The Bisexual Option

by Fritz Klein MD

  “Do you have a relationship going now with a man or a woman?”

  “No. But I have sex a lot. With guys. I get turned on once in a while to a woman though. Recently I spent time with this guy from Arizona State, where we went to college together years ago. I was in this car accident and got some money and went there to college. That was one of the best times of my whole life. I was freshman president, had a part-time job in a gay bar and was really close to this guy there. Anyway, we got together lately and it was good. He was straight when I met him. One of the things I really love to do is to bring a straight guy out. Anyway, while he was here we went dancing–I love to dance–and made it all over again. But he’s gone back now. I’ll see him again, though, I’m sure of that. I’ve also met a woman recently whom I like. I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you describe yourself as a happy person, Walter?”

  “Sure. I think I am. Sure I am. Why not? I got nothing to complain about these days. Sure I’m happy. But I know things are not completely right. There are times at night when I don’t sleep that I get these glimpses of myself that I realize are all messed up. And I am confused about my relationships, about men, about women. I’m generally happy, but I’d like to get rid of the confusion….”

  Walter is confused, and I would be surprised if he really is as happy as he claims to be. His view of himself is negative, his relationship with both men and women is generally not fulfilling, and his sexuality is full of aversions and compulsions. He uses sex to work out other needs. His preoccupation with his “small penis” is symbolic of his view of himself. When questioned in detail, he admitted that his penis is of average length. On further questioning, he admitted that his sex with men also is full of problems. I strongly recommended to him that he seek therapy in Louisiana as soon as he settled down, which he did. Walter’s bisexuality was part and parcel of his generally problematic functioning; his sexuality in general was only one aspect of his poor relationships.

  Ann C.

  I came to Ann’s story in a most unconventional way. One weekend in early summer I invited some friends up to my summer home in the mountains of New York State. One of them, Edwin, called to ask if he could bring along a girl he’d recently met and was involved with.

  “I’ve only known her three weeks,” he said, “but we’re at that point where we just can’t stand to be apart. She’s very vulnerable, kind of haunted, like a bird with a broken wing. She won’t be any trouble.”

  I thought Edwin’s description was fairly accurate–she was vulnerable and apparently broken, at least in her capacity to reason.

  It rained on Saturday. I think that had as much to do with what followed as anything else. Because of the weather, a kind of cabin fever took hold. I wasn’t bothered myself by the confinement because it gave me an opportunity to work. But, in retrospect, I should have been a more responsible host.

  About three o’clock on this truly dismal afternoon I heard a crashing sound, followed by silence. Then such angry voices were raised that I left my room, walked down the hall to Edwin’s door, and knocked.

  There was no answer. I didn’t knock again but went down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. A few minutes later Edwin rushed by me, suitcase in hand. Before I could speak he was in his car backing out the driveway. He did stop halfway, as though considering his action, but as he explained later he was too Ml of anger to say goodbye. (“Honestly,” he explained in a phone conversation the following Monday, “I was afraid if I stayed one more minute I’d kill her.”)

  I poured two cups of coffee and went upstairs. Ann was sitting at the foot of the bed staring down at a ceramic lamp that lay in half a dozen rather neat pieces at her feet.

  “I hope it wasn’t an antique,” she said.

  “I wasn’t attached to it, if that’s what you mean.” I handed her a cup of coffee. “Do you like it black?”

  “Thank you.” She took the cup but her hand was trembling.

  “Here.” I took it from her, putting it on the dresser.

  “Is he gone?”

  “It appears he is.”

  “Christ.” Tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  She did. She told me over the next hour, though there is no way my memory could accurately record her exact words. As her story unfolded I saw in her what appeared to be a psychosexual confusion so profound that I suggested she take a nap before we talked any further.

  “Are you just putting me off?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I would like to talk,” she said, “though I should catch the next bus back to the city.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I told her. “We’ll talk after dinner. Would you mind if I recorded our conversation?”

  “No. As long as I can talk. But why?”

  “Your situation, your problems, could be of help to other people. I won’t use your real name, and the particulars of your life will be disguised. In short, your identity won’t be compromised.”

  In all we spent three hours talking, the last talk taking place in my car as we drove back to the city on Sunday evening.

  Ann is an attractive young woman, although her looks are very much subject to the way she’s feeling. She was feeling good when we were talking. It occurred to me that she looked like the women in those movies who have to take off their glasses in order to become “beautiful.” What follows is the essence of our talks.

  “How old are you, Ann?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Tell me about your background.”

  “I come from Bridgehampton, Long Island. I live there with my mother and my grandmother. Usually in the winter I go to Florida and come back to Bridgehampton for the summer. I’ve been doing that for years. That’s where I met Edwin. We met on the beach and just started talking. I had just gotten back from a really lousy winter in Florida and... I was horny. We were having sex within an hour after we met. Trouble is, I didn’t come. I have trouble coming. He just wasn’t doing it the way I need it done. That’s why he stormed out this afternoon.”

