1 of 5: We Are Everywhere: A Fiveway Review of A History of Bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces, Look Both Ways, Open, and Becoming Visible

Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

Has appeared also in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality, co-edited by Serena Anderlini and Jonathan Alexander. Pre-published with permission of Routledge, New York. 

Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality.  University of Chicago Press, 2001.  281 pages (with index)

Clare Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender.  Routledge, 2002.  244 pages (with index)

Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.  244 pages (with index)

Jenny Block,  Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage.  Seattle: Seal Press, 2009. 276  pages (with works consulted list)²

Beth Firestein, ed,  Becoming Visible: Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan.  Columbia University Press, 2007.  441 pages (with index)

For this special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality on the intersections among queer theory and bisexuality, we thought it would be useful to review books that have substantively engaged this intersection in critical, insightful, and provocative ways.  Two such books, Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality (2001) and Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), are somewhat “older” texts that have not yet been reviewed in the pages of this journal.  To correct that omission, and in recognition of the importance that these two studies play in so many of the articles in this special issue, we offer our review and thoughts here.  To set the critical theory of these books in a more contemporary and applied context, we link them to three more recent text.  Two, Jennifer Baumgardner’s trade book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics (2007), and Jenny Block’s Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (2009) memorialize various levels of personal experience as avenues to theorizing bisexuality for the lay public, and observing the ways in which this trope deploys itself in one’s personal life and in the life and culture of our era.  Finally, Beth Firestein’s edited volume Becoming Visible (2007) offers a store of applied research as well as theoretical knowledge directed to professional counselors and therapists who intend to provide bisexual patients with the mental and psychological health care they need.  The volume’s subtitle, Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan, is emblematic of the volume’s intent to dispel the myth that “bisexuality is a phase” one can overcome with “proper” medical attention.  The idea here is that there are no reasons to “overcome” bisexuality, while there are many reasons why counselors and therapists, as well as society as a whole, should think of bisexuals as very healthy, wholesome, and valuable members of the human community.  An overview of these five books, we believe, will help readers of this collection get a fairly articulate sense of where bisexuality stands at this time in the realms of human knowledge and experience touched by these books.

To start, then, Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality offers a much-needed historical and theoretical intervention in both our thinking about the history of what the modern era knows as sexuality, and our theorizing about the development of sexual identity categories.  Co-editor Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, who was raised in Italy, brings to our reading of this book the perspective of a Mediterranean education, where awareness of bisexual behavior registers across the cultural spectrum since antiquity.  This awareness  has been articulated in a study of bisexual behavior in ancient Greece and Rome by Eva Cantarella, a professor of classical history at the University of Milan.  The book’s title, Secondo natura, encodes the concept that there is nothing unnatural about erotic expression across genders: the title translates, quite literally, as according to nature, and even better, asgoing along with nature, or seconding nature, as one seconds a proposal in a meeting.  The English elides the poetic aspect of this and reads, objectively, as Bisexuality in the Ancient World (1992).  As might be expected of a scholar based in Australia, where the legacies of Western culture have arrived only recently, Angelides’ book focuses on the past 150 years.  Oddly enough, however, Angelides’ perspective on the recent history of bisexuality helps to explain why the title of Cantarella’s book did not make it into English.  Nature came to be studied scientifically in modernity, under the aegis of Christian monotheism.  At this time, bisexual behavior came to be it constructed as against nature,because nature itself was now seen as the creation of a single deity.    In the ancient world the divine was ubiquitous, it was in the body of nature and not separate from it.  Bisexual behavior was just as natural as could be.  Indeed, as Foucault would put it, the focus was on acts, not identities, and only after the onset of Christianity, with its separation between good and evil, certain acts came to be seen as sinful.  In pre-Christian Rome and Greece, Cantarella’s book exemplifies in great detail, amorous behavior was considered an art whose forms and styles of expression were infinite, and the scientific concept of sexuality did not exist.  In the arts of loving, the young were being initiated by those with more experience.  For obvious anatomical reasons, if the students were of one’s own gender, those practical lessons in erotic love would be much ere easier to deliver.  With English being a major language of modern scientific production (if not the most important one), no wonder the original title of Cantarella’s study either makes no sense or sounds outright pedophilic; the kind of thing that gets one in trouble in today’s academe, where mind-centered learning processes prevail.   

