Aristophanes on the Origins of Bisexuality

In Plato's Symposium, the guests discuss love. This story about how people came to seek someone to love is told by Aristophanes. It explains both why people are attracted to the same sex and why people are attracted to the opposite sex.

From Plato's Symposium (Public Domain translation):

The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two.... The primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond....

..[Zeus] said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs.... After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one ....

Each of us when separated... is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women... the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature.

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