Bisexuality What Is It?

By Anastasia Toufexis

Happily married for 10 years, Richard Sharrard, a dance instructor, and Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and writer, blend in nicely enough with their neighbors in the middle-class community of Long Beach, Calif. But the couple's life-style is far from ordinary: Sharrard and Tessina are openly and unapologetically bisexual. During their unusually flexible marriage, Sharrard has enjoyed liaisons with half a dozen men, while Tessina has taken two female lovers. "It's the best of both worlds," declares Sharrard, who thinks nothing could be more natural than bisexuality.

In a world where sexual orientation is polarized into heterosexuality and homosexuality, bisexuality comes as a disturbing challenge, at once a riddle and a discomfort. "It threatens rigidity," says Lani Kaahumanu, a bisexual activist in San Francisco. "It threatens both sides of the framework." Bisexuals often inspire nervousness, distaste and hostility in both straights and gays and are all but ignored by scholars.

Lately, however, bisexuality has been hard to overlook. Bisexual characters are the newest twist in movies and TV shows, most notably Basic Instinct and L.A. Law. PBS recently broadcast a drama based on the lives of writers Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, both bisexuals. Authors Camille Paglia and the late John Cheever have confessed their sexual duality; recent biographies claim that Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant and Eleanor Roosevelt had affairs with both men and women.

But the issue has been more than fodder for gossip columns. The advent of AIDS has made bisexuality a matter of medical concern. Bisexual men who practice unsafe sex with male and female partners may help speed the spread of HIV through the heterosexual community. "Up until the time of AIDS, the term bisexual was hardly even used," says anthropologist Carmen Dora Guimaraes of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, "but with the spread of AIDS, we are now trying to flush out this enigmatic character."

Fearful of stigma and discrimination, bisexuals across the U.S. and Europe are becoming more organized and politically active, networking in such groups as BiNet and BiPAC. They are also challenging gay organizations, with which they have had an uneasy alliance, to focus more on bisexuality.

The activism has sparked a new debate about sexuality in general. Are people essentially either straight or gay, with bisexuality being merely the unnatural by-product of confusion and repression among some homosexuals? Or is bisexuality a third distinct orientation? Is sexuality governed by biology or culture? Is it fixed, an identity that is set early and endures through life? Or is it fluid, shifting with time and temptation?

In truth, sexual identity is a complex weave spun of desire, fantasy, conduct and belief; pulling on any one thread distorts the fabric. Even defining one's own sexual orientation can be difficult. Avowed lesbians sometimes sleep with men, and men who describe themselves as straight engage in sex with other men. In many Latin societies, men do not consider themselves bisexual or gay unless they take the passive-receptive role during sex. Moreover, sexuality is as much a state of mind as an act of body. People may be attracted to someone but unwilling to act on their desires out of guilt or shame; conversely, others may act contrary to their true feelings.

Statistics on the number of bisexuals are unreliable since people who engage in such behavior often do not call themselves bisexual. But the ability to respond erotically to both sexes seems to be a common human trait. Bisexuality frequently occurs among male and female adolescents in many cultures and is an entrenched though unspoken practice among men in some Latin and Muslim societies. Alfred Kinsey's classic surveys in the '40s and '50s of American middle-class sexual mores found that about 46% of the men that were interviewed and 12% of the women admitted to sexual experiences with both sexes.

Despite its prevalence, bisexuality traditionally has not been granted independent status as a category of sexuality. Instead, the behavior has been explained away as a phase. For instance, teenagers sometimes experiment with both male and female partners on the way to establishing their sexual identity. Among Sambia Highlanders in Papua New Guinea, boys practice oral sex with one another as a formal rite of passage toward manhood and adult heterosexuality. Dual sexuality has also been seen as a pragmatic response, a way to fill a sexual need when passion is thwarted by culture and circumstance, such as imprisonment. Mixing between men and women before marriage is strictly limited in some Muslim societies.

The most common perception is that bisexuals are basically straights with a taste for exotic adventure or essentially gays who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge their true orientation. To growing numbers of bisexuals, however, as well as therapists and researchers, this is nonsense. They insist that bisexuality is not a walk on the wild side or a run from reality but has a legitimate identity of its own. Explains John Craig, a 40-year-old writer in Amherst, Mass., who organizes weekend retreats for bisexual men: "I want to experience contact with a man's body and with a woman's body. That's just a basic part of who I am."

Because of society's reluctance to recognize their existence, bisexuals often face an even more torturous struggle than gays in coming to terms with their identity. Unlike gays, bisexuals lack an established community or culture to help ease the process. For men, the confusion seems to surface during adolescence and early adulthood. Al, 38, of Chicago, recalls that during his troubled college years "there was almost no place I could go where bisexuality was part of the norm." Having "bought into the myth that bisexuality was a political cop-out," he swung between describing himself as straight and gay. But his distress was so great that "I went though a period of a year or two where I called myself 'unlabeled.' "

Some bisexual women travel a similar path. Sarah Listerud, a member of a large Catholic family, arrived at Oberlin College believing marriage for her was a "given." During her sophomore year, she fell in love with a woman. She had subsequent lesbian liaisons but remained attracted to men. "I thought bisexuality was a phase I was going through before joining the lesbian community," recalls Listerud, now 29 and living in Chicago. But then, she would "bump into a guy in the cafeteria who was really cute or get a crush on a guy. Finally, it was like a little light bulb went off. I thought maybe bisexuality is real. I was absolutely terrified. It was undesirable; it was not politically correct. I was sure to be ostracized from the lesbian community."

