After Look
Both Ways, my rah-rah book about having a love
life with men and women, was published last year, I was
pummeled by dating rejection from folks I had never met (and
probably never would), as in these choice words
responding to a review: "I offer a warning to
anyone who finds himself or herself the object of Ms.
Baumgardner's attentions: She appears to be incapable
of sustaining any relationship," and "I
don't presume to know whether Baumgardner is bi or
gay, but based on this review of her book I wouldn't
date her." One person just came right out and
said, "Steer clear of bisexuals." The
prevailing biphobia was almost charming in its retro-ness,
prompting me to wonder, Is it 1980? I mean, really, do
people, especially gay women, still think it's
OK to hate bisexuals?
"Yes," said my ex Anastasia at the time.
"Next question."
I laughed,
because I thought she was kidding--or at least
commiserating about the "steer clear"
advice, given that lesbians and bisexual women fall in
love all of the time. But in fact, Anastasia was speaking as
someone who also distrusts women who look both ways.
"I've been with bisexual women in the
past who don't seem to be truly into girls, who
needed to be drunk to have sex," Anastasia explained.
"And the constant rejection wore me
down."
Other women are
suspicious of anyone who would identify herself that way.
"I live in the South," says Lisa Johnson, a
professor at work on a book about being a psycho
girlfriend, "where you will not get any dates with
women if you say you are bi." Johnson considers it a
big-time red flag when a woman on Match.com describes
herself as bisexual or bi-curious, similar to how I
react when people list Gravity's Rainbow as their
favorite book or express interest in tantric sex. "I
don't want to spend time on people who have not
developed a queer sensibility yet," says
Johnson, whose town of Spartanburg, S.C., is so conservative
that gay people go to meetings of Parents, Families,
and Friends of Lesbians and Gays because they are so
desperate for community.
Both
Anastasia's and Lisa's comments strike me as
hard on the sexually inexperienced bisexual person,
who, while annoying, has to start somewhere. (I too
did the old drunken-hookup-with-women thing back in the
day. Which might be why Anastasia is so frustrated by
bisexuals.) Their words also strike me as interesting
since both have been involved with men at least as
much as with women; Anastasia, for instance, lives with
her boyfriend, with whom she has a child. Self-flagellation,
anyone? "It's true," says
Anastasia, "my main issue with inconstant bisexual
women is I fear I am one." Anastasia's
trajectory seems to feed into the belief proffered by
some lesbians that since partnering with men still
trumps doing so with women in terms of social approbation
and even household income, why would you count on a
woman who could have a man? Isn't it just
setting oneself up to feel like some straight guy's
sloppy seconds?
Well, first of
all, most bisexual women are partnered with women,
according to Amy Andre, an expert on bisexual
women's health. Second, such a justification
for hating bisexuals relies on increasingly outdated
notions of men being more able to "take care
of" a woman financially. These days I doubt
that many women--of any orientation--choose a
mate based on earning power, and most people nowadays,
regardless of gender, expect to take care of a partner
as much as they are cared for. I grant that same-sex
partnerships are often stigmatized while opposite-sex
couplings are generally viewed as normative. However,
it is one thing to acknowledge that it is difficult on
a personal level to compete with the social
approbation male-female couples still receive, and
it's quite another to actively contribute to
the disparagement of an entire social group.
There's
evidence that bisexual women are suffering--in
quantifiable terms that will be of interest to anyone
who cares about human rights. Andre, who is
herself bisexual and has a master's degree in
sexuality studies from San Francisco State University,
reports that bi women experience more oppression and
stigma than women of any other sexual orientation. She
cowrote the book Bisexual Health--published in March
2007 by a coalition of organizations including the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy
Institute--which analyzed more than 100 studies that,
taken together, demonstrate "that bisexual
people have worse physical and mental health than
people of any other orientation," says Andre.
"There is a lot of evidence that bisexual women
in relationships with monosexual partners have notably
higher rates of domestic violence than women in any
other demographic," says Andre, who is in a
relationship with a nonhostile, phobia-free monosexual
woman. "If it were not a reflection of
biphobia," Andre concludes,
"there'd be no statistical difference between
the safety in relationships of bi women and women of other
sexualities."
I told Andre
that I had never seen any statistics that indicated assaults
were significantly higher for bisexual women, which gets at
another key feature of bisexual life -- lack of
visibility. Though it contributes to the dubious
privilege of passing as straight or lesbian, as the
situation might warrant, lack of visibility, like low
self-esteem, is rarely correlated with much good.
Citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and other sources, Andre notes that bisexual people
make up 50% of the queer population, yet, she says,
"I meet people all of the time who say that I
am the only bisexual person they know." Not long ago,
Andre keynoted an event, after which several people
approached her to share stories. "One female
doctor told me that she dated a lesbian who
wouldn't allow her to use the word bi to identify
herself in front of lesbian friends," recalls
Andre. "I felt her story was not unique."
The more I dug
in, the more jarring stories I heard. Author and
third-wave feminist Rebecca Walker, once the longtime
partner of Meshell Ndegeocello, is now living with a
man -- the father of her young son. She says she sees
animus in the "sometimes smug disregard" for
male partners of bisexual women, including her own.
She finds it odd, noting that "in his very
openness to partner with a bisexual woman," her guy
"is at least theoretically supportive of the
LGBT community and women's sexual
freedom." At the annual conference of a national
women's organization, Walker's partner
was chased out of the men's bathroom by a cabal of
taunting women. "They said because both bathrooms had
been turned into women's rooms," recalls
Walker, "he could finally get a taste of how it
felt to be in the oppressed minority." Sexual
harassment has come into play too. Walker cites a
recent incident at a reading for her book Baby Love
where a lesbian got in her space, rubbing her arm and
insisting she walk her home. "It was clear
[this woman] felt territorial," says Walker,
"as if I, a woman who had been in a long-term lesbian
relationship, was 'available' and would
continue to be until I was with another woman."
