“Can you prove that?”
“Well,” I laughed, “that’s a tall order at the moment. I have a patient coming in a few minutes, but give me some time to think about it.”
When Liz left I took down a book from my shelves called Changing Homosexuality in the Male by Dr. Lawrence J. Hatterer. I had read the book previously and I remembered that the point of view toward the bisexual was on the side of nonexistence.
In a list describing common and uncommon homosexual subcultures, Dr. Hatterer places the bisexual in the “disguised” group–along with closet queens and married males who regularly practice homosexuality. This almost universally held opinion is passed on to the public, both heterosexual and homosexual. And because it is easier to accept and understand the bisexual as a disguised homosexual, public acceptance of expert opinion goes for the most part unchallenged.
As disguised homosexual, the bisexual is by this process “reduced.” We tend to categorize people, to put them into the most readily available group. In the worlds of commerce, government, and religion, this is to some degree logical. That this mistaken practice is also adopted by the individual in his or her search for self-identity–and held onto at all costs for lack of a suitable alternative–is tragic.
This is what Liz means when she says that Bill is better off being thought of as gay. Taking it further, if public and expert opinion are the only guiding standards to self-identity, Bill is “better off” thinking of himself as gay. Human beings need to belong. They need to communicate with their peer group. They need to sit around the communal fire not only in warmth but in dignity.
This is especially true in our society when it comes to the business world. In the world of business, banners of visible achievement are flown. Products are manufactured and sold, people are employed, money is made and lost, all in the name of business. Coca-Cola is as internationally known a symbol as the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes. Buying and selling is most successfully carried on when the people flying the banners know the buyers to whom they are selling. Advertisers know that certain groups of people will remain loyal to a product for a lifetime–if that product can be correctly aimed by means of a direct emotional appeal to the given particular group.
In government, too, the virtue of loyalty can be extolled and exploited for all kinds of personal gain, both good and bad–all the more easily if the exploiters know their targets’ place in society and can keep them there. Wars are “sold” this way, just as are worthier propositions, such as that all humans are created equal. As long as human beings can be simply classified as one thing or the other, the possibilities are endless.
It would be absurd to suggest that bisexuals are any more or less evil (or, for that matter, good) than heterosexuals or homosexuals. It is absurd as well to suggest that bisexuals are any more or less loyal than other groups around the communal fire. But the quality of loyalty may be different. What we have failed to see up to this point is that the bisexual may be less loyal to the status quo than to nature. Differences, freedom of choice, have been a threat to the group since before the beginning of recorded time.
One of the classic romantic questions asked of psychiatrists is, can one love two women or two men at the same time? My answer to that one is, “One can if one can.”
Can human beings love both men and women at the same time? They can if they can.
What does this do to the individual’s standards of loyalty? Is he or she able to carry the burdens of trust necessary in relationships that are more than transient or skin-deep? Or is he or she, by playing a dual role, a “spy”?
During wartime, spies, when captured, may be shot. An even worse fate may await citizens convicted of treason. They are often held up to particularly vicious public scorn before being killed. As much today as in the remote past, loyalty to “one’s own” is held dear by the human race, north, south, east, and west. We simply do not condone spying or treason. They are acts so abhorrent that we are shocked by their existence, and often feel no guilt in erasing the spy, the traitor, so that no living trace remains. Being “drummed out” is, in a very real sense, being told that it would have been better had you never been born, and that from this time forward the position will be taken that you never were. “My country–right or wrong,” is a line straight to the human heart, a place of worship in the human psyche.
The bisexual resembles the spy in that he or she moves psychosexually freely among men and among women. The bisexual also resembles the traitor in that he or she is in a position to know the secrets of both camps, and to play one against the other. The bisexual, in short, is seen as a dangerous person, not to be trusted, because his or her party loyalty, so to speak, is nonexistent. And if one lacks this sort of loyalty, one is so far outside the human sexual pale that one is virtually nonexistent.
Let us return again to Dr. Hatterer’s interesting word “disguise.”
A disguise is a deceit. A human being who spends his or her life in disguise is not to be trusted. It follows that a Jew in Nazi-ruled Europe who disguised him- or herself as a non-Jew to keep from being killed was not to be trusted by anyone. Yet, in retrospect, there are few of us with a claim to intelligence, let alone humanity, who would not trust the secret Jew above the S.S. officer who proudly showed his true face to the world.
In our society, with its strong negative view of homosexual behavior of any kind, it is quite understandable when bisexuals, or “closet” homosexuals, disguise their behavior. But bisexuality is not disguised homosexuality, nor is it disguised heterosexuality. It is another way of sexual expression. Although it contains elements of both heterosexual and homosexual behavior, it is a way of being, in and of itself, a way neither better nor worse than the more accepted ways of healthy heterosexuality and healthy homosexuality.
