David is not endowed with such epic qualities. His essence is riddled with personality defects and neurotic failings. He cannot love, cannot even get close. He hurts the people who love him–his family: his male lover Giovanni, and Hella, the woman in his life. He also hurts the peripheral people in his life: Joey, with whom as a teenager he has his first male sexual experience, is made unhappy because of David’s guilt; Sue, a girl he uses to prove his manhood, is also manipulated. This inability to love is clearly voiced by Giovanni when David leaves him:
“You are not leaving me for her,” he said. “You are leaving me for some other reason. You lie so much, you have come to believe all your own lies. But I, I have senses. You are not leaving me for a woman. If you were really in love with this little girl, you would not have had to be so cruel to me…. “You do not,” cried Giovanni, sitting up, “love anyone! You never have loved anyone. I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror–…. And you–you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?”
David’s bisexuality is not real. It is a transition to homosexuality, a way station, though it covers many years. It begins with his inclination toward homosexuality as a teenager. Then comes the repression, and running away.
I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well–by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.
He becomes a lover who “is neither man nor woman,” nothing that can be known or touched. His vacillating movements, his many women, and his “joyless seas of alcohol” were part of his unconscious homosexuality trying to get out. And in the end his bisexuality does evolve into homosexuality. Hella is discarded, “since all that once delighted him turned sour on his stomach.” His “true” nature emerges as he goes off to Nice, roaming “…all the bars and at the end of the first night, blind with alcohol and grim with lust, [he] climbed the stairs of a dark hotel in company with a sailor.”
3. “The Sea Change”
Baldwin’s tragic image is perhaps the nadir of the bisexual’s portrait. In most of the few cases where the bisexual is depicted at all, emerging from the world of nonexistence, violence and death are not shown to be the result. The pain the bisexual brings about is more often emotional than physical. In his short story “The Sea Change,” Ernest Hemingway sketches such a scene. At the end of the summer, the handsome, tanned young couple are sitting in a Parisian cafe. He has just found out that she wants to go off with a woman. She tells him that he must understand that she loves him, he must let her go off; she will return to him. He understands, is hurt, but he lets her go. The action changes him, however, to the extent that he even looks different in the mirror. Once again the bisexual is someone who cannot be trusted, someone who is not loyal, and someone who cuts deeply into the lover’s psyche.
4. Sunday Bloody Sunday
In Sunday Bloody Sunday the wounding of a loved one is exquisitely shown. Both Alex Grenville (Glenda Jackson) and Dr. Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch) are emotionally hurt by Bob Elkin (Murray Head), their bisexual lover. Reviewers described this film as moving, adult, and wise–a movie that explored how people cope successfully with the pain of partial loves and terminated affairs. The two main characters are fully realized. Alex is a 34-year-old, bright, educated divorcee–. Daniel, a Jewish doctor in his early forties, successful, urbane, cultivated, and sensitive, is homosexual but thoroughly masculine. The film depicts the last week of their parallel love affairs with Bob, 25, the kinetic sculptor emerging from the lower class, who in a cowardly fashion leaves both of them and London for a new life in the States.
The characters do not have guilt and self-pity because of their sexual orientation. As John Schlesinger, the director, said in an interview:
The doctor happened to be homosexual, but that was not the point of the film. The woman happened to have been married before, but that was not the point of the film. The boy happened to enjoy being with both of them, but the picture is not trying to explain his bisexuality. His bisexuality is a fact.
And to that extent the movie is highly successful.
Bob’s bisexuality is a fact. But how is he depicted as a human being? As a bisexual how does he affect events? Here we perceive once again the blurred negative image of the bisexual. When I left the theater, I asked myself what these two highly intelligent and sensitive people could see in Bob, the object of their love. I was not alone in asking this question. Here are some descriptions of Bob from the critics: “shallow,” “doesn’t know how to give of himself,” “callous and callow,” “a free spirit not yet formed with access to everything,” “a mere type,” “nothing in him is revealed except perhaps youth and cockiness and nostalgie de la boue,” “elusive,” “having the new morality of enlightened selfishness,” “conveys a passivity and deficiency of feeling that hardly recommends him as a love object,” and “on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder.”
