The Bisexual Option

by Fritz Klein MD

  The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. ‘Twas a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country. Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.

  Years later, as a woman on the deck of a ship returning to England, Orlando ponders the change in her condition. While wondering whether, if she leapt overboard, she could swim in the women’s skirts she must now wear, she tosses her foot impatiently:

  …and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth.

  They are the same legs on the same human being. The responses of Nell Gwyn and the sailor are both sexual. But whereas Orlando the man can parade his shapely legs without a second thought, Orlando the woman must consider that if the sight of her ankles means the death of an honest fellow, she must in all humanity keep them covered and carry “the sacred responsibility of womanhood.” The same legs on the same person gain acknowledgement from both sexes. Only when the leg belongs to the correct (opposite) sex is sexual desire permissible. The author’s comment on the naturalness of bisexual response is obvious. But she is less interested in bisexuality per se than she is in the forces that cause men and women to play throughout a lifetime the gender role assigned by their genitals. On the continuum, Orlando is both man and woman in one person. As a woman she remembers her life as a man; that past is as much a part of her as her present. As she approaches England, she thinks of how she will never again be able to swear an oath in anger at anyone.

  ... And I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea, and ask my lords how they like it. “D’you take sugar? D’you take cream?” And mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong. “To fall from a masthead,” she thought, “because you see a woman’s ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the slave of the frailest chit in petticoats, and yet to go about as if you were the Lords of creation.–Heavens!” she thought, “what fools they make of us–what fools we are!” And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each.

  Orlando knows the secrets and shares the weaknesses of both sexes. In a story less about the idea of gender and more about particular characters and events, Orlando might still have been emotionally intimate with both sexes, with or without being bisexual. But if in such a story the person who “knew the secrets” and “shared the weaknesses” of both genders were bisexual–and therefore “nonexistent” in society’s prevailing view–the portrayal, while more “realistic,” could never convey the transcendence of gender as convincingly as Woolf does in her fantasy.

  Within this fantasy, the author asks us to understand her vision, her truth. When, as a young man, Orlando loved with all his heart and soul a beautiful Russian princess named Sasha, she broke his heart and darkened his soul. He was forced for the rest of his life–his male life–to ponder the meaning of love and even question its existence. Yet his love does not wane, even when he becomes a woman–quite the contrary; and much becomes clear:

  ... though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity.

  “Beauty.” “Falsity.” Isn’t the larger portion of any civilized lifetime spent seeking beauty? Beauty to Virginia Woolf is understanding. This is not exactly a new idea. To know how another person feels is a part of wisdom, and in the eye of wisdom nothing is new; everything exists and always has existed. To Virginia Woolf, there is wisdom in the idea of bisexuality, of the androgynous human being comprising both male and female components.

  2. The Left Hand of Darkness

  An emissary by the name of Genly has been sent by a conglomerate of 80 worlds (the Union of Peoples) to the planet Winter to persuade the king of Karhide, a country of Winter, to join the conglomerate.

  Winter is exactly what its name implies–a harsh, mostly frozen world where the people are in constant struggle with the elements. Although there are seasons, including summer, the winteriness is never completely gone. One gets the feeling that winter, after centuries, is bred into the marrow of its people and institutions.

  Genly brings to the king an offer of trade, treaty, and alliance. Although he is self-described as black with a flat nose, Genly is a representation of the human male in general–black, white, red, or yellow–as we know him. What distinguishes him from the people of Winter, aside from the obvious differences of origin and culture, is his maleness. He is seen on Winter as a sexual freak because on Winter, men and women don’t exist. The people of Winter are not male and female–nor are they neuter. They are potentials. Each person is a manwoman operating sexually in cycles of 26 to 28 days called kemmer.

  The culminant phase of kemmer lasts from two to five days, during which sexual drive and capacity are at maximum. It ends fairly abruptly, and if conception has not taken place, the individual returns to the somer phase within a few hours and the cycle begins anew. If the individual was in the female role and was impregnated, hormonal activity of course continues, and for the 8.4-month gestation period and the 6- to 8-month lactation period this individual remains female. The male sexual organs remain retracted (as they are in somer), the breasts enlarge somewhat, and the pelvic girdle widens. With the cessation of lactation the female re-enters somer and becomes once more a perfect androgyne.

  The people of Winter are not “bisexual,” in that they are not men, not women. But the bisexual idea underlies Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness:

  ... Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be... “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be–psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.

  ... A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter.

  .., There is no unconsenting sex, no rape. As with most mammals other than man, coitus can be performed only by mutual invitation and consent; otherwise it is not possible.

  Seduction certainly is possible, but it must have to be awfully well timed.

  … There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.

  APPENDIX B

  Bisexual Survey Results

  The questionnaire was given to the first 150 people coming to the Bisexual Forum in New York City during 1976-77. Six declined to participate. Of those
who did, 16 (10 men and 6 women) were heterosexual, and 1 man was homosexual; 127 were bisexual through self-identification, bisexual experiences, or both.

  Following are the results of the survey: *

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  INDEX

  NOTE: The page-based index from the print version of this book has been replaced, in this eBook format, with this list of suggested search terms.

  SUGGESTED SEARCH TERMS

  AIDS

  Advise and Consent