Bisexual Men Exist by Vaneet Mehta

Author:Vaneet Mehta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2023-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Barriers to research

In Recognize (2015), Brian Dodge talks about the issues he experienced when trying to conduct research into bisexual men for his chapter ‘Scientific Research on Bisexual Men: What Do We Know, and Why Don’t We Know More?’ Dodge talks about his time as a participant in a postdoctoral HIV-research training and how he ‘encountered a very unexpected and unsettling resistance to understanding and accepting bisexuality as a valid sexual orientation, particularly among men’ (p.119).

He was proposing a small ‘pilot research study that was intended to explore issues related to HIV risk and sexual identity among bisexual men’ (p.119). Dodge says that in the early 2000s, when he was trying to conduct this study, there was greater understanding of the significance of identity, discrimination and community. There was also knowledge that identity and behaviour didn’t necessarily align and that individuals’ sexual behaviours and partners varied throughout their life. Therefore, it seemed only logical to explore the lived experiences of bisexual men and how this interplayed with their risk of contracting HIV.

But Dodge found himself constantly rewriting, revising and reviewing his proposal due to the barriers he faced. He states that while some people in the HIV research world would say that men who have sex with men and women are the reason for HIV spreading from homosexual to heterosexual communities, they would swiftly follow this statement up with another stating that bisexual men do not exist.

And this became a blockade for Dodge. One grant reviewer, on reading Dodge’s proposal, demanded evidence that bisexual men exist. Dodge revised the proposal, adding such evidence as well as a letter of support from Dr Fritz Klein, who detailed his own evidence in the matter of the existence of bisexual men. The grant reviewer did not find this evidence sufficient to back up the claim that bisexual men existed.

This essay from Dodge highlights yet another barrier. If those in positions of power to give grants and funding into research aren’t willing to accept the existence of bisexual and m-spec men, then they aren’t going to provide funding to allow research into the hardships of these men. This adds to the issue of the lack of research, which makes the cycle of invisibility harder to break.

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