As Diamond followed up every two years with the women she was studying, her hypothesis found new support. “They were moving in all possible directions,” says Diamond. In 2005, 10 years after she began her study, the pie charts continued to change, and about 67 percent of the women had changed their sexual identity labels at least once. Many self-labeled lesbians had unlabeled themselves. Most of the women who had initially preferred not to have a label had taken on the bisexual label. Some unlabeled women became lesbian, and others heterosexual. [...]
In her 2008 book Sexual Fluidity, Diamond says sexual fluidity is actually relatively common. It’s not a conclusion that everyone agrees with: Qazi Rahman, a senior lecturer of cognitive neuropsychology at King’s College London, for example, suggests that her study was too small to “tell us much about women in general.” But Charlotte Tate, a gender and sexuality psychologist at San Francisco State University, says that Diamond’s sample size is larger than the recommended sample size for qualitative research, and considers Diamond’s findings significant. “Sexual fluidity is a real phenomenon,” says Tate. “It is a part of the human experience.” [...]
If the narrative departure represented by bisexuality was discouraged, sexual fluidity—which denied the very idea of static orientation—was an even more remote afterthought, even though it had been observed in the academic literature by the late 1970s. “The notion of sexual fluidity is not a new one,” writes Diamond in Sexual Fluidity. A 1977 study of 156 bisexual male and female college students found that some had consistent patterns of attraction over time while others did not.1 The authors proposed that sexuality is not fixed at a young age, but could vary over a lifetime. A few other studies over the next decade made similar insights, underscoring the importance of time in measuring human attraction. At one point, some researchers devised a new model for quantifying sexuality that included the element of time.2 Yet the model, along with these early studies, failed to have much of an impact.
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