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A History of Bisexuality

By Steven Angelides

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2001 Steven Angelides
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226020894
INTRODUCING BISEXUALITY

In any case bisexuality merges imperceptibly into simple inversion.

Havelock Ellis 1901

BISEXUALITYa state that has no existence beyond the word itselfis an out-and-out fraud, involuntarily maintained by some naive homosexuals, and voluntarily perpetrated by some who are not so naive.

Edmund Bergler 1956

It is my opinion that while the word bisexual may have its uses as an adjective . . . it is not only useless but mendacious when used as a noun.

John Malone 1980

Im not sure that because there are people who identify as bisexual there is a bisexual identity.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1991

Doubts about the veracity of bisexuality as an identity are not new. Variously characterized within dominant discourses of sexuality as, among other things, a form of infantilism or immaturity, a transitional phase, a self-delusion or state of confusion, a personal and political cop-out, a panacea, a superficial fashion trend, a marketing tool, even a lie and a catachresis, the category of bisexuality for over a century has been persistently refused the title of legitimate sexual identity. Yet, as is all too familiar to scholars of sexuality, the same cannot be said with regard to homosexuality. Since its invention as a peculiar human species in late-nineteenth-century scientific discourse, the homosexual as a modern identity has been the object of a rigorous, frenetic, indeed paranoid, discursive essentialization. Far from having doubt cast incessantly upon its veritable existence, the homosexual has been mapped, measured, and monitored in what can only be described as an interminable and insane reiteration of the supposed essence and truth of its being. On a much smaller scale, but with as much scientific zeal, has been the cataloging of myriad other psychosexual deviations. From the perverts invented by nineteenth-century sexology to the seemingly endless list of twentieth-century paraphiliacs, Western science has placed sexuality in a privileged relation to truth with regard to human subjectivity.2As Foucault put it: Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth: it is up to us to extract the truth of sex, since this truth is beyond its grasp; it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness.

Curiously, however, the category of bisexuality seems to have been spared the rigors of this never-ending demand for truth. Bisexuality continues, in fact, to represent a blind spot in sex research. This apparent oversight by our all-consuming regime of sexuality is particularly puzzling in view not only of the rather long history of research suggestive of the prevalence of bisexual practices in most human cultures, but also of the emergence, in many Western countries within the last two decades, of burgeoning and highly politicized bisexual movements. On the surface this may come as no surprise, given the common association of bisexuality with (self ) deception and unreality. Perhaps bisexuality is unnatural, without essence after all? Is it the antithesis of truth, an untruth? Or is it an imaginary or nonexistent state? And what would it mean to answer in the affirmative to these questions: Would bisexuality therefore be without history, even outside of history? And might this explain why so little ink has been spilled establishing its veracity, historicizing its (lack of ) meaning? Opting for this explanatory path is for me, however, wholly unsatisfactory. For one thing, if so little critical attention has been accorded to bisexuality, how can anyone so confidently assume anything about its meaning, let alone arbitrate its truthful existence?

Marjorie Garbers Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life is one of the first comprehensive studies of bisexuality to engage some of these questions. In an encyclopedic account of eroticism within a wide range of cultural and literary texts, Garber sets out not just to put bisexuality on the sexual map, but to challenge common assumptions that have long structured its meaning. Her concern is not with theorizing or politicizing bisexuality as the latest identity now finding its place in the sun. Instead, she seeks to inquire into what bisexuality can teach us about sexuality in general. The lesson, according to Vice Versa, is that the nature of sexuality cannot be located in the fixed identities of gay and straight. It is, rather, mobile and mutable: The nature of sexuality . . . is fluid not fixed, a narrative that changes over time rather than a fixed identity, however complex. The erotic discovery of bisexuality is the fact that it reveals sexuality to be a process of growth, transformation, and surprise, not a stable and knowable state of being. Garber urges us to dispense with the hetero/ homosexual opposition as our starting point for understanding sexuality. Why not begin just with the category of sexuality? she asks. Proposing a framework based on the Mobius model, Garber visualizes sexuality in terms of a three-dimensional figure. This kind of topological space makes redundant any concept of sexuality as either/or, as two-versus-one. No longer radically distinct, the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality flow in and through one another.

Garber goes even further to suggest that, far from being a third sexual identity, bisexuality is a sexuality that puts into question the very concept of sexual identity in the first place." The logic behind this idea, as I mentioned above, is that she identifies the nature of sexuality to be a kind of unpredictable fluidity, uncontainable within the fixity of hetero/homosexuality. However, this unpredictable fluidity, this sexuality, is for Garber none other than bisexuality. That is, in constructing her Mobius model, she actually conflates sexuality with bisexuality, and substitutes the notion of sexual identity with that of bisexual eroticism. The concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality are thus subsumed by a bisexuality she argues is neither the inside nor the outside but rather that which creates both.

Anything but immature, peripatetic, erroneous, illusory, unnatural, bisexuality in this scenario is human sexuality itself. By extension, then, bisexuality is coterminous with human nature, with truth itself. The effect of Garbers intervention is thus not so much a disruption of what Foucault would call the scientia sexualisthe procedures for telling the truth of sex9although she certainly wants to deconstruct truth in the form of fixed and oppositional sexual identities. Rather, and working within this regime of truth, Garber effectively inverts the terms of the scientia sexualis: the untruth becomes the sole truth. Such a move of reversal is, of course, not without its uses. Like the first part of any deconstructive movement, it is essential to effect a strategic reversal of any binary opposition in question. It is equally important simultaneously to displace the negative term of this opposition from its position of dependency on the positive and to situate the former as the latters very condition of possibility. This much Garber has done, and the concept of sexual identity, and thus the binarism of hetero/homosexuality, may appear on the surface to be momentarily...