For other women, bisexuality is a late discovery. "Many never had any sexual attraction to other women," notes psychiatrist Tim Wolf of San Diego. "But now they are in their 30s or 50s, and they fall in love with a particular woman." Lani Kaahumanu was a typical San Mateo, Calif., housewife, wed to her high school sweetheart for 11 years and the mother of two children. With the women's movement of the '70s, "all of a sudden there was this freedom to love women," says Kaahumanu, 48. She divorced and for four years lived what she calls a "very public lesbian life." But by 1980 Kaahumanu had fallen in love with a man. Wolf speculates that women come to a realization of their bisexuality later than men do because women tend to be more physically affectionate with each other throughout their lives and this closeness camouflages the sexual desire. Women also seem to show more sexual flexibility than men and switch their sexual focus more often, he adds.

What causes the duality of desire? Most experts believe sexual orientation develops from a mix of nature and nurture, but the recipe remains a mystery. Gender may be fixed prenatally by a chromosome and a wash of hormones, but does a flood of chemicals prime the fetus for a particular sexual preference?

Scientists are discovering differences in brain structure -- at least between straight and gay men. UCLA researchers reported this month that autopsies showed that the anterior commissure -- a bundle of nerves that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain -- appears to be about a third larger in homosexuals than in heterosexuals. Another study, published last year, revealed that a segment of the hypothalamus, which influences sexual activity, seems to be half as large in gay men as it is in straight men. A recent survey found that when one twin is gay, an identical sibling is three times as likely as a fraternal twin to be gay as well.

Although such findings suggest a strong biological influence, they are hardly conclusive. One problem: Are the differences in brain tissue the cause or the result of differences in behavior? "You've always got to keep in mind that experience changes the brain," stresses June Reinisch, director of the Kinsey Institute. And if nature is paramount, why don't identical twins always have the same sexual orientation?

Freud believed that human beings are bisexual to begin with -- polymorphous perverse, as he put it -- but become heterosexual or homosexual because of their early experiences of love and sensation. Bisexual as well as gay men often report having distant, aloof fathers, leading to speculation that homosexual behavior is in some aspect a search for male nurturing that has become eroticized. Researcher John Money of Johns Hopkins University compares the acquisition of sexual orientation to learning to speak. "You did not have a native language on the day you were born," he explains. "But by the age of five, you'd got it. When it's set, it's set, and there's nothing you can do about it."

Culture is undoubtedly important as well. "It's a lot like eating," says Richard Parker, professor of medical anthropology and human sexuality at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. "We all have an urge to feed ourselves. But whether we like Thai food or American meat and potatoes depends on where our tastes and appetites develop. Some cultures develop a taste for spicy food, and it is largely the same for sexuality."

According to Kinsey, sexuality is a continuum. On the heterosexual-to- homosex ual scale of 0 to 6 that he devised, only 50% of male subjects can be classified as exclusively straight and 4% exclusively gay. Sharrard falls right in the middle of the Kinsey scale, equally attracted to men and women, but such balance is rare. Tessina calls herself a 2, mostly heterosexual.

Some bisexuals have a stronger physical passion or romantic longing for one sex. Eric, 31, a journalist in San Francisco, has sex with women and men, but "I experience more emotional intensity with men." Other bisexuals, like John Craig or Sarah Listerud, find that attraction varies over time, even taking on an almost cyclical quality.

To Eric, bisexuality "enhances the human experience. You get a fuller, richer sexual life. Other men plow through life without understanding the parts of themselves that are feminine." Bisexuals often claim to be more sensitive and empathic lovers. "There is some truth in that," says psychologist William Wedin, director of New York City's Bisexual Information and Counseling Service. "Part of being bisexual means that you see things from more than one perspective. You can't be comfortable in stereotypical ways of thinking and reacting."

Still, many bisexuals, especially men, are racked by discomfort and conflict. About two-thirds of bisexual men are married, notes Wedin, and discovery that a husband is involved with other men can easily wreck a marriage. The husband feels humiliated, and the wife betrayed, not so much by his having sex with men as by his having gone outside the marriage.

Jason, 37, a Seattle architect, avoided deceit by disclosing his bisexuality before his marriage. "We talked about our marriage vows because I did not want to say 'I will forsake all others.' I couldn't vow monogamy." But he is faithful to his wife in one sense: his outside liaisons are limited to men, and only one at a time. "Besides, I can't handle too many emotional relationships at a time. You can get burned out."

That is a common complaint. "Your feet are in both camps, but your heart is in neither," observes Eric. "You have the opportunity to experience a kind of richness, but you constantly feel you have to make a choice." But forcing a selection may not be the wisest course. "You create a sexual neuter if you attempt to wipe out one set of feelings over the other," warns Wedin. "The more you attempt to repress it, the greater the disruption it tends to cause in the other set of feelings."

Answers to the puzzle of bisexuality are becoming more urgent. As the threat of AIDS intensifies, more precise information regarding bisexuals' prevalence and practices is desperately needed. As agitation for bisexual rights increases, a clearer understanding of sexuality's origins is pivotal to the debate. One thing is already evident: more even than gays, bisexuals used to live in the shadows. Now they are entering the spotlight.

With reporting by Hannah Bloch/New York, Michele Donley/Chicago and Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles