Don’t Fence Me In

The modern era—let’s say the last century—has seen a fundamental change in the way people in the West think about their sexuality. Before that time, as philosopher Michel Foucault suggests in Volume I of his The History of Sexuality, people performed various sex acts with each other but were not defined by what they did in bed (or in the woods or the stable). In the late nineteenth century, though, the act became the man or woman who performed it. Instead of homosexual behavior, there was created the hitherto-unknown category “homosexual (person).” Once there were homosexuals, there had to be a way to define people who weren’t—hence the category “heterosexual (person).” Other sexualities received definition, too. Instead of people who exhibited a variety of behavior, we now had “voyeurs and exhibitionists,” “sadists and masochists,” “fetishists,” “zoophiles,” “transvestites” and more. As society changed rapidly from agrarian to industrial, as more people left their ancestral homes to make their way in the cities, a new category of sexual scientists began studying the uprooted populations and found them teeming with different sorts of sexual behavior. Like Darwin classifying dozens of types of finch, the scientists began studying and classifying people according to the kind of sex they were having.

As time went on, people cooperated. They began to think of themselves and each other in terms of the categories that had been invented to describe them. Decades passed and communities formed where folks could meet and play with others like themselves. The concept of sexual identity was embraced so thoroughly that “identity politics,” the twentieth century’s gift to the sexual identity jumble, was born. Now we do not placidly wait for scientists to tell us about ourselves—we tell them, often loudly.

In the face of all this coming out and identifying oneself as other than the norm, bisexuals, who are open to the possibility of intimate and sexual relationships with both men and women, are labeled “confused.” We are as often labeled this way by homosexuals as heterosexuals. Much later than gays and lesbians, bisexuals are finally organizing as a separate community and launching our own political and social movement.

There was an organized bisexual community in San Francisco some twenty years ago, but it fell on hard times. The sexy seventies were a much lusher environment for bisexual people than the austere eighties, when, instead of speculations about Elton John’s and David Bowie’s sex lives, you heard about how bi men were “spreading AIDS into the heterosexual community.” The current generation of bisexual activists, the ones who came out in the 1980s, usually gravitated to the gay and lesbian communities if they found any community at all; these new activists often have in common not much but a bisexual orientation and a fierce desire to end their sense of isolation.

1990 was our watershed year. We gathered in San Francisco in June for the first-ever National Bisexual Conference. Members of BiPOL, a local bisexual political action and advocacy group, had toiled for two years to organize it and make it a reality. Some of the same people involved in conference organizing had also contributed pieces to a book of bisexual coming-out stories, called Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. The book and the conference were ways for us activists to meet and rub together the sticks that would spark our new community; for non-activists there would be, perhaps, the first steps in realizing they weren’t alone.

Around four hundred fifty people from the Bay Area, the nation and the world attended; we met, socialized, shared stories, networked, had flings, went to workshops and marched in a big, visible contingent in the Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade. Mother Goose Productions held a special Jack-and-Jill-Off in the conference’s honor (that was my idea, I’m proud to confess), and over one hundred fifty wide-eyed bisexual folks and their friends filled the Goose clubhouse to panting, writhing sardine-can capacity, many popping their group-sex cherry in the process.

It was a stunningly diverse group. Holding the sex party and inviting conferees was a case in point. One stereotype held about bisexuals is that we’re all swingers or at least aficionados of threesomes, since how can a person who’s attracted to both sexes be happy having sex with only one? (After all, there aren’t enough she-males to go around.) In fact, many bi’s are monogamous in orientation, and their bisexuality means to them simply that they don’t choose partners according to what gender they are—men and women are both eligible for consideration, but when the final cut is made they want just one special person in their bed. Other bi’s are extremely uncomfortable with the swinger stereotype and think it gives us a bad name; they were, needless to say, not among the guests at the party, and some were unhappy that the party was happening at all. Another related stereotype is that bisexuals are hornier than other people: We need a potential sex-partner pool of everybody in the whole world with whom to satisfy our indiscriminate needs. A cursory glance around the halls at the conference site, though, turned up at least as many shy-looking librarian types as wild and crazy guys and girls. Even the sex maniacs among us—me, for instance—were far too busy networking and workshop-ping to prowl around much. It often surprises outsiders that bisexuals, like other sexual minorities, have many interests and concerns other than sex, even though a divergent sexuality is the basis for adopting a bi identity. Four out of five of my workshops were about sex, it is true, but I found myself talking about it a lot and doing it less than I might have on an ordinary weekend.

