By JT Santana | jtwb768

There are days that ask for solemn reflection, days that demand a history lesson, and days that deserve a little glitter, a little attitude, and a very clear message to anyone still confused about bisexuality in 2026: yes, bisexual people exist, no, they are not required to prove it to you, and no, their current partner does not magically rewrite their sexual orientation. September 23 is Bisexual Visibility Day, often called Celebrate Bisexuality Day or Bisexual Pride Day, and it is a day built around something that should sound ridiculously simple by now: bisexual people deserve to be seen as bisexual people. 

The numbers alone make the old habit of treating bisexuality as some tiny corner of LGBTQ+ life look absurd. Gallup’s latest U.S. estimate, based on more than 13,000 adult interviews conducted during 2025, found that 9% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+. Bisexual adults make up the largest part of that population: 58.6% of LGBTQ+ adults, equal to 5.3% of the entire U.S. adult population (Gallup, 2026). That is not a statistical footnote. It is millions of people whose identities are still routinely misread, dismissed, sexualized, questioned, or erased. 

So yes, today can be playful. Wear the pink, purple, and blue. Post the flag. Make the joke about having twice the dating options and somehow still finding nobody worth texting back. Celebrate bi artists, writers, activists, friends, relatives, coworkers, partners, and the people who have not told you they are bi. Then keep the celebration attached to the larger point: visibility is not simply about being noticed. It is about being recognized accurately, treated with dignity, and allowed to exist without having to submit evidence to a jury of strangers.

A Day Born for People Everyone Kept Pretending Not to See

Bisexual Visibility Day did not appear out of nowhere, and it did not begin as a branding exercise for social media. The observance traces back to 1999, when bisexual activists Wendy Curry, Michael Page, and Gigi Raven Wilbur created International Celebrate Bisexuality Day. The first observance was marked in connection with the International Lesbian and Gay Association conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, on September 23, 1999 (City of Boston, 2025). The name “Bi Visibility Day” became more common later, yet the original purpose remains easy to recognize: make room for bisexual people to be visible on their own terms. 

The date carried personal and cultural significance. September 23 is Gigi Raven Wilbur’s birthday, and historical accounts of the observance describe the founders’ admiration for Freddie Mercury, whose birthday falls in September and whose life held significance for the founders (City of Boston, 2024; Bi Visibility Day, n.d.). The choice was never about inventing bisexuality in 1999. It was about giving a long-existing community a day that named it directly. 

The movement behind that day reaches farther back. San Francisco issued a proclamation recognizing Bisexual Pride Day in 1990 during the first National Bisexual Conference. By the end of that decade, bisexual organizing had produced national networks, conferences, health initiatives, scholarship, cultural work, and a visual symbol that would become instantly recognizable. 

That symbol arrived just before the holiday. Activist Michael Page created the bisexual pride flag in 1998, giving the community three stripes that now show up on everything from banners to bracelets to cupcakes that are almost too pretty to eat. Page’s design used broad pink and blue bands with a narrower purple band between them. The flag was intended to give bisexual people a distinct symbol at a time when bisexual identity was frequently swallowed into gay, lesbian, or straight categories depending on who was looking. 

There is something fitting about that timing. First came a flag meant to make bisexual people visible. Then came a day meant to make bisexual people visible. Twenty-seven years after the first celebration, the assignment is apparently still unfinished.

Bisexuality Is Not a Math Problem

One of the strangest things society does with bisexual people is turn their identity into arithmetic. Are you 50% attracted to men and 50% attracted to women? What if it is 70/30? What if it changes? What if you have only dated one gender? What if you marry someone? What if you are single? What if Mercury is in retrograde and you kissed somebody at a barbecue in 2007?

None of that is a diagnostic test for bisexuality. The Bisexual Resource Center describes bisexuality as attraction to more than one gender and notes that the attraction may be physical, romantic, emotional, or some combination of those experiences. It may not occur at the same intensity, in the same way, or at the same time across genders (Bisexual Resource Center, n.d.). A person does not need an evenly divided attraction chart, a particular dating history, or a sexual résumé stamped by a certification board. 

A bisexual person in a monogamous relationship is still bisexual. A bisexual woman married to a man does not become straight on her wedding day, and a bisexual man married to a man does not become gay when the license is signed. Single bisexual people remain bisexual, which should be obvious once we remember that heterosexual people do not lose heterosexuality every time they go home alone. 

