Mr. Williams’ single act will not get him to be called a heterosexual–whereas any homosexual activity on the part of any heterosexual is often enough for him or her to be thought of as homosexual. So the “either-or” view really works in one direction only–to transport everyone who is not 100 percent heterosexual to the homosexual camp. Which, of course, as seen in the case of Oscar Wilde, further obfuscates the identifying of overall behavior as bisexual… which is how every other individual on my list is also correctly describable.
These bisexuals were chosen for the list because, being famous, there is documented proof of the sexual preference. Still, this would not be true for, say, Michelangelo, even though he is certainly famous. On circumstantial evidence alone, Michelangelo was a bisexual, but we remain less than certain of it because there is no hard evidence to prove what he was sexually. A razor’s-edge line separates hard evidence and conjecture. One century’s supposition can be another century’s firm conclusion. A hundred years from now, Michelangelo might be put on the list; new evidence may be unearthed.
History keeps historical figures alive in the sense that our views of them are subject to change. We do not let them rest in peace. In some cases, 1000 or 2000 years is not enough to settle all the questions, to lay the case to rest. This is particularly true of Alexander the Great, the first name on the list.
Today, Alexander is thought of as more homosexual than heterosexual. Yet despite what Mary Renault terms his “normal Greek bisexuality,” only twenty years ago Richard Burton, because of the homosexual taboos extant at the time, played him as a heterosexual in an otherwise remarkably accurate Hollywood film. Alexander has been claimed by both heterosexuals and homosexuals. In Alexander’s case, the people’s “right not to know” has been formidable. It is interesting to note that since the emergence of “Gay Lib,” the homosexual’s right not to know, such as in the case of Alexander, is every bit as strong as the heterosexual’s. But Alexander, though Macedonian, was a Greek culturally, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually. He lived according to the normal Greek bisexuality of his time.
He lived 33 years, not long. If there is any truth at all in the theory that the individual shapes history (as opposed to the Tolstoy-an view that events create the individual), then Alexander, who at the age of 16 was appointed Regent of Macedon by his father, Philip II, is a towering example. In his teens he served under his father in war and was appointed to the rank of general. By the time he reached his early twenties his legend was established. Two thousand years after his death, Afghan chiefs would claim to be his direct descendants.
His motivation for conquering the world was to make the world Greek. His enemies, who might hold out against his armies, would quake at the news that he himself was on the march. As a warrior he viewed the impossible as a personal challenge. In Sogdiana he and his army were faced with what appeared to be an impossible ascent up what was known as the Sogdian Rock–in Mary Renault’s words, “high, sheer, and riddled at the top with caves well stocked with food and water…. The single path to the top was entirely commanded from above. The area was under snow.” Had Alexander not undertaken the task of conquering Sogdian Rock, he would not have seen and met Roxane, the daughter of the chief, Oxyartes. He fell in love with her at first sight, spared the people and the town, and asked her father for her hand in marriage.
Roxane married a man with but five years to live. During that time, Alexander was continually off on another siege; it is apparent that he did not give her much of his time. After his marriage to Roxane, he took a second wife, Barsine-Stateira, the daughter of Darius. Judging by the accounts of the marriage ceremony, it was so lavish that from that time on Barsine had to be regarded as his chief wife. What Roxane said about this second marriage is unknown but her feelings were expressed in blood when, during the year following Alexander’s death, she put Barsine to death and had the body thrown into a well. Thirteen years later she herself was murdered, together with her son, Alexander IV.
The heterosexual side of Alexander’s bisexuality is apparent from the above facts. His homosexual side is just as clear. In defeating King Darius DI of Persia, one of Alexander’s spoils was Bagoas, the youngest of the king’s court eunuchs, a boy of exceptional beauty and an accomplished singer and dancer. Their close attachment lasted until Alexander’s death. But it was Hephaestion who shared a lifelong love relationship, both emotional and sexual, with Alexander. They met early in youth and Hephaestion is described as being taller and even better looking than the handsome Alexander. Beginning his career simply as a member of the King’s own cavalry regiment, Hephaestion was promoted eventually to the highest military and civil rank and was never defeated in any of his independent assignments. His unexpected death nearly unseated Alexander’s reason. For 24 hours Alexander lay on the body until his friends dragged him off by force; for three days he fasted, could only lie weeping, and was unapproachable. He forbade all music in court and camp, ordered mourning in every city of the empire, and dedicated to Hephaestion his late regiment, to bear his name in perpetuity.
Because of his culture, Alexander’s open bisexuality was not at all unusual. When we think of Alexander, we do not focus on his sex life. It was part of the man, as it is part of all living creatures, but that is not why he is remembered, nor why he was Alexander the Great. This is not true of another household name on our list.
Oscar Wilde was a child of far from ordinary parents, particularly the father, who also figured in a sensational trial. Sir William Wilde, famous as a doctor and an intellect, and the possessor of an abnormally strong sex drive, was accused of having violated a woman patient.
