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The Evolving Use of the Word "Bisexual" with Mark Wilkinson
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Follow Mark Wilkinson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkJoseph_82
Follow Mark Wilkinson on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markjoseph82/
Mark's "Bisexual Oysters" paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750481318817624
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Though the bisexual/fluid community has always existed, the word "bisexual" has evolved significantly in popular usage over the last 60 years. Mark Wilkinson, a PhD candidate at Lancaster University, has been studying media representation of the LGBT+ community and the discursive construction of identity & community, using linguistics to understand how queer people identify themselves over the years -- and how others identify our community in the press.
In part one of this two part interview, we discussed Mark's paper, "Bisexual Oysters", which analyzes how the word "bisexual" was used in The Times (of London) over the past six decades. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it was not used nearly as much as today, and it often did not describe sexuality but rather other aspects of gender or presentation, as well as androgyny, "co-ed" spaces, or "unisex" objects. Mark also discusses the prevalence of fictional characters as opposed to real people being described as "bisexual", contributing to bi erasure and invisibility. We also chatted about when and why these semantics are important -- especially to unite in solidarity for political purposes -- and when and why it's important to remember that "bisexuality" is not a universal identity across time and space, but rather a discursive construction that emerged at a particular time, location, and moment in our culture.
Stay tuned for part two which continues tracking the use of the word "bisexual" in the 1980s through 2017, how the word grew in usage during the HIV/AIDS epidemic (with unfortunate consequences), and some history of the term "LGBT" and how the B has historically fit in (or not).
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Transcript
Introduction & Zencastr Promotion
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00:02:11
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It is time to share your story with Zencaster.
Guest Introduction: Mark Wilkinson
00:02:27
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Two Bye, guys. We have a very interesting episode today, some research about bisexuality and the history of the term bisexual. And joining me is Mark Wilkinson. Welcome, Mark. Hi, everybody. So Mark is a PhD candidate at Lancaster University using corpus-based critical discourse analysis to study media representation and the construction of identity and community. And I will ask him to explain what the hell that means in a minute.
00:02:57
Speaker
His research is primarily concerned with the discursive construction of sexual identity in the mainstream British media, and his work aims to combine historical knowledge with discourse theory in an attempt to map how, when, and why certain identity formations were privileged over others.
Complexities of Sexual Identity
00:03:16
Speaker
resulting in concepts like the LGBT community and the deracialization of queer people in popular culture. And I came across Mark's work through Twitter. I think actually one of our listeners recommended that I look into your work. Thank you, listener.
00:03:32
Speaker
Yeah. And you had been tweeting about this paper you wrote on the history of the word bisexual in the British press. So we'll get into that in a minute. But welcome, Mark, to two bye guys. Nice to have you. Why don't you start by telling us a little about yourself? How do you identify? And what are your pronouns? And then we'll get into the work and everything.
00:03:54
Speaker
Well, that's sort of, it's kind of a loaded question, right? Because like the two kind of like lead into one another, right? Let's just, we'll talk about this question for the whole time. Exactly. It'll be an entire hour of just me, just how I identify. So basically, I mean, yeah, this is, this is an interesting question because, and I am at risk of probably making it more complicated than it needs to be, but
00:04:22
Speaker
how I identify and you know as somebody who spends his entire day thinking about identity and um identity generally but more specifically sexual and gender identity I'm obviously going to have a lot to say on the matter right so so I like to think of myself and you know ideally I like to think of myself as like a queer leftist radical
00:04:47
Speaker
However, I'm just kind of plain old gay, which is not nearly as exciting. You know, I am a cis man. I am in a relationship with another cis man. Most of my major relationships and sexual experiences have been with other cis men. But, and this is sort of like where it's kind of a nice segue into the work itself, is that I think that
00:05:11
Speaker
you know, mapping sexual identity and culture and history and all of these things onto words, right? You know, symbols, signifiers like gay, bisexual is problematic because they have different meanings at different times in history and they might not necessarily fit with people's experiences, right? And we had talked about this a little bit when we were emailing back and forth that I was like, you know,
00:05:38
Speaker
I'm gay, but I'm sort of uncomfortable with the term, and I prefer queer, and there's kind of two main reasons for that. So the first reason is that gay is the only word that is available to describe the experience that I have, the way that I live my life, right? But I've also, and I came out when I was in my early to mid teens, but subsequent to that, and I was already identifying as gay, and I was out to my friends,
00:06:06
Speaker
and family later, a little bit later. But I still had sexual experiences with women, right? And not because I felt coerced to, or like I had to, or like I was denying my sexual identity. I wanted to, right? Like it was just something that I enjoyed and I did.
