Bisexual or bi-sexual?

One question that's cropped up many times in my 20-something years of bi activism and bi volunteering is this:

Should bisexual and bisexuality be spelled with hyphens, as bi-sexual and bi-sexuality?

I say, down with the hyphen! Two reasons:

1) We don't hyphenate homo-sexuality or hetero-sexuality.

2) Generally when words get hyphenated like that it's because they aren't real words or are just getting accepted into English as a single word (think of old films where to indicate the passage of time they have a flipping calendar with "TO-DAY IS" on it -- or how early on people tended to write email as e-mail). As bisexuality is real and definitely not something invented earlier this week, I think the hyphen sends out all the wrong signals on that front too.


I wrote this in a thread somewhere else but thought it was worth copying over here :)