Bisexuality rarely gets the same kind of validation that is a necessary part
of forming a healthy identity.
Annalee Newitz and Jillian Sandell
Issue #16, October 1994
For months we have been having conversations with each other trying to
work out where we stand as bisexuals. It probably doesn't sound that
difficult, but our bisexuality is often construed by others as being at odds
with the rest of who we are — queer socialist-feminists in academia.
Bisexuality rarely gets the same kind of validation that is a necessary part
of forming a healthy identity. Particularly within the queer community,
which supposedly includes us, we often feel insecure and ashamed about
'coming out' as bisexuals. Why do we feel so ashamed? Queer activism taught
us to take pleasure in our sexuality, and yet in queer circles we rarely
find our experiences affirmed in the way homosexuality and lesbianism are.
It's true that there have been changes. In recent years Gay Pride parades in
New York, San Francisco and other places have been renamed to include
lesbians, gays and bisexuals. Similarly, bisexual organizations such as
BiPOL and BiNet have been formed in several major cities. But it is still
the case that, despite bisexuality being a reality for us and many other
people, it is rare to find positive representations of ourselves within
contemporary popular culture — or any kind of culture for that matter.
Since Alfred Kinsey's invention of the famous 'Kinsey scale' in the late
40s, the idea that most people fall somewhere between 0 (totally
heterosexual) and 6 (totally homosexual) on a sexual preference continuum
has been hotly debated. What Kinsey suggested, in designing this scale, was
that 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' are not opposites, but rather two
possible positions on a continuum of sexual desire. One might be a 2 on the
scale (preferring hetero sex, but occasionally enjoying homo sex), or a 4
(tending toward homo, but really liking both), or any other number between 1
and 6. In 1978, psychiatrist Fritz Klein published the first book about
bisexuality aimed at a mass audience, The Bisexual Option, and
modified the Kinsey scale, creating what he called the 'Klein sexual
orientation grid.' This 'grid' expanded Kinsey's 6 point scale to a 7 point
scale (where 1 is hetero only, and 7 homo only), and measures a number of
variables that might influence sexual orientation: sexual attractions,
fantasies, behaviors, emotions, and self-identification among others.
Klein's grid demonstrates that sexual orientation is wildly difficult to
determine in the contemporary era: rather than a simple 0-6 scale, we now
need a grid where we rate seven 'variables' with a 1 to 7 ranking, and
include in this ranking how we felt in the past as well as how we would feel
'ideally.' Your sexual orientation, in Klein's grid, ends up looking
something like one of the graphs from the Clinton Administration's economic
package.
When Klein began his research for The Bisexual Option, he
discovered there were almost no articles or books on bisexuality available
in public libraries and medical indexes. In the New York Public Library in
1976 he found only 2 monographs on bisexuality, and no books at all. Even
today, despite the boom in queer publishing, A Different Light (a gay and
lesbian bookstore chain) has only in the past 6 months introduced a section
specifically on bisexuality. In other words, it is only very recently that
enough books on bisexuality have existed to fill such a section.
During the 1970s, openly bisexual superstars like David Bowie, Andy
Warhol, and Marlon Brando made bisexuality chic. At that time, the feminist
and gay rights movements were gaining momentum and sexual 'swinging' and
experimentation were popular 'lifestyle choices' among the middle-class as
well as in the counterculture. While bisexuality obviously existed in the
lives of many people, from stars to activists, it never inspired its own
large-scale political movement nor did it ever generate a viable community.
In the 70s, bisexuality was chic not because it was a political issue, but
because it was associated with 'sexual liberation.' The gay and women's
liberation movements were also associated with sexual liberation, but became
established political movements by foregrounding civil rights issues.
Bisexuality was never 'political' in the way gay rights and feminism
continue to be. With the arrival of 'queer' as an umbrella term for all
kinds of sexual minorities, you would think bisexuality might have finally
come into its own as a political issue. Yet it remains a marginalized term
within queer (read: mostly homosexual) politics.
