Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Her first heterosexual experiences consisted of necking parties commencing around age thirteen. Her first homosexual experiences began very shortly thereafter.

  • • •

  They used to have articles in the teenage magazines “Do You Have To Pet To Be Popular?” The answer was always that you didn’t, and that someone like Frankie Avalon or Fabian felt that it was more important that the girl be sincere and a terrific person in her own right.

  I’ve always wondered who writes that crap,

  Where I lived, it wasn’t so much that you had to pet to be popular. It was more that there was nothing else to do. Popular meant you got invited to parties, and parties were where people made out, and if you didn’t make out nobody asked you to the parties because what fun would you be to anybody?

  When I first started going to these parties, there was no formal dating in our social circle. About a dozen kids would be invited to one kid’s house. Half boys and half girls, logically enough. We would all go down to the basement recreation room—every house had a basement recreation room, knotty pine paneling and asphalt tile floor and a big record player in one corner. We would dance, and the parents would go upstairs, and somebody would turn out the lights and we would get together in couples and make out. The boys and girls were all the same age and equally inexperienced at sex. All we knew was that it was an enormous amount of fun. It wasn’t considered to be related to love. It was just something that was fun, and slightly forbidden, but perfectly safe and innocent, and it felt good. Some of the girls would be with the same boy every time, and others—I was one of them—would neck with a different boy at each party. In fact once in a while we would couple off early and make out, and then the lights would come on when somebody’s parent came downstairs to make sure nothing much was happening, and then when the parent left we got back to business and picked up new partners in the process. I suppose you could call it a juvenile version of swinging, although we didn’t think of it that way. It didn’t much matter who you were with. It was the thrill of it that counted.

  Whenever some of us girls got together, we would giggle about it and exchange sly bits of double entendre and giggle some more. We talked quite freely among ourselves about what boys kissed well and what we had done with various boys, whether we had let them get inside our bras, whether we had touched their penises. About how some of them got hard immediately and stayed hard throughout, and some didn’t, and who had the biggest one, and if the boys shot or not . . . And giggling our heads off all the time.

  After this had been going on a few months, I was invited to spend the night over at a friend’s house. We used to sleep over at each other’s houses all the time at this age. This particular evening her parents were not due home until midnight, and we were very daring and had two boys come over and visit us, but they brought a friend along so there were the three of them and the two of us. Naturally the evening’s entertainment consisted of making out, with the extra boy cutting in from time to time as if it were a dance. It was a smaller group than usual and there were no parents around, not even upstairs, and this made us quite adventurous. We went farther than usual. All three of the boys touched me under my panties and I reached orgasm a couple of times. We also jerked the boys off and they all came at least once. I was very excited, both by what I was doing and by what my friend was doing.

  She had twin beds and we slept together in her room. We stayed up for hours giggling about what we had done with the boys and one of us—I don’t remember who—said something about wishing the boys were there now because she was in the mood for more. We talked about that some more and she suggested that we could do a lot of the same things by ourselves with each of us taking turns pretending to be the boy. And we giggled over the fact that we wouldn’t have to be afraid of going too far, since neither of us was equipped with a cock.

  And that was how I had my first sex with a girl. It was the most natural thing in the world and we never even thought of it as something unnatural or taboo. It was naughty, of course, but in the same way as making out with boys was naughty. We thought of it exactly the same way.

  I think that’s precisely the way it should be with children that age. It seemed natural to us because it was natural. We had a couple of horny young bodies and a yen to do something with them, and we had made no connection between emotional involvement and sex, so what difference should it have made whether sex involved a boy and a girl or two boys or two girls? Either way it’s the same—warm little animals doing what feels good and enjoying the discovery of new ways to feel good all over.

  I had sex in about the same way with two of my other girlfriends as well. We did basically the same things with each other as we did with boys. We engaged in deep soul kissing, stroked each other’s breasts, touched each other’s genitals and worked ourselves to orgasm. We also mimed the act of coitus, with one of us taking the man’s part and lying between the other’s thighs, and then rubbing our pussies together until we came—if we were lucky.

  Nobody always took the man’s part. It was standard for us to switch roles and take turns. There was no oral-genital sex, I think because no one knew of its existence. I don’t think we would have had any compunctions about doing it if anyone had thought to suggest it, but we didn’t know anything about it. We would kiss and suck each other’s breasts, but we didn’t think about kissing genitals.

  Stupid of us . . .

  The whole thing ended as easily as it had begun. One year when school started we were all dating boys individually and the parties stopped. It happened as quickly and completely as if someone had thrown a switch. And at the same time the sex between us girls stopped also, without anything being said about it. The subject was not mentioned at all, and we all went on dates with boys to movies or dances and did or did not make out with the boys depending on circumstances, and that was that. Oddly enough, when we began dating, for most of us it meant a definite decrease in sexual activity. Once we were in a dating situation all the usual rules applied—only neck with a boy if you like him, only go with one boy at a time, all of the nonsense that characterizes the dating system and prepares boys and girls for the unnatural joys of a monogamous heterosexual marriage.

