“How do you get along with them now?”
“Walt and I are very close. Andrew works for my father, who is now executive vice-president.”
“So you and Walt got away?”
“Yes. Walt is an engineer up in Boston. He never contacts anyone in the family except me. He’s okay. A bisexual too, by the way.”
“What about Andrew?”
“Straight and narrow like Father.”
“So you married early?”
“Yes. I was seventeen. Sort of young, delicious, and rich. He was twenty-five, just out of law school, brilliant, good family, Father approved and I did love him. His name was, still is, Joe.”
“What about college?”
“Well, I did go one year to Columbia, but the baby came and I dropped out to be a mother. I enjoyed being a mother. I have no regrets about that. Would you believe I’m a grandmother?” She showed me a picture of her six-month-old grandson, sitting in a highchair, his parents on either side. “That’s my son and that’s his wife. I have another son, unmarried. He’s in college.”
“How do they feel about the divorce?” I asked, handing back the picture.
“Well, not bad. What’s hard on them, I think, is that I’m living with a woman now. That really came from left field. I don’t think they believe it. But then I don’t think children can ever believe their parents have sex of any kind. I had a wonderful sex life with their father. I’m sure I could climb into bed with him right now and enjoy it, although I wouldn’t.”
“Why did you leave him?”
“Leave him,” she laughed. “Joe left me. You see, it was never a good marriage.” She paused, shaking her head. “That’s not entirely true. We were good parents and we did love each other at least for the first, say, eight to ten years, but we were trapped. Love isn’t enough. Sex isn’t enough. There has to be”–she brought her palms together, delicately pressing her fingertips–”there has to be closeness, intimacy, warmth, understanding. Closeness.” Her fingers bent and closed. “Closeness. Do you know what I mean? Joe and I had everything but intimacy. He was and is a very busy and successful man. He’s a public man, if you understand what I’m saying. He’s got this need to reach as many people as possible. Joe is a politician, really. Me, I like one person at a time. Or a family. If things are okay between me and one other person, I’m fine. Joe has to be okay with the world. Closeness with one person scares him. So over the years I kept pushing him to intimacy, and finally it reached the point where he had to either love me or leave me and, being Joe, he left.
“Walked out the door one day and it was over. He married his secretary, if you can believe it. Pretty young girl. Hell, I don’t blame him. He could never be for me what I needed. I was hurt at first. Bone hurt, you know, but then I began to realize something. I was free. The children were grown, my husband was gone, and, goddamn it, I was free to have a look and see if I couldn’t maybe find what I was looking for and could never get from Joe. I used to have these fantasies while I was married about other people. That’s what led to the affairs, all with men. They didn’t amount to much really. Just bored housewife filling an afternoon kind of thing.”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“Not really.”
“Do you think they are pertinent to your bisexuality?”
“I guess anything sexual is pertinent in this conversation. Let’s see, what can I tell you? There were four men over a twenty-year period. When I look back on it now, it seems that all the sex was in cars, movie houses, motels. Sex on the run. Sometimes it was satisfying, sometimes it wasn’t, but it filled or killed time. Once I actually picked up a man in Grand Central Station. We met after that for two years, every couple of weeks. He was killing time too…”
“Did you like, or love, any of these men?”
“I’ll never know, because my love... my loyalty was for Joe. I thought that eventually Joe and I would find each other so I never really gave enough of myself to love the other men, although I certainly liked them.”
“Was Joe having affairs?”
“I’m sure he must have, and of course he certainly did with his secretary.”
“Why did you choose sex as a way of killing time?”
“Oh, sex was only one way. I played tennis, redecorated the house in the country every six months, traveled, wrote poetry–that wasn’t killing time. Sex was just one way. Sex with men, that is. Men sort of demand it, so if you want to spend time with a man outside of your marriage, sex is the handle. Often I could have just gone for a long drive and talked. Just been with him, but that’s harder to justify than sex. I think. I don’t really know. What I do know is that it wasn’t that way with women.”
“Your bisexual life began during your marriage?”
“I didn’t think of it as a bisexual life exactly. But yes, it did. After fifteen years into the marriage.”
“Do you remember a specific incident or did it grow in your fantasy life first?”
“That’s hard to say. Four years before the divorce I went on a weekend with this woman I’d known in college. We hadn’t seen each other in years. We took a fall drive up into Vermont to the Canadian border, stopping at little inns and just having a close, warm time. We were closer than we had ever been before. I think the weather and time of year had something to do with it. The leaves were turning, and each day was what we kept calling ‘Pumpkin Perfect.’ We talked and talked and went on hikes and laughed… how we laughed. At an inn in Woodstock, Vermont, two attractive men asked us to dinner. We liked them, but we politely turned down the invitation. Later we wondered why. I mean, they were attractive, intelligent men.”
“What did you conclude?”
“We didn’t want to dilute what we were having. We didn’t want to lose each other in some competitive game with the opposite sex.”
“Would that have been necessary?”
