Bi+ History
Kim Kemmis (he/him) studies cultural history, specifically the history of bisexuality+ and the development of bisexual activism and community.
Kim Kemmis (he/him) is a Research Affiliate in History at the University of Sydney. His PhD was in cultural history, and he is exploring the history of bisexuality, especially the lived experience of bisexual people, and the ways in which they saw themselves.
Why are you interested in research on bisexualilty?
My initial research was in Australian cultural history, into how opera was used to build prestige and identity at personal, community and national levels, from colonial times to the establishment of major permanent companies in the 1970s.
Gender and sexuality kept turning up, in how women were treated in the opera industry, and how queer people used it to make a safe public space for themselves.
As I became more involved in bi+ activism and public history I saw there was a need to fill out more of our story.
Can you tell me about your research?
I’m interested in the development of bisexual activism and community in the second half of the twentieth century. More specifically, I’m currently looking at the bisexual critic and novelist Colin MacInnes (1914-1976) and his writings about sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m also planning an oral history project on the history of bisexual community building in Australia and its connections with international movements.
3 things you wish everyone knew about bisexuality?
Bisexuality isn’t half straight, half gay, but something entirely different.
Our sexuality is who we are, not what we do.
Bisexuals+ make up the greatest proportion of the non-heterosexual population. We are not outliers, we’re not anomalies in the data. To quote Arthur Miller, attention must be paid!
What do you think are the most pressing issues within the bisexual+ community today?
The bi+ community has worse health outcomes, poorer access to services, and higher levels of domestic and sexual violence, compared to other groups. We need to improve all of these.
We need higher visibility. We need to normalise bisexuality, so people are aware that being bi+ is good, that there are other ways of understanding yourself beyond the patterns you’re forced into.
We have to do something about hegemonic heterosexuality, the binary thinking that erases us, that reads Oscar Wilde and Freddie Mercury as gay rather than bi.
Are you bi?
Yes
Tell us a little about your experience? When did you know you were bisexual?
As a child in the 1970s I wasn’t aware there was any problem in really liking David Cassidy from The Partridge Family and Julie Newmar from Batman. (You may need to Google them). I worked out I wasn’t straight when I was in my early twenties; the right label didn’t come for a few years after that.
Do your friends and family know you are bisexual?
I am out to friends; I’m not close to my family, so I think they know through social media and some public appearances.
Do your colleagues know you are bi?
My colleagues know I’m bi. I have a bi flag on my desk, and I was in a video my university made about LGBTI+ staff and students.
When did you come out as bi and was there any particular reason you came out?
I came out as bi in 1996. I’d been married for several years, and realised I had to accept that part of me. My wife was and is totally accepting. But as an evangelical Christian, it wasn’t a comfortable position to be in, and it still took a long journey to accept myself, though conversion therapy (spoiler: it didn’t work), to full acceptance and eventual entry into a world of people who think and live the way I do.
Does being bisexual+ change how you approach your research or work? How so?
For the most part queer people are invisible in the historical record. Without an explicit statement of their subject’s sexuality, historians default to ‘They were very good friends’. But I know how we think! And if you read sources with that in mind, you start to see evidence of queer people everywhere. I found a newspaper article from 1865 that recorded some bad behaviour by ‘men-poodles’ one night at the opera. It’s a hilarious piece in itself, but I had an ‘a-ha!’ moment that gave the incident a whole new meaning. I wouldn’t have had that insight if I wasn’t bisexual. (My article about it is on Academia.edu if you’re interested.)
Learn more about Dr. Kim Kemmis here.