4.3: Bisexual Visibility

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The modern concept of bisexuality gained the nation's attention in Alfred Kinsey’s research of the 1940s and 1950s in which he found widespread indications of bisexuality within the United States population. In 1963, Jefferson Poland and Lee Koch started the Sexual Freedom League, one of the first bisexually-oriented groups. In 1964 in New York, the Sexual Freedom League collaborated with gay activists in the first known LGBTQ protest. In 1965, Poland moved from New York to San Francisco where the league’s activities garnered broad media coverage.

In 1972, New York bisexual activists formed the National Bisexual Liberation Group, one of the first known groups expressly for bisexuals, and published one of the first known bisexual newsletters, The Bisexual Expression. This was followed by the Bisexual Forum in New York in 1974, the San Francisco Bisexual Center in 1976, and ByWays in Chicago in 1978. In 1972, at the annual Friends General Conference in Ithaca, a subgroup of bisexual Quakers wrote the "Ithaca Statement on Bisexuality" and published it in the Quaker's Friends Journal and the LGBTQ periodical the Advocate, raising bisexual awareness and consciousness.