"Bisexuality, Gaia, Eros: Portals to the Arts of Loving"
BiReCon: Selected Proceedings from the 2010 Int'l Bisexual Research Conference
Contribution by Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, Keynote Speaker
Part 2 - Addressing the Audience: Bisexuality and Ecology Today
On the public-sex area of the beach, a group of bisexuals forms and we decide to meet later at the Club Le Look. It’s a “gay” club we hear. We feel we’d be more welcome than in other libertine clubs because we’re “gay” too. It turns out customers are 90 percent gay men. There is a lot of sexual play in the scene. In our area, it includes fellatio between males under the table and light play between two bi women above. The ever inclusive, I observe a young guy at a nearby table, alone. He seems lonely and I weave him to join. We all move close to the music and form a bawdy dancing circle. The public seems quite excited. The show is interesting. Someone asks us to stop and we do.
The following evening I go back to Le Look to meet the group again. The henchman of the club meets me at the entrance. He won’t let me in. He is very upset with me. He says, in a very angry, Parisian accented French:
“I’ve sent the guy away!”
I ask to get in.
“You can’t” he says, “unless you give up you ‘het’ ways.”
I ask for some explanation?
“This is a GAY club!” he yells. “Gays don’t’ wiggle their butts in het clubs,” he claims. “So we don’t want you ‘hets’ to wiggle your butts on ‘our’ terrain!”
“But we’re bisexuals,” I dare say, “the whole group was having fun together. We came here because it’s ‘gay’.”
It’s beside the point, I soon realize. The guy is simply ignorant of bisexuality. There’s no awareness of it as a community, an orientation, a style of erotic expression. The henchman claims gay male customers protested yesterday.
I move on, passing a straight club next door with female pole dancers. The atmosphere is very gender binary, commercialized, hyper-sexualized in a consumerist way.
My friend is just a few steps away. I wave at him. We sit at a nearby café, exhausted. Over a glass of wine, I ask him the million dollar question, “why do you go to Le Look? Are you gay?”
“I’m bisexual” he replies. “And single. At straight clubs there’s an extra charge for single men. Sixty Euros, versus 10 for a het couple.”
I look at him in the face. I date bi men, so I’m aware. “But don’t you get picked up at gay clubs, I mean, by men?” I ask.
“Sometimes I do,” is the reply I get. “I’m bi but prefer women.”
Later on I notice the very pronounced sensibility of the back of his body I tend to like in bi men, as it reminds me of myself. I think of Carol Queen, another bisexual pioneer, and her historic video, Bend Over Boyfriend.
Later on I notice the very pronounced sensibility of the back of his body I tend to like in bi men, as it reminds me of myself. I think of Carol Queen, another bisexual pioneer, and her historic video, Bend Over Boyfriend.
The young man is French. He speaks no English. “What does ‘bi’ mean to him?” I wonder. “No bi pride, acceptance, visibility?” I reflect. “We’re in France! We’re in the summer capital of French libertine culture. The bi movement has been co-opted in the LGBT movement and has lost its agenda.” I conclude to myself. “Where is the vision?” I tell my French friend about my keynote. He has no awareness of conferences on bisexuality. He seems almost surprised. “There’s a reason why this happened.” “Right.” “This will be a great story to tell!” we laugh away. And, yes, that’s of course why it happened--turning my vacation into experimental research!
Acknowledgment: This piece is pre-published here with permission of Routledge, New York, a division of Taylor and Francis.
BiReCon | 28 BiCon | 10 ICB
Bisexuality Research Conference, 28th Bisexuality Conference, 10th International Conference on Bisexuality, London, UK, August 26-30, 2010
BiReCon Proceedings: A forthcoming issue of The Journal of Bisexuality
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