In fact, when bisexuality surfaces as an issue in queer activist culture
and the mass media it is often mistaken for or represented as something
else: bisexuals are conceived of as deviants (queer among queers?), fickle
lovers, psychotics, spreaders of disease, closet homosexuals, and betrayers
of the queer cause who at any moment can 'switch sides' and reap the
benefits of a heterosexist culture. The controversial film Basic
Instinct (1992) is a perfect example of how bisexuals are understood to
embody not just one, but nearly all of these negative traits. Catherine
(Sharon Stone), the murder suspect in this film, is a bisexual who, among
other things, enjoys promiscuity, 'deviant' s/m sex, and cruel mind games
which foster near-psychosis in her male and female lovers and cause us to
suspect that she too may be insane. What is interesting about this movie is
not just its negative portrayal of bisexuality, but the way it has been
hailed as a 'lesbian text' by film critics and moviegoers alike. Any way you
look at it, bisexuality is demeaned or eliminated in this film. If you think
of Catherine as a bisexual, she is evil. If you think of her as a lesbian,
she isn't bisexual. What we have, then, is a bisexual who is either just
plain bad or nonexistent. This kind of reaction to bisexuality is not
unusual — bisexuals are oppressed and rendered invisible by both straight
and queer culture. The amount of hostility and selective blindness triggered
by bisexuality suggests to us that it poses a serious threat to our present
conception of sexual identity. Most people still cling to the notion that
they are 'one or the other' — straight or gay. Bisexuality complicates this
idea.
For this reason, bisexuality seems most visible as an option when it
helps to explain the intensity with which people become involved in romantic
triangles. The romantic triangle leads to one of two scenarios: all three
partners become involved in a 'swinging' or non-monogamous arrangement; or
jealousy prevails and one or more partners commit an act of emotional or
physical violence. Both scenarios involve what mainstream culture would call
'deviance' or 'sickness.' While non-monogamy and menages a trois are not
anti-social acts like violence, they are nevertheless associated — in
heteronormative culture — with questionable sanity.
Clearly while bisexuals can be what Fritz Klein calls 'sequential
bisexuals,' that is, monogamously attached to one gender at a time, this is
not the dominant understanding of bisexual habits. Even among bisexuals
themselves, non-monogamy is often the 'practice' for the 'theory' of
bisexuality. In their recent exhaustive study of over 800 self-identified
bisexuals called Dual Attraction (1994), sociologists Martin
Weinberg, Colin Williams, and Douglas Pryor found that bisexuals reported in
1983 that their 'ideal arrangement was to have two core relationships — one
heterosexual and one homosexual.' What is more interesting than this
finding, however, are the kinds of questions the (non-bisexual) authors pose
before getting their answers: 'Can bisexuals be truly committed to more than
one partner or to partners of different sexes?...How are multiple
relationships organized?' That is, Weinberg et. al. assume going into their
research that bisexual identity necessarily implies a non-monogamous
lifestyle. Their task, as they see it, is simply to document how this
non-monogamy occurs, not to find out when or if indeed it really does to the
extent that popular stereotypes might suggest. Regardless, it is certainly
the case that self-identified bisexuals are more likely to question
monogamy. An ad for the Bay Area Bisexual Network reads: 'We support
celibacy, monogamy, and non-monogamy as equally valid lifestyle choices.'
Patricia Ireland, controversial president of NOW, also declared her
bisexuality by stating she has both a husband and a female lover.
Bisexuality gets associated with non-monogamy and group sex because it is
difficult to imagine a purely bisexual act that involves only two people.
Two women together, even if they are bisexual, engage in 'homosexual sex.'
Likewise, a bisexual man and woman together engage in 'heterosexual sex.'
