at the
"Sexual Orientation, A Contextual Continum" plenary
the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (SSSS)
Eastern Region conference, Penn State
June 11, 1993
Copywrite 1993, Loraine Hutchins
"...neither manifest homosexuality nor heterosexuality necessarily correspond to any specific mental, somatic or hormonal characteristics, both the gay desire and the desire for the other sex are expressions of our underlying trans-sexual being, in tendency polysexual, but constrained by oppression to adapt to a monosexuality that mutilates it. But the repressive society only considers ONE type of monosexuality 'normal,' the heterosexual kind, and imposes educastration with a view to maintaining an exclusively heterosexual conditioning."
-from "Homosexual Desire Is Universal", in Homosexuality and Liberation: elements of a gay critique, English edition, 1980, by Mario Mieli.
Mario Mieli is one of the many beautiful people we've lost to the AIDS
pandemic, a gay-identified scholar, a father of Italian and British gay
liberation, a man who wrote from a love of bisexuality, not a denial of it.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself -- one out, loud, PROUD bisexual in the universe, speaking her truth in hopes of making us ALL, myself included, whole.
I've lived openly as a bisexual since 1971. I live alone, or with roommates, not lovers, by choice. I have several long-term lovers, one in particular I've been in a commited, primary, open relationship with for 4 years. I've had more sexual experience with men but am just as attracted to women; I just have a harder time acting on it. And none of this makes me "typically" bisexual. There is no such thing.
I've participated in and led bisexual support groups and sexual diversity training sessions for about 20 years. I'm also a political bisexual, an organizer involved in mobilizing bisexuals locally and nationally, most intensely since 1987 when the AIDs crisis and the last March on Washington first catalyzed us into action. (Any of you interested in the emergence of the bisexual political movement, please speak with me after this session. I have many contacts, stories, and resources to share.
When Lani Kaahumanu and I were doing research for our book, BI ANY OTHER NAME: Bisexual People Speak Out , we spent many hours making lists of every corny pun we could think of on the word "By", trying to come up with a title for the book. This title -- Bi Any Other Name - finally came to us, directly out of the experience of being bisexual. As we say:
"We bisexuals are caught between our heterosexual
and homosexual families. We're called by every
other name but bi, and still we dare attempt our
love."
BI ANY OTHER NAME is an anthology. It contains the coming
out stories, poems, and essays of 76 women and men. As we say in the book's
introduction,
Coming out bisexual, ... affects everyone. It breaks the conspiracy of silence, as gay people have also done. But it also challenges current assumptions about the immutability of people's orientations and society's supposed divisions into discrete (non-permeable) groups. Bisexuals' coming-out challenges other peoples' understanding of themSELVES.
***
I'd like to read to you from my current favorite book -
STONE BUTCH BLUES, by Leslie Feinberg. In this chapter the
main character, Jess, a working class lesbian, has been "passing" as a man
for a number of years. She first chose to pass as a man to get factory jobs
in the 1950s and then later took hormones for awhile in the 60s and had breast
reduction surgery. She struggled alot with her gender identity, not because
of her own confusion so much as trying to fit into society's categories.
She always knew she was a butch who loved femmes, whether people perceived
her as a woman or as a man. Jess knew she loved femmes. Her experience
with men was almost uniformly violent - so there was never any question about
her feeling bisexual. Then, after many years of living as a man she met
someone else like herself, a man, Ruth, who passed as a woman in the world.
Ruth has just painted Jess's bedroom ceiling for her like the sky.
...I sighed. "I really do have trouble not being able to figure out if what
you've painted is about to be day or about to be night."
Ruth rolled toward me and rested her hand on my chest. "It's not going to be day or night, Jess. It's always going to be that moment of infinite possibility that connects them."
Ruth's face was very close to mine. We became aware of the symmetry of our breathing. She slid her hand slowly along my body from my chest to my stomach. She dropped her eyes. I chewed my lip. "I'm afraid," I answered the question she hadn't asked out loud.
"Why?" she asked. "Because I'm neither night nor day?" I squeezed my eyes shut. I knew I would lose her if I wasn't honest; I knew I might lose her if I was.
"Yes," I told her. "That's part of it. Remember your geometric theory? More than double the trouble?"
Ruth rolled onto her back. "I'm not suggesting we do it in the road."
I stared up at my sky. "You know what I mean. But that's only part of
it. If I really have to be honest, it's because I'm afraid not to be with
someone who is night or day. I guess I felt like the femmes I was with anchored
me. It was the closest to normal I've ever felt."
Ruth curled up into my arm. "Were you her dawn or her dusk?"
I smiled sadly. "In the beginning I was her dawn. By the end I was her
twilight." We both sighed.
"You want more truth, Ruth? There's a place somewhere inside of me where
I've never been touched before. I'm afraid you'll touch me there. And I'm
afraid you won't. My femme lovers knew me well, but they never crossed those
boundaries inside of me. They tried to coax me across the borders into their
arms, but they never came after me. You're right there with me. There's no
place for me to hide. It scares me."
Ruth smiled sadly. "Isn't it funny? That's exactly why I would like to make love with you."