“Not necessary, but it usually happens between men and women. I mean, there’s the pairing, and then there’s dealing with who’s going to get whom. Usually the men decide, and before it’s over you’ve lost your friend to some one-night-stand lover. When I think of all the times I’ve sold out my friend for the momentary attention of some man and all the times I’ve been sold out.”
“All is fair in love and war?”
“Exactly. And it’s awful. Men sell each other out for women too. It shouldn’t happen.”
“Did you and your friend become lovers?”
“Oh no. Nothing happened, but I wanted something to happen. When I got back home–she lives in Texas–I thought about her. One afternoon I was thinking about her hands, of all things. She has lovely hands, and I found myself masturbating and thinking about her. Whenever I masturbated before, it was because Joe was out of town on business, and then I would think of men but in a vague sort of way. I would imagine some man having me on my kitchen floor or behind a machine at the laundromat. Crazy things like that. But with her, I would think of us in bed just loving and touching and kissing for hours. It was delicious. Well, we never did have each other. Never saw her again as a matter of fact.
“About six months later, though, Joe was away and I met this woman at the Museum of Modern Art. We shared a table at the cafeteria. We just hit it off so nicely. We made a date for lunch the following week. She took me to her apartment, and, no kidding, within ten minutes we were on the bed and oh my.”
“That was your first sexual experience with a woman?”
“Yes.”
“What did you feel?”
“Good. I felt good. I felt a new part of myself. God, it was glorious.”
“Did it last?”
“No. She moved to North Carolina. That was all for a while. After the divorce I met a man I liked tremendously, an account executive for one of the big ad agencies. He was a sweet man, very sexy and considerate. He put the word out and I got a job in an art gallery. For about three or four months it was really intense but heavy because he was married. I had no de
sire to hurt another woman the way I had been hurt, so after lots of emotional ripping and tearing I broke it off. It was hard because I really liked him, but you have to be careful or you go from the frying pan into the fire. More than finding a lover I wanted to find myself, which for me means finding the right lover. Then one quiet afternoon a young girl came into the gallery. She was about twenty-four and we got into an interesting conversation. We made a date for dinner and we had a nice thing for a while.”
“Sex?”
“Oh yes.”
“How was it?”
“Good, but another filler. It had everything but it, if you know what I mean. That closeness just wasn’t there.”
“Did you have the closeness with the ad man?”
“Yes. Very much so. That’s what made it so hard to let him go.”
“So you kept seeing the young girl.”
“Yes, and then through her I met Sue. We were at a vernissage and…well, within a few weeks I was in love. I fell in love with Sue the way I did with Joe years ago. All the way.”
“Does Sue have much in common with Joe?”
“No. Nothing. She’s as different as a man is from a woman. I don’t know why we love each other but we do. It may be the best relationship I’ve ever had.”
“Do you still have fantasies about men?”
“Sure. Depends on where my head is at that moment, though I really masturbate very little these days. I guess I’m into the lesbian life now. I go off on weekends with Sue and other women. We share a house in the Hamptons in summer. It’s nice. I have a lot of lesbian friends. There is a feeling of comradeship between six or eight of us that is new and wonderful.”
“Had you any inkling ten years ago that you would be doing what you are doing now?”
“Oh, lord no,” she laughed. “Isn’t life amazing? It just never lets up.”
“Do you consider yourself homosexual now?”
“Not really. I don’t like the label.”
“Do you consider yourself heterosexual?”
“I don’t like that label either. I guess I’m most comfortable thinking of myself as bi, but that’s a label too, isn’t it? Well, listen, does it really matter? I’ve loved both men and women in my life. I’m a lover. Let’s just call me a lover. Is that fair?...”
Indeed it is. Jane O. has shown a capacity to love both men and women and enjoy sex with both. This is not to say that she doesn’t have some neurotic patterns that show through in some of her comments–for example, she glossed over her relationship of 20 years with Joe, which raises questions; and there is more pain behind her “bored housewife kind of thing” remark than she showed. But had she not turned to women for love, everyone would probably agree on her healthy ability to get into a new meaningful relationship. She is not “pathological,” though, for doing so. There are many possible reasons or motives for such a decision, but whatever they are, if a person shows the ability to find meaning, deep intimacy, and happiness in his or her relationships, that person surely deserves to be considered psychosexually healthy.
PART III: THE BISEXUAL IN SOCIETY
CHAPTER 8
Sociological Findings
Sociology is the study of human beings in groups, in communities of all kinds–mainstream or marginal, privileged or oppressed, “above-ground” or “underground.” On the level of sexuality, homosexuals and heterosexuals constitute such communities. They overlap in professional and family life, but sexually at least, the lines of demarcation are clear. But why should this be so?
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost’s farmer advises. But Frost questions that. Why do good fences make good neighbors? He gets no answer from the farmer, who is not speaking out of wisdom but out of fear.
Male and female homosexuals have formed their own communities because no room was made for them in the mainstream. They couldn’t join fully in the mainstream without loss of personal identity as men, as women–as human beings. They renamed themselves “gay” and “lesbian,” which they preferred to the straight world’s labels of “queer” and “dyke” (though some of course have since defiantly readopted those terms).
