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This chapter explores how adolescents learn about sex and sexuality. It discusses various parental strategies for the socialization and education of children about sex and contraception, focusing on distinctions between moral education and information exchange. It shows that religion influences what parents say about sex and contraception, with whom they discuss it, how often, and with what degree of ease. The association between religion and developing homosexual and bisexual identities, attractions, and practices in adolescence is also considered.

This chapter gives information about Demosthenes' family and relatives, including his grandfathers — Demomeles and Gylon — and his parents, Demosthenes senior and Kleoboule. A genealogical table is included. It surveys his date of birth, his childhood, his nickname Batalos, and his difficulties in learning to make speeches. It discusses the evidence for his marriage and children. It raises the question whether he was bisexual and analyses the Erotic Speech ascribed to him.

This chapter begins by considering the asymmetry of knowledge which characterizes the opposition between Sodom and Gomorrah. This analysis of the Proustian discourses on male and female sexuality in terms of both the rhetoric and cultural context is then developed by a consideration of their hermeneutic unraveling in an attempt to answer what kind of story is being told and the role of knowledge in it. This chapter describes the most spectacular modes of knowing in A la recherche: knowledge as revolution and revelation. Nobody's sexuality is straightforward in A la recherche. The text alternately speculates about ‘who will come out next’ and shocks by revelations of homosexuality.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the four dimensions of human sexuality: firstly, the type of specific action patterns that are produced by the individual (performance) and the motivation underlying the expression of these behaviors; secondly, the orientation of the behavior and of sexual fantasies associated with it (sexual orientation); thirdly, the sexual identity that the individual believes he or she has; and finally, the sexual role that the individual plays in society. It then turns to a discussion of homosexuality and bisexuality.

This chapter presents analyses of the sex marketplaces of Latino bisexual men in New York City between 2000 and 2009. Chapter aims are to identify the role that sexual marketplaces play in the sexual lives of Latino bisexual young men, particularly the impact of historical and geographic differences, as well as their implications for HIV prevention research and interventions. The following overriding research question was explored: what are the political, technological, and social enabling conditions that have produced the behavioral differences from 2000 to 2009 that we have observed? More specifically, how do male friendship groups function as mechanisms of “intimate surveillance” vis-à-vis sexual partner selection, and what are the digital platforms (e.g., cell phones, Internet cruising) that enable these interactions? How might we frame these “local sexual cultures” within what we refer to as “intimate/participatory surveillance,” and what social philosopher Gilles Deleuze has called “societies of control”?

This chapter provides a narrative of the author's performance and retraces her unique tactics of setting an admirable example in turning the institution of heterosexual, monogamous, and monosexual marriage inside out. It also shows the vitality and pleasure of a possible queer politics and counter-public which prioritizes non-normative intimacies, coalition building, sex education, and advocacy over love, privacy, and the life-long couple form of marriage. Together with some other gay activists, she decided to organize a fake wedding to encourage further thinking about and discussion of the issues of marriage. She proposed to a gay activist who was a long-time friend, and a lesbian woman whom she had just met. There would be three of them in a marriage: one gay man and two lesbian women. The wedding ceremony was to claim that bisexuality is not a crime.

This chapter re-contextualizes Leslie Cheung's (sudden) suicide in light of Cheung's cross-dressing gender performativity, his “bisexuality”/“androgyny” and “intersexuality”, and the polarizing reception and consumption of his work both locally and internationally. It also provides the first sustained study of Cheung's gender and sexual representations as consumed locally, while mapping his suicide as a result of various forms of stigmatization he had suffered from Hong Kong's own inadequacies in negotiating its contradictions embedded in glocalized consumer culture. In addition, it carefully questions the ways in which a cultural icon with his various nonnormative behaviours and expressions, struggled to negotiate with mainstream media. Cheung's suicide was caused by his depression and health problems. However, the local media in Hong Kong made Cheung's tragic story into a negative example that linked being gay to being depressed and suicidal. In spite of his suicide and death, his charisma and his beautiful face and voice onscreen preserve his everlasting image, fame, life, and glory.

This chapter reviews research on bisexuality. A multidimensional understanding of bisexuality has emerged, which emphasizes the intersectionality of identities. It also emphasizes the differential salience that different identities may have for bisexual persons at different times of their life and within different communities. There are differences between men and women as to how they experience and manifest bisexual identities. Sexism may foster a pseudoacceptance of bisexuality through pressure for women to participate in performative bisexuality. Men and women base their identities on different characteristics such as sexual behavior for men and relationships for women. Women tend to be more fluid than men in their behavior as well as in their identities. Demographic studies have revealed that women are more likely than men to identify as bisexual.

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the impact of Lawrence's ideas about sexuality on Murry's treatment of sex in Still Life, and also takes up the issues of repressed homosexuality and homosocial desire in his friendships with Lawrence, Gordon Campbell, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Mansfield's bisexuality is discussed in relation to Murry's treatment of lesbianism in his novel. The chapter analyses Murry's writing process and his difficulty in following nineteenth-century narrative conventions to write a modernist novel.

