The Bisexual Option

Second Edition

Fritz Klein

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317713203
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios LGBT

Soon to be translated into Japanese! The Bisexual Option explores bisexuality, explains the bisexual, and explodes myths surrounding this large "unseen" segment of the population. Now in its second edition, this intriguing book gives an overview of bisexuality. As there is still no book that covers the subject like this one, it is must reading for establishing a contemporary view of bisexuality and those committed to a bisexual lifestyle. Fritz Klein, an experienced psychiatrist and expert in bisexuality and sexual orientation, explains the concept and the variables of sexual orientation and where bisexuality fits. He covers many subjects in the book including:

• myths of bisexual nonexistence and the "either/or" dilemma
• intimacy, both emotional and sexual
• an explanation of bisexuality and the Oedipus Complex
• definitions and examples of the healthy and troubled bisexual
• major sociological findings about bisexuality
• the bisexual in history
• the bisexual as depicted in the arts
• factors that will influence bisexuality in the future The book helps readers understand where they fit on the sexual orientation continuum. The Bisexual Option aids in explaining who bisexuals are and why they have problems in heterosexual as well as homosexual societies and shows bisexuals that they are not alone. Even helping professionals will find information on this "invisible" but large segment of the population. A variety of readers will want to read The Bisexual Option including the bisexual community and individual bisexuals, the homosexual communities which include many bisexuals, mental health practitioners, psychologists, both students and professionals, university students, married partners of bisexuals, HIV/AIDS workers who wish to become acquainted with how bisexuality affects the risk to the heterosexual community, sexologists, and researchers.

PART I:
WHAT IS BISEXUALITY

Chapter 1

The Threat

The New York Public Library, known for its liberality, has two monographs on bisexuality. No books.

Why?

The Index Medicus, which lists all articles appearing in scientific journals on every conceivable medical subject, had 47 pieces on homosexuality. None at all on bisexuality. The category is omitted altogether.

Why?

The New York Psychoanalytic Institute, one of the major organizations of its kind in America and, indeed, in the world, has in its library catalogue over 600 items on the subject of homosexuality–and only 60 on bisexuality.

A few weeks prior to gathering the above information for the first edition of this book, I received a call from a friend asking me to lunch. Liz is the wife of a successful New York designer of women’s clothes. There was an urgency in her tone that caused me to respond with an immediate yes, although I was quite busy.

“I’m free tomorrow,” I said.

“I need to talk to you today.”

“How about a drink around four?”

“Your office?”

“Fine.”

When she arrived I poured her a drink. As we sat down she said, “Do you always offer your patients a drink?”

“I hardly consider you a patient.”

“Well, I don’t know. You’d better turn on the tape. I may never say again what I’m about to say now.”

I switched on the machine.

“You know that Bill and I have been married for over twenty years.”

“Quite happily, from all appearances.”

“In our case appearances are not deceiving. We are very happy.”

“So you and Bill are not the problem.”

“In a sense, we are. How do I put this?” She sat a while staring into her glass. “About a month ago we were at a dinner party and this psychologist was there, an expert of some kind. He was holding forth on the nature of sexuality and he said that the homosexual and heterosexual were facts of life, and that the bisexual didn’t exist. Bill challenged that opinion and the psychologist just took him apart, saying that the bisexual is nothing more than a closet gay. Bill really felt bad when we left. Bill said he didn’t believe anything the psychologist said, but still he couldn’t come up with an effective rebuttal. Since that incident we’ve been in constant dialogue over bisexuality. We’ve talked about little else, and it’s begun to affect his work and our lives. There are the children to think about, and …oh my God, I don’t know where to begin.”

“Which of you is bisexual?”

“We both are.” She stopped to light a cigarette. “Does that surprise you?”

“It’s been rumored for years that Bill is gay and that your marriage is a front.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.”

“What do you … what have you believed about us?”

“That you are a couple very much in love. That Bill is bisexual and that you are heterosexual.”

“You didn’t suspect about me?”

“No. I suppose because you haven’t been that open about it. Bill has been known to flirt now and then with both men and women.”

