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Pioneers of the Bisexual Movement
Feeling oppressed by both the homosexual and the heterosexual world, American bisexuals began to organize in the 1970s. Shown here are two important pioneers of the new movement.
Marguerite Rubenstein (b.1930), an Amercian therapist, was the driving force behind the founding of the Bisexual Center in San Francsico in 1976. It was the first bisexual organization with its own center offering a variety of services. An earlier group, the National Bisexual Liberation Group, had been founded in New York in 1972. Fritz Klein (1932 -2006), an American psychiatrist and pioneer of the bisxual movement, published “The Bisexual Option” in 1978, the first psychological study specifically devoted to bisexuality.
When the gays and lesbians tried to gain recognition as a minority, they sought to increase their numbers by asking potential members to come out of hiding (“out of the closet”), to stop pretending that they were heterosexuals and declare their homosexuality to the world.
By implication, this divided the human race into two mutually exclusive camps – “gay” or “straight”, or, in the words of Alfred Kinsey, into “sheep and goats”. However, this division did not sit well with very many women and men who were erotically attracted to both sexes. Indeed, they now felt oppressed by both the homosexual minority and the heterosexual majority, calling both of them them one-sided “monosexuals”. In response, therefore, they began to organize as another minority – the bisexuals. As their movement grew, American bisexuals organized their first national congress in San Francisco in 1990. Networking with similar groups led to a first International Congress on Bisexuality in Amsterdam 1991, and this was followed by others. Today, the bisexual movement also includes many transgendered people and sees itself as part of a larger liberation movement that tries to break down the traditional polarized gender categories.
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