The chapter begins with an intertextual reading of Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’ and Murry's Still Life. That reading emphasises differences between Murry and Mansfield in their fictional treatment of the concept of ‘bliss’, female sexuality, bisexuality, and the power dynamics of marriage. The chapter then explores the ways that Murry's and Mansfield's relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell underlie the structure of ‘Bliss’. It considers how these relations mark a general shift from the influence of Lawrence to that of Bloomsbury on Murry and Mansfield.

The concept of bisexuality has certainly had an adequate amount of attention from scholars and researchers around the globe. Different theories and models have been used to explain how it occurs in the life of a man. In this chapter, bisexuality is viewed in terms of various theories such as psychoanalytic theory, development theory, and sexual orientation theory to help explain its shift from the transitional event it used to be viewed as to the distinct sexual orientation as we perceive it today. The theories show that individuals arrive at their sexual identities after taking several probable routes that can be stimulated by social and personal influences. In the surveys conducted a more accurate characterization of experimental groups manifests if participants are sufficiently discriminated by sexual orientation. The chapter also gives empirical data that describe patterns, similarities, and differences in the development of bisexuals, lesbians, and gay identities.

Dionysus was, of all gods, the most closely associated with the phallus, the erect male member, at once the instrument and symbol of male sexuality. His myths and cults also refer to the liberation, if only temporary, of both women and men from social controls, including sexual controls, which in most cultures are among the most rigid. The god himself is represented to a surprising degree as detached and unconcerned with sex. One can refer to Dionysus's detachment as ‘asexuality’, but one might also speak of his bisexuality, the coexistence of elements of both genders that may, in effect, cancel each other out, or even of his transcendence of sexuality. There are frequent references to his effeminacy, such as Aeschylus's lost play Edoni. Is this paradox, the effeminate god of the phallus, the phallic god of women, illusory, trivial or quite central to the conception of the god and the nature of his cults? The subject can be examined under, roughly, three headings: iconography, myth and cult.

There is only very limited research on the sexual landscapes of Latino bisexuals. This is in part due to the structural barriers confronted by expressions of bisexuality in Latino cultures in the United States and elsewhere. This chapter looks at the “erotic landscapes” of bisexually active Latino men in New York City. The concept of erotic landscapes is used as a way of linking what might be described as “sexual geography” (the spatial organization of sexual experience) with “sexual culture” (the symbolic meanings and representations associated with sexual conduct in different social and cultural settings. A case study of the sexual life of one informant is presented from his first sexual encounter at the age of fifteen into his twenties, and the implications for the prevention of HIV infection and sexually transmitted infections are discussed. A salient point is that public venues for sexual activity do not necessarily increase HIV risk.

This chapter focuses on the novel Written on the Body. The publication of Written on the Body marked a change from the structural complexity of Sexing the Cherry, with its duplications and intertwining of narrative voices and historical periods, by turning back to the simplicity of the single narrative voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. However, as in Winterson's first novel, this simplicity is more apparent than real; in the case of Written on the Body because the gender and physical aspect of the autodiegetic narrator are never made explicit, thus suggesting that s/he enjoys the type of bisexuality Jordan achieved in Sexing the Cherry at the end of his quest for individuation.

This chapter details the contrasting mix of liberalism and conservatism reflected in Uncle Go’s replies to his gay and lesbian correspondents. Uncle Go’s idiosyncratic theory of homosexuality, in which only feminine men are regarded as genuinely being gay while masculine gay men are considered to be bisexual, is presented.

This chapter talks about homosexuality and bisexuality. It states that the study of homosexuality is one of the most troubled examples of the impact of ideology on scholarly inquiry, and that any complications within the study of homosexuality and bisexuality are due to no less than four main components. It studies a definition of bisexuality, the controversy surrounding it, and ends with its clinical aspects. With regards to homosexuality, the chapter looks at the traditional psychoanalytic viewpoint of homosexuality, dominant psychodynamics, categories of male homosexuality, and the “general seduction” theory, which involves the concept of penis envy.

The author presents the “down low” as both a mainstream media construction and as described by E. Lynn Harris in his novel Invisible Life and argues that the secrecy and marginalization of African American men on the DL reveal the centrality of monogamy in definitions of both black respectability and homonormativity. The contrast between the mainstream media construction of TheBlack Man on the DL on the one hand and Harris’s personal account of secretly loving a man and a woman on the other sheds light on how dominant constructions of the DL not only perpetuate racism, heterosexism, and hegemonic notions of gender, but also mononormativity. The author demonstrates how narratives of The Black Man on the DL rely on compulsory monogamy to maintain race, gender, and sexual hierarchies and to displace anxieties about promiscuity and HIV transmission on to the bodies of young black men. In constrast, Invisible Life is a polyqueer narrative of the DL in that it offers a critique of compulsory monogamy and a vision of a world in which bisexual African American men would not have to choose to be either gay or straight.

While many of the characters in Hollinghurst’s most recent novel can be more readily understood as bisexual than homosexual, much of the critical discussion around the text has situated it in terms of a gay identity and literary culture and thus erased its many bisexualities. Much attention has also been drawn to the lack of explicit sex in the novel when compared to Hollinghurst’s earlier works. Viewing the text’s narrative structure and less-direct approach to sex through the lens of bisexual camp, this essay reads in The Stranger’s Child a critique of the persistent rewriting of bisexuality as gay, queer, or immature, and a resistance to the category of the gay novel, which nevertheless anticipates its own reception as one