Recent movies like Threesome (1994) and Three of Hearts
(1993) danced around issues of bisexuality in their depictions of love
triangles which contained heterosexual and homosexual partners. That both
films needed to situate bisexuality in mixed-gender/orientation love
triangles brings us back to a point we made earlier: bisexuality is often
cast as the cause for romantic triangles, particularly those with 'deviant'
outcomes. In the movie Threesome, for example, two young men and a
woman end up in bed together after longing for each other separately.
Tellingly, the main character says in voice-over at the beginning of the
movie, 'This is a story about how we became deviants.' One bisexual woman,
writing a personal essay in the collection Closer to Home: Bisexuality
and Feminism (1992), states that 'the image...[in] my mind' of bisexual
sex is 'two seedy-looking men and two women getting it on, maybe one of them
wondering if she should have bothered to learn these other peoples' names
before jumping into bed with them.' Bisexuality, which is so hard to imagine
within the terms of a 'standard' one-on-one sexual encounter, comes to
represent and be represented by 'deviant' sexual encounters.
What we see here is a chain of associations beginning with bisexual
identity and ending with sickness. In between, we find non-monogamous sexual
relations, violent rage, sickness, and AIDS particularly. In an August 1992
issue of Time, Anastasia Toufexis and Eugene Linden demonstrate how
this kind of association can work. 'As the threat of AIDS intensifies, more
precise information regarding bisexuals' prevalence and practices is
desperately needed,' they write, thereby equating bisexual practices with
the spread of AIDS. As many people have pointed out, bisexuality is often
attributed to some kind of monstrousness or freakishness in individuals.
The Hunger, an art house hit from 1983, featured bisexual vampiress
Catherine Deneuve seducing first David Bowie, then Susan Sarandon, into
sensual blood-drinking encounters. Besides the vampire, another way we find
bisexual individuals represented is in the figure of the hermaphrodite, a
person whose sexual organs combine male and female attributes. In Thomas
Geller's Bisexuality: A Reader and Sourcebook (1990), placed among
articles about bisexual identity is a work called 'Normal and Atypical
Gender Differentiation,' which describes (and contains graphic illustrations
of) the development of ordinary and hermaphroditic sexual organs. At an
individual level then, the bisexual is viewed as supernatural (maybe even
imaginary, like vampires), or as a medical anomaly whose biological sex is
essentially deformed.
These are not the only ways bisexuality has been rendered problematic by
its association with aberrant identities or sexualities. In April 1982
Barnard College in New York hosted a feminist conference entitled 'Towards a
Politics of Sexuality'. The conference proved to be an historic and
controversial event, triggering the so-called 'sex wars' that are still
raging today within the feminist community. The conference was unique in
that it provided a space for feminists to discuss the erotics and politics
of non-normative sexuality. Vance's Pleasure and Danger (1984), the
landmark text that contains papers from this conference, demonstrates the
kind of polarized thinking we are talking about. The two factions that
emerged were not comprised of straight and lesbian women, but of 'vanilla'
and 's/m' women. Many women at the conference viewed sadomasochism as being
inextricably linked to cross-generational sex, transvestism, transsexualism,
fetishists, sex-workers and bisexuality, arguing that all of these groups
would threaten and pollute the women's community. Since sexuality was a
political choice, and lesbianism the politically correct choice, any other
kind of sexuality was considered counter-revolutionary. Bisexuality was
considered to be threatening to the cohesion of the women's movement, not
only because women were having sex with men but also because of its
association with other unusual sexual practices. Contemporary questions of
butch/femme echo these earlier discussions, with butch/femme being linked
with bisexuality and s/m.
Since the early 1980s there has been a significant increase in explicit
representations of sadomasochistic sexuality within popular culture. What is
interesting, in the context of our present discussion, is that s/m culture
is also one place where representations of bisexuality are readily
available. However, despite the frequency of mixed-sex encounters within s/m
parties and erotic literature, bisexuality itself, as an identity, is often
marginalized or erased, with s/m being the primary sexual identity of the
participants. Madonna's Sex (1992), an erotic picture book full of
the paraphernalia of s/m, is a prime example of the mainstreaming of s/m,
and it is typical in that it explicitly connects s/m sex with homosexuality,
and flagrantly appropriates queer imagery (much to the chagrin, it should be
noted, of the queer community itself). But more importantly, Sex is a book
about bisexuality, containing images of both straight and gay sexual
encounters. Yet the book is hailed as 'queer.' Once again, bisexuality falls
by the wayside.