  “What happened?”

  “We started having sex and I got terribly excited and I bit him. I guess I bit him too hard because he hit me. That really turned me on and I sort of got him pissed so he’d really get on me. Really put it to me. But it didn’t get him excited, it just got him angry. So I got angry and hit him across the face. Then I told him about this guy I slept with in Florida who I always could come with, which was true, but that’s when he broke the lamp. I knew I shouldn’t have said it but I was horny. I’m always horny. I think it throws people off because I don’t look like the sexy type.”

  “Earlier you told me a bit about how you were with your mother and grandmother. Could you go into that again, but in more detail?”

  “Where do you want me to begin?”

  “Wherever you’re comfortable.”

  “My family owns this big restaurant in the Hamptons. That is, they did own it until two years ago when they sold it. I still think of it as ours, though it’s closed now. The new owner couldn’t make a go of it. It was such a success when we had it because of my grandmother, who’s the best German cook anywhere. But she wanted to retire. She’s eighty-two now.”

  “Did your mother work in the restaurant?”

  “We all did. My grandmother, my mother, my older brother, and myself.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Boy, there’s a question. I never knew him. Never saw him. I don’t know to this day if he’s alive or dead. My mother divorced him a few months after I was born. He was Irish. My mother and grandmother are German.”

  “Let’s talk about your sex life. What was your first sexual experience?”

  “Masturbating.”

  “How old were you when you began?”

  “About six.”

  “Can you describe what you did?
What you thought about? How you viewed it?”

  “It sort of all comes together, if you’ll pardon the pun. Like from six to sixteen I masturbated and it was the only sex I had till then. My favorite way was to be alone in the house–I first did this when I was eight–and put on my mother’s bra and stuff it with napkins or Kleenex. I’d put on her makeup and a slip and parade in front of the mirror until I got really hot and then I would get a hand mirror and get on the bed and hold the mirror between my legs and masturbate with my finger. I did that a lot. A couple of times a week. I’d be so afraid I’d get caught and I was so guilty. I mean, I felt guilty all the time.”

  “Did you have fantasies when you masturbated?”

  “Yes. I would think about breasts. Women’s breasts. I still do. The thought of breasts really gets me off. I wish I had big ones so I could suck my own.”

  “Does that happen as well when you’re with a man? Do you think of women’s breasts?”

  “Not always. Just sometimes.”

  “In our previous conversation you said you were bisexual.”

  “Yes. For the first time. I was in therapy in Florida for a time and that was the first time I ever told anyone I masturbated or how I masturbated. It’s only over the past few months I realized I’m bisexual although I’ve always known it in a way. I used to think that maybe I was a lesbian.”

  “Let’s hold on a minute now and go back to when you were sixteen. That’s when you first had sex with another person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Male?”

  “Yes. This boy from high school.”

  “How was that?”

  “Better for him than me, I think. I just never got off. I used to go home after and masturbate.”

  “Were there other men after that?”

  “Until I was eighteen I went out with quite a few boys. Then one night two boys gave me a ride home from school. It was spring and pretty warm out. We went to the beach and I made it with both of them. I came. It was the first time I’d ever come with another person but I really felt... like I thought I must be some kind of pig. I felt that’s what the boys thought.”

  “Did you see them again?”

  “Not sexually. When I graduated from high school I cracked up.”

  “What do you mean ‘cracked up’?”

  “I just went to pieces. I felt like my mother and my grandmother were trying to destroy me. I really felt that. I began having tantrums and smashing things and just going crazy at home. And then one day my mother, who’s a very cool, cold person, and I were in the kitchen and for no immediate reason I turned on her. I grabbed her around the throat and I tried to strangle her. I really wanted to kill her. My brother came running in and pried me off her. I kept saying, ‘Why don’t you love me? Why don’t you love me?’ Then I just fell apart after my brother made me apologize. To this day I hate that he did that. Made me apologize.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just felt so alone when he made me tell her I was sorry, because I wasn’t sorry. She never did love me. They tell me I look like my father. My mother and grandmother hate my father. I think they must hate me too. People tell me I look Irish. Everyone else in my family looks German. Anyway, they sent me away to this expensive beautiful funny farm and I was there for a year. I was twenty when I got out. I didn’t go to college. I took odd jobs cleaning people’s summer houses but in the winter there was no work so I went to Florida and waitressed. I’ve been doing that now for six years. Back and forth and every spring when I come north I go home to my mother and grandmother. They put me down all the time. Nothing I do is right, although my grandmother and I are closer now.”

  “Why do you go back?”

  “Money. I can never make enough money to make it on my own. My family is pretty rich. My brother is off on his own now. Very successful in business. He never goes back. He told me recently that he understands now why I am the way I am. They treated him better than they treated me because he was a boy and because he looks like them. I swear in that house with those two women I’m a freak.”

  “What if you had to survive on your own financially?”