The bisexual is envisioned and portrayed as a human being whose bisexuality is symptomatic of his inability to love deeply and who must, because of his sexual orientation, hurt those who love him. Bob says of himself: “I know you don’t think you’re getting enough of me, but you’re getting all there is.” And Alex replies: “Perhaps you shouldn’t spread yourself so thin.” The bisexual as emotional villain.
5. Advise and Consent
If the bisexual is seen as a person who hurts and wounds his or her loved ones, then it must follow that he or she would also be represented as being the injured one, the receiver of pain.
In Allen Drury’s novel, Advise and Consent, Senator Brigham Anderson is a historical bisexual (played by Richard Kiley when it was adapted for the stage in 1960 and by Don Murray in its Otto Preminger movie treatment in 1962). Senator Anderson, a happily married man, is blackmailed over possible exposure of his past wartime homosexual experience. Here, the melodramatic solution to the bisexual’s dilemma is death by his own hand. As in Giovanni’s Room, this extreme resolution of the bisexual’s problems is not typical. More often the bisexual is seen as being only emotionally hurt and psychologically wounded.
6. Butley
In Simon Gray’s 1972 theater piece, Ben Butley is an example of a bisexual who is emotionally hurt. Butley was also filmed in 1974, with, as in the play, Alan Bates in the title role. Bates plays a London University English teacher who in the course of one day learns that his wife is finally leaving him for another man and that his young male lover is also opting for a new partner. In this day of personal failure we see Butley railing at his colleagues, loathing his students, and despising himself. Though charming and witty, he is portrayed as bitter, cruel, rude, and full of alcoholic self-pity. He is committed to nothing–not to love, not to friendship, not to his profession. He is unable to maintain satisfactory emotional involvements–either heterosexual or homosexual. Though he is extremely adept at verbal darts (some quite poisonous), it is Butley who is hurt, who aches emotionally and who suffers psychological pain.
7. Death in Venice
There is one aspect of fictional psychological failure that applies not only to the bisexual but to the homosexual as well. To some extent, the bisexual and homosexual are as they are because they are seen as failed heterosexuals being fixated in an early stage of psychosexual development. This idea is at the heart of the classical psychoanalytic explanation of any orientation other than heterosexuality. A perfect example is Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s classic novella, Death in Venice.
Though Mann’s masterwork deals with the character of Aschenbach, aging, attracted to the elusive young Tadzio, it does not deal overtly with sex. It is the story of a decaying society and dying values. Visconti, however, turns Death in Venice into a sexual story. Aschenbach (married, the father of a daugh
ter) is portrayed by Dirk Bogard, playing helpless counterpoint to the beautiful Tadzio’s flirting eyelashes. To explain Aschenbach’s behavior we are shown a scene (not in Mann’s work) in which he is unable to function sexually with a woman. Of course, anyone can be neurotic; I have no argument with a bisexual being portrayed as a neurotic individual, but why must the bisexual always be seen that way?
Recently, the homosexual man and woman have achieved a considerable degree of acceptance in art and literature, as well as in society. The bisexual in this regard tends to ride on the homosexual’s coattails. In the last couple of years, for example, a number of pieces have been written or produced in which the bisexual is treated as a homosexual, and as a homosexual is depicted positively. The progress is slow…but it is progress.
8. The Front Runner
The Front Runner, a novel by Patricia Nell Warren published in 1974, shows the bisexual as a homosexual. Harlan Brown, a 39-year-old track coach, falls in love with his star runner, Billy Sive. The novel explores their loving relationship. In this tragic story the homosexual is seen as real and human. As homosexual, both lovers are depicted in a positive light. But Harlan Brown’s homosexuality is emphasized, and his bisexuality is all but ignored. He is depicted as homosexual in many respects: he views himself as such, he prefers men erotically and emotionally, he lived in the gay subculture for a number of years. His relations with women, on the other hand, are less important–casual sexual alliances in high school and a bad marriage that produced two children and ended in divorce. As a homosexual Harlan Brown is depicted sympathetically; his bisexuality is relegated to the realm of near nonexistence.
