Conceptualizing Bisexual Health Promotion: A Mutilevel Perspective for Reducing Sexual Health Threats to Latino/a Bisexual Teens and Young Adults

Bisexuality in the eyes of public health is often not viewed as other dimensions of the human experience (e.g., adolescence, childbirth, mortality, marriage) that are studied by public health. Bisexuality enters public health with the AIDS epidemic and it is rapidly reduced from a human experience and expression to a vector explaining the HIV spread from networks where the virus is concentrated to the general population. Regardless of the debates around this mechanism of transmission, the fact that bisexuality is not viewed as an experience or form of human expression but rather an individualized behavior, our tendency has been to think about interventions in very narrow ways. This presentation draws on our empirical findings with Latino (a) bisexual groups: a) an ethnographic study with bisexually-active Latino men (n=18); b) a qualitative study with self-identify Latino (a) young men and women (n=30); c) a mixed-methods ethnographic of the sexual markets of bisexually-active Latino men (n=160); and from fieldnotes of working with providers of HIV/STI services to Latino populations in New York City over the past 5 years. The aim of this presentation is to reflect how to address the sexual health threats to these groups from structural and meso-structural perspectives using the bisexual experience, the experience of being bisexual and the expressions and voices of bisexual Latinos (as) as points of departures. This presentation is intended to stimulate the debate and further the agenda of comprehensive sexual health interventions for bisexual groups nationwide.