  “I know what you’re getting at. It’s not the money I go back for. It’s the pain, I’ve heard all that before.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Listen, you can’t live without money. I can never make enough to get away.”

  “Would you if you could?”

  “I’d rather not pursue that if you don’t mind.”

  “All right, Ann. Tell me, if you will, the pattern of your love life over the past six years.”

  “After I got out of the funny farm I met quite a few men but nothing came of it except I just felt more frustration. In spite of my sexual drive I don’t want much more in bed than to be screwed and to come. For instance I’m not into oral sex. My jaw gets tired sucking a man and I don’t much like being eaten. I like to be fingered. I like to be kissed and fingered at the same time. That always gets me off. I like it when a man puts his cock between my legs. I get very excited over that. I don’t know why. Men tell me I don’t do enough in bed. I like the man to take me away, if you know what I mean.

  “Last winter I met this man in Florida. We had wonderful sex. I always came with him. Not much foreplay. We really had good sex and a lot of it. Then one day I came home early from work and he was dressed up in my clothes. A dress, wig, makeup, everything. At first I was shocked, but he told me he does it all the time. He has a wardrobe of women’s clothes and he gets some kind of release from dressing that way. What bothered me was that here at last was a man who satisfied me sexually, and he liked to dress as a woman. He said–and this man is in his mid-forties–that his secret desire is to be a lesbian. He’s a successful architect and no fool but he has lots of problems with his father. It really confused me and we broke up before I left. You know I told you that I had this thing about women’s breasts. He told me he’d get hormone shots so he’d have breasts for me. I almost said yes. Can you imagine? I really considered it. Then I went into therapy for a while and the therapist suggested I try a woman just to see if I really did want that. I never went back to him after that but I thought a lot about it. When I came back north about two months ago I had a dream about sex with a woman. I woke up crying. Not that it was a nightmare. It wasn’t. It was just so good. The next night I went to this gay bar out on the highway. It’s a lesbian bar. I’d known about it for years. Sure enough I got into this conversation with a woman about ten years older than me. She had big breasts and she was a very warm person. I was nervous of course because the bar is not that far from the house I grew up in, but I wanted the experience so badly that it didn’t matter. The woman made a date with me, which I didn’t keep, but I went back to the bar a couple of times and on one of them I met her again. We went for a drive in my car and she kissed me when I let her off at the bar again. We made another date and finally wound up in bed. She had really large breasts, not terribly firm, but she let me play with them and I sucked them and cried and just sucked them and played with them like some thirsty person off a desert. She fingered me and I came and after a few more dates I fingered her but she wanted to sixty-nine with me and that turned me away. I met another woman at the bar with really beautiful breasts and nipples and I’ve been seeing her a lot. Her name is Lola and we have a good time. We had a fight last week because I’ve been seeing Edwin too. That’s why I came on this weekend, to punish her because she’s been mean to me lately.”

  “In what way mean to you?”

  “She says I should leave my mother and grandmother and that I’m weak. I can’t stand it when someone says I’m weak.”

  “Do you think you are strong?”

  “No. But I just don’t like anyone to think of me as weak. Lola wants me to move in with her and share the rent and so on. She’s really been nice and we get off good together. But I don’t want to be a lesbian.”

  “What do you want to be?”

  “Straight,
I guess. Or maybe bisexual, but I don’t want to be a lesbian. Yet I need the love I get from Lola.”

  “How does it compare to the love you get from Edwin?”

  “You know the thing about who would you save in a burning building? Well, in a burning building I’d save Lola.”

  I could come out with some diagnostic words and label Ann, but that’s not my purpose here. What is important is to be able to see how her involvement with others on a psychosexual level is streaked with hurts, ambivalences, nonrealistic strivings and internal expectations. Her bisexual nature is not as important as her need to be hurt, her desire for fetishistic objects, her confusion and very low self-image. She functions poorly on almost all levels. As a bisexual, her relationships with both men and women leave a good deal to be desired both on a sexual as well as an emotional plane. Her feelings of being unloved affect her ability to love others–both men and women. On parting she told me that she plans to enter therapy again when she returns to Florida in the winter. Let’s hope that the pain of being considered a “freak” is diminished, or perhaps even eliminated altogether.

  Donald J.

  Donald J. is a 27-year-old pediatric resident in one of the New York hospitals, undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Born in Montreal, Canada, the youngest of four in a close-knit Jewish family, he had his first sexual exchange with a female prostitute at the age of 18. This was followed by several similar experiences, none of which he found fulfilling. At 22 he was “fulfilled” when he began a good sexual relationship with a girl he met in medical school in Toronto. It lasted for a year and a half. During this time he carried on an “unfulfilling” sexual relationship with a male medical student as well, although he remembers the relationship itself— its emotional content–as more satisfying than the one with the girl. After these two alliances ended he formed another male relationship in which the sex was excellent but the emotional relatedness all but nonexistent. This relationship ended when he moved to New York for his internship.