00:06:22
Speaker
And so does that mean that I'm bi? Well, no, because most of my sexual experiences and relationships have been with men. So I think that gay is the most accurate term in this particular historical moment and cultural moment.
00:06:41
Speaker
but it's almost like a shorthand, right? Because if you explain your entire sexual history and your gender identity to every single person that asks, it's confusing. And probably like a little bit too much, like an overshare. But also I think that, you know, having, we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, you know, I spent many years living in, I'm originally from Canada, but I spent many years living and traveling in, um,
00:07:09
Speaker
East Asia and then many years living and traveling in the Middle East. And let me tell you, like there are many, many men in these areas who have sex with or have sexual experiences with other men and women who have sexual experiences with other women. And they would never identify as gay or even bisexual. And, you know, at least in the concept, in the circumstances of men,
00:07:35
Speaker
you know, it's a lot to do with like, who is the penetrative partner, the so called dominant partner. And I'm talking like, like, cis male students that I had that were like, this wasn't like, like, on the download, like, this was really like, like, almost sort of casually, I mean, this is obviously after getting to know the students, but they would sort of casually talk about having sex with men.
00:07:58
Speaker
at the weekend is sort of like an alternative. Like, you know, like we couldn't find like, you know, like X kind of restaurant. So we went for Chinese instead, like they could just very like, like it was sort of like almost matter of fact.
00:08:11
Speaker
But mapping our concepts of gay and bi and lesbian, whatever, onto their experiences is just absurd because these are Western concepts and they're particular historical and cultural concepts.
Identity and Language
00:08:25
Speaker
And I think in terms of history as well, similarly, if I was one of my ancestors and I was born in
00:08:32
Speaker
12th century scotland like i would still be attracted to men you know when i was still if i was lucky to be able to have sex with this man as well but i would also to subsist off land have to marry you know a woman and i would have to have children in order to subsist off plan and i'd probably be as happy as i am now you know like because
00:08:51
Speaker
the language and the culture wouldn't have afforded me the opportunities that i have now to build a life with another man right so that's sort of like thinking about it in terms of like identity and like the social and cultural circumstances.
00:09:04
Speaker
Then in terms of politics, I tend to shy away from gay and drift towards queer because over the past 10 to 20 years, the connotations associated with mainstream LGBT politics, which is usually but not always construed by the politics of white, cis, middle class, non-disabled gay men. For instance, the fight for same-sex marriage is
00:09:32
Speaker
is a goal which doesn't necessarily benefit everybody who would fall within the umbrella of the LGBT population, but also doesn't really comport with my own politics as a socialist that I'm more concerned with, like a redistribution of wealth. And I think that queer tends to signal
00:09:58
Speaker
a politics that is more concerned with building coalitions with anti-racist movements, anti-austerity politics, advocates for affordable housing. And in addition to a political commitment to universalist principles on redistribution, also the focus on crucial issues like the murder of mostly trans women of colour, murdered and missing women, girls, and two-spirit folks in Canada, queer homelessness, quality health care for trans people, especially in the... Well, not especially, but we have a massive crisis of health care for trans people in the UK right now.
00:10:28
Speaker
And so the short answer to that, I guess, is that while my politics, while my identity in terms of my personal life is certainly gay, like I'm romantically and sexually gay, I would say that my politics as a socialist can port more easily with the identifier queer.
00:10:46
Speaker
Fascinating. So I want to respond to a little and ask you a follow-up. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. So on the queer identity politically makes total sense to me, and I'm the same way. And you're a good company on this podcast. We've interviewed quite a few queer radical socialists. We could call this podcast two socialist bi guys sometimes. You might want to consider that.
00:11:13
Speaker
Would we get more listeners or would we get banned from Spotify? I don't know. Okay, but I have a question about the identity stuff. And like, it's, you're actually, I think, helping to put in context a question that I always have. And we've talked about a lot on the show, and I like, still don't really know
00:11:34
Speaker
what to do with this. But it's like, we've talked a ton about straight identified people who are sexually fluid or having sex with men or but are identifying as straight and like a question we often ask is like,
00:11:48
Speaker
Are they straight? Is identity the identity you choose? Because many bi people would say, well, bi means the openness to attractions or sex with more than one gender, and so that falls under that umbrella.