Other diversities I noted among the group: a wide age range (from late teens to grandma and grandpa types), various educational levels and class backgrounds. A great effort was made by conference organizers to make the event accessible to disabled people. Similarly, outreach was done so the group would be racially and culturally mixed, so we had the benefit of many different kinds of bisexual experience from which to learn. Still another element of diversity was the way in which people self-identified sexually—as we quickly saw, there is no one way to be bisexual. Many of us named ourselves lesbian or gay. Others had lived largely heterosexual lives. Some were swingers, some quietly married; a few really were the members-of-threesomes that our culture’s sexual mythology insists we all must be. Some of us refused to label ourselves at all; for some, perhaps, that’s a cop-out, but for others it may be a return to the way we experienced our sex before the doctors intervened and gave us names. Surely many of us—myself included—find bisexual a sorely limiting term for the polymorphous way we experience our sexuality. Many discussions centered around this: “Why should I call myself anything at all? I’m just sexual.” Many seemed to agree that until “just sexual” was a suitable name for everybody, we who love both have political and social gains to make by identifying as a community.

It’s impossible to draw you a clear picture of what a bisexual is. As my observations about the group who gathered for the conference show, the community is too diverse for any generalizations to hold water. And I think that’s wonderful! If anything, the several hundred bi’s who came to San Francisco are unrepresentative of the many who don’t even know a bi movement is forming around them. Goddess knows, the heterosexual community is plagued by an assumption of “normalcy” that exists only for the few—plenty of hets are every bit as kinky as I am, whether or not they’d admit it to anyone but their partners. In recent years the gay and especially the lesbian communities have attempted to establish their own versions of that myopic “normalcy” as one subgroup and then another pronounced upon the right, “politically correct,” way to be gay. The result has been predictable: Many twist their experience and feelings to try to fit the mold, while others define themselves according to subsexual identities—“leather daddy,” “lesbian who sleeps with men,” “femme dyke.” It is just as ridiculous and potentially damaging as some heterosexuals’ tendency to label one kind of sexuality acceptable and another not. The fact that bisexuals look like they will be even more difficult to corral and label seems incredibly positive to me. If we are all too different to establish a centrist standard of political correctness we’ll just have to learn to love our diversity. Perhaps, in exposing the fact that there exists no solid boundary between sexual orientations, no “fence,” we will help everyone understand that it’s okay to be sexual just the way they are, to explore and move and try different things. That, at any rate, is my hope for our movement. It would be a lesson, if we learned it well enough to teach it to our het and homo friends, that could change the world.

I saw that lesson in action in two different workshops I presented at the bi conference. My aim in “The Politics of Coming Out” was to discuss self-labeling and identifying oneself to others as bisexual—how that felt for people, how to get support for doing it, and, most politically, what effect it could have on the world around one to do so. I hoped to encourage people to see the potential of coming out: Not only does it help people feel better to not have to hide an important aspect of themselves from others, it also gives those others information about bisexual people—it gives bisexuality a human face. This works for desensitizing people to any kind of diversity, not just sexual; it’s easier to fight against society’s racist assumptions if you know people of other races, for example. (As you’ve no doubt noticed, acceptance of diversity is the biggest axe I have to grind—and I want it honed ’til it’s sharp.)