Angelides’ book helps one to see what has been lost in this scientific modernization, and what a postmodern perspective can recuperate for itself and humanity’s future, in the ways of bringing back a positive, sustainable notion of the primitive. Angelides uses deconstructive strategies and a Foucauldian approach to the history of sexuality to trace the development of the category of bisexuality, from psychoanalytical and sexological theories at the end of the 19^th century, through post-war gay liberation, to queer politics at the end of the 20^th century.  With critical sophistication and a general command of his subject, Angelides rightly points out how seemingly central bisexuality was, conceptually, to early psychoanalytic and sexological theory.  For instance, Freud’s theories of polymorphous perversity and naturally innate bisexuality serve as foundations for his theories of sexuality, even as they ultimately position bisexuality as the “immature” (e.g., “perverse”) state out of which sexual maturity (i.e., heterosexuality) must arise.  Angelides adeptly shows how bisexuality is cast in this role both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, namely in relation to the genesis of each individual and that of the species.  From this starting point, Angelides deftly demonstrates how a series of controlling binary oppositions—man and woman, but also, fairly quickly, heterosexual and homosexual—come to dominate theoretical, and cultural as well as political, constructions of sexuality and sexual identity.

In the process, bisexuality becomes, in Angelides’ accounting, a kind of “ghostly other” to sexuality itself—there in the shadowy background, but ultimately something that must be denied in the pursuit of more mature sexual expressions.  In other words, the persistence of bisexuality in this ghostly role embodies cultural fears that “sexuality,” per se, may not exist; that it may be nothing but a cultural construct.  Even with the rise of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, when some gay liberationists advocated a “bisexual chic” or a sexual freedom that would return us to our original polymorphous-ness, bisexuality never seemed to gain traction, either as an identity or a community or even a politics.  

Consider, for instance, Adrienne Rich’s famous “lesbian continuum,” which seemed to acknowledge, explicitly, like Kinsey’s famous scale, a continuum of sexual, erotic, and intimate interest, from the fully lesbian to the singularly straight.  In the hands of gay and lesbian activists and thinkers, however, the two poles become the focus of attention—gay and straight.  The minoritizing logics of identity politics figure “gayness” as another identity, like straightness, and the in-between status of bisexuality seems to question too much the non-threatening innateness upon which much of gay politicking came to depend.  We’re born this way, after all, so please don’t discriminate.  Bisexuality, by comparison, seemed too much the sexuality “of choice,” and particularly in the advent of AIDS, it came to be seen as the dangerous sexuality that vectored disease from promiscuous homosexuals to an otherwise pristine suburbia. So while bisexuality seemed to be the “centerpiece” of much gay liberationist thinking, it was a bisexuality in name only, a very theoretical bisexuality. 

Angelides moves deftly from history into theoretical discussion, focusing on the work of sexuality studies scholars such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—thinkers whose work dominated the study of sexuality in the 1990s.  In particular, he uses the work of Judith Butler, particularly Bodies That Matter, to unpack the prevalence of binarisms that made bisexuality a difficult subject to consider, even at the headily questioning height of queer theory.  Angelides pointedly asks, “Why is bisexuality the object of such consistent and intense skepticism?  […]  In short, why has bisexuality been rendered, for the most part incidental and even irrelevant to the history, theory, and politics of sexuality”? (190).

Following the lead of Foucault and Butler, particularly in their genealogical mode, Angelides ultimately situates his historical survey of bisexuality less as a discovery of the truth of bisexuality or the revelation of a hidden history (see Marjorie Garber’s Vice Versa for that story), but more as a theoretical questioning of why bisexuality is a conceptually troubling category.  He writes, “[t]racking the epistemic path of bisexuality has been for me one way of bringing into clearer view the failure of our epistemology of sexuality; that is, the impossibility of any attempt to posit this thing called ‘sexuality,’ and its component identity-parts of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual” (196).  For Angelides, undertaking such a theoretical venture has real-world consequences, in a number of ways.  In many ways, attending to the theoretical difficulties that bisexuality poses to our conceptualization of sexuality mandates a complete theoretical reconsideration of sexuality; and indeed, Angelides calls at the end of his study for a substantive rethinking of how we understand the history of sexuality:

This deconstructive history has demonstrated that no analysis of sexuality can afford to ignore the category of bisexuality, which mandates a critical rethinking of some of the central terms and strategies of Foucauldian and queer theories.  While these theories have provided, and continue to provide, cogent political and theoretical tools for antihomophobic and anti-heteronormative inquiry, it is important to attend to their own structuring exclusions in order to strengthen their political and theoretical promise (199).

Put another way, a queer theory that misses bisexuality’s querying of normative sexualities is a queer theory that is itself too mastered by the very normative and normalizing binaries it seeks to unsettle; as he succinctly puts it, “[a]s deconstructive readers and cultural critics we need continually to monitor the sites through which the reiteration of sexuality, and its accompanying hierarchy of hetero- and homosexuality, is taking place” (201).

