[ This message is from the RIME BBS Network "Gay Issues" Conference. Please do not attempt to reply via e-mail. ] Southern Voice September 25, 1993 copied with permission from Southern Voice BISEXUALS MYTHS IN THE MIDDLE "They can't make up their minds." "They just can't admit that they are gay." "They sleep with everybody." Bisexuals are often on the receiving end of those kinds of comments from people in the lesbian and gay community, many of whom will not even concede that true bisexuals even exist. But these men and women in the sexual middle, accepted by neither gays nor straights, insist that these myths really are myths. What follows are their stories, told from both the male and female perspective. WHAT ABOUT THOSE BREASTS? by Richard Eldredge During a recent night out at the Armory, [REDACTED]] had several gay friends grill him about exactly what he finds attractive about the female gender. "I found myself explaining the virtues of breasts to a group of guys who have never even touched a female breast," says [REDACTED], 28, who is bisexual. "I found myself defending my sexuality, attempting to explain what makes women attractive to me. It's hard to nail down exactly. It could be the perfume or the way her hair looks. Finally, I just gave it up. I realized I wasn't making any sense to them whatsoever." The walls of [REDACTED]'s Virginia-Highland apartment speak volumes about his orientation. Two large Madonna posters (one featuring the Material Girl in leather while the other has her completely nude save for a few well-placed bangles and beads) fight it out for wall space with various framed glossies of tanned male models wearing Speedos. He has a cartoon taped to his refrigerator as well. The drawing features three squirrels riding in a car as the indecisive driver squints at the various signs and forks in the road ahead. The caption below reads: "OK, who let the bisexual drive??" "I think it's a funny comic strip, basically," says [REDACTED]. "But in some small way, I also see it as a small subtle jab from the homosexual community toward us." It's only been a year since he rang up his friends and family back home in Michigan to announce his bisexuality. "A lot of times, you get that raised eyebrow when you tell people, like, 'Oh, you're one of them?" he says. "I've found that the homosexual community here considers us to be part of them, but suspiciously. I hear 'Why can't you make up your mind?' a lot. I think you have to be bisexual to understand it." [REDACTED] says that he discovered his bisexuality at 12 or 13 when puberty hit. "I knew even at that young age that my feelings toward both sexes were viewed as abnormal, but I really thought that was natural for everyone and that the homosexual aspect would go away as I got older." It was when he was 14 that he heard the word "bisexual" for the first time and realized that he wasn't alone, that there was a word for his "condition." "In high school, I thought that I had to make a choice, so I made the easy choice, to be straight. It wasn't until I went to college away from my hometown and my parents that I began to explore my homosexual side. It was shortly after that that I realized that I didn't have to make a choice." [REDACTED] says that he feels equally comfortable going out to bars whether they're located in Buckhead or Midtown but that, as a rule, since he moved to Atlanta last year, he finds himself spending more time in the city's gay clubs. "For reasons not relating to sexual attraction, I would say that presently I'm more apt to want a relationship with another man rather than a woman. I feel more compatible with guys." Back in Michigan, however, [REDACTED] had relationships exclusively with women. And the women he's dated here don't know about his bisexuality, an intentional move on [REDACTED]'s part. "I think that most women would run for the nearest exit if I told them," he explains. "Automatically they would think, 'Oh, I'm going to get AIDS' or something. If the relationship started getting serious, certainly, I would tell them. It's important first, though, to get to know the person rather than a stereotype." He admits to still being in the dark on a lot of the gay male mindset. "A lot of gay people just tend to write off bisexuals as people who are just coming out, people who aren't yet comfortable with the 'g' word or the 'h' word. What they don't understand is that there are all kinds of bisexuals out there. Some of them are married but still want to have fun in a gay club. My personal feeling is that there are a lot of homosexuals out there who are really bisexual but, because of group pressure or whatever, don't explore it. I've just heard too many supposedly gay men tell that story about getting drunk and accidentally sleeping with a woman." "Of course, my hair stylist has a different perspective entirely. He tells me that the only reason bisexuals call themselves that is so they can get a date for Saturday night." Steven Webster, 26, is a bisexual man who is married to a woman. He says he has also found that most bisexuals have had a unique experience in coming to terms with their sexual nature. "Most people say that the major issue here is coming out. I don't agree. The major issue is not coming out - it's the realization that you can receive satisfaction from either sex, that you can have a wonderful and fulfilled relationship with a woman or a man." Even though Webster is now separated from his wife, he says that his sexuality didn't break them up. "It was interpersonal differences that led to us not being together anymore." Webster admits that, like a lot of other bisexual men, he thought getting married would close the door on his homosexual yearnings. "The temptation to be with men didn't go away. I thought that getting married would abate those urges. But that's not why I got married. Like anybody else, I got married based on one thing - love." Webster says that even though he's now free to go out to gay clubs, he doesn't often go out. He says that when he does go out to a gay establishment, he has to spend most of the evening explaining himself and his lifestyle to gay men. "Being bisexual has created problems for me," he admits. "The biggest thing is ignorance. It cause a lot of high emotions, particularly from gay men. they flat-out don't understand." Webster says that even though his first marriage didn't work, he would never rule out getting married again. "If it's the right person, it's the right person, regardless of gender. That's the really unique and wonderful thing about being bisexual. You have the ability to fall in love with absolutely anyone. I view it as a great gift in many ways." [REDACTED] and Webster both say that it is difficult to find other bisexuals to talk to about their unique situation. That's the chief reason Sedric Maurice, a 30-year-old professional dancer from Atlanta, started the