The word itself can hold more than one personal definition. Many people use “bisexual” to mean attraction to more than one gender. Some people use “bi+” as a broad umbrella that includes people who identify as pansexual, fluid, omnisexual, polysexual, queer, or with other terms connected to attraction across more than one gender. The Bisexual Resource Center uses that broad framework, yet personal labels remain personal choices (Bisexual Resource Center, n.d.). 

That flexibility occasionally sends people into semantic combat as if somebody has announced a cage match between “bisexual” and “pansexual.” There is no need for one. Those identities can overlap, people can use one label, multiple labels, or no label, and nobody gets a trophy for correcting another person’s self-description.

The B Is Doing a Lot More Work Than People Admit

The latest Gallup numbers are worth sitting with for a moment. In data collected across 2025, 9% of American adults identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or another identity outside heterosexuality. Bisexual adults represented 5.3% of all U.S. adults and 58.6% of LGBTQ+ adults in Gallup’s estimate (Gallup, 2026). 

Age makes the picture even more interesting. Gallup found that 23% of adults under 30 identified as LGBTQ+, compared with 10.4% of adults ages 30 to 49 and roughly 2% to 3% among older adults. Bisexual identity accounts for a substantial share of that generational difference, especially among younger women (Gallup, 2026). The most recent data do not suggest that bisexuality is some rare exception sitting on the edge of queer life. It is central to the demographic story of LGBTQ+ America. 

Yet numerical size has never guaranteed social visibility. A person can belong to the largest subgroup inside a coalition and still have their identity routinely overwritten. Put a bisexual person in a different-gender relationship and strangers often read them as straight. Put that same person in a same-gender relationship and strangers often read them as gay or lesbian. The person did not change; the assumption did. 

That is the peculiar trick of bi erasure. Bisexual people can be everywhere and still be treated as though they are nowhere. Their visibility can depend less on who they are than on who happens to be holding their hand in public at that moment.

The situation gets stranger inside LGBTQ+ spaces. Bisexual people may hear that they are “not queer enough” in one room, then get treated as suspiciously queer in another. Some are accused of seeking attention when they name their identity and accused of hiding when they do not. It is an exhausting little double bind: speak and get questioned; stay quiet and disappear. Fenway Health notes that bisexual+ people can encounter erasure, invisibility, misconceptions, and stigma within heterosexual society and LGBTQ+ communities (Fenway Health, 2024). 

Visibility Day pushes back on that contradiction. A population that forms the largest share of LGBTQ+ adults should not have to keep reintroducing itself.

Bi Erasure Has Real Consequences

It would be easy to keep the entire day in party mode, and there is value in joy. Yet the pressure to disappear has costs that go beyond irritating conversations at family dinners or awkward moments in queer spaces. Health research continues to show serious mental-health burdens across LGBTQ+ youth, including bisexual youth, in environments where stigma, discrimination, bullying, and rejection remain present.

The Trevor Project’s 2024 national survey included 18,663 LGBTQ+ people ages 13 to 24. Twenty-eight percent of respondents identified as bisexual. Among bisexual respondents, 65% reported recent symptoms of anxiety, 51% reported recent symptoms of depression, 37% had seriously considered suicide during the previous year, and 10% reported a suicide attempt during that period (The Trevor Project, 2024). Those figures describe a survey sample rather than every bisexual young person in the country, yet they are far too substantial to dismiss. 

The same survey found a broader association between affirming environments and lower suicide risk across LGBTQ+ youth. Young people living in very accepting communities reported suicide-attempt rates at less than half the rate reported by those in very unaccepting communities (The Trevor Project, 2024). That finding places visibility in a larger social context. Being seen without acceptance is not enough; recognition has to be paired with safety, support, and respect. 

Fenway Health has pointed to a related problem: bisexual people may encounter erasure and stigma in heterosexual spaces and within LGBTQ+ communities (Fenway Health, 2024). That two-directional pressure can leave people feeling as though they are permanently being asked to pick a side in a contest they never agreed to enter. 

A Pride day can carry joy and seriousness at the same time. The balloons do not cancel the data, and the data do not cancel the joy. Celebration can be part of resistance to the idea that queer life should be discussed only through crisis, trauma, or controversy.