Critique of Identity Politics
00:12:05
Speaker
that could be bi but if but they're not choosing that identity and why not and and then we haven't talked as much although we are a lot this season and my co-host Alex is sort of in your boat like he was gay identified and i also interviewed a guy at court vox a couple episodes ago
00:12:14
Speaker
So
00:12:24
Speaker
gay identified for his whole life and doesn't want to lose that identity, but also has had some sexual fluidity and also uses the word queer and actually identified as pansexual and gay. So there's like this some amount of sort of fluidity within the gay identity.
00:12:42
Speaker
So I guess like I don't know what my question is even but it's like I grew up thinking gay was much more rigid than I'm learning it actually is and I guess the same with the word straight but it's all really about how these words are used in context and in our cultures
00:13:01
Speaker
So so I don't is it is it a semantic issue that doesn't matter or what do we do with? This is it helping us or is it? Is there a way to unify? The come on things. Yeah, I think that that's like ten questions No, so I'll just give you like a couple of answers figure out what's going on in my head, please I'll just say some things and then you can decide to include them or not. Okay, great. I think that
00:13:31
Speaker
It does matter. I think semantics do matter. And if they are helpful, so, you know, like there's this idea of like strategic essentialism, like, you know, like you need to have in order to fight for things like in the past to fight for civil rights, you need to have
00:13:49
Speaker
a group identity to campaign. We're talking about electoral politics. You need to be able to go to your elected representatives and say, this particular group is being marginalized or underrepresented or suffering from the effects of decisions made in government, et cetera, et cetera.
00:14:09
Speaker
However, I think that that's only useful up to a point, and then these terms tend to divide. And this is sort of one of the problems with identity politics today, is that some identity politics are not all, and I think that there would be other people who would disagree with me, and I would be quite willing to probably end up agreeing with them. I'm easily persuaded.
00:14:33
Speaker
But the point I was going to make was that identity politics can be quite neoliberal in the sense that it's about like, well, like I gave the example of marriage, right? Like marriage was primarily about like, well, securing property rights and, you know, and it was about
00:14:48
Speaker
assimilation to a degree. I mean, and partially that was really useful because, you know, like in the HIV and AIDS crisis, like if your partner was dying, you can visit them in hospital. If they died, you could lose your house, you could lose all your belongings, like you wouldn't be able to go to the funeral, blah, blah, blah. Those are really important things to campaign on behalf of. But what ends up happening is that if you only have a politics of identity, then
00:15:15
Speaker
It becomes like, there's a theorist named Nancy Fraser and she talks about, I think it's transformative politics versus affirmative politics. So affirmative politics would be upholding the systems that already exist and that account for or facilitate the oppression of large groups of people all over the world.
00:15:35
Speaker
And then there's transformative justice, which would be dismantling those structures, right? So in the case of marriage, instead of advocating to have the right to get married, we dismantle the institution of marriage. And anybody can enter into a civil partnership with a best friend, with two people, with their brother or whatever, you know? Like, so that you can have the same sort of validation of relationship in whatever case.
00:16:04
Speaker
So I think that it can be divisive. The problem is, is that, and then on top of that, in regards to the other question that you were asking about the language, I think that it's cultural and it's historical. So like if somebody said to you now, like I'm a homosexual, it sounds strange, right? Because we've moved on to a point where like homosexual has connotations of medicalization and
00:16:29
Speaker
mental illness, et cetera. So people say gay, right? Whereas, you know, I think that now or in a transition period where people are moving away from that term and then, and that's just within the West or Anglo America, really. And if you think about it in terms of like other places throughout the world and the global South and the East, wherever,
00:16:50
Speaker
there are different sexual identities that we don't have necessarily, they don't have the same names,
Research on Queer Identities in Media
00:16:57
Speaker
right? So for instance, two-spirit as opposed to saying trans or gay, right? So there's a really good example of a poet and a scholar in Canada named Joshua Whitehead and
00:17:13
Speaker
They were nominated for a poetry prize, and I may be messing up the story, but it was some sort of literary prize. And basically, it was for trans literature. And Joshua Whitehead said, I'm not trans. I'm two-spirit.