  I think most of the girls had no further homosexual experiences. It was something they regarded as unimportant, something done only for laughs. I might have done the same route myself, except that I became extremely close to another girl, one who had not been a part of the original group and who had very little experience with boys and none with girls. We became best friends, went on double dates together, and there was a time when she was sleeping over at my house after we had gone on a double date and it occurred to me that I would like to mess around with her.

  I made an excuse, something about wanting to show her how my date had kissed me. I got in her bed and started fooling around with her, and one thing led to another as I had more or less hoped it would, and I wound up petting her to orgasm.

  She began crying immediately. I wanted to know what was wrong, and she said that the two of us were lesbians, I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. We talked for hours about it. It seemed that while I was having all of this sex she was doing a lot of reading, so although she didn’t have experience she knew more about all of it than I did. We compared notes and decided that we couldn’t be lesbians completely because we liked boys, so we might as well have some fun while we figured out just exactly what we were.

  The fun we had involved cunnilingus from the first night. She was the one who suggested it, having read about it in some book or other. She did it to me, and then I did it to her, and then we “invented” the sixty-nine posture and did it to each other. Awhile later I learned, much to my chagrin, that sixty-nine had been around for a good many years. I honestly thought the two of us had dreamed it up all by ourselves, and it was so much fun I thought we ought to take out a patent on it.

  We went on having sex together until graduation, when we went to different co
lleges. By then I had had sex with two other girls, too. And I had gone all the way with several boys, and discovered I liked it immensely.

  I’ve never stopped liking it, either.

  • • •

  Joanne’s bisexual experiences continued at college, where she first became aware of the particular problems of bisexualism in a world divided into heterosexuals and homosexuals. There was a group of lesbians on campus, but she felt uncomfortable in the group, not sharing their antipathy for males. During her last years in college she felt herself forced into a cyclical pattern which she was to repeat until the time of her marriage. She would be exclusively heterosexual for a time, devoting herself entirely to a male with whom she fancied herself in love. Gradually her homosexual impulses increased in intensity, and as she found herself drawn to a girl she felt it was necessary to break off with her male lover. A bout of homosexual contacts followed, generally taking the form of a bevy of short-term sexual unions rather than an intimate and mutually exclusive relationship with a single girl.

  • • •

  I always felt it ought to be possible to have sex with both men and women on a continuing basis. But there didn’t seem to be a way to do it and I gradually let myself be brainwashed into considering myself a freak for wanting to live what I now consider a completely normal and natural sex life. I felt you had to be either a vegetarian or a carnivore and there was no middle ground. Whichever diet I tried, it only made me hungrier for what I was missing.

  Sometimes I would think I was basically a lesbian and was having sex with men because I couldn’t accept myself as a homosexual. Other times I would be sure that lesbianism was just a stage I had gone through, a normal enough stage for a young adolescent but one that in my particular case had gotten fixed because I refused to grow out of it like others in my social set. I would switch from one point of view to the other depending upon the way my sex life was structuring itself at any particular point in time.

  I got married largely to break the pattern. I thought I loved Norm at the time, although I know I didn’t feel a bond anywhere near as close as the one that exists between us now. But I did love him, and enjoyed being with him, and we made each other marvelously happy in bed. I told myself that marriage was a time when you settled down with one person and made a permanent go of it, and once you were married to one man he was the only person you ever slept with, male or female. Marriage gave me a way out of my present life, or at least I saw it in those terms. And I felt that, as I grew to love Norman more and more, and as we made a life together, I would cease to have any desire for anybody else.

  It did work that way at first, too. He was—and still is—a wonderful lover. We were always good together in bed. And we seemed to want the same things out of life—interesting work, a good apartment, savings for the future, maybe a pretty ordinary life but a sound one. I was ready for it by then. I had knocked around long enough to appreciate the value of not having to wonder who’s going to be there in the morning. Of having the same person there every morning and being able to count on him.

  Then I started to get itchy feet. Feet? I guess it was another part of me that got itchy. I thought about having a baby, and we talked about it. I felt it might settle me down. We tried unsuccessfully, and Norman found out that he was sterile. Just one of those things. It seemed tragic at the time, but afterward we talked it over and discovered that neither of us really wanted children. We each thought the other did and each of us was willing to go along with it, but now with the air cleared we decided that his sterility was a blessing in disguise. It kept us from starting a family neither of us really wanted and it enabled me to stop taking the pill.

  But the itchy feet didn’t go away. And it became a very specific thing, a desire for a girl. Not a specific girl. Just a yen for female-type lovemaking which wouldn’t go away no matter how I might wish it away.

  I took hesitant little steps in that direction. Walked back and forth in front of lesbian bars wishing something would happen and hurrying away if anybody so much as cocked an eyebrow at me. Exchanged long looks with fairly obvious lesbians in public places. And gradually talked myself into giving it a try, telling myself I wasn’t taking a thing away from Norm.