A male operating freely in both homosexual and the heterosexual world can choose to define himself as bisexual and not need to form or join his own subculture. He doesn’t need the fence. He can live in both communities, moving back and forth as his needs or desires dictate. Although he may decide to hide his “queerness” from the straights and his “closet behavior” from the gays, he does not necessarily need to belong to a community of bisexuals. He is among his kind when he is among human beings.
This is not to say that a need for a bisexual community doesn’t exist at all. It does. But not for the same reasons the male and female homosexuals created their subculture. Men and women gather together into groups primarily for mutual protection and support. The bisexual can survive in either the heterosexual or homosexual camp, or both, and that makes him or her an elusive subject for the sociologist. If there were such a thing as a bisexual community, there would doubtless not be as few sociological studies as there are.
Philip W. Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, of the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, have done extensive sociological work on bisexuality, published in Sexual Deviance and Sexual Deviants. They report:
We know that a great many people have sexual relations with members of both sexes. Seldom do they claim to divide their attention and commitment absolutely equally (hence the misleading quality of the term bisexual), but both types of sexual experience have independent importance for them. Despite the documented existence of large numbers of such people, one is hard-pressed to find much systematic scientific literature on the topic of bisexuality. Psychoanalysis, for example, has already declared itself on this issue: it is irrelevant. Orthodox Freudian analysts feel that bisexuality does not exist as a clinical entity; a person is either heterosexual or homosexual. The person’s expressed self-identification is of no consequence, except as a symptom of inability to come to grips with his or her true sexuality. Irving Bieber has stated: “I conceive of two distinct categories–heterosexual and homosexual…. The two categories are…mutually exclusive and cannot be placed on the same continuum. ... A man is homosexual if his behavior is homosexual. Self-identification is not relevant....” The Lesbian community provides a perfect counterpoint. In it, claiming a bisexual identity receives no community validation, but rather a great deal of negative response. More important, it is precisely in this community that women learn how to “understand” their own sexuality, the motivations to attribute to themselves, and the boundaries of the sexually possible, the sexually likely, and the sexually impossible. In this context one learns that bisexuality is possible, but uncommon, and that bisexuality is really an inability to come to grips with “true” underlying Lesbianism.
So we see one reason why the bisexuals have not declared themselves in a community. The stigma of homosexual behavior in the heterosexual world and the equal intolerance for heterosexual behavior in the homosexual world have left most bisexuals feeling they have no choice but to pose as one or the other, in accordance with the values of whichever camp they are presently in. But the bisexual’s need for community may be just as great as anyone else’s.
From 2 to 6 on the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid-that is, from heterosexual mostly (2) to gay/lesbian mostly (6)–the range of bisexual possibilities is so wide that heterosexuals and homosexuals often find it incomprehensible. What has helped open and widen this range of possibilities is a relaxation of sexual self-repression, hence, an increased openness and flexibility with regard to the gender of sexual partners on the part of bisexuals–both those whose major sexual focus is women and whose incidental focus is men, and those whose major sexual focus is men and whose incidental focus is women. Included somewhere with this range is the bisexual whose focus is nearly evenly divided between men and women, and the individual whose bisexuality is sequential–a person who, f
or example, has lived with a mate of one sex and after separation lives with a mate of the opposite sex.
Morton Hunt’s Sexual Behavior in the Seventies, does not even mention bisexual behavior on the contents page or in the index. It is not exactly true to state that Hunt does not consider bisexual behavior. He does. But he calls it homosexual:
Some self-styled bisexuals, as we have indicated, are basically homosexual but seek to minimize their conflicts and sense of deviance by having occasional heterosexual episodes.
There is the qualifier “some” at the beginning of the sentence, but Hunt follows with:
Others have had a bisexual period when, for many reasons, they still thought or hoped that they were heterosexual, though they eventually recognized that their real orientation was toward same-sex partners.
These statements are misleading. They feed the nonexistence myth. What Hunt is describing are some of the bisexuals found on the KSOG at 5 or 6 (predominantly gay/lesbian). Of course, no mention is made of the “self-styled bisexual” who is basically heterosexual but seeks to minimize conflict by having occasional homosexual episodes (the 2 or 3 on the KSOG). The heterosexuality represented by many doctors and sociologists as the superior option is never considered as a possible source of personal conflict. I would suggest a reading or rereading of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love as an example of a heterosexual conflict (see ). The conflict of the 2 or 3 may be different from that of the 5 and the 6–the 2 or the 3 is more likely to live in the heterosexual community–but it can be there nonetheless.
A moving illustration of this difference is the story told by a young Californian now residing (with his female friend of four years) in New York City. He is 26 and the young woman is 24. At a meeting of the Bisexual Forum, they were asked by the moderator whether they were bisexual. The woman shook her head no and the man lowered his eyes. He tried to speak but tears began to fill his eyes. The woman spoke for him at first. “We have been living together for four years and are very much in love. I can tell you without qualification that Sydney is a wonderful lover to me and that we have no problems in that area. He’s ardent and loving and we are very happy together.”
The Bisexual Option Page 12