No matter what sexual orientation a person has, he or she lives on a continuum. Despite the certainty of eventual death, the life of an individual goes on until that time. During the course of a lifetime, each individual plays a number of roles: father, mother, soldier, teacher, heterosexual, homosexual, and so on. We take comfort in the labels; they help define our relationships with one another and with the world at large. Yet with each label we acquire, we limit our infinite possibilities, our uniqueness. It is our insistence on labels that creates the “either-or” syndrome. This is well illustrated by the mother and father who came to see me about the progress of their 25-year-old daughter, who was a patient of mine. They are a nice couple, prosperous, good churchgoing citizens. All their lives they have marched in a sometimes meandering, sometimes straight line for God and country. They have been rewarded with a comfortable life. When they came to see me everything was in its place except their daughter, who had recently announced to them that for the moment she was living with a woman. They were particularly upset because they were paying part of my bill for the therapy necessary after their daughter’s recent divorce.
“Would you rather she hadn’t told you?” I asked.
“What kind of a world is this where such a thing can happen?” the father replied.
“What has happened?”
“If this is where therapy leads, then to go on paying is throwing good money after bad.” The mother was on the verge of tears. “A lesbian. We sent her to you and now she’s a lesbian.”
“Why do you say she’s a lesbian?”
“She told us.”
“She told you she was a lesbian? She said that?”
They looked at each other as though allied against some dark, sinister force. The mother answered. “She’s living and doing God knows what with a woman. What else do you call it?”
“What did your daughter call it?”
“Whatever she calls it, she’s too sick to know what it is.” The father waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal.
“She says she loves this woman,” the mother said, comforting her husband with a pat on the arm. “She actually wants us to meet her.”
“How do you feel abou
t that?”
“We don’t know what to feel. Do you know that she and the woman she’s living with have an open relationship?”
“What does that mean to you?” I asked.
“Well, it means that she sees other people as well. One of them is a man.”
“She’s had too much freedom. That’s her problem.” The father’s voice was choked with anger. “A man here, a woman there. You can’t live that way. You’re one thing or you’re another. That’s the danger. Too much freedom. She’s a lesbian now, no matter what she says to rationalize her disgusting behavior.”
“Has she suggested to you that she’s a bisexual?”
“We don’t believe that for a minute,” he said. “She’s telling us that just so we won’t make trouble for her.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“You’re one thing or you’re another.” The father banged his fist on my desk. “I’ve lived long enough to know that, and I’ve been in business too long to believe anyone who says they’re one thing today and another thing tomorrow. How long would you and I be in business, doctor, if we lived that way?”
“Your daughter’s love life is not a business.”
He got up, ready to leave. “One way or another, it’s all business.”
The calling-a-spade-a-spade point of view has a certain unvarnished, up-front honesty that I frankly admire. Artlessness is seldom without genuine charm, but that does not transform it into the truth. To understand the complexity of extradimensional choice requires more than mere straightforwardness, however tutored by experience it might be.
“Won’t you sit for a while longer?” I pointed to his chair. “We all have your daughter’s best interest at heart.”
For the next half hour or so I became their ally in the wish for a psychosexually secure future for their child. It says much for them that after a few more sessions they did eventually come to accept, if not respect, their daughter’s choice of love object. But they held fast to the view that “One way or another, it’s all business.”
Labeling is a tried and true method of eliminating the threats of uncertainty, ambiguity, fear. A familiar old myth illustrates this. In the form of an ill-contrived joke, it says that a man may father many beautiful children, be a transcendent lover of women, earn numerous degrees at the highest university level, discover a cure for an incurable disease, earn his country’s most bespangled award on the field of battle; but should he fellate one penis, he will be forever known thereafter not as a loving parent, a lover, a scholar, a Nobel Prizewinner, a brave soldier, but as a “cocksucker.”
There is another myth that, though not primarily sexual, is equally absurd in assigning a negative connotation, based on prejudice to begin with, to a mere fact of life. Many people in this country, especially in the South, consider a person with “one drop” of African-American blood to be “black.” Why is this person not seen as white at least in degree? The answer is as simple as it is profane. A threat is best dealt with if it is dismissible. In the world of sexual choice the homosexual is the black. He is a “fag,” a “fairy,” a “cocksucker.” We need not take him seriously. Somehow, God seems more secure in his heaven if we are not burdened with the element of degree, when we are judging threatening behavior, especially sexual behavior. Hence, if the bisexual is really a homosexual with a screw loose, his or her social and psychological obliteration is a comfort and a safeguard to all. This holds true for the homosexual as well as the heterosexual because existence, of however despised a kind, is preferable to, better than, a higher state than, nonexistence.
Abhorrent as “The Love that Dared not Speak its Name” has been to society over the centuries, at least no serious case has ever been made for its nonexistence; homosexuals or lesbians may have been despised for their “perversion,” but their psychosexual existence has never been in question. The homosexual belongs. The lesbian belongs. He or she has a culture. He or she can be loyal to a team.
