Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics. Paula C Rust
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calling themselves lesbians. One reader wrote, “I don’t consider any woman a ‘dyke’ who sleeps with a man. Period.” Clausen’s Fall 1990 defender pointed out that some of the points made in readers’ letters were not responsive to Clausen’s article at all. She wrote that “the letters ignored what for me was the most significant point: that Clausen no longer feels she can attach a label to her sexuality. This point was made quite clearly, and I am confused by the letters condemning her for continuing to call herself lesbian.”22
The fact that letters ostensibly written in response to Clausen’s article were less than completely responsive to the article itself suggests that Clausen’s article was only a trigger. Most of the women who wrote to the editor were obviously engaged in a much larger ongoing debate with a rather complicated history. The two men who wrote brief complimentary letters were apparently not party to the same discourse. Whether they were actually unaware of the heavy political debate within which Clausen’s experiences took place, or whether, as men, they could not participate in this debate, their letters gave the impression that they were peacefully oblivious to the bullets flying past their ears.
Out/Look’s Spring 1992 issue on bisexuality included fifteen pages of cartoons and a selection of articles titled “What do bisexuals want?” “Just add water: Searching for the Bisexual politic,” “Strangers at home: Bisexuals in the queer movement,” and “Love and rockets.” Under the titles, the authors explored the debate about bisexuality, analyzing the political sources of lesbians’ concerns—and secondarily, the concerns of gays in general—about bisexuality and outlining the strategic and ideological difficulties facing the bisexual movement.
In the next issue, the editors wrote that they had “received a striking number of responses” to the issue on bisexuality, and that “Curiously enough, the last time we received this much mail was in response to Jan Clausen’s ‘My Interesting Condition’.” “Tender spot?” they rhetorically questioned their readers. According to the editors, most of the letters they had received were from “bisexuals who felt uncomfortable with the constraints of a ‘debate’ around bisexuality as we had posited it.” They included excerpts from these letters in a sidebar that spanned the length of a printed dialogue among three bisexual writer/activists who presented their views of what the issues really were. Amanda Udis-Kessler, Elizabeth Reba Weise, and Sarah Murray explained that bisexuals are diverse people with a variety of personal needs and political goals. Weise pinpointed the growth of the lesbian and gay movement during the 1970s and 1980s—especially the emergence of a political lesbian identity—as the source of the current antipathy toward bisexuality, and Udis-Kessler attributed the recent growth of a political bisexual identity to this antipathy. Weise also pointed out that some of the most active leaders in the lesbian movement were really bisexual women who either repressed part of themselves in the name of lesbian purity or remained quiet about their involvements with men, and who had recently begun to show “a little more of the reality of their lives.” Bisexuals were not outsiders seeking to ride lesbian and gay coat-tails, but insiders who were finally being honest about themselves.
In the Lesbian and Gay Community represented by Out/Look, bisexuality is a very controversial issue with important implications for lesbian and gay discourse. In 1990, Clausen established a connection between “lesbians who sleep with men” and “bisexuality,” thereby constructing bisexuality not as a new issue to be added to an existing repertoire, but as a challenge to ongoing lesbian and gay discourse. Lesbians’ objections to bisexuality were aired generously and taken seriously, not marginalized and dismissed as they were in The Advocate. But by 1992, these objections were replaced by the voices of bisexuals themselves. The debate among lesbians about the place of bisexuals in the lesbian community had become a debate in which bisexuals themselves were an interested party and had an active voice. Bisexuality as an issue had been replaced by bisexual issues, for example, the development of a bisexual politic and the relationship between bisexual politics and lesbian and gay politics. Whereas The Advocate’s “Bi and Beyond” had framed the issue as one of bisexual inclusion in the lesbian and gay movement, Out/Look had gone one step farther to construct not only bisexuals, but a political bisexual voice.
Meanwhile, in the conservative world of 10 Percent, the issue of bisexuality—let alone bisexual issues or the bisexual voice—barely exists at all. 10 Percent came closest to tackling the issue of bisexuality in its second issue, published in Spring 1993. “My girlfriend is becoming the man of my dreams” was written by Kate Bornstein, a “bisexual heterosexual lesbian gay male transsexual woman who is in a committed relationship with a lesbian man named David.”23 She pointed out that bisexuals gained recognition by inclusion in the name of the 1993 March on Washington but transgendered people did not, thereby portraying bisexuals as members of the gay establishment that excluded transgendered people. Judging from the lack of letters to the editor in the next issue, readers had no opinion on the subject. The word “bisexual” appeared again a few issues later when Eric Marcus wrote, “I’m not even all that comfortable being grouped with bisexuals, let alone transsexuals, transvestites, and queer straights” because “we have different lives, face different challenges.”24 Two letters to the editor in the next issue disagreed, arguing that Marcus’s attitude was divisive and phobic. Neither reader mentioned bisexuality except when quoting Marcus; the issue constructed was a general one concerning appreciation of diversity.
In lesbian and gay publications, the issue of bisexuality—which is primarily of interest to lesbians—competes for space with gay issues such as AIDS. In lesbian publications, more time and energy can be devoted to hashing out the details of lesbian ideology, including the political meaning of bisexuality. Dedicated to the discussion of issues that are relevant within lesbian feminism, Lesbian Contradiction provides a receptive audience for discussions of lesbians who have sex with men and bisexuality.
Like general lesbian and gay publications, Lesbian Contradiction initially constructed the issue as one of lesbians who have sex with men. In issue number 2, “Many Lesbians Are Going Straight Now . . .—A Conversation” consisted of thirteen comments written on a wall in a women’s bathroom, one in response to the other. The women had thirteen very different opinions and perspectives. Some discussed their feelings about lovers who leave them for men or offered opinions about whether lesbians who “go straight” are capitulating to compulsory heterosexuality or whether they were never lesbians to begin with. Others acknowledged their own attractions to men and wrote about the isolation they felt because they feared censure by lesbians. Voice #11 mentioned that she was just beginning to find support from other bisexuals and asked others not to judge her. Voice #12 agreed that “We should all be free to be who we are,” but Voice #13 revealed that liberal views are not always accompanied by understanding, “[e]ven if some people can’t make up their minds who they are!”25 A year later, Gwen Fay expressed her exasperation over the fact that lesbians can be as prejudiced as anyone else, and deplored the fact that there are so few opportunities for us to air our differences that the conversation had had to take place on a bathroom wall.26
These opinions were echoed in 1989 after Lesbian Contradiction published “Desire and Consequences: Sleeping with a Strange Man” by Juana Maria Paz, “A Second Coming Out” by Stephanie Sugars, and “I’m Still a Lesbian” by Jane Dwinell.27 One reader blasted the magazine for printing Paz’s description of “women and men fucking each other.” She did not “[condemn] Juana for having heterosexual sex” but she resented Juana’s claim to lesbian identity and Lesbian Contradiction’s decision to give space to heterosexuality when space for lesbian expression was so limited already.28 The editors defended their decision by reiterating the newspaper’s mission to serve as a broad forum for discussion of feminism by all women, not only lesbians.29 Dwinell wrote