More interestingly, and speculatively perhaps, Angelides stretches the implications of his critiques beyond the humanities into the social sciences and even the hard sciences.  He suggests that “…science ought [not] to abandon questions relevant to those things assigned to the category of ‘sexuality,’ but…scientists ought to pursue a different set of questions altogether” (206).  For example, the much vaunted search for the “gay gene,” which seems to dominate some scientific inquiry into homosexuality, seems misguided at best, if not seriously theoretically flawed as an investigative project.  Angelides urges that we not let our scientific thinking be dominated by the same binarisms that have hampered psychological thinking.  Rather, he argues, we should consider other, potentially more interesting questions about the multiple and plural natures of desire, attraction, and intimacy—questions that would not simply replicate the old, normalizing, and constraining hetero/homo divide, which doesn’t do justice to the complexity of sexuality anyway, either theoretically or experientially. 

A History of Bisexuality is, in many ways, a stunning book, one which scholars and lay readers alike can learn from, appreciate, and ultimately enjoy.  What partially hampers Angelides’ approach in positing such questions is his failure to account for some scientists and medical professionals, such as Dr. Fritz Klein, in doing exactly what he suggests they do.  Indeed, Angelides’ elisions of Klein’s famous study and treatise, The Bisexual Option (originally published in 1978), seems grievous in this case, particularly since Dr. Klein’s Sexual Orientation Grid attempts to move questions about sex, sexuality, intimacy, and eroticism away from identity and towards a complex plurality of modalities.  Nonetheless,A History of Bisexuality still dazzles with the scope of its historical sweep and its theoretical acumen.

Also published in SexGenderBody.
Reprinted here with thanks to Arvan Reese and Routledge, NY.

5 of 8 - What's in a Word? Dissidence, 'Denial,' and Health on a Poly Planet - From The G Tales

You call me ‘promiscuous,’ I call you ‘dishonest,’ a poly person tells the average person who believes that monogamy is the only natural way to love.

You call me ‘denialist,’ I call you ‘believer,’ a dissident person tells the average person who believes that HIV is the only cause of AIDS.

When you call AIDS Dissidents by their own name you exercise leadership in the sexual freedom movement.

Alternative lovestyle communities ignore AIDS Dissidence at their own peril.

From private conversations

Part Five 

 

“Going back to New York with a more complete, more articulate explanation of your position, with a chance for pointed questions and responses, was your first thought,” I reminded G as we resumed the conversation after a pause.

“It sure was,” G confirmed.  “I had a publicist who was doing bookings for me, and the first thing I asked her to do was contact Greensocks again and see if they’d book me for a reading there.  I alerted her to the previous problem, to put out feelers and be cautious.”

“And what happened?”

“The person who does bookings and that store said they’d be happy to have me.  We agreed on a date for the reading and it appeared on the store’s calendar for several weeks, during which I booked my flight and made other travel arrangements.”

“Oh, interesting.  Were you looking forward to the reading there?”

“I was.  I know that many people in the initial audience were more flabbergasted by how I was treated than by what I had read.  I felt I must muster the courage to go there again.”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“A bit.  I was a bit ‘frobbly’ as we say in poly.”

“I can understand that.”

“Thank you.”

“How did it go?”

“It didn’t go.”

“What do you mean?”

“A couple of weeks before the reading we found a message in the email.  It was copied to several persons involved in the planning of the event.  It said that the reading would be cancelled because of ‘AIDS denialism,’ which the collective running the store considered ‘very dangerous’.”

“OMG!  That must have felt terrible.  How did you respond?”

“I remained quite self-possessed.  I sought help in writing a clear, direct response.  In it I rejected the accusation.  I explained that if I was a ‘denialist’ then the discoverer of the so called ‘AIDS virus,’ now a Nobel Prize winner, was a ‘denialist’ as well, which put me in good company.  I asked the collective to reconsider.”

Oxidation, Water, Food, and AIDS in Africa: 

Interview with Luc Montagnier

2008 Nobel for HIV Science

Video: courtesy of House of Numbers, by Brent Leung

“Did they?”

“I don’t know that they gave my request any serious consideration.  The difference between dissidence and denialism did not seem to register with them.  In my response I had explained that dissidents see more complexity in AIDS than those in the conventional camp.  Therefore, calling them ‘denialists’ was a misnomer because the word denial implies the opposite of complexity.”

“Makes sense.  What did you do then?”

 “Well, when Greensocks confirmed the cancellation, I realized I was banned in New York for my political/scientific dissidence on AIDS.  I rebooked the reading in a café in New Jersey.  A small crowd came.  Perhaps that was best.  The New York crowd was definitely not ready for an open discussion of the issues implied in this topic.”

“You’re probably right there.  How did you end up launching the book and what was the effect of these precedents?”