“He hates the ‘gay’ label. Not because of the connotation-God, half the people we know are gay-but because it simply isn’t true. I feel … ah … well, that’s it. I really don’t know how to label myself. Neither does Bill. For years we entertained the possibility that we were superneurotic. But now Bill feels that he’s not neurotic but just the opposite. Healthy.”

“What do you think?”

“You know that there is a flood of opinion out there that would drown both Bill and me with an army of experts to say that you can’t be bisexual and healthy. Bill is better off being thought of as gay, with his marriage as a front, than he is as a bisexual.”

“Does Bill know you called me?”

“Yes. We both want to resolve this. We hate being told we don’t exist sexually. Do we? Does the bisexual exist outside of being a confused gay, or just sex-mad?”

“Not according to many experts.”

“How do you feel?”

“One, I think it’s a presumption to tell people they do not exist. And two, I think the bisexual not only exists independently of the homosexual label, but exists period.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Well,” I laughed, “that’s a tall order at the moment. I have a patient coming in a few minutes, but give me some time to think about it.”

When Liz left I took down a book from my shelves called Changing Homosexuality in the Male by Dr. Lawrence J. Hatterer. I had read the book previously and I remembered that the point of view toward the bisexual was on the side of nonexistence.

In a list describing common and uncommon homosexual subcultures, Dr. Hatterer places the bisexual in the “disguised” group-along with closet queens and married males who regularly practice homosexuality. This almost universally held opinion is passed on to the public, both heterosexual and homosexual. And because it is easier to accept and understand the bisexual as a disguised homosexual, public acceptance of expert opinion goes for the most part unchallenged.

As disguised homosexual, the bisexual is by this process “reduced.” We tend to categorize people, to put them into the most readily available group. In the worlds of commerce, government, and religion, this is to some degree logical. That this mistaken practice is also adopted by the individual in his or her search for self-identity-and held onto at all costs for lack of a suitable alternative-is tragic.

This is what Liz means when she says that Bill is better off being thought of as gay. Taking it further, if public and expert opinion are the only guiding standards to self-identity, Bill is “better off” thinking of himself as gay. Human beings need to belong. They need to communicate with their peer group. They need to sit around the communal fire not only in warmth but in dignity.

This is especially true in our society when it comes to the business world. In the world of business, banners of visible achievement are flown. Products are manufactured and sold, people are employed, money is made and lost, all in the name of business. Coca-Cola is as internationally known a symbol as the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes. Buying and selling is most successfully carried on when the people flying the banners know the buyers to whom they are selling. Advertisers know that certain groups of people will remain loyal to a product for a lifetime-if that product can be correctly aimed by means of a direct emotional appeal to the given particular group.

In government, too, the virtue of loyalty can be extolled and exploited for all kinds of personal gain, both good and bad-all the more easily if the exploiters know their targets’ place in society and can keep them there. Wars are “sold” this way, just as are worthier propositions, such as that all humans are created equal. As long as human beings can be simply classified as one thing or the other, the possibilities are endless.

It would be absurd to suggest that bisexuals are any more or less evil (or, for that matter, good) than heterosexuals or homosexuals. It is absurd as well to suggest that bisexuals are any more or less loyal than other groups around the communal fire. But the quality of loyalty may be different. What we have failed to see up to this point is that the bisexual may be less loyal to the status quo than to nature. Differences, freedom of choice, have been a threat to the group since before the beginning of recorded time.

One of the classic romantic questions asked of psychiatrists is, can one love two women or two men at the same time? My answer to that one is, “One can if one can.”

Can human beings love both men and women at the same time? They can if they can.

What does this do to the individual’s standards of loyalty? Is he or she able to carry the burdens of trust necessary in relationships that are more than transient or skin-deep? Or is he or she, by playing a dual role, a “spy”?

During wartime, spies, when captured, may be shot. An even worse fate may await citizens convicted of treason. They are often held up to particularly vicious public scorn before being killed. As much today as in the remote past, loyalty to “one’s own” is held dear by the human race, north, south, east, and west. We simply do not condone spying or treason. They are acts so abhorrent that we are shocked by their existence, and often feel no guilt in erasing the spy, the traitor, so that no living trace remains. Being “drummed out” is, in a very real sense, being told that it would have been better had you never been born, and that from this time forward the position will be taken that you never were. “My country-right or wrong,” is a line straight to the human heart, a place of worship in the human psyche.