00:17:27
Speaker
I'm two-spirit queer indigenous. So as much as I'm honored and like solidarity with my trans brothers and sisters, I cannot accept this award. So language does matter. The labels we use do matter. And sometimes they matter because we need to build coalitions and sometimes they matter because we need to disrupt the system.
00:17:47
Speaker
Interesting. Well, and as we'll discuss in a few minutes, those words, the meaning and the use can change over time quite quickly sometimes, not just within our lifetimes, but for bisexual within the last 10 years. And so what the identities mean now may not be what they mean soon. Or there may be new words that better explain what's going on as things shift.
00:18:22
Speaker
Let's get into your work a little, but before we get into the actual paper you published, tell us a little like, what is corpus-based critical discourse analysis mean? Is this the next critical race theory? Are we going to get banned from school? And how did you get into this research to your PhD student? Why did you transition to doing this work? What's interesting to you about it?
00:18:48
Speaker
So corpus-based critical discourse analysis is a combination of two disciplines within linguistics. So critical discourse analysis is looking at discourse, right? So just ways of thinking and talking about the social world, right? And it is critical in the sense that it would look at a
00:19:11
Speaker
a newspaper article, for instance, that would say something like, youths have been shot like over the weekend or whatever. And like what is missing from that sentence is that the police shot them, right? Or, you know, like, like things that are built into our
00:19:27
Speaker
our grammar, like she was raped, right? Like the subject of the rapist is actually removed from the sentence, right? So critical discourse looks at grammar and how grammar and discourse kind of shapes the way we perceive the world. And it's critical in the sense that it comes from a Marxist background where people are looking at injustice and how language functions to perpetuate injustices.
00:19:51
Speaker
But one of the critiques of critical discourse analysis is that it can very easily be kind of like cherry picking examples. So critics would say, like, you know, like critical discourse analysis, just look through the newspaper and we're like, that's racist. That's misogynistic.
00:20:07
Speaker
Which isn't really rigorous linguistic analysis. Anyway, so what corpus linguistics does is it takes large amounts of data. So like my, in my PhD, I have like 23 million words.
00:20:24
Speaker
Right? And you have various computer programs that look at language patterns. And if language patterns are consistent across a sustained period of time, then you can make a kind of scientific argument. I put that in the scare quotes.
00:20:42
Speaker
you can make an argument based on statistics that something is, that it's not being cherry-picked, that there's quantitative evidence to back it up, right? So like my supervisor did really interesting work on representations of Islam in the British press. And like what he found was that Paul Baker is his name. And what he found is that Islamic tends to, and he did this work with Tony McHenry and Costas Gabrielatos, I should say their names.
00:21:09
Speaker
they found that Islamic always goes with the word, not always, but a majority of the time goes with a word like terrorist, right? But it never goes with a word like school or scholar or something. So if you always hear the word Islamic with terrorist, then it kind of primes in your mind that
00:21:30
Speaker
Islam and anything that is Islamic is associated with terrorism, right? And so it's a useful way of deconstructing the news and critiquing how things are represented. So I wanted to look at how
00:21:47
Speaker
queer identities, so lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex people have been represented in the British press over a sustained period of time. So I'm looking at 60 years. Initially I wanted to look at like a hundred years and I wanted to look at lots of different papers, but my
00:22:05
Speaker
My supervisor was like, that's crazy, you'll never finish. So I'm just looking at the times in London, at the times of London, and looking from the years 1957 to the year 2017. 1957, because that's when there was a report published called the Wolfinden Report, which recommended the decriminalization of sex between men over the age of 21, consensual sex over the age of 21 in private.
00:22:31
Speaker
So there's a lot of caveats there, but then, and up to 2017, and that's just arbitrary because that's just when I started it. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Well, then we'll see what happens after 2017. That is changing. So I was going to ask you why you chose, because I've only read this one paper on bisexual oysters as the title, but I was going to ask why you chose to study bisexual as opposed to gay, lesbian, trans. Are you doing the similar studies with those other terms?
00:23:01
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So that answers that question. I'm looking at everything. I cast a really wide net. And so if you, and the thing is that if you go back to the fifties and sixties, words like bisexual, I mean, gay, obviously wasn't used. Gay just meant happy. It was homosexual, bisexual. We'll talk about it in a minute.
