Bisexuals' gathering signals increased unity, acceptance -------------------------------------------------------- Friday, February 5, 1999 By RUTH PADAWER Staff Writer The Record (a newspaper published in Bergen New Jersey) What is obvious to Jennifer Hadlock is dubious to others: She is bisexual, neither gay nor straight, an idea that makes both camps view her with suspicion. "I'm too gay for straight people and not gay enough for gay people," said Hadlock, a 27-year-old community organizer. "Gays and lesbians think bisexuals aren't committed, that we have one foot in the other camp. And straight people think bi just means gay. They're both wrong. I'm bi no matter who I'm dating." Hadlock is one of the 175 people expected at this weekend's Tri-state Regional Bisexual Conference on the Douglass campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Such conferences, including national and international meetings, have been more frequent in recent years. A decade ago, such large conferences were unheard of. Considering how long bisexuality has been forced to stay underground, such fervent organizing in the past few years is a testament to the movement's coming of age. It is a frontal assault on the way society divides desire into two simple categories -- heterosexual and homosexual -- as if sexuality were either black or white, and never gray. At times, gays and lesbians have resisted that message as much as straight people have, because at its core, bisexuality challenges the claim that sexual orientation is set -- once and for all -- before birth. Despite that, bisexuals have managed recently to gain a measure of recognition within the gay rights movement, as well as an identity as an assertive community of their own. The Bisexual Resource Guide -- a bisexuals' yellow pages -- now has 2,100 entries for newsletters, Web sites, and political groups, among other resources. When it began 13 years ago, it was an eight-page photocopied list of 40 groups. "It's a completely different world than it was just a few years ago," said Lani Ka'ahumanu, who came out as a bisexual in 1980, to the horror of her lesbian friends, and went on to become a leading voice of the movement and co-author of its bible, "Bi Any Other Name." This weekend's conference includes workshops on coming out in the workplace, alternatives to marriage, and building a bi movement. No one knows how many bisexuals there are, but the 1994 landmark survey of sexual practices by University of Chicago sociologist Edward O. Laumann found that many more people have sex with both men and women -- and find both genders desirable -- than identify themselves as bisexual. While only 0.8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women call themselves bisexual (compared with 2.0 and 0.9 respectively who identify themselves as homosexual), far more report being attracted to both genders (3.9 percent of men and 4.1 percent of women), and even more report having had sex with both. Freud himself wrote that all people are actually bisexual, and sex-research pioneer Alfred Kinsey once noted, "Nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into pigeonholes." It was Kinsey who, in 1948, devised the scale from zero (completely heterosexual) to six (completely homosexual), reflecting his view that sexuality ranged over a continuum. Anthropologist Margaret Mead likewise concluded, "A very large number of human beings, probably a majority, are bisexual in their potential capacity for love." Not everyone shares that view. "I think this activity violates natural law, and it's wrong, period," said Len Deo, president of the New Jersey Family Policy Council in Parsippany. Still, he added, bisexuality offers a weapon in the effort to "convert" gay people to heterosexuality. "Basically, bisexuals are confirming what we've been saying all along: There's choice in human sexual behavior, and that refutes the claim of being born gay." Most of the straight world, however, is far more oblivious to bisexuality, or merely tucks it in behind homosexuality. "The narrowest definition of bisexuality is the one my mother uses: She thinks I'm only bisexual when I'm single and actively seeking a man or woman. Other than that, in her mind, I'm either straight or gay," said Tom Limoncelli, a regional organizer of this weekend's conference and a coordinator at BiNet USA, which, at nine years old, is the oldest bisexual organization in the country. "There are a lot of people who feel like my mother does. Not many of them are bisexual." Homosexuals have often dismissed the idea of bisexuality, calling it is merely a phase -- a sign of confusion, or experimentation, or gutlessness from people afraid to admit they're gay. When bisexuals spoke from the podium at the Northampton, Mass., Pride March several years ago, several gays and lesbians turned their backs in protest. Gay rights organizations held seminars titled "Bisexual Men: Fact or Fiction?" The Gay Activist Alliance of Morris County -- a prominent statewide group -- rejected a proposal in the early 1990s to add "bisexual" or "transgendered" to its mission statement. Emboldened by the feminist and gay rights movements, however, bisexual activists pushed for change. When Colorado considered an amendment denying civil rights protection for homosexuals and bisexuals, bisexuals distributed leaflets and buttons at gay rights rallies, reading: "The Right includes us. Why don't you?" By 1993, the high-visibility national rally for gay rights had a new name: "March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Equal Rights and Liberation." In New Jersey, a few years later, the Gay Activist Alliance reconsidered its previous position and voted to include bisexuals. Since then, openly bi activists have joined the leadership of national gay rights groups, and one prominent organization, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, has announced that at its next quarterly board meeting, in May, it will consider changing its name to be more inclusive. Bisexual campus groups have cropped up at many colleges; students now talk about their "fluid sexuality." Bisexual characters have appeared on television sitcoms and in films. What was once eccentric -- David Bowie and Elton John as chic bi -- has lost some of its shock value. Model Rachel Williams, singer Ani DeFranco, National Organization for Women ex-President Patricia Ireland -- who has a husband and a female companion -- and Sandra Bernhardt are just a few on the growing list of celebrities who are open about their bisexuality. "Bisexuality is the big elephant in the living room that no one in the gay mainstream and the gay aristocracy wants to talk about," said Loraine Hutchins, another prominent bisexual spokeswoman, who co-authored "Bi Any Other Name" and will be the keynote speaker at this weekend's conference. "The queer movement as a whole has ceded The idea of 'choice' to the Right. We're saying: So what if it is a choice? Why don't we have a right to choose?"