“But what do you mean by being himself?” said Gerald. “Is that an aphorism or a cliché?”
“I mean just doing what you want to do. I think it was perfect good form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the church door. It was almost a masterpiece in good form. It’s the hardest thing in the world to act spontaneously on one’s impulses–and it’s the only really gentlemanly thing to do–provided you’re fit to do it.”
“You don’t expect me to take you seriously, do you?” asked Gerald.
“Yes, Gerald, you’re one of the very few people I do expect that of.”
“Then I’m afraid I can’t come up to your expectations here, at any rate. You think people should just do as they like.”
“I think they always do. But I should like them to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. And they only like to do the collective thing.”
“And I,” said Gerald grimly, “shouldn’t like to be in a world of people who acted individually and spontaneously, as you call it. We should have everybody cutting everybody else’s throat in five minutes.”….
There was a pause of strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love. It was always the same between them; always their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact, a strange, perilous intimacy which was either hate or love, or both. They parted with apparent unconcern, as if their going apart were a trivial occurrence. Yet the heart of each burned from the other. They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heartburning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness.
Gerald and Birkin are intensely interested in the women in their lives, both emotionally and sexually. Lawrence in no way suggests that these men are repressing a desire for an exclusive relationship with each other. They are not closet homosexuals. Their problem is more complex than that. And yet it is simple. They love each other, and Lawrence wishes they could express that love openly. Yet he is too honest a writer to cause something to happen that cannot happen, given the era, the place, and the characters involved. And so the sexual tension between the two men is strong, if camouflaged.
“Gerald,” he said, “I rather hate you.”
“I know you do,” said Gerald. “Why do you?”
Birkin mused inscrutably for some minutes.
“I should like to know if you are conscious of hating me,” he said at last. “Do you ever consciously detest me–hate me with mystic hate? There are odd moments when I hate you starrily.”
Gerald was rather taken aback, even a little disconcerted. He did not quite know what to say.
“I may, of course, hate you sometimes,” he said. “But I’m not aware of it–never acutely aware of it, that is.”
“So much the worse, is it?” he repeated.
There was a silence between the two men for some time, as the train ran on. In Birkin’s face was a little irritable tension, a sharp knitting of the brows, keen and difficult. Gerald watched him warily, carefully, rather calculatingly, for he could not decide what he was after.
During a winter trip to the continent, Gerald dies, an apparent suicide. No one is as touched by Gerald’s death as Birkin. He says to Ursula:
“He should have loved me. I offered him.” She, afraid, white, with mute lips, answered: “What difference would it have made!”
“It would!” he said. “It would!”
Gerald’s doom is sealed by Lawrence in an earlier scene. In it Birkin (Rupert) tries to reach into his friend and fails.
“You’ve got to take down the love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal. We want something broader. I believe in the additional perfect relationship between man and man–additional to marriage.”
“I can never see how they can be the same,” said Gerald.
“Not the same–but equally important, equally creative, equally sacred, if you like.”
“I know,” said Gerald, “you believe something like that. Only I can’t feel it, you see.” He put his hand on Birkin’s arm, with a sort of deprecating affection. And he smiled as if triumphantly.
He was ready to be doomed. Marriage was like a doom to him. He was willing to condemn himself in marriage, to become like a convict condemned to the mines of the underworld, living no life in the sun, but having a dreadful subterranean activity. He was willing to accept this. And marriage was the seal of his condemnation. He was willing to be sealed thus in the underworld, like a soul damned but living for ever in damnation. But he would not make any pure relationship with any other soul. He could not. Marriage was not the committing of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then he would retreat to the underworld for his life. This he would do.
The other way was to accept Rupert’s offer of alliance, to enter into the bond of pure trust and love with the other man, and then subsequently with the woman. If he pledged himself with the man he would later be able to pledge himself with the woman: not merely in legal marriage, but in absolute, mystic marriage.
So Lawrence’s bisexual idea remains that. An idea. An important, perhaps even profound, idea waiting for its time. Waiting for “reality,” for people, for events to catch up.
Ursula tells Birkin he cannot have two kinds of love because it’s false and impossible.
“I don’t believe that,” he answers.
Neither do I.
CHAPTER 10
The Bisexual Future: Present-Day Factors
So far we have looked at bisexuality as it has been and as it is now. The temptation in any conclusion is to crane the neck around a distant corner to bring a view of what will be. I’m afraid, though, that to claim such foresight would be presumptuous. I don’t know what will be–no one does. Obviously, though, the present affects the future just as the past has affected die present. There are dynamics at work that will shape things to come. If we cannot foretell the bisexual future through these present factors, we can list and break them down, in a spirit of inquiry rather than prophecy.
There are, it seems to me, nine major factors in the present that will probably affect bisexuals in the future.