The bisexual resembles the spy in that he or she moves psychosexually freely among men and among women. The bisexual also resembles the traitor in that he or she is in a position to know the secrets of both camps, and to play one against the other. The bisexual, in short, is seen as a dangerous person, not to be trusted, because his or her party loyalty, so to speak, is nonexistent. And if one lacks this sort of loyalty, one is so far outside the human sexual pale that one is virtually nonexistent.

Let us return again to Dr. Hatterer’s interesting word “disguise.”

A disguise is a deceit. A human being who spends his or her life in disguise is not to be trusted. It follows that a Jew in Nazi-ruled Europe who disguised him- or herself as a non-Jew to keep from being killed was not to be trusted by anyone. Yet, in retrospect, there are few of us with a claim to intelligence, let alone humanity, who would not trust the secret Jew above the S.S. officer who proudly showed his true face to the world.

In our society, with its strong negative view of homosexual behavior of any kind, it is quite understandable when bisexuals, or “closet” homosexuals, disguise their behavior. But bisexuality is not disguised homosexuality, nor is it disguised heterosexuality. It is another way of sexual expression. Although it contains elements of both heterosexual and homosexual behavior, it is a way of being, in and of itself, a way neither better nor worse than the more accepted ways of healthy heterosexuality and healthy homosexuality.

No matter what sexual orientation a person has, he or she lives on a continuum. Despite the certainty of eventual death, the life of an individual goes on until that time. During the course of a lifetime, each individual plays a number of roles: father, mother, soldier, teacher, heterosexual, homosexual, and so on. We take comfort in the labels; they help define our relationships with one another and with the world at large. Yet with each label we acquire, we limit our infinite possibilities, our uniqueness. It is our insistence on labels that creates the “either-or” syndrome. This is well illustrated by the mother and father who came to see me about the progress of their 25-year-old daughter, who was a patient of mine. They are a nice couple, prosperous, good churchgoing citizens. All their lives they have marched in a sometimes meandering, sometimes straight line for God and country. They have been rewarded with a comfortable life. When they came to see me everything was in its place except their daughter, who had recently announced to them that for the moment she was living with a woman. They were particularly upset because they were paying part of my bill for the therapy necessary after their daughter’s recent divorce.

“Would you rather she hadn’t told you?” I asked.

“What kind of a world is this where such a thing can happen?” the father replied.

“What has happened?”

“If this is where therapy leads, then to go on paying is throwing good money after bad.” The mother was on the verge of tears. “A lesbian. We sent her to you and now she’s a lesbian.”

“Why do you say she’s a lesbian?”

“She told us.”

“She told you she was a lesbian? She said that?”

They looked at each other as though allied against some dark, sinister force. The mother answered. “She’s living and doing God knows what with a woman. What else do you call it?”

“What did your daughter call it?”

“Whatever she calls it, she’s too sick to know what it is.” The father waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal.

“She says she loves this woman,” the mother said, comforting her husband with a pat on the arm. “She actually wants us to meet her.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“We don’t know what to feel. Do you know that she and the woman she’s living with have an open relationship?”

“What does that mean to you?” I asked.

“Well, it means that she sees other people as well. One of them is a man.”

“She’s had too much freedom. That’s her problem.” The father’s voice was choked with anger. “A man here, a woman there. You can’t live that way. You’re one thing or you’re another. That’s the danger. Too much freedom. She’s a lesbian now, no matter what she says to rationalize her disgusting behavior.”

“Has she suggested to you that she’s a bisexual?”

“We don’t believe that for a minute,” he said. “She’s telling us that just so we won’t make trouble for her.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“You’re one thing or you’re another.” The father banged his fist on my desk. “I’ve lived long enough to know that, and I’ve been in business too long to believe anyone who says they’re one thing today and another thing tomorrow. How long would you and I be in business, doctor, if we lived that way?”

“Your daughter’s love life is not a business.”

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