to answer the question about sexual self-identity but followed the instructions for bisexual women throughout the questionnaire and were assumed to identify themselves as bisexual. Altogether, these 45 women will be referred to as “bisexuals.”
Finally, 7 women (2%) said that they were Heterosexual with Bisexual Tendencies, 14 women (3%) indicated that they were not sure what their sexual orientation was, and 25 women (6%) said that they preferred not to label themselves. In answer to the follow-up question, 8 of the women who preferred not to label themselves chose the label “bisexual,” 14 chose “lesbian/gay/homosexual,” and 3 refused to label themselves. Although some women did choose lesbian or bisexual identities when pressed, they preferred not to label themselves, and they are not considered part of the lesbian or bisexual subsamples in this study.
Most of the women who responded, regardless of their sexual self-identities, are well-educated Euro-American women. At the time of the study, three out of four were college graduates, and only 7% had no schooling beyond high school. Ninety-two percent are White, 3.4% are Black or African-American, 2% are Indian, and the rest belong to other racial groups. Although 24 states and Canada are represented in the sample, 93% of the women lived in the Midwestern United States. Since the population in the Midwestern states is 87.2% White,5 if we assume that women of different racial groups are equally likely to be lesbian or bisexual, then the sample underrepresents Women of Color.
Most women were employed, as figure 3.2 shows. Despite their high levels of education and employment, however, participants in the study had low to moderate incomes. Almost a quarter lived in households with total annual incomes of less than $10,000 (figure 3.3). One-third lived in households with incomes of over $30,000, but only 19% of these women lived alone; the other 81% shared this income with at least one other person.
Participants ranged in age from 16 to 67. There were some differences among women of different ages in the terms they chose to describe their sexual self-identities (figure 3.4). At all ages, approximately three out of four women described themselves as lesbians. Among women who did not call themselves lesbians, however, older women were more likely to call themselves Bisexual than younger women. In fact, women aged 35 or older were eight times more likely than women in their teens or early twenties to call themselves Bisexual. Younger women, on the other hand, were more likely to say that they were “heterosexuals with bisexual tendencies” or to say that they did not know what their orientation was or that they preferred not to label themselves. Approximately one out of five women under 25 could not, would not, or preferred not to label her sexuality.
One out of five lesbian and bisexual women was not romantically involved with anyone at the time she participated in the study. Among lesbians, over half (55%) were involved in serious, committed relationships with other women, and 4 were involved with men. Bisexual women, on the other hand, were almost equally likely to be involved with women and men. But only 7 (16%) bisexual women were simultaneously involved with both women and men; 17 were involved in relationships with women only, and 12 were involved in relationships with men only. Most bisexual women described their relationships as serious relationships or marriages. Women who were unable or unwilling to label their sexuality were more likely than either lesbian or bisexual women to be single; one out of four was not involved with anyone. This was probably due to their young age. Those who were involved were twice as likely to be involved with women than with men, and just as likely as bisexuals to be involved in serious relationships with women.
Not surprisingly, bisexual women were more likely than lesbians to have been married to men in the past and they were more likely to have children. But a large number of lesbians had also had serious relationships with men. Four out of five bisexual women, and two out of five lesbians, had been seriously involved with or married to men (figure 3.5). Many lesbians who had not had serious heterosexual relationships had had casual heterosexual relationships or dated men; only 10% of lesbians had never had any type of heterosexual relationship at all. Twenty-five percent of bisexual women and 15% of lesbians had children.
Sexuality is not merely a matter of with whom a woman sleeps or with whom she slept in the past. Sexuality is also a matter of to whom she is sexually attracted and other factors. In general, one might expect that lesbians would be attracted to women and bisexual women would be attracted to both women and men. But feelings of sexual attraction are not that clear-cut, and neither are women’s choices about how to identify themselves sexually. In fact, lesbian and bisexual women who participated in this study had almost as much in common as not with respect to their feelings of sexual attraction. Figure 3.6 illustrates the range of sexual feelings toward women and men that were reported by lesbian and bisexual women, and by women who could not, would not, or preferred not to label their sexuality.6
Only one-third of lesbians (36%) said that their feelings of sexual attraction were exclusively toward women; two out of three reported that they had some heterosexual feelings. For most, these heterosexual feelings comprised only 10% of their total sexual feelings but some lesbians reported that up to 50% of their feelings of sexual attraction were toward men.7 Bisexual women, on the other hand, reported feelings that ranged from 80% heterosexual to 90% homosexual. In other words, all bisexual women were attracted to both women and men, but so were most lesbians. Very few bisexual women reported that they were equally attracted to women and men (16%), and they were more likely to express a preference for women than a preference for men. Women who were not sure what their orientation was or who preferred not to label themselves covered as wide a range as bisexual women, from nearly exclusive heterosexual feelings to nearly exclusive homosexual feelings. For detailed information about the feelings of sexual attraction and relational histories of the women in this sample, see Rust (1992b).
As I explained above, I refer to the women who participated in this study as “lesbians,” “bisexuals,” etc., on the basis of their sexual self-identities at the time of the study. But many of these women have not had the same sexual identities throughout their lives. Some lesbians used to call themselves bisexual, some bisexuals used to call themselves lesbian, and some women who preferred not to label their sexuality had tried calling themselves both lesbian and bisexual in the past before they gave up labeling themselves. Among lesbians, 39% at one time called themselves bisexual.8 Bisexual identity is often considered a stepping stone on the way to coming out as a lesbian. Slightly more than half of these lesbians called themselves bisexual before they came out as lesbians; in hindsight, these women might well see their earlier bisexual identity as a transitional stage. The other half, 17% of all lesbians, called themselves bisexual after they came out as lesbians. For these women, bisexual identity was not merely a stepping stone. Although they had returned to a lesbian identity by the time they participated in this study, they had considered themselves bisexual after, not before, coming out as lesbians.
Among bisexuals, 84% had called themselves lesbian in the past.
For these women also, bisexuality was not merely a stepping stone on the way to coming out as a lesbian; they had already tried to identify themselves as lesbian and decided to identify as bisexual instead at the time of the study. But bisexual identity had not been permanent for most of these women, either; three out of four had changed identities more than twice.
Likewise, most of the women who said that they were not sure what their sexual orientation was, or who preferred not to label themselves, were not merely in such an early stage of coming out that they had not yet taken on a sexual identity. Three-quarters of these women had identified as either lesbian or bisexual in the past, and most had identified both ways at different