Since s/m is self-consciously theatrical, with participants adopting
roles and negotiating scripts to perform, one's 'everyday' identities are
discarded. Indeed part of the seductive appeal of s/m is to be able to enter
another world where 'everyday' sex is left behind, so that mixed-sex as well
as same-sex encounters occur while maintaining one's 'queer' or 'straight'
identities. Of course, sexual acts always involve an element of performance,
and a kind of role-playing, but what concerns us is that one role — namely
bisexuality — is consistently dismissed. In other words, s/m allows
participants to perform bisexual acts while simultaneously disavowing it by
claiming that the acts are just s/m. Pat Califia's Macho Sluts
(1988) and Doc and Fluff (1990) are both excellent examples of s/m
literature that includes bisexuality yet is specifically targeted for, and
claimed by, lesbians. A positive aspect of s/m is the creation of the safe
space where acts can occur within a negotiated contract, but it seems
unnecessary to disguise the reality of many mixed-sex encounters — both at
the level of fantasy and reality.
Lately a kind of s/m chic has emerged, often associated with 'pro-sex'
activists like Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin, and s/m has become a convenient
stand-in for a variety of alternative sexual activities, including fetishism
(especially leather), transvestism, and sex between people of different
generations. As sexual acts that transgress 'normal' queer and straight sex,
these activities end up being collapsed into different versions of
'deviance'. While pro-sex activists have had some success in countering
negative stereotypes that persist about s/m (and other alternative sexual
activities) bisexuality itself has yet to become chic.
Merely making bisexuality become 'chic' is clearly not a goal in itself.
As some commentators noted last year, one of the possible negative
side-effects of the popularity of 'lesbian chic' was that it codes
lesbianism as merely a kind of fashion statement, something that requires
certain consumer goods to mark the individual as lesbian. Another concern,
of course, is that anything that is a fashion statement one year is pass the
next. Seeing sexual identity as a fashion is no better than saying it is
part of a passing phase. With the arrival of s/m chic a pattern seems to be
emerging where a lifestyle or sexual identity becomes more mainstream and is
marketed so that a number of associated consumer goods are purchased. Since
there are no obvious consumer goods that accompany bisexuality this may be
one reason for its absence in consumer culture. But the reasons go deeper
than that. They have more to do with a kind of biphobia within straight and
queer culture.
We often find biphobia when bisexuality is mistaken for homosexuality.
Within academia it is almost common-place to argue that there is a queer
sub-text in films and books that are, on the surface, bisexual or even
heterosexual. Vito Russo's acclaimed book on homosexuality in the movies,
The Celluloid Closet (1981), is not only a study of actual lesbian
and gay characters in Hollywood films but also one of the first examples of
the increasingly popular trend of 'reading' the queer subtext of films. This
trend is well established and films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1953), Black Widow (1986) and Thelma and Louise (1991)
are just three texts that are routinely considered to be 'really' about
lesbians. Yet they are all about women who are, at least on the surface,
heterosexual. We certainly do not condemn the practice of finding the queer
subtext in 'straight' culture. We simply wish to broaden the possible queer
readings to include bisexual ones. While homoeroticism is strongly suggested
between these female protagonists, the idea that they might be bisexuals is
never raised.
Why might this be? Resistance to bisexuality from the gay and lesbian
community is especially strong. It is almost as if bisexuals threaten queers
with assimilation into the heterosexual world. The bisexual makes it
difficult to maintain a clear boundary between queer and straight
communities. This fear of assimilation is characterized by Susie Bright, in
Sisters, Sexperts and Queers (1993) as the 'Titanic paranoia' where
'there are only six lesbians left on the life raft, and if we lose one more
person, we're all going to sink...it's only threatening to those who are
insecure, who feel as though we are losing our community'. Yet,
significantly, Bright, who is an outspoken supporter of all sexual
minorities, calls herself a lesbian while living a bisexual life.
In Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993) Alexander Doty suggests
that the queerness of mass culture comes from the ways in which texts are
received and read, rather than queerness necessarily being 'in' the text.
Thus the meaning that is 'in' the text may be heterosexual but the meaning
that is 'around' the text may suggest lesbian or gay desire. Because the
mass media rarely shows positive representations of queer people, finding
the queer subtext in popular culture becomes a form of pleasure, and even a
kind of necessity, for many people. Yet, these two kinds of meanings — the
queer subtext and the heterosexual surface text — always remain mutually
exclusive rather than co-existing alternatives. The possibility that Susan
Sarandon and Geena Davis, or Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell might be
portraying bisexual women does not seem to be an option.
One of the most influential theoretical texts available on queer identity
in culture, Eve Sedgwick's Between Men (1985), demonstrates the
problems with trying to extricate a bisexual perspective from a queer one.
Hailed as one of the first academic works about homosexuality in classical
literature by its author and the students it has influenced, Between Men
is in many ways an example of what happens when we focus too hard on finding
a queer 'subtext' and ignore its bisexual context. One of the many key
arguments Sedgwick makes in this book is that men often deal with their
sexual desire for one another by putting a woman in between them. This woman
might be a source of romantic rivalry, or a person one man gives to the
other in marriage, or a fictional woman who symbolically represents the
'real' male object of desire. The two men who desire one another act out
their love on this woman, and therefore homosexuality gets 'buried' in a
heterosexual relationship.
A woman between two men therefore comes to stand in for a homoerotic —
even homosexual — bond. Using Sedgwick's idea (perhaps improperly), one can
'prove' that when a gay man falls in love with a woman it represents a
burial of his homosexuality, rather than an affirmation of his bisexuality.
Sedgwick herself points out that her formulation is intended to criticize
the way men use women as pawns in their own (often financial) dealings with
each other. And yet she has generated a notion which is now used in queer
theory circles to reproduce this very problem. The women a gay man might
love are just tools he uses to get at a man whom he 'really' loves. There is
no possibility here for a bisexual reading, in which a man feels
simultaneous desire for women and men, but is forced to choose between them.
We believe that it is time to take seriously and pay attention to that
woman (or man) who is 'in between.' Why don't we try to analyze what seems
obvious about Sedgwick's scenarios? She *is* describing bisexual desire —
the desire two men experience for each other *and* for women. Why should a
man's desire for a woman 'really' be desire for men? Why can't a man
'really' desire both, and be torn apart because his culture asks him to
choose one over the other? Understanding fictional and non-fictional
situations like the ones Sedgwick describes as bisexual (rather than
covertly homosexual) makes telling the truth about ourselves a lot easier.
We do not have to erase or discount one gender in order to find out what is
'really' happening. Nor do we have to expend great amounts of energy wishing
away sexual desires that seem messy because they stray outside the lines of
a rigidly defined homosexual or heterosexual identity.
Accepting bisexuality as a form of desire common to both straight and
queer people would allow us to understand what is, in many ways, right
before our very eyes. Rather than agonizing over a search for the buried
'queer' subtext in our popular culture, we might instead stop digging and
take the surface of this culture seriously. Even when we find bisexuality on
the surface of things, it is still often read as homosexuality. Personal
Best (1980), Basic Instinct and The Hunger are all
quite explicitly 'about' bisexual women, yet are rarely described as such
and instead are listed in film guides and reviews as being about lesbians.