AIDS. In the 1980s the AIDS epidemic spread like wildfire through the two populations of male gays and IV drug users. Of course this scourge deeply affected the bisexual population as well. Already in 1983 the Bisexual Forum in New York had its first member die of AIDS.
Early in the 1990s, the world’s medical and scientific experts are extensively investigating the bisexual population in order to find out how many people are at risk, who they are, and how to reach them. For all the reasons mentioned above in the section on sociological studies, they are finding out just how difficult it is to get accurate and meaningful statistics.
At first the self-identified bisexual community ran for cover. I know of many bisexual men who became practicing heterosexuals. Former “swingers” decided to become monogamous and quite a number of bisexual women eliminated many if not all male partners.
As knowledge of the importance of practicing safe sex has spread, and as the epidemic has raged on year after year, the sexual behavior of the bisexual has indeed changed, just as has that of the male gay population. There are now more monogamous relationships and fewer indiscriminate sexual liaisons among people who define themselves as bisexual.
The main problem however, is that the bisexual identity is just one variable in a person’s orientation. Too easily overlooked are all those people who practice bisexual behavior but call themselves heterosexual, and members of communities, such as the African-American or Latino communities, in whose cultures bisexual behavior is viewed in an extremely negative light, and
whom education on safe sex still often fails to reach.
The bisexual is indeed caught in this devastating epidemic. Bisexual men, just like gay men, are at risk, as are their women partners, whether bisexual or heterosexual. More and more women are being infected with the virus. The bisexual is, alas, one conduit of AIDS between the heterosexual and homosexual communities spreading the disease from one section of the population to the other. Hopefully before too long, a cure and/or vaccine will be discovered and this deadly factor in the life of the bisexual, the homosexual, and the heterosexual will be eradicated.
Sex Roles and Stereotypes. Who is masculine? Who is feminine? In Queen Victoria’s time these were not questions but assumptions. They are assumptions still, but not to the same rigid degree. Although many still accept without question that what is male is “masculine” and what is female is “feminine,” we live in a world more open to individual choice. It is becoming more and more clear that such answers do not reflect a law of nature, but imposed cultural attitudes. Assumptions, however, die hard.
The era in which people passively accepted simplistic male and female stereotypes, and embraced the false security inherent in assigned sex roles, is ending. Truth is indeed setting us free–to see, for example, that in one culture (our own) aggressiveness is considered an essentially masculine trait, in another (Tchambuli), a feminine trait, in a third (Munduguma) both a masculine and a feminine trait, and a fourth (Arapesh) a trait shunned by both sexes. This is not to say that there are not biological, as well as cultural, differences between what men and women think and how they behave. But the two sexes share more similarities than differences. What makes this obvious truth difficult to absorb culturally is that we surround the physiological differences with marketable symbols, such as lipstick and dresses for women, neckties, sporting goods and hunting weapons for men. These symbols have nothing intrinsically to do with men and women as they really are, but everything to do with how we want them to be.
Cultural stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are changing all the time. Yes, there are differences between what men and women think and how they behave; but any given list of these differences is merely a list of gender characteristics in a particular culture at a specific time.
George Washington wore a wig and ruffles. In World War II “Rosie the Riveter” emerged as a national symbol of femininity by holding down a man’s job. Rosie was a wartime necessity, albeit one her grandmother would probably not have understood.
But in a very real sense Rosie, a creation of American wartime propaganda, freed American women from the stereotypical, centuries-old idea of what a woman is made for. After the war, the housewife-and-mother ideal was reimposed and remained more or less in force for 20 more years. But Rosie was resurrected in the political ferment of the 1960s and the women’s movement. And now the raised consciousness of women is forcing change in what is expected of both sexes. Women have had to carry the burden of such characterizations as “hysterical,” “passive,” “frivolous,” etcetera. The male-ideal counterparts of these clichés are enumerated by Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon in The Forty-Nine Percent Majority as follows:
No Sissy Stuff: The stigma of all stereotyped feminine characteristics and qualities, including openness and vulnerability;
The Big Wheel: Success, status, and the need to be looked up to;
The Sturdy Oak: A manly air of toughness, confidence, and self-reliance;
Give ‘Em Hell: The aura of aggression, violence, and daring.
But these stereotypes, thanks largely to the women’s movement, have begun to change rapidly. New words have come into general use. “Fathering” is one. It expresses the idea that fathering a child is not the same thing as merely being the father. Fathering, like mothering, bespeaks a care and devotion beyond what has previously been expected of fathers. This development promises exciting possibilities for the future.