Bi Myth Bingo, Since Apparently We Are Still Doing This

Some bisexual myths have survived with the tenacity of a glitter spill in carpet. They keep reappearing, they are hard to vacuum up, and somebody always insists they are “just asking a question” five seconds before saying something wildly inaccurate.

• “Bisexuality is a phase.” For some people, labels change over time; for many others, bisexuality is a stable identity across decades. A label changing for one person does not make everyone else’s identity temporary.
• “Bisexual people are confused.” Attraction to more than one gender is not confusion. Knowing that more than one gender can attract you can be a very clear piece of self-knowledge.
• “Bisexual means 50/50 attraction.” There is no percentage requirement. Attraction can differ in intensity, form, frequency, or timing, and a person can still identify as bisexual (Bisexual Resource Center, n.d.). 
• “Bisexual people cannot be monogamous.” Sexual orientation identifies patterns of attraction, not a mandatory relationship structure. Bi people can be monogamous, polyamorous, celibate, casually dating, married, divorced, happily single, or staring at dating apps with the same exhausted expression as everybody else (Bi.org, n.d.). 
• “Your partner determines your orientation.” A relationship can describe who someone is dating; it does not automatically redefine who they can be attracted to. A bisexual identity does not expire when a relationship becomes serious. 
• “Bisexuality excludes transgender or nonbinary people.” Many bisexual organizations define bisexuality in gender-inclusive terms, including attraction to more than one gender. Individual people choose the labels that fit them, and no outsider needs to turn somebody else’s identity into a vocabulary exam (Bisexual Resource Center, n.d.). 

These myths are not harmless little misunderstandings when they repeatedly tell people that their own account of themselves is unreliable. They create a culture in which bisexual people can be pressed for proof, treated as sexually available, distrusted in relationships, or made to feel unwelcome in spaces that claim to include them.

The remedy is not complicated. Believe people when they tell you who they are, stop treating orientation as a courtroom claim that requires exhibits A through F, and retire the idea that attraction to more than one gender tells you anything automatic about someone’s character.

The Flag Deserves Its Own Entrance

The bisexual pride flag is one of the best pieces of visual shorthand in LGBTQ+ culture. Michael Page introduced it in 1998, using three horizontal bands: pink across the top, purple in the center, and blue at the bottom. The pink and blue each occupy two-fifths of the flag’s height, with purple taking the middle fifth (University of California, Santa Barbara, n.d.). 

Page’s historical explanation tied pink to same-sex attraction, blue to opposite-sex attraction, and purple to the overlap. Contemporary community descriptions often use broader gender language, reflecting how many bi people now describe bisexuality as attraction to more than one gender. The basic visual concept remains the same: the colors meet, blend, and create something recognizable in its own right. 

There is a second layer to Page’s design that feels almost painfully appropriate. He described the purple as blending into the pink and blue in a way that echoes how bisexual people can blend unnoticed into gay, lesbian, and straight communities. A person can be standing right there, fully bisexual, and still be visually assigned to a different category by everyone around them. 

The flag answers that invisibility with color. Pink. Purple. Blue. No footnotes required.

It is hard not to appreciate the aesthetic confidence of it. The bisexual flag does not whisper. It looks like sunset met neon, made one questionable decision, and ended up iconic.

Visibility Is More Than Posting the Flag Once a Year

Posting a flag on September 23 is fine. Posting a flag and then spending the rest of the year making jokes about bi people being greedy, confused, promiscuous, secretly gay, or secretly straight is considerably less impressive. Visibility is useful when the culture around it changes, not when it becomes a twenty-four-hour decoration.

For friends and family, support can start with language. Do not assume that a bisexual person’s orientation disappeared when they started dating someone. Do not ask for a complete romantic history to verify a label. Do not treat bisexuality as an invitation to ask invasive questions about threesomes, sexual experience, or what somebody “really prefers.”

For LGBTQ+ organizations, inclusion should show up in programming and data. If bisexual people are the largest share of LGBTQ+ adults in Gallup’s latest estimate, organizations serving LGBTQ+ communities need to look at whether bi people are visible in leadership, outreach, health education, events, support groups, and research. An organization can have the letter B in its acronym and still make bisexual people feel like an afterthought. 

