Courage

ACKNOWLEDGING MY occasional attraction to members of the same sex has led me in some interesting directions, both intellectually and physically. Though I’ve thought about girls since I was about 17, I’ve only had one female lover. And though moments with her were few and scattered across years and even continents, they rank as some of the most erotic experiences of my life. That first time–I’m sure the six previous years of regular fantasizing probably had something to do with it–was easily the most turned on I’ve ever been. Ever. I didn’t even know it was possible to be that hot. Even when men turn me on (and they do), it’s so easy for them to ruin it by starting to poke and prod before you want them to. But with her that was never an issue, and the safety of it all was incredibly arousing.

Of course, the degree of my response was also terrifying, and I can’t say we handled the new twist IN our relationship very well. We had been close friends, roommates, and looking back I can see that what we avoided was what bisexuals everywhere find it easy to avoid: Actually loving someone of the same sex. One major downside of being bisexual is that you are not forced to fully deal with and accept your capacity to love and be loved by someone of the same sex, the way a 100-percent gay person is. You can just squash those feelings away somewhere (even IF they sometimes leak out) and just go back to safe and unthreatening straight relationships.

This is basically what we did, even while we were messing around with each other, and after a while we drifted apart.

Now, years later, I think I would be much more able to handle a relationship with a woman. My fantasies have even advanced from older-woman-tying-me-up to me-tying-up-innocent-co-ed (I’m 32 now). Of course, in the meantime I’ve gone off and married a man–a straight man even, and not even one of those gender-bending bisexual guys or swishy effeminate straight boys (they do exist) who were some of my best pre-engagement boyfriends, and for whom I will always have a lasting affection. (To his credit, my husband is very fond of his lavender cashmere sweater, and, back in the 1980s, used to wear eyeliner when he went out dancing.) Have I assimilated? Have I sold out my bisexual siblings?

No. I feel as much like a visitor from Mars as I ever did when I move in most of society, but that has much more to do with my personality, which I will not go into here, than my sexuality. I suppose gay/lesbian/bisexual activists might dismiss me out of hand as a mere poseur, a pretender, who never fought the fight, who never really risked anything. But even if I were gay, I don’t know how politically active I would have been anyway–I’m allergic to marching and chanting and group decision-making. I prefer to express myself and hear others say things in a more complex and individual way, such as by writing little essays.

It is true that to the average person I meet or interact with casually, I am pretty much entirely closeted, unless I am flirting with them. I did go through the whole Coming Out bit in a way (as a matter of fact, I made a sort of little announcement in this very newspaper), even calling my mom and dad to tell them I was bisexual. I don’t remember what my mom said, though she was probably used to the idea since my cousin had finally come out as a lesbian to the family. But my dad, who was a therapist, said, “Chris, everyone I work with who’s bisexual is really messed up.”

My dad’s wife also wrote me a bewildering and hurtful letter blasting my “revelation,” but she later apologized and said she didn’t know what she was talking about. Since then I’ve never discussed it with them, and in a way I wish I’d never brought it up. My sexuality is none of my parents’ business, and I realize NOW that they really don’t want to know about that part of my life anyway. When I got married I didn’t sense any big sighs of relief, though; my family has never been oppressively heterosexual. They just seemed happy that I’d found someone.

Or perhaps I’m being naive.

I could conclude with a lecture on Why Straight Sex Could Really Use a Little Queerness (that is, a break from the standard heterosexual routine and mindset), or the theory that Everyone Is a Little Bisexual and If You Acknowledge Those Feelings Within Yourself It Will Open Up Worlds. Perhaps I could insist that Bisexuals Are Queer Too, describing the time my sort-of-girlfriend and I were maced while kissing in a bar in Prague. I could rant about how American culture is terrified of ambiguity, and demands of its citizens a branded identity: Gay, Straight, Democrat, Republican. Or maybe I could just say something along the lines of Entering Your Bisexual Phase? Go for It, Baby, Cuz the Mainstream Will Get You Soon Enough! But I won’t. Because I’ve written all those articles already and thrown them away, and you don’t really want to read them. Aren’t we all sick to death of posturing and bragging and performance?

Anyway, I’m thinking more these days about buying a weekend shack in the Catskills and whether my fertility is still intact after all those ovarian cysts and whether my husband resents me for stealing the extra room in our apartment to write in even though he says he doesn’t, than I am about sex. Or what the world would be like if we didn’t all have this fucked-up Ozzie and Harriet/Judeo-Christian possessive heterosexual model of a relationship in our heads. Or what sex might be like for young women if they got to know it first with each other instead of with drunken, groping young men. Or how less violent men would be with each other if they could acknowledge their attractions instead.

Or about Elizabeth and where she is now and what might have happened if we’d had more courage.

Christine Wenc was the editor of The Stranger between 1992-1993. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York.