“I booked workshops in sex-positive community centers on the West Coast.  I decided to give the book good exposure with a focus on its connection between the Gaian scientific paradigm that emphasizes symbiosis and the ways in which styles of love where amorous resources are shared are symbiotic, and therefore Gaian, as well.  I gave presentations where I focused on these topics rather than the science studies research.”

“But G, were you deluded enough to think that the problem would just go away?  That people would just buy the book and never read it and never raise objections?”

“No.  I write books wishing to be read from cover to cover.  That’s how I read books than make me passionate and from which I learn.”

“So?”

 “So, I was hoping that at some point readers of a certain caliber would come along.  I never doubted the quality of the book.  It definitely is my best so far.  It was written under a powerful inspiration and the publisher was the best I could hope for.  It’s an alluring product, something people want to get when they see it.”

“And did these readers manifest?”

“Yes.  The first was a gay man from the Southwest with a superior education who came out to me as HIV+ in a letter and repeatedly said that I was ‘RIGHT ON’ in everything I said about AIDS.”

“Woooow.  That must have been something to you!”

“Yes.  It made me cry.  It was the best evidence that I had hit a right cord.  I thought of all the suffering the ‘poz’ population endures: when they are not well because of illness, when they are well because of being looked upon as public perils.  Potential criminals whose sexual desires are constructed as ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ one might say.  These people have to walk the Earth in shame, embarrassed to be still around--instead of being celebrated as heroes and heroines of life for having being capable of healing themselves.”

“Now you’re getting a bit rhapsodic, G, as usual--your dramatic side.”

“Ok, ok.”

End of Part Five, G Tale # 5

 

Disclaimer:  This Tale does not constitute medical advice in any way.  Readers are invited to consult their own healers and health care providers. 

References: For scholarly and scientific references to contents and theories referred to in this dialog, refer to Gaia & the New Politics of Love, whose bibliography lists all sources involved.  

2 of 5: We Are Everywhere: A Fiveway Review of A History of Bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces, Look Both Ways, Open, and Becoming Visible

Cont’d, Book Two: Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces. (Routledge 2002.)

By Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

Has also appeared in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality. Re-published with permission of Routledge, New York. 

Given such a sweep, Angelides’ text is well balanced by Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender, a text which is as every bit as theoretically savvy as Angelides’, but one which also provides nicely drawn portraits of actual communities in order to ground the theoretical consideration of bisexuality.  Published just a year afterA History of Bisexuality, Hemmings’ text examines bisexuality not just from the perspectives of the history of sexuality and queer theory but also from the analytics of cultural geography, which attends more to the lived experiences of bisexuals in specific locales.  Such an approach offers her, ultimately, a somewhat more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of bisexuality.

Much like Angelides, Hemmings sees bisexuality as offering a theoretically rich way to interrogate and potentially destabilize the dominant hetero/homo binary:

…if we consider bisexual meaning in spatial terms, it becomes clear that bisexuality is not only a location between heterosexuality and homosexuality, binary genders or sexes, but also resides at the heart of lesbian community, between lesbian and gay communities, and in parallel with transsexuality within queer feminist terrain.  As a result, a bisexual subject is capable of producing knowledge that is at odds with dominant and community formations of sexuality and gender, and for that reason alone is worth attending to. (196)

But Hemming’s approach to bisexuality through cultural geography offers us an acute awareness of the particularity of bisexuality as it is situated in specific locales; she maintains, for instance, that “…where bisexual identity or community is the result of…struggles over bisexual meaning, it is frequently at the expense of the specific nature of bisexual political and cultural location” (196).  Hemmings details in her chapters, through interviews, media analyses, community profiles, and theoretical explorations, how the particularities of lived experience shape different understandings of bisexuality.  In some communities, such as in lesbian communities in Massachusetts, bisexuality becomes figured as a space between lesbianism and straight male desire, so as to demarcate it as separate from lesbianism.  In this way, bisexuality seems a “masculine threat to lesbian safety” (13).  In contrast, in San Francisco, bisexuality becomes part of a fantasy of radical inclusiveness, a way to recognize and value the multiplicities of queer desire.  Given such differences, Hemmings ultimately argues that bisexuality can be perceived both as "subversive of gender norms" and as a "reinscription of dominant (i.e. heterosexist) gender and/or sexual discourse" (117).  Put another way, engaging in bi-erotic behavior can prompt us to question what a real ‘man’ or ‘woman’ should do; at the same time, other versions of bisexuality practiced by some people might allow men and women to maintain dominant heterosexual relationships while ‘playing around’ with homo-eroticism in the privacy of a bedroom—without having really to confront what it means to be openly queer. 