Bisexuals of Atlanta Network in May 1992. Maurice says that it was almost impossible for him, even though he's outspoken about his bisexuality, to find other bisexuals with which to share experiences. So he put an ad in Creative Loafing to organize the group, and the response surprised even him. "We went from maybe a dozen people at our first discussion meeting to 37 participants at our first potluck dinner two weeks later," he says. "Now we have around 100 members, and we're still seeing growth." The network sponsors dinners, parties, speakers and discussion meetings and has members who address the political, the social and the psychological needs of its members. Maurice says that Bisexuals of Atlanta's membership is presently split pretty closely between male and female members, a statistic he's excited about. "I've learned a lot from our female members, and we may even start a separate organization exclusively for our female members." "The energy is incredibly high when we come together for a meeting. Just to see 100 bisexual people in a single room at a single time is very inspirational. There's no outside forces at work, no hatred. We're all accepted in that room." For more information about the Bisexual of Atlanta Network, call (404) 908-3413 TREASON TO THE SISTERHOOD by Gale Reter As a bisexual woman, Cat Archer knows the attitude she would probably face if she walked into a radical feminist lesbian group. "You are a traitor. They say first of all that you're lying to yourself and, second, you're a traitor and, third, you're going to screw up their life because you're going to have a relationship with them and then you're going to leave them for a man." Anita Bressenham, another bisexual woman, says that if she went into a women's bar with her husband, just to enjoy the atmosphere, some women would jump to salacious conclusions. "We're not swingers looking for some cheap thrills. Everyone thinks that we're promiscuous, and they turn it into a sex issue. And it's simply not true. Even if you have the capacity to love both sexes, this doesn't necessarily mean that you will love them both at the same time or will ever feel comfortable doing so." Says Archer, "Just because you're bi doesn't mean that you have to sleep with everyone you know." Like bisexual men, Bressenham and Archer say they face hostility and misunderstanding both from the straight world and from women who love women exclusively. As Bressenham puts it, "my favorite myth is that we are sitting on the fence and we can't decide. My response to that is, 'We're trying to tear it down because we don't believe it should be there.'" Archer says, "If heterosexuals find out, in their mind you no longer belong with the hets. You're gay. And when you approach your gay friends, hoping they'll accept you, it's another story." Another comment that bisexuals often get from lesbians and gay men is that they are not really bisexual but stuck in a phase on the way to fully accepting their true sexual nature. "Part of the mythology that we have to fight as bisexuals is that we are in transition, that there is no true bisexual - we are all in transition from being gay to being heterosexual or heterosexual to being gay," Archer says. "Some people may go through it as a transition, but I haven't personally known anyone who went through that as a transition and said, 'Well, I'm bisexual buy now I wish to identify as gay.'" "I don't think I will ever become just gay or heterosexual, because I've gone through reconciling with myself that I have the capacity to love anyone. After having that, I can't see limiting myself. to me, that is more logical than [saying], 'Once you've had a woman, how can you go back to a man?' Once you've had it all, how can you limit yourself?" Female bisexuals face an additional obstacle in their interactions with the lesbian community. The specter of AIDS has not yet emerged as a major health problem among lesbians, and some lesbians feel that sleeping with bisexual women increases the chances of that happening. "Statistically, I am at greater risk with a male partner than with a female partner," Archer says. "But it is not your sexual orientation that makes you high risk, it is the sexual activity that you participate in." Bressenham says that while she always "had the capacity to aesthetically appreciate women," it wasn't until later in her life that she came to the realization that she was bisexual. "When I actually fell in love with a woman and realized that I had the capacity to erotically appreciate a women, I said, 'I'm bisexual,'" Bressenham says. She is now involved in a "quad" relationship with her husband and another couple. Currently, Archer has two men in her life. "People say, 'Well, why didn't you choose a woman if you're bisexual? And I have to say that a man came along, not a woman, and that's who I fell in love with. Not that there wasn't room for [a woman], but I don't feel that I have to be 50-50." "The thing that bisexuals want people to realize is that we're not a see-saw where you have to be on one end or the other," Bressenham says. "There is a whole range between heterosexual and homosexual." Often isolated from both the straight and gay worlds, bisexuals in Atlanta have begun to form networking groups. Both Archer and Bressenham are members of Bi Atlanta. "We don't have a community," Bressenham says. "Nobody openly recognized us, and until I started meeting people through the group, I thought that my husband and I were completely out of the spectrum and that there was nobody out there like me - very much like gay people did before their movement started beginning." "The group has been really wonderful for me because it has helped me to realize that there are other people out there who feel the same way I do." And what message would Archer and Bressenham like to send to the gay/lesbian community? "We are out here and we are part of you," says Archer. "I'd like to see a lot of the fear in the lesbian community about association with us dissolve. I'd like to see people be more honest. I'd like to see people stop labeling and limiting themselves." "We don't want to be labeled and we don't want to label you," says Bressenham. "We just want to accept everyone as a human and get on with it. Gay people have been oppressed for thousands of years, and we want them to understand that they have become the oppressors now because they will not allow us to open up and be honest without being discriminated against." "The gays have joined the hets in condemning us, but we want them to understand we want the same things. We want to live in peace." For more information on Bi Atlanta, call (404) 256-8992. For reading materials on bisexuality and bisexual issues, Charis Books and More in Little Five Points has a bisexual section. --David B. O'Donnell ____ atropos@netlab.cis.brown.edu \ / 72241.1701@compuserve.com; Dowager@aol.com \/