But straight and gay culture alike continue to insist, in a literal
sense, that things are not nearly so simple. How else can we explain gay
people in fiction and real life who have straight sex sometimes, and vice
versa? Go Fish, the highly acclaimed recent film about lesbian romance,
contains a scene in which a mock tribunal is convened to pass judgment on a
lesbian who has recently slept with a man. Although slightly ironic, this
'trial' points up a very real — and oppressive — aspect of gay and lesbian
culture. Duplicating some of the most oppressive aspects of heteronormative
society, many gays and lesbians will insist that sexuality must be black and
white: even if sometimes you are attracted to the opposite sex, this urge
must be squelched in the name of your purely queer identity.
For all these reasons and more, we believe the world is ready for a new
way of politicizing and understanding identity. Bisexuality is only one
example of the kind of identity which suggests possibilities for
coalition-building between marginal groups and their mainstream
counterparts. Feminism and the gay rights movements were able, separately,
to forge strong political movements out of sexual liberation by challenging
existing assumptions about the relationships between gender, sexuality, and
power. A coalitional identity politics might take these movements one step
further by bringing their separate concerns together. For example, the open
acknowledgment of bisexuality as a genuine social force would help to forge
much-needed alliances between straight and queer communities. Separatism is
always a necessary first step for new political movements, a way of creating
a safe space within which members can feel strong and validated. Continuum
identities like bisexuality question separatist thinking, and help people
work together on issues that affect them all.
We are not arguing for bisexuality as a new identity within
already-existing minority identities; rather, we are suggesting bisexuality
as a metaphor for anti-separatist identity which is better suited to
contemporary experience. Specifically, bisexuality could be used as a
jumping-off point for coalition building in areas where heterosexual,
homosexual, and feminist concerns greatly overlap. AIDS organizing is
clearly one area in which a loosening of the distinction between homosexual
and heterosexual interests is needed. Already, a great many straights do
feel comfortable helping out with AIDS-related causes. But understanding
human sexuality as a continuum would emphasize that it is *everyone's* task
to help end this sexual plague — it isn't just queer and queer-sympathetic
work. Furthermore, issues of domestic violence and other forms of
relationship troubles are clearly common to all people, regardless of where
they fall in the Kinsey continuum. Books such as Naming the Violence
(1986) about domestic abuse have emphasized that this isn't just a
heterosexual problem, caused by patriarchy and unenlightened straights.
Queers — male and female — are the victims of domestic abuse, and they
suffer the same kinds of losses and joys as do straights in the context of
romantic attachments. Viewing our sexualities as variations on a bisexual
theme would help people come together to work through problems in the home
and family — and would call everyone's attention to the way sexual and
romantic relationships are in many ways the same all over. Switching from a
male partner to a female partner will not solve your problems with jealousy
or battering. It may just put a different gendered face on them.
Finally, we believe that the continuum model of identity which explains
bisexuality might be constructive in defining other forms of minority
identity as well. Bi-racial identity, like bisexual identity, is still
largely invisible and often a source of confusion and shame. Racial identity
is frequently viewed as an 'us and them' situation — many people who do not
choose to identify with one race or the other in their backgrounds find
themselves alienated from their communities. If we were to make race and
ethnicity into 'continuum' identities, this would more accurately reflect
the reality of contemporary life (as well as being far more inclusive).
While it was once empowering for minorities to assert their value by
embracing uniqueness, it is now becoming clear that such a move can be
constrictive as well. Many people no longer feel as if they can fit into any
of the minority communities available to them. As a model for understanding
how human identities work, the continuum offers us a place from which to
view each other as versions of the same thing, rather than diametrically
opposed to one another.
Annalee Newitz is a freelance writer and a graduate student in the
English Department at UC-Berkeley. Currently she is at work on a series of
articles about sex and class in mass culture, and a dissertation on
representations of monsters and psychopaths in American pop culture.
Jillian Sandell is a graduate student in the English Department at
UC-Berkeley. Her most recent article on John Woo and Hong Kong cinema can be
found in Bright Lights Film Journal. She can be reached at the
following Internet address:
jillians@socrates.berkeley.edu.