Hemmings is perhaps most convincing about such complexities, theoretically at least, when comparing bisexuality and transgenderism.  She notes, for instance, how “…there are a number of similarities in the ways that bisexuality and transsexuality are given and give meaning within queer and feminist studies currently…” (99).  On one hand, both bisexuality and transgenderism are increasingly seen among queer theorists and activists as the new frontier in sexual rights advocacy.  Trans studies in particular has a lot of current theoretical chic.  On the other hand, however, bisexuals and the transgendered strike many as embracing heterosexual privilege, particularly since transsexuals are viewed as reifying norms of gender as they seek to become “real men” or “real women.”  Ultimately, such attention to the complexity of lived bisexual experience prompts Hemmings to call for an approach to bisexuality that is aware of both its potential (theoretically) and its limitations (experientially):

A focus on bisexual knowledges found elsewhere, those not fully circumscribed by dominant formations of heterosexuality and homosexuality, …provides a strategy for resisting the narrativization of heterosexual and homosexual histories that rely on a denial of bisexual specificity.   Instead of celebrating dubious bisexual transgressions of sex, gender, and sexual positions, I advocate an approach that insists that bisexuality’s capacity to generate radical reconfigurations of those oppositions resides not outside but within social and cultural meaning.  (197)

As such, Hemmings’ approach, we feel, builds nicely on Angelides’ call for research that historicizes bisexuality in ways that both deconstruct older and limiting conceptualizations of sexuality while also paying attention to the historical particularity of how individuals and communities negotiate their relationships, both amongst themselves and in relation to controlling paradigms, including sexuality.

Also appeared in SexGenderBody

6 of 8 - What's in a Word? Dissidence, 'Denial,' and Health on a Poly Planet - From The G Tales

You call me ‘promiscuous,’ I call you ‘dishonest,’ a poly person tells the average person who believes that monogamy is the only natural way to love.

You call me ‘denialist,’ I call you ‘believer,’ a dissident person tells the average person who believes that HIV is the only cause of AIDS.

When you call AIDS Dissidents by their own name you exercise leadership in the sexual freedom movement.

Alternative lovestyle communities ignore AIDS Dissidence at their own peril.

From private conversations

Part Six

“What else happened around this book worthy of note?  Anybody else extolled its virtues?” I asked as G and I continued our conversation.

“Well, Deborah Anapol, a founder of the poly movement, read the book and wrote a glowing review.  That made me very happy.  We published it in various places, and are still waiting for Loving More Magazine to live up to the challenge of publishing it also on its pages, perhaps with a disclaimer about the views on AIDS expressed in the book itself.”

“Seems fair.  Anything else?”

“Yes, a few days ago I found a review of the book on Polyamory in the News.  It was scathing.  The usual accusations of ‘denialism’ compounded with a whole bunch of personal attacks.  I was described as a fallen public figure that had become ‘radioactive’ in poly circles after Greensocks and that was now an ‘embarrassment’ to the poly community and movement.”

“Ouch!  How did that feel?”

“Awful,” G said.

“I bet.  Did you respond?”

“Well, by that time I had learned what kind of strength I had to muster to stand behind my statements.  Besides, I now knew that when a reader’s mind was open, the book made its positive effect.  I responded to the accusations and waited for the owner of the website to post my comment.”

“Right on!” I cheered her.

“The comment was not exactly gentle.  Yet he posted it.”

“How did that feel?”

“Felt good.  I realized that now the ball was rolling.  That there was a dialog, a conversation, a debate, an open way to deal with the intellectual/ideological conflict that has been dividing the community.  I know that many polys question the government’s narrow views of AIDS and of public and personal health in general.  However, the current poly leadership--perhaps in an attempt to posture as more ‘respectable’--wishes to keep this under wraps.  Finally, the whole thing was unwrapping--unfolding itself.  More comments came, that defended me from personal attacks and pointed to the subtlety of my theoretical perspective as well.  I was happy. ”

“Good for you, G,” I commented.  “That’s the nice part of being poly, no?  Polys typically accede discussion--once you get the ball rolling, they flock in, they are so gregarious, so symbiotic’,” I commented.

“Yes, that’s why I insisted in playing the game. Others told me to leave them alone, move somewhere else, change niche audience altogether.”

“Didn’t you want to do that?”

“Part of me did.  I felt so ostracized, so unheard.  Why would I be telling my friends these things if not because they’re important?  But at least on the East Coast the government’s view definitely prevailed.   A regional divide is there, and I did feel a pull toward the West Coast, where I always feel more at home.”

“Is ‘denialism’ more popular there?”  I asked G.

“Wait a minute,” G said, “why are you still calling it ‘denialism’?  That’s the problem, remember?  Dissidence,” and her voice got more passionate as she asked that question. 

“Right, what’s in a name?  Can things change just because they’re called by another name?” I asked.

“Think of Lani and Loraine’s book, Bi Any Other Name?”