We lay quietly. I kissed her hair. "Oh, Ruth, I haven't had to navigate
sex in a long time, with anyone. I don't even know who I am as a lover anymore.
But I'm scared you'll leave me now. Can't we figure it out as we go along?
"
****
Bi every other name ...
Okay. Is this relationship described between Jess (the woman passing as a man) and Ruth (the man passing as a woman) a gay relationship? A heterosexual relationship? A bisexual relationship? A transgender relationship? Or all of the above? And, why does it matter?
You tell me. Right now, in our society, many people are telling each other that it seems to matter a whole lot.
Let me read you from the April 9th Washington Blade, an article
entitled, "What is a homosexual?: Senate Armed Services Committee wrangles
w/Gay sex" -
"There's considerable dispute, even in the military,
as to what a homosexual is," said one panelist at
the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings March
29 & 31. That `dispute' had spilled out into the
public arena when more than a week later, radio and
television program guests were debating WHETHER
sexual orientation is a choice OR a result of
biology."
Notice anything overty, or subtly "either/or" about both this gay reporter's
framing of the debate and the debate itself? Yes, BOTH heterosexuals
AND gays tend to frame sexual orientation in terms of either/or, (either
day or night - as Jess's friend Ruth would say), nothing about all that's
in between.
Something the Blade didn't report, and neither did any other journalist in all the hundrds of accounts I've read on the topic - is that in the first day of hearings one lone Senator asked his colleagues if perhaps they weren't all together on the wrong track assuming there are two discrete, separate groups (gay and straight) in the military, that there might also be .............bisexuals. And you know, NO one acknowledged that he had even spoken. No one reported his question. It has disappeared from the transcripts. This is how strong our denial, our clinging to either/or polarities and boxes is.
Current Research
I'd like to tie up bi summarizing some current research findings on this expanding bisexual middle ground. But first, I must comment on the persistent denial of bisexuality still evident in most research to date, research, I might add, still ridiculously obsessed, with whose numbers, or whose brain parts, (you KNOW what studies I'm talking about) are bigger than whose.
There is an alarmingly renewed presumption in much of this "new" research on the origins of homosexuality that we humans are not responsible for our sexual choices, that we are driven. How reassuring that "that fuzzy line between gay and straight is now certified as biologically inviolable," as Daryl Yates Rist says in his Nation article.
Ironically it's the homoPHOBES that believe in BIsexuality MORE than doctrinaire born-gays. Homophobes believe "that the subversive kernel of same sex love ...lies waiting to bloom in all of us, under proper watering." Terrified conformist gays plead, "Oh, no, we won't infect you, it's not catching." Is this a DISEASE MODEL, or what?!
Or as Kay Diaz says in her article in Z Magazine, "It's no accidnet the powers that be find solace in hearing that gay biology is destiny. They want a cure." (And it ain't a cure for AIDS!)
Homosexuality's cause would not be important unless it was stigmatized in the first place. Why are we not looking at brain differences between accepting folk versus bigots, about what causes fear and hatred of gayness, or blacks, or Jews, or women?
Ever since loving-our-own stopped being what people DID and became who we ARE, it's gotten more and more polarized into warring camps. And what polarities ignore, of course, is the middle. If we're looking for gay genes, or brain formations, where are the bisexual ones? How can we assume a dichotomous, bi-polar gay/straight biology without looking and waht constitutes the middle? Yet we don't.
It may be that sexual DESIRE is heavily programmed (through maternal
hormones in the womb, if not genetics), AND that sexual BEHAVIOR is ...
ultimately attributable to all those things that make up what we call "nurture"
or environment or culture. However, we'll never find that out the way we're
going. As the authors of "Looking for Gay Genes," an article in the newsletter
of the Council for Responsible Genetics put it, "Failure to come up with
clear environmental causes does not mean that the answer lies in biology.
All the studies fail to acknowledge that sexual attraction depends on personal
experience and cultural values and that desire is too complex, varied and
interesting to be reduced to brain structures, hormones or genes. ... Grounding
difference in biology does not stem biogtry. "
This is also exactly the limits of identity politics and why I feel
it is much more important for us to build queer-inclusive coalitions among
progressive peoples -- for better health care, jobs, environment and housing,
for a non-racist, non-sexist society --than to fight for a gay rights movement
that will primarily benefit middle class white men.
As Daryl Yates Rist, a gay scholar going AGAINST this reformist, born-gay
trend, says in his Nation article, "Ultimately...it is cowardly to
abnegate our individual responsibility for the construction of sexual desires.
... Refusing the expedient lie and insisting instead on the right to fulfill
ourselves affectionally ... is an act of utter freedom."
And, I would add, one we cannot forfeit, cannot do without.
***
There are an increasing number of bi-identified, and gay-identified, researchers now doing research on bisexuality. Dr. Ronald C. Fox, a research psychologist from San Francisco, prsented some of his preliminary findings at the SSSS national conference in San Diego this fall. Fox compares self-identified bisexual women and men. He used a self-report survey questionnaire with a sample of 835 women and men and asked them about their orientation and how and when and to whom they self-disclosed. He found that women "first became friends with gay, lesbian and bisexual persons and formed opposite and same gender relationships earlier than men," but that "men first thought that they might not be heterosexual earlier than women."
