Since 1989, the proportion of American adults identifying as bisexual has tripled. The evidence suggests that bisexual people feel psychologically safer admitting who they are and living as bi.

In 2024, University of Portland, Oregon, researchers tracked bisexual preference in three iterations of the General Social Survey (GSS), a huge, ongoing, authoritative study of Americans’ lives. In the 1989-1994 GSS, 3.1 percent of respondents claimed bisexuality. In the 2012-2018 GSS, it was 9.3 percent. In 2021, it was 9.6 percent, triple the 1989 proportion.

Most bisexuals are women (3.7 percent vs. 1.6 percent of men).

Bisexuality also skews young. Compared with those over 40, younger Americans are three times more likely to claim it. Why the age difference? That’s not entirely clear, but sexual experimentation clusters among the young, and as the culture becomes more sex- and gender-fluid, bisexuals may feel more comfortable coming out.

In the 1950s, sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey declared a “sexual continuum” from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively lesbian/gay, with bisexuality in between. Kinsey himself was bisexual. Married to a woman, he had male sex partners.

But other researchers insisted bisexuality didn’t exist. Their arguments:

The naysayers insisted that people are straight, lesbian/gay, or lying. Such denunciations may well have kept many bisexuals in their closets.

Lesbians/gays began celebrating their sexuality in the 1970s. That decade also marked the founding of the first bisexuality organizations. The media discovered bisexuality in 1974 when a Newsweek article........

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