Beyond Risk: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Male Bisexuality and Its Potential Health Implications

Sexuality researchers have recently voiced concerns regarding the dominance of the “risk paradigm” in current sexual health research. While bisexuality in all forms has received notably less scientific attention than homosexuality, bisexual men represent a substantial and diverse group of men that were all but ignored in the United States until reports of elevated HIV/AIDS among this population. Given the significance of the epidemic, an emphasis on the factors associated with “risk” of HIV infection and transmission for bisexual men and their partners has been of critical importance. However, an artifact of disease-focused research is that much of the contemporary knowledge related to the sexual behaviors of bisexual men has been constructed solely in the context of “risk.” This has led to a conceptualization of bisexual men as little more than vectors of disease transmission, most notably with their presumably heterosexual and monogamous female partners. Ironically, previous myopic examinations of sexual risk among bisexual men may have resulted in work that provides us with a very limited understanding of the behaviors and interactions that much of this work seeks to change. Thus, the aim of this presentation is to offer an overview of several recent innovative quantitative and qualitative research studies on male bisexuality. By moving away from the exclusively risk-focused nature of most previous research, we will examine the numerous potential positive and negative health implications of male bisexuality using a more holistic and comprehensive sexual health framework.