Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1997 The Prevalence and Nature of Biphobia in Heterosexual UndergraduateStudents Michele J. Eliason, Ph.D. 1 Little scientific attention has been paid to bisexuality or to societal attitudes about bisexual people. Often, biphobia has been assumed to be identical to homophobia. In this study, 229 heterosexual undergraduate students rated their degree of agreement to stereotypical statements about bisexuality and provided information on their attitudes about the acceptability of bisexual, gay, and lesbian people. Although there was a high degree of correlation between biphobia and homophobia, negative attitudes about bisexuals, men in particular, were more prevalent than negative attitudes about lesbians or gay men. Biphobia and homophobia should be considered related, but distinct, phenomena. INTRODUCTION Until recently, bisexual people have been a largely invisible segment of the population. In spite of work by Kinsey and others to conceptualize sexuality as a continuum, many people view sexual identity as a dichoto- mous variable, with heterosexual or homosexual as the only choices. This dichotomization effectively erases all points on the continuum between these two extremes, and has a profound effect on research on sexual ori- entation (Kaplan, 1995; Paul, 198S; Udis-Kessler, 1990). As lesbian and gay people became more visible on college campuses and in the media in the 1970s, studies of homophobia (negative attitudes about homosexuality and/or homosexual people) began to appear in the scientific literature. However, bisexual people were not as visible, or were not considered as 1 372 MB, College of Nursing, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242. 317 0004-flOOOTMMaMBrailSVD C 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation KEY WORDS: bisexuality; biphobia; homophobia; attitudes.