One Gay Drop
At the beginning of the week, Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin ("Today In History: 1958 Broadcast On 'The Homosexual In Society'", 24 November 2008) noted the 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking radio broadcast in Berkeley, California. He wrote about the broadcast that "This is not only believed to be the first radio broadcast to deal favorably with gay people, it is also believed to be the first to include an actual gay person to speak directly of his experience."
The bulk of the article is an article written just after the event by the late Del Martin for the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, a pathfinding group of lesbians. Del Martin became a more familiar name this past summer when she married her long-time partner, Phyllis Lyon, the first same-gender couple married in San Francisco after marriage equality became the law (before it became against the law again, etc.).
The article makes fascinating reading. I pulled out this one small excerpt for a rather different reason. I think this was more noticeable to me since my involvement in marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
"Bisexual invisibility" has been an issue in recent years. In some ways people in more recent decades have rather taken the mere existence of bisexuality for granted, although there seems at times to be widespread disbelief that bisexuals actually exist. It's an uncomfortable situation for self-identified bisexuals.
I was interested to find that it–the existence of bisexuals–did not even come up in the Kinsey report. This was not because of a blind spot or prejudice on the part of Kinsey (so far as I could tell). Instead, it was because Kinsey, by design, refused to describe sexual orientation as such in favor of documenting and measuring that which was objective and quantifiable, namely, heterosexual or homosexual activity.
The famous Kinsey Scale does not really describe a continuum from "heterosexual" to "homosexual" with "bisexual" in the middle. The scale describes a history of behavior with men at one end who had experienced exclusively homosexual activity, men at the other end who had experienced only heterosexual activity, and those with roughly equal experience of both falling in the middle.
Whether there was even the idea of "a bisexual person" available at the time is unclear to me. And that's why this excerpt from Del Martin's article caught my attention. In the section quoted, Dr. Beach enumerates the "varying degrees of homosexual behavior" (which itself seems naive and dated), including the scary "latent homosexual"–scary particularly to those latent ones!
On the subject of bisexual invisibility I was interested to read that "those who find satisfaction in both homosexual and heterosexual behavior" are merely one sub-classification in the broad category "homosexual", what today we would see as the definition of "bisexual". Evidently, at the risk of drawing a parallel between the gay experience in America and the black experience in America, in the 50s–and remember that this broadcast came 10 years after the Kinsey report–there was also a "one-drop" rule for homosexuals: one homosexual experience, even a latent tendency, and you were a homosexual!
WHAT IS A HOMOSEXUAL?
Dr. Frank Beach Jr., anthropologist and professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, deplored the fact that nowhere in the previous discussion had there been a definition of the term “homosexual”. He recounted the varying degrees of homosexual behavior: the latent individual who has tendencies but who manifests no overt behavior, the individual who has one or two experiences in his life time, those who find satisfaction in both homosexual and heterosexual behavior, and those with exclusive homosexual experience.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Sunday, 30 November 2008 at 00.49
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I think the definition changed over time. Books like George Chauncey's "Gay New York" make it clear that before the second world war, a man could have sex with men, he could have sex with a lot of men, he could have sex only with men — but so long as he was the "top", he wasn't a homosexual. Only the person who "bottomed" was homosexual.
It was in the crazy 1950s that the "one drop" definition came to apply — one homosexual encounter, and you were queer for life.
on Sunday, 30 November 2008 at 02.16
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I have a problem with this whole thing on several levels. It's long been known heterosexual men will in some situations engage in sexual activities with other men. No romance involved. No feelings of love and attachment, just mutual pleasuring. When the opportunity to have an opposite-sex partner comes up, that's what they do. And what about the masochist who "submits" to sex with another male as a means of self-degradation or punishment? (The masochist's terms, not mine.)
I think activity is next to useless as a determinant of orientation. It tells me something that bisexuals were categorized as a subset of homosexual. Why that and not as a subset of heterosexual? Evidently, the "one-drop" rule. Do it once and you're "tainted" for life.
As for the "latent" thing, I'm very skeptical. Seems to me it's a term conjured up during a very repressive period to explain deeply closeted homosexuals and maybe some who had had a same-sex experience or two and then felt guilty and feared being found out.
It's not where a person's genitals go, but rather where his/her heart is or wants to be.
So, where do bisexuals fit in? I suspect most bisexuals strongly favor one gender or the other, where romantic attachment is concerned, however much they can and do enjoy sexual activities with partners of both genders. Just a hunch.
on Wednesday, 3 December 2008 at 01.15
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I think your remarks are probably about right, SW, but there's nuance. Certainly there's situational homosexuality (prison is the usual, ready example) that says little about orientation. But fifty years ago the mere idea of "orientation" as something one felt, versus something one did, seems still to have been an emergent concept (as per Bill's comment, too).
I am an adherent of "gay" as an orientation, an identity one feels, the orientation one is aware of regardless of what one does. But I don't really argue with Kinsey's decision at the time to focus on activity as objective reality. Particularly at that time it was impossible to get reilable statistics on who was "homosexual" (or "homophile", or whatnot), since one could only ask the respondant and the answers were much, much less likely to be candid in those days. Trying to determine what people did seemed much more tractable, much more measurable with some hope of accuracy.
A subordinate point of mine is to highlight that Kinsey never, ever reported anything akin to a statistic like the "10% of men are gay" that is sometimes attributed to him. He did report on how much experience of "the homosexual" men had over some time period in their lives. (I quoted that here if you'd like to see it again.)
As for "the bisexual", I think part of my observation is that "bisexual" as a category hardly existed at the time, and yet Kinsey's approach to characterizing the sexual behavior of the American male implicitly included what we would think of today as bisexual behavior.
on Thursday, 4 December 2008 at 03.08
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I followed the link, Jeff, and it was very interesting and well done. Regarding nuance, in my comment above, I would've done better to write, The masochist's perceptions, not mine.
on Thursday, 4 December 2008 at 14.20
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SW, I was thinking "nuance" in relation to what I thought Kinsey's thinking might have been regarding sexual practices versus sexual identity with an ear towards hearing how those ideas have grown and shifted in the past six decades.
I had no argument about the possible "humiliation" in an S&M scenario, where it might happen. Humiliation is a function of the embedding society and a person's relationship with that, and it could work that way for many people and, as Bill points out, in many modern cultures where it is humiliating (if the person accepts the "humiliation"–it requires both!) to be a receptive partner, but perfectly normal to be an active partner in a homosexual act. I might prefer to that it not be so widely viewed that way, but there you go.