00:23:26
Speaker
Lesbian has maintained its meaning throughout the 60 years. Transgender did not exist. Queer existed, but was used in lots of different ways. And so it's been really interesting finding out not just how queer people are represented, but the different identifiers that have been used over the years. And this ties back to what we were saying at the beginning that language changes and as language changes, so does identity.
00:23:55
Speaker
Right. It's kind of interesting that like lesbian has been more stable and gay and bisexual have changed and trans didn't even exist and other words were used. It's interesting how it's all moving in different ways. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they had transvestite and transsexual, but there's a lot of people that I think could have been trans and were not represented as such in
00:24:23
Speaker
newspaper because there just wasn't a word for it, right? Yeah, actually, can I just ask, I'm curious, like, were those words that were used, like, now they are very derogatory, like, I wouldn't, you know, obviously use the word transit, like, was it not a derogatory term then? Well, yeah, I mean, I think that transgender was encouraged by the trans community, as opposed to transvestite and trans and transsexual.
00:24:48
Speaker
Although I think that there are trans people that still use the term transsexual. And I think as well that, you know, there's something interesting happening in the fifties and sixties where there,
Podcast Sponsorship
00:25:02
Speaker
so the Wolfen didn't report that I was telling you about what they, they were arguing to decriminalize sex between men. And one of their ultimate goals of doing so was that they would be able to find a cure.
00:25:19
Speaker
right? They were like, if we can decriminalize it, treat it like a health issue, we'll find a cure. And one of the possible cures that they proposed was what we would now call gender affirming surgery. So like sex change surgery that they actually thought, you know, what we'll do with all of these gay men and with these women is that we'll just give them sex assignment surgery or gender assignment surgery. And so there's a really different way of thinking about it. Whereas now the UK is
00:25:49
Speaker
Extremely transphobic and you know, and yet you go back to the 50s and it was seen as like almost I mean it never came to pass but it was seen as a possibility they were like well Maybe we can just give everybody gender assignment surgery on the NHS on the National Health Service Wow
00:26:12
Speaker
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Findings on 'Bisexual' in The Times
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00:27:44
Speaker
Let's get into this paper because it's really fascinating, especially for our bisexual audience. But before we talk about the actual meaning of the word bisexual and how it's changed, tell us a little about the method of how you did this research. What did you actually look at? How did you pull it out just so we have some context as we get into it? So basically what I did was, and this was sort of like a lucky mistake, which happens a lot with research, which is that
00:28:13
Speaker
I was collecting articles from it's called the Times Digital Archives. They have all of their issues digitized back to like 1785 or something like this. So I was looking at what kinds of words were used to represent what we would now consider the LGBTQI population and bisexual I had on the list.
00:28:38
Speaker
But when it came up in the 50s and 60s, first of all, there was only like 15 or 16 occurrences. And one of the theories behind the work is that if you talk about something in a certain way over a sustained period of time, it comes to be perceived as such, right? But if there's only 15 occurrences of something over 10 years, then you can't really make that argument. So it fell down and I was like, oh no. Then I talked to my supervisor and I was like, what do I do? And we were looking at them.
00:29:07
Speaker
And we quickly realized most of them, I think it was like 11 out of 16 of them didn't reference sexual identity at all. They referenced other things. And so this was how I started doing this work specifically on bisexual. So what I did was I found every article or searched for every article that mentioned the word bisexual in it
00:29:33
Speaker
between 1957 and 2017. And then I broke them into different historical periods to make the analysis a little bit easier. So between 57 and 67, those are the 10 years before sex between men is decriminalized. 68 to 78, because that's sort of the era of the sexual revolution, the lesbian and gay liberation movement.
00:29:56
Speaker
79 and 90, which is very important in the UK because that's the premiership of Margaret Thatcher who brought in sweeping neoliberal reforms and destroyed the post-war consensus. But at the same time, this was also the rise of the HIV and AIDS epidemic.
00:30:15
Speaker
from 91 to 2003. 2003, because that's when they repealed Section 28. Section 28 was a bylaw. I mean, it was a local law. It was a for for local councils, which prohibited the teaching of homosexuality in schools as a, quote, pretended family relationship. So it was illegal to mention any kind of sexual identities.
