Mapping Sexual Orientation

By Robyn Ochs

Published in RECOGNIZE: The Voices of Bisexual Men. Find the whole book here.

To state the obvious: human beings—and our sexualities—are complicated. Each person has a unique experience of self and sexuality. Yet we have a need to organize, classify and categorize things in order to make sense of our environments, turning chaos and randomness into perceived order. When we encounter something unfamiliar—an object, event or person—we sort it through our systems of meaning and respond to it as a member of a “preformed category.” “Oh, he’s a whatchamacallit,” we say to ourselves, and then we filter our understanding of this newly encountered person through the associations we have with that category.

Which categories of identity are important to us and what they mean are based upon our own experiences, assumptions and prejudices and are culturally specific. In present-day United States, for example, salient categories may include gender identity, sexual orientation, race, nationality, class status, age and so on. Thus we make assumptions about people we meet based upon their perceived group membership within these categories. It is important to remember that the menu of possible identities within a category is also culturally specific. In some languages— Vietnamese, for example—the word “bisexual” does not exist. And the same word may be assigned negative, neutral or positive value, depending upon context.

Ascribing identities to others also has its down side: we can over- generalize and ascribe to people labels with which they do not, in fact, identify. In other words, we can misread them.

How does this apply to sexual orientation?

When we encounter people for the first time, we “read” and classify them based upon the limited information available to us. For sexual orientation, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we usually assume that people fall into the dominant category, heterosexuality. Heterosexism and heteronormativity have created the illusion that heterosexuality is superior and that it is pervasive. But not everyone is heterosexual, and we usually fail to recognize those who are not. Within queer community, a similar dynamic is in play, with homosexuality being the default presumption.

And we tend to assume that sexual orientation categories are binary, clearly defined and mutually exclusive. But in reality, many people’s sexualities are complicated. We are complicated in terms of whom we desire, the specific sexual acts that turn us on and the types of relationships to which we aspire. And to further complicate identities, our actual behavior or experience may or may not align with our desires. We may, for example, have powerful similar-gender attraction, but no similar- gender sexual experience.

In addition, we do not all use the same criteria to categorize our own sexualities or thosef of others: Is that which we understand to be our “sexual orientation” based upon behavior, desire or fantasy? Is it defined by our current experience, by our recent experience or by our experience over the course of our lives? How do we decide which experiences, desires or fantasies “count” and which do not? How much same-gender attraction, experience or fantasy does it take to push someone out of the identity category “straight” and into another category? How much different-gender attraction, experience or fantasy does it take to push someone out of the category lesbian or gay and into a different category?

To complicate things further, these spaces of attraction do not have universal labels. The authors in REC*OG*NIZE: The Voices of Bisexual Men—An Anthology, who all occupy what might be called the “middle sexualities,” define themselves using a multitude of labels; so do you, our readers; and so does everyone else.

There is no simple solution to the problem of labeling. Labeling is a complex process constantly negotiated through individual experience and social context. It is mediated by our various intersections of identity: geography, social class, gender, race, ethnicity, age and so on. A 20-year- old university student in a large Northeast city in the United States is likely to have a different identity vocabulary than a 67-year-old rancher in rural Oklahoma or a 34-year-old Evangelical working at a nursing home in suburban Mississippi.

Some researchers have taken on the challenge of mapping sexual orientation. Below are three models, with a brief discussion of their strengths and weaknesses.

First published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), Alfred Kinsey and his research team provide a measurement tool called the Kinsey Scale. In it, sexuality is placed on a linear continuum, with one end of the continuum representing exclusive heterosexuality and the other exclusive homosexuality.

In 1980, Michael Storms graphed sexual orientation on a two- dimensional map with an X and Y axis. This scale draws a conceptually different map, presenting sexuality more as an open field, and allowing for asexuality (0, 0 or a very low number on the graph) and takes into account the reality that people are varying degrees of sexual: some people are more sexual than others.

In his 1987 book, The Bisexual Option, psychiatrist Fritz Klein expands upon the Kinsey scale with a model called the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG) which utilizes a 7-point continuum similar to Kinsey’s (heterosexual only, heterosexual mostly, heterosexual somewhat more, heterosexual/homosexual equally, homosexual somewhat more, homosexual mostly/homosexual only but also assesses 7 different aspects of sexuality and incorporates the factor of time. Participants are asked to map themselves according to the past (from early adolescence until one year ago); the present (during the past year); and “ideal,” an aspirational category (where would you place yourself on this scale if you could choose?). This 21-point scale obviously results in a more complex picture of sexuality.

These are crude tools, as they ask broad questions that could be interpreted in multiple ways and sexuality is so much more than that which is measured on these scales, but they nonetheless shed some light and are helpful for introducing the concept of complex sexualities.

Keep in mind that all three of these models rest upon the presumption of a gender binary and conflate sex and gender and they are therefore structurally problematic. To their credit, Kinsey, Storms and Klein created these models at times (1948, 1980 and 1987, respectively) when there was a near universal cisgender assumption (at least in the United States and other Western nations) that there were two—and only two—sexes, and during which the terms gender and sex were conflated and used interchangeably. For those unfamiliar with the difference between these terms, sex describes our biological makeup; gender is a social construct. The conflation of sex and gender remains largely the norm even today, though increasing numbers of people are coming to understand both that gender is not the same as sex, and that there are significant numbers of people who fall outside of the binaries of each. (This could be compared to sexual orientation?)

For one of my educational workshops, in an attempt to update these models, I have created an exercise that—rather than assuming a sex/ gender binary—puts “different sex or gender attracted” and “similar sex or gender attracted” as the two ends of the continuum, with similar signifying people who more or less share your gender (or sex) identity; and different being people with a different gender (or sex) identity than yours. For example, if you identify as a man, different could be woman or genderqueer or any other gender identity that is not man. I also ask workshop participants to decide together whether we will be doing the exercise based upon the category sex or upon the category gender, so that we are all answering the same questions. Some people—especially those with non-standard sex or gender identities and/or attracted to same— might answer the questions very differently if the answers were based upon the category sex than they would if the answers were based upon the category gender.

Among other questions, respondents are asked to chart their sexual attraction, sexual behavior and fantasies, before age 16, in the past year and during the past month. The final question asks, “What word or words do you use to describe your sexual orientation?” It is from seeing the responses of thousands of participants that I am convinced that sexuality is wonderfully complex. The labels straight and heterosexual usually cover at least the first three numbers on the scale (zero through two), and occasionally extend even farther. Those who identify as lesbian and gay usually cover four through six. Bisexual is usually two to four— occasionally even one to five—and so many other labels are reported: omnisexual, fluid and pansexual (usually the same range as bisexual), queer (usually two to six), asexual, “no label” and more. The introduction to this book lists the sexual orientation identities of the authors whose work appears within the covers of this book.

Thus, our categories each cover a broad range of space, and furthermore, they overlap. Thus, a given bisexual might be gayer than some gay men or lesbians, or straighter than some straight people.

One of the “bonus questions” I often include in my workshop exercise is “How many sexual orientation identities have you had—so far—in your lifetime?” Invariably, several people in the room report “two” or “three,” and often there are a few who report “five,” “six” or more. The default assumption is that everyone is straight, so most of us likely start there. But what happens next is often no simple story. Many of us use different labels at different points in our life or identify with multiple labels simultaneously: after all, labels—when self-selected—are tools for understanding ourselves and for communicating information about ourselves to others. Thus it is possible that we might use different labels when with our closest peer group from what we might use when speaking with an elderly relative or a co-worker.

In conclusion, sexuality is complicated, identity is a journey and mapping sexuality is no simple process.