To my surprise, the bisexual women and men who attended that workshop had a slightly different agenda. Many of them were young and just coming out, but they didn’t want to just talk about bisexuality. They wanted to address coming out, identifying, and getting support as abuse or incest survivors; people with disabilities (especially “hidden” ones like environmental illness); of different culture, particularly those who were of mixed race and had the same kind of split around their racial identity as they did around their sexual identity; of different political conviction; and other sorts of personal diversity. As they spoke, it dawned on me that these people, drawn together to share the common experiences of a sexual identity, were passing the sexual to talk about wanting to “come out” as themselves. They wanted to claim all the parts of themselves, not just the erotic. Ironically, it was that possibility of sexual acceptance (so often the hardest kind of acceptance to achieve) that led them to assert the desire to be all of who they were. I had never seen members of a sexual subgroup do that before. I consider it a very good sign.

It made me wonder—and I have been wondering ever since—what it would be like to live in a world in which we were accepted, not just for our sexual desires (that would be a miracle in itself), but for everything about us. The most important, and moving, part of this scenario is that full acceptance by others will be impossible until we can first accept ourselves.

The discussion did not stray far from sex in my other workshop, “Carol and Loraine Talk about Kinky Sex,” which I facilitated with Loraine Hutchins, my new friend from Washington, D.C. We had just met, but we’d been corresponding for a long time: She is the editor, with local activist Lani Ka’ahumanu, of Bi Any Other Name, and I had “met” her by mail in the process of submitting a piece for the book. She’s a wild woman, and so am I, of course, so I had the feeling it was going to be a smokin’ workshop.

We sat among a very large circle of people who, true to my experience in the coming-out workshop, wanted to talk about all of who they were. We were sadomasochists, exhibitionists, beastial-ists, cross-dressers, people who liked sex toys, people who used gender as a sex toy, people who liked sex in groups, people who liked masturbating better than anything, people whose fantasies seemed unacceptable even to them. I reminded us that, to the heterosexual world, we were virtually the textbook definition of kinky simply by being bisexual. For some of the people in the room, that was as far out as they got—it didn’t seem very wild after all, considering the company they were keeping. I watched as a roomful of people struggled with their socially inculcated desire to make each other wrong, label someone else as “really” perverted, and manage to find a way to respect each other and try to tell the heartfelt truth about each one’s sexual difference. Of course we found a lot of similarities as well as differences (that always happens once you shut up and listen), and the amount of hot, sexy truth-telling that went on there made me wonder if perhaps bisexuals aren’t pretty special people after all. The kinky ones, anyway. It seemed that the very process we had gone through to acknowledge our bisexuality made us more thoughtful and open about the other aspects of our sexuality. And since community and identity politics lag behind for many of those other sexualities, talking about and getting support for those secret parts of ourselves was truly precious.

Maybe it wasn’t our bisexuality that made us special, prepared to share our secret lives so readily, but the magic of being part of a crowd coming together for the first time and absolutely thrilled and awed by itself. At any rate, it was quite an experience. The nineteenth-century shrinks would have been blown away—most twentieth-century ones too, I suspect. I wonder if my open and honest fellow conferees know how rare it is for a group of strangers to get down like that.

It is part of our emerging belief system that we bisexuals are destined to play a role of mediation between gay and straight: We are not fences but bridges. But I have glimpsed more. I have seen a future keynoted by respect for what makes us distinct as much as for what unites us. Perhaps it is the future of identity politics, when we splinter not into a handful of special-interest groups, but refract into all the colors of the rainbow—and some of us, the space between the colors. No simple names—of our ethnicities, our political affiliations, and certainly not of our mercurial sexuality—can do justice to the complexity of who we are. But the naming begins the process of acknowledging that we are not all alike—that there truly is no such thing as normal. It’s enough to make me thank the doctors for making up those silly names, for trying through artificial definition to separate us from one another. It means I can look forward to a world in which it’s accepted that there are many, many ways to be. Bisexual versus monosexual? It’s just a start.