00:30:38
Speaker
or non-heterosexual identities in school up until 2003, which is really, really late. So like a lot of people that grew up and are our age now, you know, never being able to discuss it. I mean, not that I don't think we discussed sexual identity in Canada either, but I don't think there was any laws against it. And then 2004 to 2017, because that's when you have the Gender Recognition Act, the Civil Partnership Act, Same-Sex Marriage Act, et cetera, et cetera.
00:31:06
Speaker
So I broke the data into each of these time periods and then looked at how the word bisexual developed over those decades.
00:31:14
Speaker
Cool. And one last framing question. In the US, I think of the Times as the New York Times. This is a little bit left of center, but highly regarded by some paper. But this is a different Times. How is the Times in the UK viewed, and where does it fall politically, and why did you choose that paper?
00:31:37
Speaker
I mean, to me, it's grossly right-wing. But to me, the New York Times is a little grossly right-wing sometimes. So the reason why I chose the Times, there's a couple of like, practically, it's because it's all digitized online. So it's just really easy to access, right? Because I wanted to, and the second reason is that
00:31:59
Speaker
because I initially wanted to look at lots of different papers and for your American audience or for American audiences outside of the UK, we have broadsheets, which are like news, like proper news. And then there's tabloids, which are, of course, tabloids, right? So like most people are familiar with the Daily Mail, like that would be an example of the British tabloid. And I wanted to look at all of them.
00:32:22
Speaker
but because it was going to be, it was far too much to analyze. So I decided that I would focus on one and I wanted to find something that was like quote centrist, but the thing is that there are no centrist papers in Britain and our media ecology is extremely skewed to the right. Like even the guardian is like, you know, centrist at best, you know, I think it used to be more left wing, but it certainly isn't now. And so, but the times,
00:32:52
Speaker
has a place within the history and scope of British media or the British press, which is that it's considered the voice of the establishment. So I thought that it would be interesting to look at the ways in which sexual identity was represented as kind of like, these are established norms. They didn't cover a lot of scandals. They didn't cover a lot of
00:33:20
Speaker
shocking stories like when they talked about sexual identity tended to be kind of tempered. Do you know what I mean? So I thought that would be an interesting way of looking at the language.
00:33:32
Speaker
Cool, awesome. Okay, so let's go through, so you mentioned those sort of five time periods that you broke the research down into. So let's go through them and talk about how bisexual was used in each of them, because it's fascinating. So let's start with the 1957 to 67.
00:33:51
Speaker
era when there were you you talked a little there were only 16 occurrences of the word bisexual so already that's interesting that it was i mean in the other in the later time periods you have thousands and thousands of uses so that alone is interesting that it was barely used but but talk about that and how was it used in those 16 occurrences so 11 of those occurrences so five of them did
00:34:19
Speaker
more or less reference somebody who I think that it would translate to today, right? That we would still understand the use of bisexual today. Although interestingly, and we'll come back to this, most of them are in fiction.
00:34:37
Speaker
Right? So they're not talking about real bisexual people. They're talking about characters. So that's something. But we'll come back to that because there's a lot more of that that is consistent throughout all of the decades in question. The 11 occurrences which do not reference sexual identity were bisexual organisms. So it basically they didn't have sexual differentiation.
00:35:00
Speaker
Um, the other one was bisexual situations. So bisexual situations were basically just situations where there were men and women present. Um, and look, there was a few unique uses, which are really, really interesting. So I'll read like one or two, just as an example, cause they're quite funny. So in an article published in 1957, it's called the, um, the story of the oak oyster. And it was published on August 31st and it says,
00:35:27
Speaker
Next week, that most glittering debutante of the gastronomical season, the oyster, makes her, or should it be his, annual debut. Either his or her is correct, for the British oyster is bisexual. American oysters are males or females during their entire lifetime. So here you see first British exceptionalism, right? They're always better.
00:35:54
Speaker
They're always looking down on Americans, basically everyone else. But what's really interesting here is that they're talking about organisms. So they talk about bisexual tube worms. They talk about bisexual plants. The second example that I gave you was, of course, bisexual situations. So they talk about things like sports, like fencing, canoeing, dancing.