  It was what I had been missing.

  I said earlier that it’s the same thing making love to a man or woman. It is the same thing in the sense I meant it, that it’s natural and pleasant and enjoyable either way. But in another sense it’s as different as night and day.

  When you make love to someone of the opposite sex, the oppositeness is the whole thing. The two of you are yin and yang, paired opposites that fit together to make up a whole being. The man fits into the woman, the cock fits into the cunt, the man gives and the woman receives, and it is the difference between the two of you that makes the physical excitement and satisfaction.

  With another woman, it is as if you are making love to yourself. When I eat a girl it is as though I am eating myself; when she eats me I feel my own female mouth upon my loins. Making love with a man is harsh and hard and fierce, passion climbing up sharply, hitting a peak, falling off a cliff. With a woman it is a slower and gentler thing. A very gradual process with no rush toward any goal but a lot of good scenery along the way.

  I must sound like a failed poet. But I think you can probably understand what I’m getting at. That’s why it’s so ridiculous when somebody wonders why a person who is bisexual can’t settle for one sex or the other on the theory that you can do virtually everything with a man that you can do with a woman. Sex is more than organs, more than bodies. It’s two people relating to one another, and who the people are determines what the sexual experience is going to be like. It’s one way with a man, another way with a woman. It’s something still different in a group situation where you make love to both men and women at once. In one respect it doubles the excitement, combines things. In another respect it’s not as good because you can never get as involved with a person when there are more than two people in the game. You have to divide your attention, and it’s more a game than an interacting human relationship.

  Anyway, I needed both. Both men and women, and I started making the gay scene in a very furtive way, always terrified I would run into someone I knew, always scared that word would get back to Norman.

  Ultimately I told him.

  Not out of guilt, because that’s not what it was, exactly. It was more my irritation at having to keep this secret from him. I was deceiving him, and by making him the object of my deception I was castrating him in my own eyes if not in his, and I disliked myself for doing this to the man I loved. And I was in a turmoil at the time, and confessed to him much as I had married him, hoping this time that the act of confession would solve my problem for me. That he would forbid me to see women sexually, in which case I would obey him, or that he would think I was disgusting and want out of the marriage, in which case I would give him a divorce and try to make some different kind of a life for myself. Either way I thought it would bring matters to a head.

  It more or less did, but not the kind of head I had in mind. Norman heard me all the way through, not showing anything in his face, and then he grabbed me up and swept me off to the bedroom and made love to me with more honest-to-Christ passion than he had shown in months. And he was always a passionate man, but this was like Gangbusters.

  I said, “Wow! What got into you?”

  “The conversation,” he said.

  And he told me he had never known that I had had any gay experiences, but that he wished I had told him earlier because he frankly thought it was the most exciting thing going. I couldn’t understand this. He explained that a great many men are turned on very dramatically by lesbianism, either because they can identify with both parties or because of latent homosexuality or whatever. He said whatever it was, it certainly worked in his case. On top of that he said he wouldn’t be jealous in the least if I went on having girlfriends, and there was no need for me to keep it a secret from him. He would
share however much of it I wanted him to share. If I preferred to keep it to myself, that was all right with him. If I wanted to tell him all or part of what I was doing, he would be interested.

  And he added that if I ever wanted to bring home a friend for a three-way party, that was also fine with him. I thought he was just kidding when he said this. I didn’t realize he was saying what he meant but keeping it light in case it was something that disgusted me.

  I did have some further lesbian contacts but they were unsatisfactory for reasons I explained before. I couldn’t be on an equal footing with these girls. I wanted a bi-girl in a similar situation, and how would I go about finding one?

  I actually discussed this point with Norman, and the next night he brought home a book on swinging—not one of yours, I’m sorry to say—and a correspondence club bulletin. I took a quick look at them and asked him what he had in mind. He just shook his head and told me to read them both through and get my thoughts together on the subject, and then we could talk about it.

  I read the book and the magazine at one sitting. The book was idiotically written, supposedly case histories but obviously manufactured by the writer. Still, there was enough to it so that you could get the idea of what swinging was all about and even absorb a certain amount of the swing philosophy. You had to work hard to get it, though, because the sanctimonious hack who wrote it went to great lengths to let you know that he personally thought swinging was disgusting. If anything, that gave it an added attraction for me. Anything he was against, I figured was probably fairly worthwhile.

  The magazine interested me far more in certain ways because these were real people and it made the reality of swinging far more vivid. While reading the book it was possible to envision the entire thing as a part of a fantasy world, a very pleasant and interesting fantasy but fundamentally unreal. The magazine brought it all home. I enjoyed reading the ads and figuring out what all of the euphemisms meant. French culture, Greek culture, B-and-D, sun worship, and some other terms that were less obvious to me. The book, phony as it may have been, was helpful here. I learned, for example, that “versatile” meant bisexual, and that when a woman wanted to meet a generous man it meant she expected money for her sexual favors.