ABSTRACT
Australia is one of a very few countries where HIV infection and AIDS continue to be highly concentrated among men who engage in male-to-male sex. In this chapter, we will examine Australian research on men who engage in both homosexual and heterosexual activity. On the whole, these men do not think of themselves as ‘bisexual’, although some of them may do so. It is difficult to decide on an appropriate descriptive term for such men-elsewhere we have sometimes referred to them as ‘men who have sex with both men and women’— a very cumbersome solution to the problem. Dowsett (1994) writes of them as ‘homosexually active’, although this too is problematic when he writes of ‘gay and other homosexually active men’ since we would then need to refer to them as ‘homosexually and heterosexually active’. Since this book is about ‘bisexualities’, we shall use the term ‘bisexually active’ for the sake of brevity, whilst acknowledging the problematic status of the term, particularly as it tends to gloss over the fact that sexual practices are either homosexual or heterosexual and are not (except in some rare instances) bisexual. The same is true for sexual encounters.