00:36:19
Speaker
as being bisexual. There was a massive scandal or moral panic about having women in the priesthood, and they were like, we can't have a bisexual priesthood, which is such a weird way of talking about it. Anyway, and then finally, there were a couple of examples that didn't fit into any particular category. And there's a couple that I think are really interesting because basically,
00:36:45
Speaker
I think that most of them were talking about bisexuality as almost like a
00:36:50
Speaker
a synonym of haemaphrodite, right? Right. I was going to ask if that's the word that kind of replaced this usage for the oysters or organisms. Yeah, absolutely. Essentially. And so they're talking about Lord Byron, who was a writer, a poet, and a very famous, and they talk about his bisexual nature resulted in his homosexuality.
Cultural Context of 'Bisexual'
00:37:15
Speaker
And it took me a minute to think about it but I was like they mean like his soul is like he's half woman half man so like the part of him that is in love with man. Is the female part and face versa right so it's a really strange use of bisexual they talk about.
00:37:36
Speaker
bisexual fragrances. They talk about bisexual fragrances a lot, which is like unisex, right? So that not only was it hemaphroditic, but it also meant unisex. In the 70s, I'll get to this, but they talk a lot about bisexual fashion. Interesting. And bisexual instruments as well, which is quite funny. The conch, the flute, and the drum are apparently bisexual instruments. Why? So you're thinking of picking up an instrument.
00:38:03
Speaker
Because men or women could play those instruments? I suppose so. Oh, you have a visitor. I have a visitor, I have a dog. Hold on, let me just put her here. So she only speaks Portuguese. Cute. Thank you. I guess you'll have to edit that part out. Leave it all in.
00:38:34
Speaker
So from the 1960s into the 1970s, there's a big change. We're getting into this era number two now. Okay, cool. So from 1968 to 1978, you have a big increase in the amount of
00:38:51
Speaker
uses of the term bisexual, which actually comport with our contemporary definition. So bisexual is being attracted to people who identify as male or people who identify as female. So it goes from 31% in the 50s to 66% in the 70s. So it's a big jump.
00:39:10
Speaker
right? And there's a lot of talk about bisexual people and again it's mostly fiction, right? What I found was that most of the examples that I was finding of the use of bisexual was in the reviews section
00:39:29
Speaker
And so when I looked at where it was coming from, I was like, that's strange. And it's bisexual characters in film, television and theater. Interesting. Right. So there was something exotic about a bisexual character, but bisexual people didn't exist in real life or they didn't talk about them in real life in the times. Right. I mean, yeah. What do you think that does? Like, how do you think that contributes to the culture of like when it's mostly talked about as fictional characters, but not real life? Or what does that reflect?
00:40:00
Speaker
I think that it's that people are, I think that we live in the West specifically, we live in a, one of like the greatest paradigms that sort of structures most of our lives is binaries, right? You know, everything from like emotional binaries, like happy, sad to sexual binaries, like
00:40:19
Speaker
gay straight, you know, and people are very uncomfortable with things that don't fit within that, right? But it's, I think that, you know, I mean, you're a writer, like it's sort of fun to play with like exotic characters, unexpected situations, right? So I think there was something, and there was a lot of like pulp fiction at the time, right? That was like, would feature like bisexual detectives, and like bisexual mysteries, things like this, which is really interesting.
00:40:44
Speaker
Um, but there's still a lot of bisexual fashion. So you have, um, bisexual garments, bisexual hats, lots of bisexual clothing. So that, that again, essentially we would call today unisex or something like that. Exactly. Right. Interesting. And so this, this raises a really interesting point about kind of like what you would consider like historical translation. Like how do you take,
00:41:11
Speaker
when you read historical fiction or historical newspapers, how is it that you understand terms that maybe are unfamiliar to you? And we do that by translating them, right? So it's a bisexual fragrance. It's very easy for us to understand as a unisex fragrance, right?
00:41:34
Speaker
But there's a lot of examples that would not be able to translate today. So for instance, they talk about bisexual parenting. What is that? And bisexual parenting, yeah, right, is usually, the example that I found was a mother who, and the quote is, by filling the male role in the household as well as her own, provides the children with a bisexual model for their behavior. So in other words,
00:42:05
Speaker
this is completely, I don't know how you would, I mean, first of all, it assumes that a single mother cannot raise a child on her own with a father figure, right? It's a very gendered way of looking at parenting in the first place. But yeah, yeah, yeah, sort of like non gender conforming parenting might be how I describe it. I guess so, right? Like they sort of say like she had to be
00:42:28
Speaker
And you hear people say this like, oh, they had to be both mother and father. But like, there's this sort of like these ideological concepts that we have about like motherhood and fatherhood and what that means. Right. And I think that it would be very difficult to translate that to now. Right. Similarly, they talk they use bisexual a lot for androgyny. So they talk about God as being bisexual, which is really interesting.