Oscar, Sir William’s second son, grew to be even more celebrated, and perhaps possessed an equally demanding sex drive. Despite Oscar Wilde’s enduring importance as a playwright, poet, novelist, and wit, we continue to think of this flamboyant, even outrageous man in connection with his sexual drive. This was directed at both genders, but Wilde was a sequential bisexual. For the first 32 or so years of his life he lived as a lusty, enthusiastic heterosexual, and for the next 14 years, until his death in Paris in 1900, he lived as an equally lusty and enthusiastic homosexual.
Wilde was charged with and tried for homosexual practices, found guilty, and sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labor. By the time he was released he was broken, both as an artist and as a man. Wilde was found guilty of committing specific acts abhorrent by the moral standards of the time. Our culture, in its collective and selective memory, translates those acts into an image of an exclusively homosexual man, despite Wilde’s active sexual pursuit of women well into his early thirties. Wilde enjoyed women on both emotional and sexual levels; he fell in love and married, not out of convenience to cover his homosexuality but because he was deeply in love with his wife, as was Alexander with Roxane. That both of these loves cooled doesn’t diminish their validity in the lifetimes of the two men any more than, say, Picasso’s change of women every ten years or so in the course of a very long heterosexual life means that he loved only the last woman living with him when he died.
While in prison, in hopes of gaining an early release on his sentence, Wilde wrote a petition to the Home Secretary. Although it puts forward what we would call today a plea of temporary insanity, it actually does a great deal more. Entitled De Profundis, it strongly reinforces Wilde’s reputation as a literary giant and shows him to have been a devoted family man who loved his children and felt deeply the agonies brought on them and his wife by his conduct. That he was using his family in an effort to secure his release is obvious. But that he had them to use, while behind bars for committing homosexual acts, would seem of paramount significance, and reason enough in itself to view him as a bisexual.
Future historians who report the sexual history of our time (loosely dating from the publication of Kinsey’s first study in 1948) will have a better-paved road to travel than past ones did. Past generations were for the most part reticent about revealing sexual p
reference if it differed from the norm. Indeed, in general the only way students of history can be sure that their subjects had sex at all is if they produced children. We can, for instance, speculate about Michelangelo’s bisexuality, or ponder Lytton Strachey’s view of Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, as a bisexual, but the open admission of bisexuality by any person, prominent or otherwise, from the past is exceedingly rare.
“I’ve been such a fool,” W. Somerset Maugham said to his nephew Robin Maugham (quoted by the latter in his book Escape from the Shadows), “and the awful thing is that if I had my life to live all over again I’d probably make exactly the same mistakes.”
“What mistakes?” his nephew asked.
“M-my greatest one was this,” the author stammered. “I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only one-quarter of me was queer–whereas really it was the other way around.”
W. Somerset Maugham was an enormously prolific and successful writer–a man who put his creative shoulder to the wheel with such strength and assiduity that year after year he produced novels, plays, short stories, and essays that for the most part read as well today as when written. Of Human Bondage, his first successful novel, is still widely read and enjoyed some 50 years after its first publication. Cakes and Ale, his own favorite novel, is so skillful in its narrative execution and so deeply felt that it is praised by critics who are less than enthusiastic about the body of Maugham’s work as a whole. There is little question that those two books mentioned above, The Razor’s Edge, and nearly all the short stories will live for many years.
Maugham’s bisexuality did not manifest itself until around the year 1908, when he was 34 years old. Eleven years earlier, with the success of his first novel he had abandoned thoughts of a medical career in order to write. His plays quickly earned him acclaim and a great deal of money. By the time he fell in love with an actress (identified only by the first name of Nan) he was financially independent. “She had the most beautiful smile I had ever seen on a human being,” Maugham said of this woman. He was in love with her for eight years. While she was appearing in a play in Chicago, he asked for her hand in marriage, but she had promised it to the son of an earl, whom she married a few weeks later. The loss haunted Maugham all of his life. The character of Rosie in Cakes and Ale is based on Nan.
W. Menard quotes Maugham in The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham:
No, I was never what is known as a “ladies man.” I didn’t have the looks or the disposition, or, I might add, the time to play at it. In my company I found most women uncomfortable and somewhat contentious, somehow sensing that I found them transparent and was quite aware of all their grubby little tricks. I think that most women went to bed with me out of curiosity, or accepted me as a temporary lover to maintain their standard of copulating only with well-known and well-to-do gentlemen, or for personal gain.
Because Maugham viewed himself as less than attractive to women, he was circumspect about approaching them. That he conducted a number of affairs with women despite this is evidenced by his statement that no one need worry about his autobiography revealing the names of “the number of women still living, with whom I have had affairs.”
He married once. It was not a happy alliance. Her name was Gwendolen Syrie Barnardo. Maugham had been unattached, affluent, and vulnerable. After acquiring him as a lover, Miss Barnardo accused him of making her pregnant. She attempted suicide, forcing the issue of marriage. Although Maugham was not sure the child was his, he said, “I could not bear to think what its future would be if I didn’t marry its mother.” The marriage lasted ten years before ending in divorce.
