Anne Frank was Bisexual

Recently, to point out the contributions that bisexual people have made to our culture, I posted a list of famous bisexual people on my Facebook wall. Many of them were well-known for swinging both ways: Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Angelina Jolie, Walt Whitman, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, Alice Walker, Margaret Mead, David Bowie, Drew Barrymore, Calvin Klein, Virginia Woolf. None of my friends even questioned the orientations of these famously bisexual celebrities.

However, several of my friends got fixated on one entry on the list: Anne Frank. I got two text messages, a private message, and a comment within an hour of posting the list. “Really? Anne Frank? She wasn’t bisexual. She was a kid!” said one of my friends– as if to imply that children can’t experience attraction. Another, resorting to the prevalent stereotype that still plagues bisexual people of all ages, suggested that Anne Frank had simply been confused by the wild waves of hormones that crash into our bodies during puberty.

Despite the ring of controversies surrounding labeling the orientation of the famed diarist and Holocaust victim, I stand by the claim that Anne Frank was bisexual. Bisexuality is defined, undebatably, as a romantic and sexual interest in people of both sexes– and Anne Frank certainly demonstrated this tendency in every capacity.

On January 6, 1944, Anne wrote in her diary: “Once when I was spending the night at Jacque’s, I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she’d always hidden from me and which I’d never seen. I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy. Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back my tears. If only I had a girlfriend!”

These sorts of musings go far beyond the basic, “I wonder what it would be like” that most teens experience at some point or another. She expresses intense emotional, romantic and physical attraction that supersedes curiosity or experimentation. Seeing this alone, one might judge Anne Frank to have been exclusively gay– but she liked boys, as well. Anne Frank’s famous adolescent romance with Peter van Pels, who shared her confinement, is one of the best-known and remembered aspects of her life in hiding.

It’s sad to me that so many readers, writers and historians pass off Anne Frank’s bisexuality as “confusion,” while few have questioned her presumed heterosexuality. While I believe, based on her writings, that Ms. Frank was bisexual, I would be far more concerned that her attraction to Peter van Pels was the result of confusion and captivity.

Anne Frank’s apparent bisexuality remains unspoken for several reasons. On one hand, we want to protect her privacy. To read Anne Frank’s diary is much like reading the diary of any other teenage girl, and to air her deepest secrets feels unfair. It was largely because of this– and to avoid stigma during the rampantly homophobic 1950s and 1960s– that Anne’s father chose not to publish Anne Frank’s secret interest in other women. Even in today’s world, it is considered gauche to out someone against his or her will.

Stereotypes and assumptions about the nature of bisexuality also play a role. People are quick to judge bisexuality as a wild phase of irresponsibility and confusion, when it is actually as legitimate an orientation as homosexuality or heterosexuality. Many people are also quick to assume that a fifteen-year-old doesn’t know enough about love or sex to understand who she is (and isn’t) attracted to. While it is true that Anne Frank might have “become” gay or straight as an adult– or simply discovered that she was more one than the other– I think it’s safe and responsible to say that she was bisexual at the time of her death.

I think another factor also holds us back from exposing Anne Frank’s bisexuality. Anne Frank was a victim, a martyr– a child who died in the merciless hands of a genocidal regime. For the sake of our own mythos, we feel a need to preserve the idea that she was innocent and chaste by all standards– a perfect child. Because biphobia is still so tragically prevalent, we feel that bisexuality is still something scandalous and dark, and something that would somehow tarnish her deserved reputation as an innocent victim.

But I can’t help but ask: would she be less of a victim, less of a child, or less of a human being if her famed early romance hadn’t been with Peter, but with her female friend Jaque? If the answer is yes– that Anne Frank’s story would be less tragic had she been known to date girls– then perhaps we haven’t moved far past the bigoted days of the Holocaust.

Anne Frank was a child who, like so many others, had dreams of love, family, and a satisfying career. All of these hopes were severed before she even reached age 16. Does it really make any difference if the life of Anne Frank’s future involved boyfriends, girlfriends, or both? Her bisexuality, whether a phase or a permanent component of her emotional infrastructure, was part of her budding identity. To ignore that aspect of her personality is to posthumously deny her the right to individualism and self-expression.

Source Used:

Frank, Anne; Massotty, Susan (translation); (1995). The Diary of a Young Girl – The Definitive Edition.


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