% of the total population), other figures suggest that the numbers of people who are attracted to more than one gender, but do not identify as bisexual, are significantly higher.
Analyzing bisexuality historically presents further challenges. Although the term dates to the mid-1800s, it wasn’t widely understood as a sexual orientation until around the mid twentieth century. Queer historians’ desire to avoid “tracing back modern sexual identities” often means they reject the term “bisexual” as anachronistic. Even amongst historians who strategically use anachronistic terms like “gay” or “LGBT,” bisexuality is often rejected as particularly anachronistic or fraught.
However, the development of modern categories of sexuality cannot be fully understood without attention to those who fall outside the gay/straight binary. There is now a general historiographical consensus that this binary is a relatively recent invention, only becoming dominant around the middle of the twentieth century. The uneven and uncertain development of “bisexuality” is the missing piece in this narrative. No sooner had “modern” heterosexuality and homosexuality been defined against each other, than bisexuality emerged to question and destabilize them.
In my forthcoming book, Bisexuality and Beyond: A History of Multiple-Gender-Attraction in Modern Britain, I explore this history by focusing not just on bisexuality but on the broader experience of what I term “multiple-gender-attraction,” an umbrella term referring to attraction to more than one gender, regardless of self-identification. The instability and fragility of bisexuality as an identity category in this period means that limiting my analysis only to people who used the term for themselves would be unhelpfully restrictive. “Multiple-gender-attraction” encompasses and extends beyond the category of bisexuality. To use the Venn diagram imagery popular amongst Bi-Monthly’s competition entries, bisexuality sits as a smaller circle within the larger field of multiple-gender-attraction.
This allows me to explore, for example, the experiences of people who wrote in to Gay News describing themselves as “not 100% gay” or “not totally gay, I suppose.” It is also a way to analyse the experiences of married men who had sex with other men but described a close emotional bond with their wives, as well as women who acknowledged attraction to men while identifying as lesbian for political reasons. Multiple-gender-attraction is not an identity, then, but a description of attraction – a tool to explore the distinctions between emotions, behavior and identity.
It could be argued that multiple-gender-attraction means we can dispense with discussion of “bisexuality” altogether. But the two concepts are not interchangeable. Bisexuality, as a label, faced particular critiques in the late twentieth century. It was sometimes tied to older ideas about sexed or gendered mixity, or written as “bi-sexual” to emphasize its sexual component and differentiate it from “political” identities like lesbian or gay. People who were attracted to multiple genders but identified as lesbian or gay were sometimes more accepted than their bisexual counterparts, although this varied. This tension is precisely why bisexuality deserves attention alongside “multiple-gender-attraction.”
I conducted seventeen original oral history interviews for the book. My participant recruitment stated that I was looking for interviewees who identified as bisexual or pansexual (either at present or in the past), and/or had experienced attraction to or relationships with more than one gender at some point in their lives. That said, some interviewees treated “multiple-gender-attraction” as essentially synonymous with bisexuality, while others found it confusing. On the whole, though, “multiple-gender-attraction” was successful in terms of recruiting interviewees with a range of identities. At the time of our interviews, nine interviewees primarily identified as bisexual, three as lesbian, two as pansexual, one as heteroflexible, and two rejected identity labels altogether.
In the archives, however, the concept becomes trickier. From a practical perspective, it’s not always clear which search terms to use. It can also put the researcher in the uncomfortable position of trying to identify emotions – in this case, attraction – in the past.
I compared my interviews to another set of interviews – the Hall-Carpenter Archives Gay and Lesbian Oral History project, held at the British Library. This project interviewed 230 people between 1985 and 1999, only one of whom identified as bisexual. However, searching the catalogue descriptions for terms like “husband” and “wife” (to find examples of relationships with someone of a different gender) and “attraction” and “identity” (to find more general reflections on emotions and labelling) produced several interviewees who had been in relationships with more than one gender. Several lesbian interviewees reflected positively on past relationships with men. However, they very rarely used the word “attraction,” making it difficult to determine whether these emotions are evidence of “multiple-gender-attraction.” This was also true of written sources – for example, would the “very deep and lasting, but not sexual” relationship that one gay man described with his wife in Gay News constitute “attraction?”
My approach in these cases was to use the terms individuals applied to themselves (gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, etc) wherever possible, and to keep the concept of “multiple-gender-attraction” as broad as possible by including people who demonstrated some evidence of love, affection or sexual attraction to more than one gender. Describing something as “multiple-gender-attraction” is not therefore a statement about how a historical subject might identify today, or whether their emotions met an arbitrary standard of “authentic’ attraction,” if such a standard were even possible to determine.
As well as recognizing that bisexuality in modern Britain was an unstable and contested category, “multiple-gender-attraction” enables practical ways of working with this recognition to analyze historical subjects, without linking people in the past to identities that they rejected. It is a way to navigate the fluidity of identity categories in the past that seeks to open up, rather than pin down, the myriad alternatives to our current framework of sexuality and gender.
Martha Robinson Rhodes is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, working on the AHRC-funded project Inclusive Histories. From 2022 to 2024 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University, funded by the Sexualities Project at Northwestern, and she has also worked for the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall. She is the author of Bisexuality and Beyond: A History of Multiple-Gender-Attraction in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026).
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the original author/s and do not necessarily represent the views of the North American Conference on British Studies. The NACBS welcomes civil and productive discussion in the comments below. Our blog represents a collegial and conversational forum, and the tone for all comments should align with this environment. Insulting or mean comments will not be tolerated and NACBS reserves the right to delete these remarks and revoke the commenter’s site membership.
ความคิดเห็น