Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics - Hardcover

If you’re walking down the street in London, you’ll find helpful words stenciled on

the street at most crosswalks: look right, reminds one, where the traffic whizzes by on the left side of the street. look left, instructs the next, as cars zoom past on the right. Sometimes you stand on a curb poised to take a step, look down, and the street tells you look both ways.

In 1993, I stood poised at an unfamiliar intersection of attraction, sex, and love—and I looked both ways. My world was New York City, and it looked like this:

Dinkins was mayor. No one walked down the street or sat at a café or drove their car while yakking on a cell phone. There were no Starbucks. I bought fifty-cent coffee from vendors stationed in aluminum carts. I  hadn’t heard of the Internet or the Web, and when I did, I took to using that early-nineties überterm, the Infobahn (a German spin on information superhighway—fortunately, both terms fell out of use). Dot-coms had yet to be invented, much less to inflate and then implode. E-mail was something that a few VAX geeks at my college used, but it had nothing to do with real life. Ellen was not out, and “outing” (the gay community’s version of a suicide bombing) loomed as potential annihilation, terrorizing closeted homosexuals. Grunge was but a year or two old; Riot Grrls were writing each other love letters and starting bands. Kate Moss was causing a sensation with her waif look. PC meaning “politically correct” was as popular a term as PC meaning “personal computer.” A rakish and idealistic Bill Clinton had just become president number forty-two, seemingly a victory for the politically correct, myself included. Doomed, intelligent Hillary was still being presented as a partner, not a First Lady, and the Clintons still believed that the nation would see that as a good thing. Bill’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” idealism had retracted enough to squeeze out gays from the military. George Stephanopoulos was considered hot.

On January 10 of that year, at age twenty-two and half a year out of the safety of a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, I boarded a train in Fargo at 2:30 a.m. and, thirty-five hours and two Milan Kundera books later, arrived in Manhattan to start an internship at Ms. magazine. I carried just two suitcases and a Coach briefcase I would never use. What I didn’t have was a paying job, a place to live, or friends—other than Michael Gardner, that is, a slightly older pal from my hometown who was fabulous, gay, and a dresser for the long-running Broadway phenomenon known as Cats. He had said I could stay with him and his boyfriend for a week until I found a room of my own. Michael had been instrumental in my deciding to move to New York; I had almost moved to Chicago. “Honey, Chicago?” Michael had said. “You need to be in New York. Why do NoDoz when there’s crack available?”

In my mind, I had arrived simply by making New York City—Manhattan—my new address. You don’t have to be from a small landlocked town with six months of winter to know that New York is one of those places—where mystique and myth and overpopulation and opportunity mix to create the frantic cocktail known as freedom. Growing up in Fargo, I had always feared that I was missing out on the party. My hopes for myself in the Midwest were grandiose, but they were often at odds with my earnest feminist proclivities. I wanted to be a fashion model, at least for catalogues; I would meet Bernadette Peters and become her understudy, or perhaps her personal assistant. Merely being in a place where the high rollers of those ambitions lived and worked and debauched and grocery shopped made me feel this close to a contract, a gig, a job, the glamorous life. A journal entry from January 19, 1993, 1:30 a.m., reads:

List of things to do while in the Big Apple

1. Letterman

2. Click and Elite

3. MOMA, Met, Whitney

4. Les Miserables

5. Audition for Cats

6. Check out Sassy, Rolling Stone, Details, and Premiere

7. Buy shoes on 8th Avenue

I have yet to “do” Les Miz or Letterman, but I did subject myself to the humiliation of drop-in day at Elite and other modeling agencies. I even suited up for a Cats cattle call. I visited museums, too, and learned that the shoe stores are on Eighth Street, not Eighth Avenue. That list, full of misunderstood directions and out-of-hand rejection, might have been all I came to know of New York had I not had the grounding experience of entering the world of Ms., which demanded new skills from me (faxing, clearing paper jams) and provided a social milieu not so different from a 1970s consciousness-raising group.

Yes, I was an unpaid intern at the one big feminist mag-azine. Ms., where the letters-to-the-editor section ran for pages and tended to drip with gratitude. Ms. of the “no ads, please, we’re feminist.” Ms. of the all-female staff and no dress code. Ms. of the (who knew?) male owner with vexing financial problems who also owned Sassy, the avant-garde teen magazine with great style and cool young editors such as Kim France and Christina Kelly. Gloria Steinem’s Ms.—that one. To a just-graduated, intense college feminist who spent her undergrad years planning antipornography forums, when not drinking the free beer at frat parties, Ms. was Mecca. We even did a pornography issue a few months into my tenure that had all the range of opinion I had mustered at my college porn forum—which is to say, from Andrea Dworkin to Andrea Dworkin. Being in the Ms. offices, even as an unpaid lackey, meant entering the serious, real work world. I would never have to say “Hospitaliano!” or any other Olive Garden/Chili’s/Red Lobster greeting again.

Or, not exactly. Since I was an unpaid intern, to pay the bills, I got a job waitressing at a macho West Village writers’ haunt called the Lion’s Head, on Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue. It was garden level and murky—even at noon—with a huge oak bar and the kind of air that is best described as visible. In 1993, the Lion’s Head was a New York institution, albeit a crumbling one, where old newspaper guys such as Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill drank, or maybe they were sober then but they still hung out in the bar, holding court beneath their framed book jackets adorning the walls. The bartenders were dyspeptic old guys with beards who wrote poetry, took themselves very seriously, and treated me like shit: “Whatayastupid? ‘Up’ and ‘neat’ are the same thing!!” Like shit, that is, until the next new girl was hired. Then, according to some tribal New York restaurant code, they loved me: “Sweetheart, make sure you get home safe—alright, Fargo? Where’s that dim-bulb new girl?”

Grizzled white men poured drinks and dispensed dubious wisdom. Young white women in tight clothes delivered the food and the smiles and said “sorry” all the time. Short brown men cooked it all and cleaned it all up, and still managed to rise above the racial oppression of the United States to make kissing sounds at us waitresses whenever we were in the kitchen. The Lion’s Head was nothing like Ms., where an editor apologized to an intern for five minutes before sheepishly asking her to make a photocopy.

I lived downtown from Ms. and east of the Lion’s Head, in the twenties, just shy of tony Gramercy Park and a few blocks from a playhouse where Oleanna, David Mamet’s drama of PC feminism run amok, was playing. My friend Karen had seen the play and reported that after...