Male bisexuality is very real, but there continue to be major myths about what being a bisexual man means. A 2016 national survey by the CDC found that 2% of men identify as bisexual (while 5.5% of women did).
According to Inverse, the biggest myth about bisexual men is that they’re “inherently promiscuous,” which several bi guys they spoke with took issue with. 50-year-old Vance told Inverse that he’s “gotten frustrated when partners won’t trust him to not cheat, and with members of the gay community who are judgmental.”
Another myth that came up among Inverse’s interviewees was the old idea that bisexuality doesn’t exist. They spoke with Jai, age 23, who said, “people have such a binary view of everything they find it hard to understand that one could be bisexual and not gay or straight.”
Bi-erasure, as the term is known, is a very real phenomenon within both the broader culture as well as the lesbian and gay communities. Those who think they don’t know any bisexual men, though, may in fact know bi men but not realize it. A 2019 Pew Research Center analysis found that “only 19% of those who identify as bisexual say all or most of the important people in their lives are aware of their sexual orientation,” whereas 75% of gay and lesbian adults were out to those closest to them.
Despite those stereotypes still kicking around, male bisexuality is becoming more accepted in both popular culture and the scientific community. A 2020 paper in the journal PNAS on the bisexual orientation in men found that “Results strongly confirmed that men who report attraction to both sexes are more genitally and subjectively aroused by both sexes compared with men who report that they are attracted only to one sex.”