Robin Maugham, also a bisexual, picks up the story: “But quite apart from the obvious incompatibility of temperaments, the marriage was bound to have failed–because even before he married Syrie, Willie [Maugham’s nickname] had met Gerald.”
Gerald served as Maugham’s secretary and housekeeper–services, in the Victorian society, that a good wife ordinarily would perform. Gerald ran the house, he kept the accounts, and helped set the tone of general hospitality at social gatherings. “... but also–” Robin Maugham writes, “it was obvious to me–he depended on Gerald to produce young boys who could creep into the Mauresque by the back door and sleep with him.”
If Maugham was three-quarters “queer” and one-quarter “normal,” there must have been a lot of boys. During his lifetime, the general public’s image of Maugham was that of the English gentleman, the club member, the successful writer, a bit stiff but not without charm. If he was not committed to a kind of a sexual bachelorhood, he was certainly committed to a bumbling kind of heterosexuality. Now, in his grave, Maugham is being wrongly labeled a restless, distraught, even miserable, homosexual.
“No man is of one piece,” he said to his nephew. “He’s made up of selfishness and generosity, cruelty and kindness.” Diversity in his artistic vision was reflected in his bisexual life. Somerset Maugham was a rare exception: in his time few actually stated their bisexual inclination. Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives, the title of the autobiography of Dr. Howard Brown, a homosexual, expresses it aptly. For bisexuals, the “closet door” is usually even more firmly shut.
Such is the case with Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, known to the world simply as Colette. She lived to the age of 81, having written over 70 books from 1900 to the time of her death in 1954. She was honored not only with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and election to the presidency of the Goncourt Academy but also with a state funeral, the only woman in French history to be so honored. Her novel Cheri is her best known, although in the United States it is perhaps topped by Gigi, which was also adapted as a play and as a musical for both stage and screen.
Colette married three times in her life. Her first marriage at the age of 20 to Henri Gauthier-Villars lasted 13 years. Six years later she fell in love with the editor Henri de Jouvenel, and in the year following her marriage to him she gave birth to her only child, a daughter also named Colette. Her second marriage was dissolved 12 years later. Then once again she fell in love and married, this time to Maurice Goudeket, a writer, who to the end she always called her best friend.
Accounts of these heterosexual affairs of the heart are available in any Colette biography. But the homosexual aspects of her bisexuality are always stated with qualifications, not because they did not exist, I believe, but because of the usual stigma attached to bisexuality, resulting in its consignment to nonexistence.
When Colette left her first husband she was befriended by the Marquise de Belboeuf, known as “Missy.” Missy, who dressed as a man and loved women exclusively, took Colette to her house, where she stayed for a number of months. In her 1975 biography of Colette, Yvonne Mitchell writes: “Though Colette shared a bed with her friend, her relationship with Missy remained ambiguous.” In Willy, Colette et Moi, Bonmarriage claimed that Colette had an affair with an actress named Polaire, with Missy, and with a number of other women. In her first biography of Colette, Margaret Crosland attempted to deny these facts: “Colette was talked of as a Lesbian because she was curious about women and found them just as interesting as men, in certain cases, more interesting.” However, in her second biography, published in 1973, Crosland describes a deep emotional and physical friendship between Missy and Colette: “The relationship between the two women is perhaps best described as ‘amitie amoureuse,’ a term much more expressive than ‘lesbianism/ of which there is no simple definition.”
Colette’s works deal mainly with the relationships between men and women. Throughout her novels and essays, however, she also deals with bisexual attachments and loves. Consistently, she wrote only about what she knew. It is clear that she knew very well the breadth and depth of human love.
One of the high points in the history of Western civilization was attained in ancient Greece. In that culture, bisexuality existed openly and was looked upon with favor. Sensuality was held in high esteem, together with its concomitant aspects of beauty and lov
e. Sensual enjoyment was recognized by the great thinkers of Greece as a legitimate ideal, necessary for happiness. Although social laws were rigorous, sensuality and its manifestations were not condemned by public opinion. Higher ethics, combined with love of the senses, created a superior culture.
Greek men assigned women two roles–mother and courtesan. In the great majority were the mothers; marriage and motherhood were highly honored. The wife had complete management and control of domestic affairs and the bringing up of the children–the girls until marriage, and the boys until early puberty, when control was taken over by men. The woman’s role was subordinate to the man’s. Education, especially in the Hellenic culture, was generally available only to the male. Girls were taught spinning and weaving by their mothers. The Greeks believed that the woman’s place was in her own quarters, where she had no need of book learning.
In Civilization Clive Bell provides an excellent description of the two roles:
... the housewife is a worker; and the Athenian housewife was recognized as such. She was treated with the respect due to every honest and capable worker; but she did not, because by the nature of her interests and occupations she could not, belong to the highly civilized and civilizing elite…. [The Athenians] divided women into two groups: a large active group consisting of those excellent, normal creatures whose predominant passion is for child-rearing and house-management; and a small idle group composed of women with a taste for civilization. To the latter went, or tended to go, girls of exceptional intelligence and sensibility, born with a liking for independence and the things of the mind.
The Bisexual Option Page 16