“Oh yeah, I remember it” I said, “it started the bisexual movement back in the 1990s.”

“Correct.  How did it do that?”

“By calling bisexuals by our own name,” I replied.

“By our own name . . . “ G reflected.  “What’s in a name? Very simple: a name allows a discriminated against, a marginalized, an invisible group to define itself on its own terms.”

“Ok.  So what I hear is that we need to call dissidents dissidents because that’s how they call themselves?”

“Exactly!” G exclaimed.

“I get it,” I continued.  “It’s a bit like calling polys polys and not promiscuous persons.”

“Yes, calling gay men gay men and not ‘faggots.’  Italian-Americans Italian-Americans and not ‘dagos.’  African-Americans African-Americans and not ‘niggahs.’  Using the dignified, self-respecting names marginalized groups chose to describe themselves, instead of the insulting words that injure and silence them.”

“So ‘dissidence’ and ‘denialism’ are not the same, even though they are two different ways to describe the same movement?” I asked G.

“Well, if you are poly and somebody calls you promiscuous, aren’t you going to feel silenced, offended?  What if someone called the polyamory movement the ‘promuscuity movement’?  Would you feel comfortable being part of that?”

“No.  I would respond by saying that we, polys have a right to define ourselves in our own terms.  We cannot accept a definition based on a negative social stereotype.”

“Well, the same applies to the AIDS Dissidence Movement, doesn’t it?  Don’t you think that dissidents have been marginalized enough to want to be called by their own name?”

“Ok, ok.  I get that.  But how would you define Dissidence then?”

“Dissidence is a political--an ideological form of resistance to an institutionally imposed silence on the questions science hasn’t answered yet.  It is a form of science in itself: it produces knowledge that moves in the direction of the paradigm shift we need to create if we want to make peace with our generous hostess, Gaia, the Earth,” G said in a passionate, vehement tone.

“But then some compare what they call ‘AIDS Denialism’ with denial of the Holocaust.  Suppose it turns out there is really nothing else to AIDS than an infection by a virus called HIV--which for some reason cannot be neutralized by a vaccine or an antibiotic.  Suppose it’s just as simple as that.  Then, wouldn’t they have a point?” I asked G, by now a bit impatient, nervous.

End of Part Six, G Tale # 5

Disclaimer:  This Tale does not constitute medical advice in any way.  Readers are invited to consult their own healers and health care providers. 

References: For scholarly and scientific references to contents and theories referred to in this dialog, refer to Gaia &the New Politics of Love, whose bibliography lists all sources involved.  

3 of 5: We Are Everywhere: A Fiveway Review of A History of Bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces, Look Both Ways, Open, and Becoming Visible

Cont’d, Book Three: Jennifer Baumgardner’s Look Both Ways. (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007.)

By Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

Has appeared in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality. Re-published with permission of Routledge, New York. 

Both Baumgardner’s and Block’s books come in the feminist tradition of theorizing from the personal, namely of using personal experience to extrapolate theoretical propositions that are not exactly macro-political but nonetheless provide insights applicable well beyond mere identity politics.  While Baumgardner’s book uses the personal as a springboard to offer comments on the media and cultural politics, Block’s book is organized as a personal narrative, which, complemented by the author’s reflections about her own story, has the ambition to offer itself as an encouragement for any reader’s personal and political transformation.  In both their methods and intents, these books are a refreshing statement about what it means to have had several decades of women’s and gender studies as an official part of higher education.  One can see these disciplines in action as one reads how these authors take pride in their gender and acknowledge the importance of female genealogies in their lives, intellectual, political, and biological.  Block and Baumgardner come to bisexuality from different perspectives:  Block defines the space of her bisexual expression within the open marriage she and her spouse gradually create together, an amicable space where their daughter is raised with abundant parenting; more faithful to the feminist communities with whom she works, Baumgardner defines her profile as that of an independent professional whose choice to be a single parent is supported by her communities with abundant affection and help.  For both authors, embracing bisexuality is related to their sense of interconnectedness between women, and between generations of women.  Via different forms of self-affirmation and feminist practice, these interconnections ground Block and Baumgardner’s determination to own their sexuality, to proclaim their sovereignty over their own bodies and selves, and to honor their multiple desires.

If Angelides and Hemmings offer us robust histories and theories of bisexuality, then Jennifer Baumgardner’s delightfully accessible and narratively-driven call to Look Both Ways, in her exploration of, as her subtitle puts it, Bisexual Politics, serves to show us how much academic theorizing about bisexuality has, as it were, hit the streets.  The answer, surprisingly, is quite a bit.  We are not certain that Baumgardner has read either Angelides’ or Hemmings’ books (though she does cite Fritz Klein), but Look Both Ways is nonetheless an often astute and clever look at bisexuality that is aware, as is Hemmings, of both its seeming liberatory potential and its lived nuisances.

