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The Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank

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Was Anne Frank's sexuality influenced by her circumstances?

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Anne Frank's sexuality, as revealed in her diary, included attractions to both boys and girls, suggesting bisexuality. It's challenging to definitively attribute her sexual thoughts to her circumstances of hiding from the Nazis, as many adolescents experience diverse sexual feelings regardless of their environments. Her expressions should be respected without being dismissed due to her age or situation, acknowledging the fluidity and complexity of sexual identity.

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Being bisexual means having sexual and romantic thoughts about more than one gender. Sexuality is not something that needs to be true for someone's entire life in order to be valid or true. For instance, someone can identify as heterosexual for most of their life and then develop attractions that are not heterosexual and then begin to identify as bisexual or as gay. This does not mean that they were always gay or bisexual, however. Models of sexuality as a static thing often do not align with people's internal experiences.

Attempting to explain away non-heterosexual attraction because of environmental factors is disrespectful to the complexity of experiences people have with their sexuality. Bisexual people are especially likely to have their experiences dismissed as "confusion" or to be required to prove their bisexuality, but these are clear manifestations of heterosexual supremacy, as straight people never have their attraction questioned in these...

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ways. Anne Frank clearly experienced bisexual attraction and expresses such clearly in her diary, and it is unreasonable to dismiss this as evidence of her bisexuality because of her age or experience.

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This isn't really a question anyone can authoritatively answer about another person, particularly not somebody who, sadly, never reached adulthood and whose teenage diary is the only thing we have to go on. I don't know that Anne's particular situation—of being in fear for her life and hiding from the Nazis in an attic—would have made her any more likely to think about women in a sexual way. I do think it's likely that many young people of her age have thoughts of this kind, regardless of their external situation, and many of them might commit them to a diary if they were to keep one.

We know from her own writings that Anne did entertain sexual thoughts about girls; she may or may not have continued to. We will never know. We do know that there has been much controversy over whether these pages should have been excised from the diary, largely because, at the time that Anne was writing (and, indeed, until recently), being bisexual was not generally acceptable in society. Many public figures whose friends knew full well that they were bisexual or gay have had this fact covered up by those friends after their deaths because it would have been thought of as a slur on their characters by the general public.

So, Anne Frank certainly had sexual and romantic thoughts about both boys and girls. We cannot say any further than this whether she would have grown up to be, or identify as, bisexual.

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The limitations of social interaction befallen upon Anne, before and during her captivity, leave Anne with many questions regarding the different feelings and sensations that she experiences despite her need to justify them in her diary.  She is unaware of how to classify or even react to the growing sexual awareness that was inevitable.  Her hormones dictate some of her writing in this part of the novel and she is struggling to validate how she feels emotionally and socially.  Sexual awareness for a girl, even in the most "normal" of circumstances, is difficult to deal with.  Anne has to deal with her "growing up" with a perspective skewed by captivity.

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