Do Bisexuals Truly Exist?
Here's my punch line to this shaggy-dog tale: it's a silly question to ask in the first place. Besides, what difference does the answer make and who cares?
Incredibly, bisexuality (the big, invisible sexual orientation) was in the news this week. An article in the New York Times by Benedict Carey* reports on a new study concerning bisexuality to be reported by "a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto". The study undertook to measure (my short summary) the penile response of men who self-identified as straight, gay, and bisexual (30 to 40 of each).
The shocking conclusion:
The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.
Hence the title of the article, since the hoary old saying among many gay men (well, straight ones, too) is to the effect that bisexuals don't truly exist: "all men are either gay, straight, or lying".
This has generated some controversy, at least among gay writers. Consider Michael Giltz writing at AMERICAblog ("Bisexuality Study: NYT Gives Prominence To Disgraced Researcher")
You would think, you would hope that the New York Times would do a little research of its own before splashing the work of Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the study's lead author.
One little note: by "head author" he means "senior author"; the "lead author", as described by the article, is "Gerulf Rieger, a graduate psychology student at Northwestern". Even more oddly, I thought, the "lead author" is not even quoted until halfway through the article, and quoting of "Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the new study's senior author", the other presumed authority, is a treat saved for even later in the article. Read Michael's post to see the surprising background on Dr. Bailey, which suggests that he just might have a bit of an agenda going with his research.
Anyway, bisexual identity is a serious issue, although I don't always feel very personally involved in it since I identify as a gay man. I admit that I tend to step — or leap — over issues of whether bisexuals "truly exist" in some objective, physiological way, or whether sexuality and sexual orientation is entirely a social construct — not to mention all the land-mine infested areas in between and surrounding those two — by taking a phenomenological, operational approach: if a person says he's bisexual he's bisexual, if she says she's bisexual then she's bisexual.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I don't seem much point in the attitude that goes "well, he say's he's bisexual, but I think he's really gay and in denial". More often than not it's projection from the mind of a gay man who is attracted to another man who, in effect, says he's not interested. Experience shows that it only leads to tears before bedtime.
I also refuse to argue "terms" and "definitions", and it usually indicates that one has run up against a "define your terms" person whenever the word "truly" appears in a sentence, as in "Do bisexuals truly exist?" We all know what we're talking about, and there's rarely anything useful to be learned from arguing about what a "true bisexual" is, or whether they "truly exist".
Hence my phenomenological approach, which sounds cold and indifferent, perhaps, but which I think is accepting and non-judgemental: if someone tells me he or she is bisexual, I accept it, because I don't see a good reason not to. Whether I think they're "truly bisexual" or really "gay and in denial" doesn't have much point to it, and I tend to find tiresome those people who endlessly go on and on about.
This came up this morning, and incidentally gave me some work to do, when I had a call from my friend & writing colleague
# Ron Suresha. My connection to Ron is multi-fold, but among other things he's been my editor for a couple of Bear-Erotica anthologies that have been published in the last few years (me in my nom-de-porn guise as Jay Neal), plus I designed and maintain
Ron's website.
Michael Bailey, author of the so-called research on bisexual men reported in the New York Times, has a history of publishing spurious psychological text which attempts to alienate queers. His book "The Man Who Would Be Queen" was so discredited among most psychologists as to cost him his dept chairmanship at Northwestern University, disparaged and outraged the US transgender community, and so vehemently declaimed by the GLBTQ intellectual community that the Lambda Literary Foundation withdrew its award of a Lammy (and led LLF president Jim Marks to recently resign). Now, this "expert" Michael Bailey has turned the focus of his distorted vision of human sexuality from transgender folks to bisexual men.
He was also talking today to some journalists who are showing some interest in the story. The main reason they called on him is that, rather coincidentally, he has a book being published in August (by The Haworth Press), a non-fiction anthology called
Bi Men: Coming Out Every Which Way, which talks about many of the issues that this article raises.
And finally, my today connection: I just this morning did the web page for the forthcoming book at Ron's site. By the way, my next story to be published in a book of Ron's will be the nostalgic piece, "Duck Tails and Fins", that I wrote for the companion fiction anthology,
Bi Guys: Firsthand Fiction for Bisexual Men, also to be published by The Haworth Press in about a year's time.
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*Benedict Carey, "Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited", New York Times, 5 July 2005.
#On the phone this afternoon, we were discussing Ron's aspirations for increasing "sexual literacy" (there was context, but that train of thought is long out of the station), and decided that perhaps we should call ourselves "sexual literacy workers".
on Saturday, 9 July 2005 at 21.29
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Terms and definitions are important. Without some common understanding, intelligent discussion becomes impossible.
I believe what distinguishes sexual orientation is where romantic longings direct a person. A little boy who gets a big crush on the little girl who sits two rows over in his school room and the following year gets a crush on the pretty young woman he has for a teacher that year is a cinch to be heterosexual. I expect the same is true, except for the gender of the objects of crushes, for a little boy who is homosexual.
I think if you have a grown person who develops genuine, strong romantic longings for or focus on people of the same and opposite sex at different times, you'd have a genuine bisexual.
The thing to keep straight is that behavior and orientation aren't synonymous. I recall reading, for example, that studies have shown many men will engage in sexual activities with other men if they have no access to women for long periods, as happens in prison or, in years past, aboard Navy ships. But once back in society, they go on from there as heterosexuals, typically for the rest of their lives. Their behavior adapts to their situation, while their underlying orientation remains constant.
To me, the more interesting question regarding bisexuals concerns whether they are confused and/or conflicted, as might be indicated by having relationships with people of both genders simultaneously. Or are they will o' the wisps who respond to others they find attractive episodically and serially, one gender at a time?