9. The War Widow
Lesbian love also has begun to receive some kind treatment. In the fall of 1976, Harvey Perr’s original TV script, The War Widow, was presented on the PBS series “Visions.” It is the tender story of two women, Amy and Jenny. World War I finds Amy’s husband away in France at the Front. Amy does not feel the separation, or for that matter much else. But her world begins to brighten when she meets Jenny, a photographer. She falls in love with Jenny. In the end, she makes the difficult choice of leaving her past life to live with her loved one. Once again we have the rich, full portrayal of two homosexual people. What is excluded is Amy’s bisexuality. It is there, but it is vague, it is not dealt with, it is ignored. Amy would seem to be a lesbian, her marriage a sham. As a lesbian she is understood and viewed with sympathy. As a bisexual her existence is fuzzy.
It is where documentary reality impinges that the bisexual does seem to be finally recognized. The two stand-out examples are the film Dog Day Afternoon and Nigel Nicolson’s biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage.
10. Dog Day Afternoon
The character of Sonny in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film, Dog Day Afternoon, is based on Littlejohn Basso, the bisexual bank robber who was sentenced to serve 20 years in the penitentiary. The movie is based on his actual Brooklyn robbery attempt in 1972. Holding nine hostages in the bank for 14 hours, he became an instant celebrity, seen by millions as he starred in a live, televised robbery-in-progress. His motivation? He needed money for his boyfriend’s (to whom he was “married”) sex-change operation. The film portrays this bisexual realistically. He is a bank robber, he has a wife and children whom he loves, and he is deeply involved with a male transsexual. What we see is a likable, neurotic, tenderhearted loser in over his head, dominated by forces both internal and external over which he has little control. His bisexuality is a fact and is portrayed as such. This outrageous bank robber was treated true to life; of course, in his case the truth teetered on the edge of bizarre, fantastical fiction–which may have helped.
11. Portrait of a Marriage
A different kind of bisexual reality comes through in the book Portrait of a Marriage, in which Nigel Nicolson describes the bisexual “truth” of the 49-year marriage of his parents, Vita and Harold, as “the strangest and most successful union that two gifted people have ever enjoyed.” They were two bisexual English writers born into the upper class in the late nineteenth century. They brought to their marriage mutual esteem, intelligence, and a deep and lasting love, though they each had numerous involvements mainly “but not exclusively” with members of their own sex.
The major part of the book deals with the stormy period in 1918-20 precipitated by Vita’s passionate love affair with Violet Trefusis. The crisis is resolved, Vita returns to her husband and home, and until her death in 1962 remains in a marriage that in her own words “included enthusiasm, deep love as well as commitment.” Vita Sackville-West, as this novelist and poet was known, is portrayed well. She is shown with faults as well as virtues. She was headstrong, with the ability to be coldly indifferent, but also passionate and giving to those she loved. Though she was rather an aristocratic snob, she was nonetheless a rebel against the assigned female role of the period.
Harold Nicolson’s contradictions are also delineated. We see a man who loves his wife deeply even while he has numerous affairs with young men. Though a racist, he felt deeply over the plight of the Jews under Hitler.
The Nicolsons did exist. Their bisexuality was a fact. But to call him feminine or her masculine would be absurd. That men and women possess many of the same traits and feel many of the same emotions is hardly a new idea today, but to see how two sensitive people lived this reality in post-Victorian England is eye-opening and exciting.
The portrayals of the bisexual in Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema and Ingmar Bergman’s 1976 movie Face to Face lie between the negative “reality” and the idea of bisexual truth; both films deal with other matters, and use the bisexual as a symbol or example.