For health and social-service providers, precise language can change the quality of an interaction. Asking about identity, attraction, behavior, partners, and health needs without assuming those categories are identical can produce a fuller picture than forcing someone into “gay” or “straight” boxes. Data that lump every LGBTQ+ person into one category can hide meaningful differences across groups.

For queer communities, one of the simplest changes is cultural: stop making bisexual people audition for belonging. A bi person in a different-gender relationship has not surrendered membership. A bi person who has never had a same-gender relationship does not need remedial queer credits. A bi person who came out yesterday is not less authentic than someone who came out twenty years ago.

Visibility becomes useful when it removes the pressure to perform an identity for other people. The goal is not to make every bisexual person loudly public. The goal is to create a culture where being public does not require constant defense.

For the Bi Person Reading This

You do not owe anyone a percentage breakdown. You do not need to explain whether your attraction is 50/50, 80/20, 37/63, or “please stop asking me weird questions at brunch.” You do not need a minimum number of partners, relationships, crushes, sexual experiences, or dramatic coming-out stories to qualify.

You can be bi and monogamous. You can be bi and single. You can be bi and married. You can be bi and celibate. You can be bi and questioning what label fits you best. You can use bi, bi+, pansexual, queer, fluid, another term, several terms, or no term at all.

You can be out everywhere, out somewhere, or out nowhere. Public visibility can be meaningful, yet nobody is required to risk family relationships, employment, housing, safety, privacy, or peace of mind to make a social point. A Pride day should celebrate people, not create another obligation for them.

You are allowed to change the language you use for yourself. Human sexuality does not owe anybody perfect consistency across a lifetime. A label can be a home, a tool, a description, a community connection, or something you eventually replace with a word that fits better.

You are allowed to enjoy today without turning yourself into an educational exhibit. If somebody sincerely wants to learn, there are books, research centers, community organizations, and an entire internet full of resources. You do not have to become Bisexuality Customer Service every time somebody has a question.

And you are allowed to celebrate the ridiculous parts. The memes. The cuffed-jeans jokes. The inability to sit correctly in a chair, according to an entire subgenre of queer internet humor. The pink-purple-blue everything. Pride does not lose seriousness when people laugh.

Happy Bisexual Pride Day — Now Keep the B Visible Tomorrow

Bisexual Visibility Day began in 1999 with activists who were tired of a community being overlooked. Twenty-seven years later, the scale has changed, the vocabulary has grown, and the data have become harder to ignore. Gallup now finds that bisexual adults make up the majority of LGBTQ+ adults in the United States, yet the basic problem that inspired the observance remains recognizable: people still have a habit of interpreting bisexual lives through gay-or-straight categories. 

That habit can look trivial when it appears as an incorrect assumption about somebody’s partner. It becomes more serious when repeated erasure contributes to isolation, exclusion, poor health experiences, or a sense that someone is never quite accepted in straight spaces or queer ones. Visibility is one part of correcting that pattern, and accurate recognition is the piece that gives visibility substance.

There is room today for celebration without pretending every problem has been solved. Fly the flag, wear the colors, send the ridiculous meme, share the bisexual artist whose work you love, support a bi-owned business, read some bi history, and check whether the LGBTQ+ spaces around you actually treat the B as a living community rather than a decorative letter.

Most of all, retire the interrogation. Bisexual people do not need to present witnesses, dating records, pie charts, or sworn affidavits proving that their orientation is real. They can tell you who they are, and you can take them at their word.

Happy Bisexual Pride Day. May your pink be loud, your blue be bold, your purple refuse to disappear, and your celebration last much longer than twenty-four hours.

References

Bi Visibility Day. (n.d.). Resources. 

Bi.org. (n.d.). Are bisexual people more promiscuous than other people? 

Bisexual Resource Center. (n.d.). What is bisexuality? 

City of Boston. (2024, September 20). September 23rd is Bisexuality Visibility Day. 

City of Boston. (2025). Bisexuality and Bi+ Visibility Day. 

Fenway Health. (2024, September 20). Celebrating Bisexual+ Visibility Day. 

Gallup. (2026, February 16). LGBTQ+ identification holds at 9% in U.S. 

The Trevor Project. (2024). 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People. 

University of California, Santa Barbara, Resource Center for Sexual & Gender Diversity. (n.d.). Pride flags glossary.