A Queer History of the United States for Young People

word”—that is, a word they could use in public but only they would know
the hidden meaning.
The word quickly became popular. In the 1938 Hollywood film Bringing
Up Baby, the actor Cary Grant (who was bisexual) appears dressed in a
woman’s satin nightgown because he has lost his clothes. When he is asked
why he is dressed this way, he jumps in the air and says, “I just went gay all
of a sudden.” The lesbian writer Gertrude Stein wrote a story in 1922 about
two women who are in love. It was titled “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” and
in the story, Stein repeatedly uses the word “gay” to describe the characters’
relationship. In 1968 activist Frank Kameny first used the phrase “Gay is
good,” and after the 1969 Stonewall riots, the word almost immediately
became commonly used by gay and straight people and gradually by the
media.
B IS FOR BI
T
he word “bisexual” is used to describe a person who is sexually and
romantically attracted to both genders. People may feel this attraction
their entire life or during stages of their life. They may act on it by
becoming sexually involved with the object of their attraction, or not. Some
bisexual people may be in a committed relationship with one person their
entire life and yet attracted to people of the other gender; this does not make
them less bisexual. Just as people may identify as heterosexual or
homosexual and not necessarily act on that desire, the same is true of
bisexual. The word “bisexual” was first used in English in 1892 and was
mainly used by physicians, though it became more common during the
twentieth century and was frequently used by people and in the media by
the 1950s.
Human sexuality is complicated, and all people have the potential for a
wide range of feelings and desires. Sigmund Freud, the father of
psychoanalysis, noted this in 1905 in Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality. Alfred Kinsey’s scientific studies on male and female sexuality in
the late 1940s and early 1950s empirically confirmed that large numbers of
his interview subjects reported attractions to both genders. Today the word
“bisexual” is commonly used, often interchangeably with the term