ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Conceptual Confusion of Bisexuality in American Sex Science, c.1924–1953

• In Event: Beyond Binaries in LGBTQI+ Histories of Sexology: Bi, Trans, Intersex

English Abstract

Bisexuality, so Regina Kunzel notes, has been “woefully understudied” by historians. This neglect has been no less common among historians of science, with Stephen Angelides’s A History of Bisexuality (2001) being the most notable exception. Adequately historicising bisexuality requires us to approach it not as a timeless category but as a variable and historically contingent framework for understanding multiple-gender-eroticism. Testing Angelides’s claims about the significance of bisexuality’s disavowal to the “modern” scientific construction of the hetero/homo binary, this paper asks why bisexuality so often manifested as a form of conceptual confusion in early-twentieth-century American sex science and research. As importantly, however, it moves beyond Angelides’s “top-down” focus on the epistemological imperatives of scientists to ask: what can we know about the individuals whom early-twentieth-century sex scientists categorised as “bisexual” in this era? Considering Carney Landis’s 1930s psychiatric case studies, Thomas Painter’s unpublished 1940 study of male prostitution, and George Henry’s Sex Variants (1941), this piece interrogates the gap between the analytical language that scientists used and the self-understandings of research subjects—for whom “bisexual” was often a much less salient and consolidated concept in this era. These reflections in turn provide a vantage point for considering anew the vexed conceptual positions that both bisexuality and multiple-gender-eroticism assumed in the production and the reception of the Kinsey Reports, which took the American public by storm in the middle years of the twentieth century.

Author

• Robin Franklin, Princeton University