12. Teorema
This film is a parable. One day a beautiful young man mysteriously appears at the home of a wealthy Italian family. He proceeds to make love to the father, mother, son, daughter, and maid. When a telegram arrives and the young man must leave, all five members of the family are dramatically changed. The maid becomes a saint, performing miracles, the daughter turns catatonic, the son in ultimate absurdity urinates on his abstract paintings, the mother begins picking up young men, and the father staggers away, naked and howling into the wilderness. The young man’s bisexuality is obviously used as a symbol. Though most critics reviewed the film favorably, there was only one point on which they all agreed: it was impossible to arrive at a definitive interpretation of the pictured theme. Pasolini’s own vision of the young man is as follows:
I leave it to the spectator–is the visitor God or is he the Devil? He is not Christ. The important thing is that he is sacred, a supernatural being. He is something from beyond….
13. Face to Face
In Face to Face both plot and characters are the media through which Bergman’s concerns with suicide, grief, and reality are explored. The story centers on Jenny (Liv Ullmann), a psychiatrist who tries to commit suicide; she is aided by the bisexual gynecologist Thomas (Erland Josephson). The film concentrates on Jenny’s breakdown, her fears, her dreams. Thomas’s role is the secondary one, but he is portrayed sympathetically if rather enigmatically. The ideas Bergman is dealing with are the immediacy of experience, the ease of getting hurt, and the enigmatic nature of suicide. Sexual orientations and emotional relationships are the vehicles for those ideas: Thomas is a man whose bisexuality is the bridge to his understanding and willing submersion in another’s pain. He helps Jenny see that “love embraces everything–even death.”
With Gemini and The Shadow Box the 1976-77 Broadway theater season illuminated bisexuality in a positive light after many years of either ignoring it or portraying the bisexual in a consistently negative light.
14. Gemini
This work by Albert Innaurato is a very funny play with a slight story line. Francis, a 21-year-old Ivy League student, has an affair with a female classmate but is also attracted sexually to her brother. Unexpectedly, the siblings visit him in his Philadelphia slum home. Jokes, pathos, and a larger-than-life picture follow. This ent
ertaining play presents the bisexual positively. The feelings of the student are handled with delicacy. Francis’s confusion and desires are viewed with warmth and sympathy, and the resolution of his sexual difficulties rings true. The play is not about bisexuality; that is not the issue. The play is about the goodness of people who are human enough to be warm and loving without shame.
15. The Shadow Box
The Shadow Box, by Michael Cristofer, won both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for the best play of 1976-77. The action occurs in a hospital where terminal cancer patients live out their last weeks or months in separate cottages with their loved ones. The play follows the plight of three dying people. One of them, Brian, is living in Cottage Two with his male lover. He is visited by his former wife. Brian, highly articulate and intelligent, knows that death is approaching quickly. His relationships with both the man and the woman in his life are touchingly portrayed. Once again the bisexual element is not the primary issue. As it is in Gemini, the bisexual “reality” is portrayed in a clear, sympathetic fashion permitting the bisexuals “truth” –both its good and bad points–to be shown.
THE “TRUTH”
1. Orlando
Virginia Woolf’s story spans three centuries. The hero-heroine’s biography begins with a boy of 16 at the close of Elizabeth the First’s reign and ends with a woman of 35 listening to “the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.”
Both as a lusty, brawling young gentleman and later as a striking, modern young woman of impressive intelligence, Orlando sees monarchs come and go and fashions change through every age.
Unlike Women in Love, Orlando does not seek to impress on the reader the bisexual ideal. In its fanciful way, Orlando creates a character liberated from the restraints of gender identity in a way that allows us to see the possibility that gender itself is more fluid than we think. When still a man, Orlando finds his home in England uninhabitable because he is being pursued by a woman of frighteningly intense character. He asks King Charles to send him to Constantinople as Ambassador:
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