Baumgardner focuses primarily on women’s experience of bisexuality, which is not surprising given her previous publications and strong interest in feminism (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism).  But she’s also savvy about the influence of popular culture in shaping our understanding of sexuality and in suggesting alternative trajectories for desire and affiliation.  She writes several times about the impact of Ellen Degeneres and Anne Heche’s former relationship on her own thinking about plural sexualities, and she recounts with glee a tension-filled movie theater in which young women expressed discomfort with hunky Matt Damon’s portrayal of the quite queer Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley; scenes of nearly missed kisses between Damon and co-star Jude Law elicited youthful squeals of discomfort.  For Baumgardner, such scenes show us how bisexuality and bi-eroticism permeate pop culture, offering many models for different trajectories of desire while still eliciting, among many others, unfortunate reactions of biphobia.  But that’s reality, as either an Angelides or a Hemmings might point out; as Baumgarnder puts it, “[t]hese subconscious and conscious images of bisexuality in ads, on TV, and in erotica reflect the lives of real women and girls” (9).  And she’s quite good at tracing such images and accounting for their personal impact on her life, all the while rooting them in their historical contexts—from considering bisexuality and second-wave feminism, to writing humorously about what she calls the “Ani [DiFranco] Phenomenon,” to musing about communal tensions among bisexual women and lesbians.

Admittedly, though, this is a “popular” text, and in comparison to A History of Bisexuality and Bisexual Spaces, Baumgardner’s analyses can seem at times too optimistic.  She seems at many points to grind the familiar axes of visibility: “Visibility is crucial to making bisexuality a political force, because it could take straight people from being the majority to being a minority” (222).  We’re not exactly sure what is meant by taking straight people out of the majority, per se, especially since, desirable as it might be, a wave of massive bisexual self-outing seems so unlikely at this time.  Also perplexingly, she writes that “…what is still usually invisible, within all of the rampant visibility that gay rights has achieved, is the insurgent role of bisexual people.  Because we are part of the mainstream, the alternative margin, and the gaystream (the mainstreaming of queer life), we have empathy for an insight into the straight and queer worlds.  Bisexual people are the primary conduits for the cultural conversation that America is having about gay rights” (35).  Yes, we agree in part: bisexuals are often invisible within both straight and gay communities; but we are still left wondering exactly how bisexuals are at the center of cultural conversations between straights and gays about gay rights. Indeed, the subtitle is misleading: there’s not much politics here, unless it’s the politics of the personal, which is an important politics, granted.  We’d hoped, though, for more macro politics, more consideration of how larger conversations, beyond pop culture, are taking shape around bisexuality in particular and around sexuality in general.  In accordance with prevalent styles in the trade book industry, the promise of such analysis is never quite fulfilled.

But there is meaty stuff here, nonetheless.  One nearly throwaway passage in the book’s final chapter gave us much pause for thought:

What Anne [Heche] symbolizes to me is the great what-if—what if it were okay for gay people to have straight expectations?  Not to “pass,” or become palatable, or go back in the closet, but simply to expect what Heche took for granted: to not have to be careful and quiet about her love life.  Heche’s cluelessness and her sense of entitlement were annoying, but they were also her weapons against fear—fear of being gay in a homophobic society and in a very homophobic (though very gay) industry. (217)

The insight here seems smart and dead on: perhaps what is necessary at times—not just to increase bi-visibility, but to help create a world of greater sexual freedom—is a bit of cluelessness, a willingness to claim a sexual empowerment even when such may not be willingly offered by those around you.  This is dangerous territory, but Baumgardner’s willingness to provoke discussion about a “bisexual politics” is dangerous, to gays, straights, and even some bisexuals too.  And while one may not be as theoretically provoked, as is the case with Angelides’ and Hemming’s books, a reader of Look Both Ways may find him-, her-, or ze-self personally provoked—and that might be the most effective kind of provocation of all.

Also appeared in SexGenderBody.  Reprinted here with thanks to Arvan Reese.

7 of 8 - What's in a Word? Dissidence, 'Denial,' and Health on a Poly Planet - From The G Tales

You call me ‘promiscuous,’ I call you ‘dishonest,’ a poly person tells the average person who believes that monogamy is the only natural way to love.

You call me ‘denialist,’ I call you ‘believer,’ a dissident person tells the average person who believes that HIV is the only cause of AIDS.

When you call AIDS Dissidents by their own name you exercise leadership in the sexual freedom movement.

Alternative lovestyle communities ignore AIDS Dissidence at their own peril.

From private conversations

Part Seven

“If AIDS was just as simple as the Swine Flu, don’t you think that a simple vaccine would have been produced already?  Don’t you remember when we talked about Echinacea?” G asked as we resumed the conversation.

