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By definition, homosexuals are people who are sexually attracted to people of their own gender — men lust after men, women lust after women. Bisexuals, in contrast, are people who are attracted to BOTH genders. The very definitions of the words supply the answer to this "debate" question.

But wait, you say — some bisexuals are actually homosexuals who are in denial. Society is deeply prejudiced against homosexuals, after all. Political correctness might keep you from voicing your biases against women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Wiccans, nudists, Arabs, or members of the ACLU, but by gorry, you can always talk nasty about gay marriage, and how the desire for a loving commitment between two human beings who happen to be the same gender undermines the God-blessed sanctity of Britney Spear's 55-hour marriage to Jason Allen Alexander.

The truth is that bisexuality doesn't seem to be "graven in stone" the way heterosexuality and homosexuality are. Some bisexuals are about 75 percent attracted to the opposite gender; some about 75 percent to their own gender; some of them even change over the course of years. In the mid-1940s, Alfred Kinsey devised a 7-point scale, with 0 being 100 percent heterosexual, 6 being 100 percent homosexual, and 1 through 5 covering the permeations of bisexuality. Kinsey's scale has been criticized over the decades (you have to stretch it to cover bi-permissives, for example — people who are open to the idea of experimental sexuality, but who don't bring the idea up themselves). Nevertheless, it remains useful and widely used.

In 1995, Harvard professor Marjorie Garber published "Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism in Everyday Life," a 600-page academic tome in which she argued that most of us would be bisexual if it weren't for "repression, religion, repugnance, [and] denial."

According to psychiatrist Joseph Merlino, senior editor of "Freud at 150," Sigmund Freud believed that all of us go through a bisexual phase before settling down, usually to heterosexuality. Homosexuals, Freud believed, are "people who [are] totally normal in every other regard except in terms of their sexual preference. In fact, he saw many [homosexuals] as having higher intellects, higher aesthetic sensibilities, higher morals; those kinds of things."

Problems may arise not from bisexuals themselves, but from deeply conservative people who believe that sexuality is a sharply defined aspect of character that can never change or evolve, and that

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