‘Uneven: Nine Lives that Redefined Bisexuality’ by Sam Mills review

Uneven: Nine Lives that Redefined Bisexuality by Sam Mills risks misdiagnosis where others see shades of gay.

Martha Robinson Rhodes | Published in History Today Volume 75 Issue 5 May 2025

‘Weibliches Liebespaar’ (Female Lovers), Egon Schiele, 1915. Albertina. Public Domain.

Historians of sexuality have long grappled with the issue of anachronism – the question of whether and how to use modern terminology to describe the past. Our terms for sexual identity are relatively recent: gay was not primarily understood as a term for sexuality until the 1960s, and homosexual was coined in the 1860s but existed for several decades only as an obscure medical term, not a concept in common use. Even the idea that who you have sex with forms an identity is surprisingly modern. Although people have been having same-sex relationships throughout human history, for most of this time they would not necessarily have thought of this as something different or noteworthy. Nor is this an issue solely relating to queer or LGBT history: the word heterosexuality didn’t appear in the Merriam Webster international dictionary until 1923, 14 years after homosexuality.

The issue of labelling historical subjects is particularly fraught when it comes to bisexuality – a term we now consider to mean attraction to more than one gender. As Sam Mills points out in this fascinating and well-researched book, the term bisexual was first used in the mid-19th century to describe species with both male and female reproductive organs: most flowering plants, for example, and some invertebrates. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that bisexual became more commonly understood to refer to sexual orientation.

Debates about its exact meaning rage on. Does the prefix ‘bi-’, from the Latin for ‘two’, support a binary idea of gender, that bisexuals are only attracted to men and women? Many bi people today argue instead that they are attracted to ‘two or more’ genders, or ‘same and different’. What of those who feel romantic and sexual attraction differently, or whose primary relationships are only with one gender? It is hardly surprising that many people attracted to multiple genders – including several of the individuals featured in Mills’ book – avoid the label ‘bisexual’, even today. While a 2015 YouGov study found that 19 per cent of the British public identified as something other than ‘completely heterosexual’ or ‘completely homosexual’, the recent census shows that only 1.3 per cent describe themselves as bisexual.

The difficulty of pinning down a definition of bisexuality has exacerbated society’s tendency to erase bisexuality altogether – to assume that, even when someone does identify as bisexual, they must ‘really’ be gay and want to remain partially closeted, ‘really’ straight and doing it for show, or going through a phase. When trying to determine attraction in the past, bisexuality becomes even more fraught. Even among historians who are happy to use anachronistic terms like gay, lesbian, or queer, bisexual can be seen as too complicated, too modern, or too controversial. Was Oscar Wilde’s marriage, for example, the result of pressure from a society that was hostile to any same-sex attraction, or was it born of a genuine attraction to his wife? Mills’ argument for the latter is fairly persuasive, although she acknowledges that it is unlikely to convince everyone – for some, Wilde’s inclusion in a bisexual history will ‘corrupt his status as a gay icon’.

This might help to explain why historical studies of bisexuality are so scarce, despite bi people forming what Mills describes as ‘the world’s largest sexual minority’. Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality is the only book-length academic history of the topic, and was published in 2001. Other, more recent books on bisexuality have come primarily from the social sciences, such as Julia Shaw’s Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality (2022) or Ritch Savin-Williams’ Bi: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Nonbinary Youth (2021). Uneven is therefore a welcome attempt to redress this absence, ‘recovering’ bisexuality in history from the late 19th century to the present.

The nine subjects of the book are well-known artists, writers, and musicians, celebrated in their respective eras, and arranged in roughly chronological order, from Oscar Wilde to Madonna. Their biographies allow Mills to examine key moments in queer history from a bisexual perspective. She covers Victorian-era criminalisation and persecution (Wilde), the ‘divine decadence’ of Weimar Germany (Marlene Dietrich), the Stonewall riots (Susan Sontag), and the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis (Jean-Michel Basquiat).

The book’s subtitle asserts that these nine lives ‘redefined’ bisexuality, but Mills does not spend much time exploring what they were redefining, and how. Despite the occasional acknowledgement that most of her subjects did not identify as bisexual – and indeed for some of them it did not yet exist as a recognisable identity – Mills is straightforward in asserting that the vast majority of her subjects were bisexual, whether or not they used the word themselves. In one sense, this is a commendable effort to redress years of bi-erasure in the media and among historians. However, it can be frustrating when, rather than opening up discussion about the complexity and fluidity of sexuality and identity, Mills prefers to shut it down: ‘Colette was certainly bisexual’; ‘Anaïs Nin was bisexual. There is no myth to debunk.’

Mills intersperses the biographies with sections of memoir about her own experiences of being bisexual – perhaps to suggest that, like her, readers might find points of connection with the lives of these historical figures. However, her subjects are by definition exceptional. The vast majority of people attracted to multiple genders will not have enjoyed the same privileges as these celebrities, nor weathered the same scrutiny. It would be illuminating to read more about who didn’t make the cut.

Uneven sets out one way for bisexuals to reclaim a place in queer history. The problem is that it can sometimes seem like simply sorting historical figures into new, differently labelled boxes. For bisexual history to develop into a field in its own right, the boxes will have to disappear.