Margaret Cho thinks the time has come for more bisexual men to come out.
"I want to see more bisexual men coming out. I know that they are out there, I know they exist," she told Gay Star News in a recent interview. "It's a lot harder for the men to feel like they have that freedom and I don't know what it is -- this kind of phobia is in place that keeps them from being able to identify as bisexual as readily as women are. That is always something that I will be curious about, why it's so hard for men in that regard."
Public perception of male bisexuality has made headlines partly because of celebrities like Olympian Tom Daley, who, though he didn't use the label "bisexual," disclosed his relationship with another man in a YouTube video last year with an addendum that he still "fancies girls." Gay conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan dubbed Daley's statement a "classic bridging mechanism to ease the transition to his real sexual identity."
In March, The New York Times' Benoit Denizet-Lewis explored the work of the American Institute of Bisexuality, a group focused on studying and increasing the visibility of bisexuality “in a world that still isn’t convinced that bisexuality -- particularly male bisexuality -- exists," to quote a sex researcher Denizet-Lewis interviewed.
"Bisexuals are so unlikely to be out about their orientation -- in a 2013 Pew Research Survey, only 28 percent of people who identified as bisexual said they were open about it -- that the San Francisco Human Rights Commission recently called them 'an invisible majority' in need of resources and support," Denizet-Lewis also wrote.
Although she is married to a man, Cho has publicly identified as bisexual and is willing to have an open dialogue about the fluidity of sexuality.
"I've always been really comfortable talking about bisexuality because people are curious about it," she told GSN. "People think there's gay or straight, they can't think that there's differences and in between there, there's different shades of gray. For me, that's just the truth of my existence and the needle just shifts as I grow older."