In Fox's study both women and men first considered themselves bisexual at about the same ages, men a little younger than women, and the ages, to some extent, are getting lower, as the middle ground of possible bisexual identity opens up.
I don't mean to sound too hopeful either. It is very difficult to be an out bisexual or gay/lesbian or transgendered person today. Often it amazes me that we continue to exist, in the face of such hatred and misunderstanding.
Sociologist Paula Rust, who teaches at Hamilton College, in upstate New York, has done a different study comparing lesbian and bisexual women. She published a March 93 article in Gender & Society on her research entitled, "`Coming Out' In The Age of Social Constructionism." In comparing 346 lesbian-identified women to 60 bisexually-identified women she found that the bi women came out later and tended to change their self-label more frequently. However, the variations in identity history among ALL of them overshadowed the differences between them. BOTH lesbian and bi women chose different labels at different times in their lives. She discusses how the either/or construction of gay/straight identities contributes to a falsely linear, developmental model of coming out. In actuality only some women progress from awareness of homosexual feelings to questioning heterosexual identity and then to permanently identifying as lesbian. There are so many variations on this experience that they can't just be considered deviations from a "norm".
Fifty-four percent of her bi women had identified as lesbians within the past year. It is well known that people will tend to identify with options they feel they have -- not those they don't have. As long as bisexuality is not a safe or popular option, the discontinuity we see between behavior and identity will continue. As Rust says, "...people whose experience of sexuality is highly varied tyr to fit themselves into a dichotomous model of sexuality...In particular, the construction of sexual categories based on partner gender creates a boundary that bifurcates sexual experiential space."
The absurdity of trying to label some women-loving-women lesbians and others "not" was pointed out to me several years ago in reading the late 1980s Kinsey study done at a womens' music festival where almost the majority (43%) of self-identified lesbians (these were lesbians, NOT bisexuals) admitted to having had opposite sex relations within the past five years, often with men who were having sex with men. This is where the denial of bisexual identity gets us, yes.
One Percent - My Ass!
Did you notice that just when we were gearing up for the third March
on Washington, this time for Lesbian, Gay and BI
Equal Rights and Liberation, and transgender people were lobbying to have
their concerns included too - just when all these people and those (PFLAG,
Straight But Not Narrow) that love and support us too might have added up
to MUCH more than ten percent, -- that that's when the studies came out clamining
only 1% of us are queer?
I have here the front cover of the April 1993 SF BAY TIMES -
entitled "One Percent - My Ass!" Let me read to you from their analysis:
In the last month, amid much fanfare, a couple of major research institutes
released studies that claim to establish, once and for all, that a screaming
ONE PERCENT of the adult male pop is gay. More (or less) on lesbians later.
(Bi's? Trans? Hello?)
Two separate studies were conducted by research guys at the Guttmacher Institute and National Opinion Research Center (NORC). We're absolutely certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that this research was in no way related whatoever to the increasing visibility of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders in our collective struggle for our human rights. We have no doubt that these research guys conducted their studies uttlerly without bias, we're certain they left no stone unturned in their quest to determine the absolute number of queers in America.
Anyway -- we thought we were everywhere, but what the hell. Now they tell us that there are only 2.5 million of us, after all. (And according to NORC there isn't a single gay person anywhere in the state of Arizona.)...
This is a groundbreaking data collection, not to be missed. So we've selected some of the more interesting and enlightening statistics from their research for you...
The Real Thing:
* There are no (zip, zero) married gay people. (Gutt)
* High school dropouts are 100 percent heterosexual. (Gutt)
* Bisexuals do not exist. (Gutt and NORC)
* There are no large populations of gays and lesbians in the Southern
United States. In particular there are not many gays in Florida, like, you
know, Key West or Miami. (NORC)
* A grand total of 1.5 % of Americans masturbated in the past 24
hrs (was this question asked in San Francisco?) Fully 11% masturbated in
the past month. (NORC)
and then they add:
If You Believe That...
* According to several national exit polls after the Pres. election,
3% of voters were willing to tell pollsters they were gay or lesbian. Since
that translates to 3 million gay voters (a) every single gay person in the
US voted and lots of supportive straight people were glad to say they were
gay, or (B) not all gay people voted but lots of us voted more than once
or (C) gay people were so excited to vote we stood in line twice to answer
pollsters questions about the experience.
* Disco was probably invented by straight people.
* 99 out of every 100 waiters in SF are heterosexual.
* Only 1 out of 100 women on the LPGA golf tour is a lesbian.
(I'm leaving out a lot of this)
and they conclude:
What This All Really Proves:
is that "...1 percent of all Americans are willing to tell a complete
stranger who calls them at home that they suck cock, lick pussy, or take
it up the ass.
Duh."
***
To me, the most important point in the whole numbers and size
queen madness is this --
until queer people are free to identify and experience as we will, there
will be no study that's reputable or trustworthy. The information is
too compromised, it's as simple as that.
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