Why Are People So Afraid of Bisexuals?

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet. Posted August 5, 2009.

I don’t like the term bisexual; I prefer to think of myself as a person of no fixed sexual orientation. It better suits the amorphous world I inhabit.

“How do you identify?” 

“Oh, I’m a PoNFSO.”

Okay; it’s a little unwieldy, and abbreviated, it hardly rolls off the tongue. So, neither fish nor fowl, I content myself with being the bacon in the LGBT sandwich.

I didn’t come of age as a free-spirited bisexual.  I always knew it was what I was, at least from the point at which I knew what the term meant. As a child, I had crushes on both boys and girls. When my best friend in high school lost her virginity, I was beside myself. But how was I to tell her I was in love with her -- especially after I had spent the previous year utterly smitten with a boy?

I remember being very little, maybe four, watching the Ed Sullivan Show, mesmerized by the siren on the screen, Miss Peggy Lee. In my memory, she is wearing a satin evening gown and a feather boa. I’m laying on my belly, looking up at the television. I can still feel the scratchy texture of the fake-braided rug on my elbows as I propped up my head with my arms. I didn’t know whether I wanted to be Peggy Lee, or just wanted to touch her.

But I was equally magnetized by Frank Sinatra -- the brash insouciance, the jacket slung over the shoulder, the cock of the fedora. I didn’t know whether I wanted to touch Frank Sinatra, or be Frank Sinatra.

Splitting the difference

When I was 19 or so, I told my mother that I was bisexual. She did what a good Catholic mother should -- the functional equivalent of sticking her fingers in her ears and singling the la-la song. It was a non-response born of kindness, and she had reason to hope I was just going through a phase. I hadn’t had an encounter with a woman yet; that would have to wait another 23 years. 

For most of my adult life, and across all sectors of my life, I had tried to split the difference between the acceptable and the unacceptable. I had wanted to be an actress and a musician, a career path not condoned by the world of the newly-minted middle class from which I sprang. So, I opted to be a writer, thinking this was somehow more respectable.

I was rarely drawn to lovers who fulfilled anybody’s dream of respectability. I liked hippies and artists and working-class men with big brains. I never really saw myself as marriage material, but when the man I was in love with asked me to marry him, I said yes. I didn’t want to lose him.

And somewhere, deep inside me, I Iiked the patina of respectability that came with having a husband. Never mind that I was a lefty writer and he was a hippie carpenter, or that we were penniless, apparently by choice. The operative terms were that I was a wife and he was my husband. I could pretend to be almost normal.

I treated my bisexuality in a similar way, as if my marriage rendered it moot. I figured that if I just didn’t go there, I wouldn’t have to go there. It might have even turned out that way, if my marriage hadn’t busted up.

(Here I’m afraid I must disappoint you, reader; my marriage did not fall apart because of some torrid affair with a woman, on either my or my husband’s part. No, it came apart for the usual reasons that marriages do: disputes over money, career goals and whether to have a child.)

A geographical cure was in order, I thought. I moved from the New York area to Washington, D.C. There, on my new job, I met a handsome young woman who happened to be a lesbian. She was brilliant, a writer, and had great taste in music. I no longer had a reason not to go there, so I went. The sex was as natural as any I'd ever had. I was 42.

Playing lesbian house

At last, my bisexuality was fulfilled. I was a full-fledged member of the LGBT community, right?

Well, a funny thing happened when I told my lover’s friends that I was bisexual.  They looked at me askance. One took me aside to tell me that she didn’t have any patience for straight girls who were “playing lesbian house.”

Time went on, the affair ran its course. But even though I had become a presence in the LGBT community, whenever I identified myself as bi, it seemed I met with resistance. For many of my new friends, it seemed, calling yourself bisexual was just a reluctance to admitting being gay.

I began to believe them. After all, I had no idea who I was anymore. I was as close to being a broken person as you could be and still hold a job. Just about every shred of my former identity was gone. I was no longer a wife and no longer a journalist. (I had given up my career in an attempt to save my marriage.)

See more stories tagged with: bisexuality, lgbt community

Adele M. Stan AlterNet's acting Washington bureau chief, and the author of Debating Sexual Correctness (Dell).

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