Coeditors and
friends Lani Ka'ahumanu and Loraine Hutchins were
bisexual when bisexual really wasn't cool, to
paraphrase Barbara Mandrell. Hutchins distinguishes
the free-form and inconsistent biphobia one might find
today from the much more intense historical tension, seeded
in a feminist movement that was dedicated to raising
up women and dashing patriarchy. "I
can't tell you how many feminist groups I was in
where lesbians confronted me and said 'We trust
you less than heterosexual
women,' " muses Hutchins, who is
partnered with a woman, of the good old days.
"They'd say, we know where they stand, and we
don't know where we stand with you."
Meanwhile, Ka'ahumanu remembers extreme derision when
she came out as bisexual in the '80s (after having
come out as lesbian in the '70s). "The
reaction was so intense. I was part of a
feminist--read lesbian--theater
troupe," Ka'ahumanu recalls. "People
who had been my friends the day before wouldn't
talk to me." Ka'ahumanu tells me about
one woman whose dog was a "known lesbian-crotch
sniffer." (The owner was quite proud of
this--and who wouldn't be?) At a march one day,
her dog rebuffed Lani's privates. The
dog's owner triumphantly announced, "We all
know why, don't we?"
The world was one
big battle of the sexes, and if you were a little bit
country and a little bit rock 'n' roll (my
preferred euphemism), you were cast as a dupe or a
traitor. Hutchins says she resisted pressure from her
sisters to entirely forgo men, saying, "I just
don't buy a feminist analysis that says my
attraction to men is something I should suppress.
That's a very 'ex-gay' philosophy." Besides,
even if she did closet her attraction to men, while
Hutchins might have appeased her separatist sisters, I
doubt she'd get past the crotch-sniffing dogs.
"I think
lesbians go to a scarcity mentality when they react badly to
bisexuals," says Ka'ahumanu, who coedited the
classic Bi Any Other Name with Hutchins. "They
have fought so hard for this piece of territory, they
have to hold on to it. It's too scary to let others
stand on it." And some of the insecurity is
legitimate, Hutchins argues, because lesbian identity
and politics often get eclipsed --"first by gay
men, and now by bisexual and trans issues."
Ah, yes. Trans
issues. They have always been linked to bisexual issues:
both theoretically, as trans identity speaks to the unfixed
nature of gender and bi identity speaks to the unfixed
object of sexuality, and historically, with bisexual
activists who fought for inclusion in the '80s
and '90s insisting that trans people be part of the
story too--at first meeting resistance and
deal-with-the-devil offers from gay organizations to
add the B to the acronym if the B's would just stop
worrying about those T's. Times have changed.
"The
gender issue has really altered the dynamic," agrees
Hutchins. "I remember this fulcrum in the mid
'90s. Bi women had created these roundtable
sharing things where lesbians would admit their fears about
bisexuals, which tended to be along the lines of 'I
can't compete with a man; I'm afraid I
can't satisfy her.' " But when trans
women and trans men entered the space, the focus
wasn't so much on the question Will a bisexual
woman leave me for man? as on Will I become a man? "I
teach at Towson University now, and there is not a
fierce identification with either the words bisexual
or lesbian," says Hutchins. "People are queer
or gender-queer."
Damn right, says
T Cooper, performer and author of Some of the Parts and
Lipshitz Six, whom I've known for around a decade and
whose father actually wrote the anthem "A
Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Rock n Roll."
I've always thought of Cooper as a lesbian--but
I was wrong. "If forced--forced--I
would use the term bi," Cooper tells me. "I
might have identified as a dyke, briefly, at age 22,
but it was always a bit unfixed and, I mean, if there
are places between man and woman, then the whole
lesbian/bisexual/gay thing sort of starts to slip
away...." Hutchins reminds me that some
other well-known trans folk pushing the boundaries
around gender, like Patrick Califia and Kate Bornstein, also
identify as bi (with reservations about the implied
binary).
In my book, Ani
DiFranco--a woman so ahead of her time she
doesn't have a nanny for her infant daughter,
she has a tranny--speaks to this shifting
terrain. "I'm in my 30s, and quite honestly I
feel like I am only beginning to awaken to my
sexuality...and to see people--really see
people," she told me. "I don't
even know what the word is, but see their chi or their
force, what is powering them around the earth. Some strike
me as very feminine, some masculine. I had a lover
once who was this beautiful woman and she was like a
goddess; she just seemed to embody femininity--so
gorgeous. And there are creatures out there that just seem
so masculine and they just embody masculine
energy...and they're not always guys. And
then there is all of this territory in between."
Not to toot our
horn, but bisexual people know about that territory in
between. "Bisexuality is very understandable,"
Amy Andre says when people claim to "just
not get" being bi. "Monosexuals take gender
into account in their attractions to others, and we
don't." If that tidy description is
true--and I think it is--we are part of the
emerging consciousness around gender, low self-esteem
aside. Change is always painful, and the bad news with
this shift is that butch, femme, lesbian, and even bi are
beginning to lose their power as labels, and with that,
hard-won culture and communities are going to fade, at
least a bit. The good news is that feminism's
enormous promise--that one about liberating the
individual--is perhaps within our sights as
never before. Why steer clear of that?