Our culture considers itself liberal and permissive, but the heterosexual view of the homosexual is, to say the least, negative. In a CBS poll, 72 percent of the people polled considered homosexuality an illness, 11 percent a crime, 9 percent a sin, and only 8 percent a preference. A Harris poll taken before perestroika and the breakup of the USSR found that 82 percent of males and 58 percent of females thought that homosexuals were the third most harmful group to the nation, behind Communists and atheists.
Is it any wonder that now, since the advent of Gay Lib and a measure of gay recognition, homosexuals may not want to recognize their possible bisexuality?
To most heterosexuals and homosexuals, the bisexual is an alien being whose dual sexuality opens up the possibility of their own sexual ambiguity. They cannot understand the bisexual’s ability to share their own preferences but not their own aversions.
The heterosexual’s erotic preferences and aversions usually do not permit an understanding of the homosexual. Homosexuals as well are baffled by attraction to the opposite sex. This creates two distinct camps from which banners can be flown. And though they may be ideological threats to each other, the two camps are as clearly distinct as, in the heyday of the cold war, the American eagle and the Russian bear. Their threat to each other is familiar, and the battle lines are clear-cut.
The wish to avoid conflict is natural and essential to life. Without peace of mind (if only of the kind available to the Sunday golfer), madness nips at our heels. Should we fail to defend ourselves, it will go for our throats. In our time, peace of any kind may be available only to the few who know themselves–and the many who keep their heads “securely” in the sand. Denial is one of the classic mechanisms by which this brand of security is sustained. For the heterosexual male, for example, the homosexual male’s behavior may contain components of his own, but denial of the homosexual’s label (and thence his role) is relatively easy. The heterosexual is not free to identify beyond certain vague, “neuter” acts, such as kissing or being fellated. But this same male confronted with a bisexual male must, if only unconsciously, deal with his own possible sexual ambiguity. The reason he is relieved to hear that the bisexual does not exist is that he thereby avoids his own inner conflict. If a homosexual male finds other males attractive, that fact has nothing to do with the heterosexual. But if a bisexual male finds both men and women attractive, that does have something to do with him in a way too close for comfort. The possibility of identification then is considerably broader. When the head in the sand comes up for air, what it sees may be unbearable.
Since, until now, bisexuality has been largely a negative, a non-state, a neither-nor-a disguised state of homosexuality or worse–how can it be described at all, let alone labeled healthy? Edna St. Vincent Millay notwithstanding, burning the candle at both ends–despite its lovely light–has had a high price exacted upon it by both history and conventional wisdom.
The state of nonexistence is indeed dangerous. Liz and Bill, both children of their time, are among its victims.
The New York Public Library, the Index Medicus, and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute pronounce a harsh judgment on bisexuality by saying little or nothing. At least we now better understand why there is such a profound silence.
CHAPTER 2
Toward a Definition
What is bisexuality?
The prefix “bi” means two, or dual. We call a person with command of two languages bilingual. A simple enough definition. Bisexuality, however, is not so easily slotted. It is generally the most complex state of sexual relatedness with people. It exists to various degrees in everyone. Its dimensions are multiple.
Its prefix could even be called misleading: it is “bi” only insofar as there are two ends to the spectrum of sexual preference.
This very complexity breeds the wide range of misconceptions about bisexual behavior–as disguised homosexuality, transitional state from hetero- to homosexuality, and of course, the ultimate psychosexual dismissal, sickness.
Complexit
y in human behavior is fed by the exercise of choice. The more choices one’s environment and inner state allow, the more complex the exercise; in the everyday life of the bisexual, for example, more intricate responses and signals are called for.
Although men and women share more in common than is normally perceived, they still are different in profound ways, and whether the bisexual is operating on a healthy or a neurotic level, these differences call for a wholeness of behavior, a dependence on the entire psychosexual spectrum, in their expression. At the office or the factory, for instance, the boss’s or the partner’s gender may matter to an employee as much as his or her ability. To succeed at work, to make it joyful or even tolerable, each employee must find ways of overcoming personal prejudice for the purpose of getting the job done. If, for instance, a woman says that she can work only with women, or a man claims that he is at his best only when employed with men, both face obvious obstacles to career advancement. The man or woman who can work equally well with members of either sex is operating in a more complex and adaptive mode than the man or woman who cannot.
Although sexual relations are work (if they are to have more than casual significance), they are also pleasurable and a kind of play. The combination of work and play with playmates of both sexes requires a subtlety of behavior, a suppleness in mind and body. For reasons that may be healthy or neurotic or both, bisexuals have a high tolerance for ambiguity and the resulting complexities. They may be at home in both worlds, strangers to none. Their range of physical/emotional responses is therefore made more complicated and demanding.
In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male Alfred Kinsey writes:
The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
The Bisexual Option Page 2