Old norms are changing with respect to sex itself. “Open marriage” and “swinging” have been around and accepted by some people as a way of life for over 20 years. However, with the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, these lifestyles have once again been put on the cultural back burner. Homosexuality has gained widespread acceptance in the medical, psychological, and social science fields, largely through the efforts of the homosexual community itself. Because these changes tell us that the sex roles of men and women are not as inflexible as they were before, we have to conclude that the bisexual, too, is having an easier time. It is allowable now for men to be more emotional, more caring, even more passive if passivity is appropriate and needed. Women can be strong, assertive, dominant, even tough, if they choose. The male’s passivity can be expressed with both men and women; and the female can be more assertive toward both sexes, too. Where will all this lead the bisexual? It should, minimally, make the road he or she travels smoother, less an uphill struggle man before. In a word–progress.
Androgyny. Of all the factors affecting the future of bisexuality, androgyny (the internal and/or external appearance of male and female characteristics in one person) is the most obscure because its core rests firmly in paradox. As Freud wrote:
... all human individuals as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content (1925, SE, XIX, page 258).
Freud is not commenting on androgyny directly, but he builds a case for its existence nonetheless. Androgyny has been represented for ages in various philosophies and myths. For example, the Tao concept of Yang and Yin combines in one the dualities of light and darkness, masculine and feminine; it teaches that if lovers are to become one each must seek within himself or herself the opposite principle. A woman must find the man in her being and a man must find the woman in his before they can truly understand each other and become one.
Androgyny is often confused with bisexuality, hermaphroditism, and even homosexuality. It is none of these things. It is the recognizing of polarities, the accepting of paradoxes and apparent contradictions. It is feeling united while at the same time feeling separate. In Androgyny, Dr. June Singer says, “Androgyny refers to a specific way of joining the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ aspects of a single human being” Jung’s anima and animus apply as well to the internal female and male characteristics in all human beings.
Bisexuality, on the other hand, is the external sexual manifestation of the duality of maleness and femaleness: the attraction to both sexes. An androgynous person need not be bisexual, and a bisexual need not be androgynous. But androgyny is nevertheless a word to reckon with when considering the future of bisexuality, first because it has become a more familiar (and less frightening) archetype in popular consciousness and culture, and second because, conjoined with androgyny, bisexuality becomes the unification of dual attractions. Obviously the more we recognize the androgynous aspects of our being, the better we understand and more intimately we can relate to each other, within and across gender boundaries.
There is every reason to believe that with the changes in sex roles and sex stereotypes discussed earlier, androgyny in all its meaning, both real and mythical, will find a more than marginal place in the collective consciousness of the future, and this consciousness will undoubtedly change the way we view sexuality in general and bisexuality in particular.
Friendship, Lovers-and Bisexuality. With the possible exception of work, nothing in life pulls us together or tears us apart like the bonding we experience with friends and lovers. The condition of being “in love” has a standing in our consciousness higher than friendship and the love shared between friends. Only in our literature and movies do we place friends on as high a plane as lovers. Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Thelma and Louise provide examples of friendship on a scale as moving in their fashion as the love relationships in Romeo and Juliet and Anna Karenina.
Some feel the hi
ghest compliment a man can give his wife is to acknowledge that she is not only a wonderful wife but also his best friend. When attempting to combine friendship with sex, however, trouble develops more often than not. When two people share sex as part of a larger relationship, a complex and mysterious game begins, having to do with power and the struggle for a dominant position. This struggle exists in friendship, too, but it can be played out in such areas as sports, hobbies, and business. Lovers need not necessarily share anything except love. They express that feeling through sex, which fills the space that friends must fill with what they share in common. This is not to say that there are no people who do not share both sex and friendship, but the combination is difficult to maintain because we tend to view the love relationship as a condition of automatic pleasure. But love, whether between friends, lovers, or both, is work–good work. To have a lover who is a friend as well is twice the pleasure, requiring and deserving twice the work.
Something we don’t always demand in a lover but do in a friend is trust. Alas, this is realized more consistently in fictional friendships than in factual ones. Perhaps we idealize friendship so because we need to believe in the trust of friends–of Huck and Jim, Butch and Sundance–more than in that of lovers. Of lovers we expect the heat of sexuality with all its volatility, its potential to turn to hate, even violence. We expect of friends that they will go on floating down the Mississippi forever, on an endless river of friendship.
Still, power struggles do not keep people from making friends and lovers and keeping them for long periods. With heterosexuals the problem of sex in friendship does not appear often because heterosexual men and women are not encouraged to view each other apart from their sexual differences. Generally, heterosexuals’ best friends are of the same gender while homosexuals’ best friends are most often of the opposite sex. Bisexuals must constantly deal with possible sexual attraction in friendship. They must settle the problem of sexual arousal by self-imposed restrictions since they do not live in the simpler world of one-gender choice that the heterosexual and homosexual find so comfortable.
The Bisexual Option Page 18
