By the time 007 left after the two hour interview, Diamond had tentatively concluded that the woman would come out as bisexual in her follow-up interview. But 007 never did. The interaction marked the beginning of Diamond’s gradual realization that her assumptions about sexuality needed to change. In addition to the static orientations that most of us think about, like heterosexual, gay, and bisexual, some people experience shifts in their attractions that don’t fit into static orientations. In Diamond’s group, in fact, most did. [...]
It was on a flight to Los Angeles to visit her parents, in the middle of reading interview transcripts and making notes, that Diamond had an “aha” moment. She realized that she had been expecting, and imposing, conventional “coming out” stories: a falsification of sexual identity followed by a revealing of the true self. But “that’s not actually what people [were] saying,” Diamond recalls.
Re-reading her transcripts, Diamond realized that many of her subjects had not been misrepresenting their previous identities at all. Instead, they were moving from one genuine, persistent identity (and label) to another.
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. [...]
Sexual fluidity is also not the same thing as bisexuality, which is another sexual orientation. “Bisexuality refers to an attraction to both males and females,” explains Leila Rupp, a social scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “while sexual fluidity refers to shifting attractions and desires.” Bisexuals who are consistently attracted to males and females over their entire lives are not sexually fluid. Fluid bisexuals, on the other hand, can be attracted only to males or only to females for periods of time. [...]
Robyn Ochs, who came out as bisexual in 1982 and has been campaigning for bisexual rights ever since, remembers some gay marches before the mid-1990s as unwelcoming. “Lesbian women thought that we were sleeping with the enemy,” says Ochs. Dawne Moon, a sociologist at Marquette University, explains that some gay people felt that bisexuals were watering down their message. Any kind of sexual variability outside of homosexuality would threaten the narrative of the gay movement, says Moon. That narrative revolved around same-sex attraction being as authentic and fixed an orientation as heterosexuality. [...]
A few recent studies of large populations, however, have identified change in attractions over time. One study of about 1,000 New Zealanders between ages 21 and 38 found that a significant number of them experienced variability in their sexual attraction over time. Among 21-year-old women, up to 9 percent had same-sex attractions, which increased to 16 percent by age 28, and then fell to 12 percent by age 38. Among the 21-year old men, 4.2 percent had homosexual attractions, which went up to 6.5 percent by age 38.3 There is evidence that these changes can continue well into middle age. A 2012 meta-study of data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States found that over a 10-year period, adults (with a mean age of 47 at the beginning of the study) exhibited variability in their sexual identity. Almost 3 percent of women and 2 percent of men changed their identity over the 10-year period.