00:42:56
Speaker
Um, the quote is, I love that. Yeah, I know. I love it too. I hope God is bisexual, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So they talked about, um, a debate, uh, wherein, uh, it was argued that the bisexuality of God had been obscured by a misinterpretation of Genesis. God made man and woman in his, and then it puts in a parentheses for brackets. It's question mark. So it changes it to it. Uh, it's image.
00:43:25
Speaker
but the whole image exists only in combination of the two. So they're saying that the Judeo-Christian God was hemaphroditic. And so we misunderstand the story of Genesis.
00:43:39
Speaker
and created man and woman in their own image or something. Exactly. Interesting. And then just two more examples of androgyny from the 70s. They have one about bisexual space stations, which again, maybe you want to visit one. I don't know. I do now.
00:44:03
Speaker
So they talk about, they say, American space engineers have therefore drawn up preliminary plans for so-called androgynous and then they put bisexual in parentheses. So androgynous or bisexual system that is neither male nor female in design.
00:44:17
Speaker
So they're saying that it's hematopoietic. And there's a few more examples of this. Wait, but the space station is because when they dock and stuff or whatever, they call those things male and female, which one fits into the other. And it is quite a phallic symbol. I mean, I saw gravity and the dock kind of goes into the thing. Okay, so that's what that means.
00:44:40
Speaker
Yeah, so apparently they found an androgynous way, or a bisexual way of docking. You've given me a new life goal, which is to somehow connect with Elon Musk and make another bisexual space station. We'll fill it with bisexual people. All the ports can go either way. Yeah, exactly. We'll just take his money. We'll leave him out of it.
00:45:02
Speaker
But yeah, so it's really interesting is that there's there's this use of but what's important about these examples is the way that they're like disambiguating androgynous with bisexual so like bisexual would be the more common term and when they use androgynous is like a new term and so then they have to put bisexual in brackets so that the average reader understands it.
00:45:22
Speaker
Interesting. So there's still like, we're almost like the 70s is kind of like this halfway point between bisexual having many uses, primarily androgyny, haemaphrodite, haemaphroditism. That's hard to pronounce. It's one of those words you only ever read, right?
Episode Conclusion & Tease for Part Two
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah. And then
00:45:43
Speaker
And then moving on to the 80s, when you finally do, you have 92% of all usages of bisexual reference, bisexual, bisexuality as a sexual identity.
00:45:55
Speaker
Okay, so we've gone from in the 60s, it's around 30%. In the 70s, it's around 66%, around two thirds. And then by the 80s, 92%, it's being used similarly to how it's used today. Yeah. So it's, I mean, that's, I knew that, you know, didn't always mean this, but that's interesting to see exactly how it rose, you know, through those decades.
00:46:22
Speaker
That's all we've got for you with Mark Wilkinson today. Thank you for listening to part one of this interview. Is this the perfect episode to break into two parts? Or did I just run out of time editing this week? Maybe it's a little from Colby and Colby, as it usually is for bisexual people. Stay tuned soon for part two, where we will learn more about the use of the word bisexual in the 80s, 90s, and all the way up until 2017. It's all really fascinating and we're going to learn
00:46:52
Speaker
a lot more about how much more the word was used and how it really rose to prominence in the 80s during the HIV and AIDS epidemic. We'll talk all about that and how it's used today and what all of this means. Will I release part two next week? Will it be in two weeks?
00:47:07
Speaker
They say consistency is key in podcasting, but, you know, sometimes we've got to be a little unpredictable, like a messy bisexual. So I'm keeping you all on your toes. So stay tuned whenever I decide to publish Part 2, because it's really interesting. I love this chat. Thank you, Mark Wilkinson. We'll hear more from him soon, and thank you for listening to 2Bye Guys.
00:47:30
Speaker
Two Bye Guys is edited and produced by me, Rob Cohen, and it was created by me and Alex Boyd. Our music is by Ross Mincer, our logo art is by Caitlin Weinman, and we are supported by the Gotham, formerly IFP. Thanks for listening to Two Bye Guys.