Charlotte Wolff's contribution to bisexual history and to (sexuality) theory and research: a reappraisal for queer times.

The concept of bisexuality has suffered from the same dilemma as that Of reality. So much has been said and assumed about both, that the words symbolizing them have become more and more mechanically used, and therefore misused. At the December 2006 conference of the Lesbian and gay Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, bisexual activist and academic Ron Fox (who is currently compiling an archive of Bisexuality resources in Amsterdam) reported that in the late seventies, as an enthusiastic graduate student who wanted to research bisexuality, he found very few resources. " There was Charlotte Wolff and little else, " he reflected, reiterating the importance he had ascribed elsewhere to her work. 1 In fact, already in the midseventies there was a heightened interest in bisexuality both in the general press and in academia. Time and Newsweek published articles on so-called bisexual chic in May 1974. Margaret Mead, having long witnessed and described (as an anthropologist) " bisexual " behavior in non-Western cultures, lamented in Redbook magazine that Western culture imposed a " straight jacket " on bisexuality. 2 At around the same time, sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz carried out a series of interview-based studies with people who identified as bisexual. 3 In View from Another Closet, Janet Bode argued that reductive dichotomous thinking that could not or would not contemplate bisexuality was at the root of the erroneous identification of the poet Sappho with " lesbianism " (from Lesbos, the island where she lived). 4 The convenient disregard of the love poems Sappho dedicated to men, Bode argued, had resulted in the elision of the poet's bisexuality from accounts of her life and work. In 1976 Maggi Rubenstein and Harriet Leve founded the San Francisco Bisexual Centre. 5 during the same year, Fritz Klein was developing the Klein Sexual Orientation grid and working on his book The Bisexual Option, eventually published in 1978, a few months after Bisexuality, Wolff's theoretical and empirical investigation. 6 Yet, pace Fox, there is no mention of Wolff 's contribution in Angelides's A History of Bisexuality. 7 Merl Storr, in her critical reader of writings on bisexuality from Freud to Kaloski, mentions Wolff only in passing, to deplore her ambiguous stance: she argues that Wolff at times seemed to conceptualize bisexuality as a mixture of " masculinity " and " femininity " rather than treating it as " a combination …