“Yeah, you were flabbergasted that the government would not openly recommend this indigenous remedy,” I commented.

“The vaccine was produced immediately, remember?  So quickly that I felt a time-tested indigenous remedy would be safer if one used it ahead of time, as a preventative.”

“Yes G,” I said.  “It took a few weeks to produce a flu vaccine, and it’s been twenty five years since the beginning of AIDS,” I reflected. “One can’t be too surprised that scientists--as well as a large portion of the general public--dissent from the simple explanations that are the basis for comparing AIDS Dissidence with denial of the Holocaust.  Is that your point?”

“Exactly!” G exclaimed.  “Do you know what dissidents call those who believe in the official explanations?”

“No.  What do they call ‘em?”

“Believers,” G said.

“Believers--as in a church?” I asked.

“Yeah,” G said.  “Believers as in a church, because dissenters realize official science is full of dogmas that serve to keep the power structures in place.”

“But that’s quite offensive,” I commented.

“Just as offensive as being called a ‘denialist’ when you’re a dissenter.”

“Point taken, G,” I replied, “but the problem seems to be that these two groups are not hearing each other--they’re not communicating.”

“Correct.”

“How could they possibly communicate better?” I asked.

“One way is offer them scapegoats, sacrificial lambs, naïve foreigners like myself who end up rocking the boat.”

“And that’s been done apparently.  What else?”

“Another way is to make comparisons on a different register.  For example, one can compare ‘believers’ to flat-Earthists back in the Renaissance, or to those who still deny global warming today.”

“How does that help?” I asked.

“It helps to get the point across that dissenters are widely aware of the historical existence of AIDS. That they know its effects have been and continue to be felt by the vast majority of the population, either because they have succumbed to the epidemic, or because their loved ones have, or because their personal and public lives have been affected in significant ways.  There is an entire new generation whose sexual, emotional, and personal lives have been organized around AIDS and the fear of ‘getting it.’  There is a healthy ‘poz’ population whose lives take place under the aegis of being considered both an anomaly and a public peril.”

“What’s your point G?”

“The point is that calling things by their name is science, it is a form of knowledge that helps to unveil the direction we need to take if we want a problem to be solved.”

“I still don’t get it, G.”

“Those in the hard sciences often do not have the humanistic skills to bring their voice to the wider public in incisive, respectful ways.  It is up to those in the humanities to do that.  For example, this young man, Brent Leung, a documentary film director, journeyed all over the world to interview scientists who’ve worked on AIDS, of all schools and perspectives.  House of Numbers, his film is called.  He also interviewed healthy ‘poz’ people, including now-adult ’AIDS babies,’ who’ve refused conventional treatments and are absolutely vital and healthy.  Don’t you think that if we want to find a solution to the AIDS problem, we should encourage science to go there?  To find out how these ‘poz’ people made it?  How they kept vital and healthy?  How they healed themselves?”

House of Numbers, by Brent Leung, Trailer

“Ok.  So what I hear you saying is that AIDS Dissidence is a form of science, that it indicates possible paths authentic scientific inquiries would explore.”

“Yes, and you see that silencing all that effort as ‘denialism,’ really denies its value, its potential to produce knowledge that is very valuable, especially to those, like us, who practice love in alternative ways.  Dissident science produces knowledge that helps in understanding the complexity of immune-related syndromes especially in relation to environmental problems, like contamination of food, water, and air supply.”

“So would you say that polys and other sex-positive people ignore AIDS Dissidence at our own peril?”

“I’d certainly agree with that.  Plus,” G continued, “by now, this movement includes several world renown scientists, some honored with a Nobel Prize, and has produced countless self-funded experiments, conventions, and other knowledge producing venues.”

“Oh.  For example?” I asked.

“The latest ‘Rethinking AIDS Convention’ in Oakland, Ca, November 2009.  Countless books, articles, investigative reports.  The latest important name is Dr. Henry Bauer, of Virginia Tech, who recapitulates the whole Dissidence theory, saga, and data, in its fierce logic and relates it to the concerns for global health and ecology that dominate climate change activism today.”

“Woooow.”

“As polys,” she continued, “we ignore the AIDS Dissidence Movement at the risk of becoming complicit with the institutional project of reducing our wonderful ability to expand love beyond monogamy to what, in mainstream society, registers as mere ‘promiscuity’.”

“What do you mean?  Explain.”

End of Part Seven, G Tale # 5

Disclaimer:  This Tale does not constitute medical advice in any way.  Readers are invited to consult their own healers and health care providers. 

References: For scholarly and scientific references to contents and theories referred to in this dialog, refer to Gaia & the New Politics of Love, whose bibliography lists all sources involved.