The Bi State of the Union

It used to be that pollsters peeked in on LGBT issues every so many years — and usually just to ask straight people their opinions on the matter. Since the early 2010s, however, polls have regularly surveyed LGBT folks, giving us a chance not only to see the LGBT landscape from a 30,000-foot view, but also to see how it’s evolving and growing. This is especially exciting for bi people, since bisexuality is the largest group within the LGBT umbrella. And based on the data we have, there’s good reason to suspect that there’s a whole lot more bi folks out there than most think.

Gallup’s latest LGBT poll, released earlier this year, shows that the percentage of Americans who are openly LGBT rose to 7.6%, up from 7.2% the year prior. They found that bi people make up nearly 60% of all LGBT folks, 4.5% of all US adults, and an impressive 15.3% of all Gen Z! A survey from the Public Religion Research Institute released just prior found the same thing: 15% of Gen Z is openly bi, along with 7% of Millennials. To put that in perspective, back in 2011, UCLA found that just 1.8% of adults said they were bi. So many people are finally spreading their bisexual wings, in fact, that there are more out bi folks today than there were openly LGBT people in total in 2016! But the truth is, we’ve actually known that humans are pretty bi for a long time. We’re only just now seeing it out in the open.

In the 1930s and 40s, the sex researcher Li Shiu Tong found that 40% of his subjects were bisexual in their behavior. (His research was never published, and ended up getting trash-picked by a curious neighbor outside Tong’s Vancouver apartment in 1993 after his death, where it languished in an obscure online archive until it was finally unearthed in 2022. Who said nosey neighbors weren’t good for anything?) In the 40s and 50s, Alfred Kinsey found that more than a third of males had overt same-sex experiences. More recently, data from the General Social Survey found that between 1989 and 2021, the number of people who said they’d had both male and female sexual partners more than tripled from 3.1% to 9.6%.

Even as more bis come out, though, many remain in the closet. According to Pew Research, in 2012, just 28% of bi people said they were out to their inner circle, compared to 77% of gay men and 71% of lesbians. In 2019, this number actually declined to 19%, with 55% saying they were only out to some or a few people, and 26% saying they were not out at all (compared to just 4% for gay men and lesbians). Stonewall UK found in 2020 that only 36% of bis are out to all their friends, and 20% to their families.

Alongside the folks who are secretly bi are those who don’t seem to realize they are bi. A study out of Spain in 2022 found that 31.5% of straight-identified young women and 13.2% of straight-identified young men said they had bisexual attractions. What’s more, an incredible 81.6% of straight-identified women and 38.8% of straight-identified men said they would be open to some form of same-sex behavior. In case that’s not wild enough, 7.4% of straight-identified women and 6.1% of straight-identified men said they’d already had same-sex intercourse! Again, these are people who identify as straight!

As troubling as it is to see just how many bi people are still in the closet or seemingly unaware that they are bi, it’s also strangely encouraging at the same time. We know more folks come out every year, and that the bi community keeps growing. We also know that bisexuality is actually fairly common and that lots of bi folks are still hidden. This suggests that as fantastic as the bi progress of recent years has been, it may all seem like just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s in store. The state of the bi union is strong, and there’s every reason to expect it will only grow stronger by the year.