Sasha Baldwin was a teenager when she began to feel attracted to both men and women. But even at 20 she says the label feels uncomfortable.

“I don’t think I realised it was bisexuality, just that I was different to most people in some aspect,” she told Hack.

If I come out and say that I am attracted to women and men people are like ‘but what do you mean, which one… do you like dick or pussy?’

And I would be like ‘it’s NOT about that! It’s not about the sex, it’s about the person’... but a lot of people, because they are one way or the other, they’re black or they’re white, they don’t understand grey.”

In a recent triple j survey of more than 10,000 listeners aged between 18-29, 11.4 per cent of respondents told us they identify as bisexual. That figure is much higher than the broader Australian population, which according to the Australian Study of Health and Relationships, is 1.1 per cent of men and 2.2 per cent of women.

Women are more likely to identify as bi within the triple j survey too: 15.45 per cent of women, compared with 5.92 per cent of men.

What is bisexuality?

LGBT relationships counsellor Clinton Power describes bisexuality as “the ability to have love and or sex relationships with either gender - so male or female” and he says he’s not surprised that young people are more likely to identify as bisexual. In fact, he takes it further: “Certainly what I’m seeing in my clinical practice is there are many more young people who are not hung up on labels,” he said.

We can learn more about bisexuality from a 2013 survey of nearly 1,200 LGBT adults by the Pew Research Center in the United States.

It found the median age when bisexuals report first thinking they could be bi is 13, the median age people say they know for sure is 17, and the median age for first telling someone is 20.

Compared with gay men and lesbians, bisexuals are far less likely to say their sexual orientation is extremely or very important to their identity: 20 per cent of bisexuals say it’s super important, compared with around half of gay men and lesbians.

Bisexuals are also way less likely to “come out” - 28 per cent of bisexuals say all or most of their friends and family know, compared with 77 per cent of gay men and and 71 per cent of lesbians.

But despite the increased number of young people identifying as bisexual, stigmas remain.

Writer Mikey Carr sums it up: "If you say that you're bisexual as a woman you get told you're just doing it for attention, people don't automatically assume that you're a lesbian,” he said.

"With men, if you say that you're bisexual, people automatically assume you just haven't been able to accept the fact that you are gay yet.”

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Behind these assumptions is a deeper one, “often known as bi-erasure”, according to Clinton Power. “People believe that bisexuality doesn’t really exist. They think someone’s just in a stage, they’re either straight or they’re gay but they haven’t really decided”.

Mikey says, for him, these assumptions contributed to a very long process of coming out.

“It actually took a number of years for me to actually accept because I was very confused,” he told Hack.

“I still subscribed to a binary view of sexuality when I was in my late teens. But I first sort of admitted to myself that I was attracted to men when I was about 17 or 18 and then it took a while for me to accept that I was bisexual. I thought I was gay, then I'd be attracted to a man and then I thought I was straight and it actually took a female friend of mine to be like 'you're clearly bisexual!'

“It was a shock. I then felt like I had to act on it. I felt this burden to test - am I actually bisexual? And that led to some confronting first experiences with men, which then led me to decide that I wasn't bisexual, that I was just a bit of a hypochondriac and that I was just projecting these feelings onto myself. It took me another five or so years until I was in my mid twenties to really accept that I was attracted to men and that it wasn't just this inner self questioning,” he said.

Mikey has since written about his experience of being bisexual.



“I didn't know a single bisexual man. It's come out since that some of my friends are bi. Since I've written articles about it - they've come up and said ‘I feel that way as well I just never felt like I had to come out’. And I'm like ‘well, I wish you would have, because it would have made it easier for me to understand!”

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Sasha kissed her best friend at a party when she was drunk. She was 16. What could be passed off as a rite of passage, was something more for her.

“You can definitely kiss your friends or a hot chic in a club - and girls know the power that holds for men - but when you go home and it still resonates with you, then you know that you’re not straight,” she said.

Her boyfriend at the time was devastated so she “put those feelings away”. It wasn’t until recently she was compelled to act on them once more. This time, her boyfriend had a different reaction.

“I actually called him and asked him if he would mind and he said he didn’t...but then you see things get really tangled up… because if I am allowed to desire another woman and act with her out of lust then why isn’t my partner? You just can’t have both,” she said.

Sasha says for her right now, monogamy is the answer, even if that means not fully experiencing one part of her sexuality.

“You want both but you don’t want both all the time. It’s not like we have a hunger, or that we’re greedy, it’s just that we can see the beauty in both.

“It doesn’t really matter that I like women as well and that I am tempted by women because my partner is tempted by women all the time and he *most of the time* still finds a way to say no, so I can do the same,” she says.

But Mikey Carr’s arrangement means he does experience both: he’s in a long term relationship with a woman but they’re able to see other people.

“So I still get to enjoy my fair share of the other sex,” he said.

Psychologist Gavi Ansara says bisexuality can work in all kinds of arrangements.

“Don’t let other people tell you who you are or how to describe yourself,” he said.

“Be authentic to you.”