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I have a confession to make. I am not a bisexual. I do not identify as a bisexual. While I do sometimes use the word “bisexual” to refer to myself when I am being interviewed, I use it as shorthand, a term of convenience. When I use the word “bisexual” to refer to myself, it means simply “I am neither homosexual nor heterosexual.” For several years, and until quite recently, I identified my sexuality as “fence-sitter.” This was a pretty good fit, for a time. I liked “fence-sitter.” It pissed people off, including a lot of people who identified as bisexual, because I was taking up that nasty little slur and gleefully plastering it all over myself like a spa mud bath extravaganza. And that was half the reason I identified myself that way. You see, I believe in the power of words. The words we use are magic, they are invocations. Things happen when you use the right words... or intentionally use the wrong ones. A few years ago, at a conference far, far away, I was asked to speak on a panel having to do with sexual identities. The conference, a university conference, had made me a bit grumpy: it was a sexuality conference, but all of my fellow academics at the conference kept distancing themselves from their topics, as if sexuality were something they had only heard about third hand, or only encountered in library books. The language they used was clinical, careful, and impersonal. I was unhappy about their words and what their words were doing – making sexuality into something that happened to other people, so that they could sit there and have Important Intellectual Opinions about it without having to talk about their own experiences, their own lives, or their own sexual selves... as if none of it would ever apply to them. So I wrote an introduction for the panel moderator to read before I read my paper. It went like this: “Hanne Blank not the kind of girl you take home to Mother. An overeducated kinky fat Jew, she is a tranny-chasing opportunist fence-sitter who sleeps with other people’s wives.” The moderator at first refused to read it. I insisted. He did. People gasped out loud. As part of my paper, I explained my identity – or rather, the complex intersection of many things, including being an academic and historian, a sexual dominant and former sex worker, a fat woman, a Jew, and a polyamorous person who is attracted to people of multiple sexes and genders – and how they influence how I view the GLBT movement (or movements, if you will). After the panel, I had people coming up to me angrily accusing me of being crude just to get a reaction; others told me they felt I was doing the GLBT community a disservice by using that kind of language to refer to myself; one or two academics told me that I was just going to undermine my point if I used that kind of inflammatory terminology, because the only thing that using phrases like “opportunist fence-sitter” and saying that you sleep with other people’s spouses was going to do was to create dissent and unease and bring up issues that made people feel insecure. I grinned quietly to myself and thought, “Good. Then my job here is done.” Now, I know, I am kind of a special case. I am very in-your-face, very confrontational, very much an activist. I believe in the positive power of creative mischief and the transformative possibilities of yanking out the tablecloth from underneath someone’s nicely laid out, mainstream-friendly tea party. There are those of you who would not be comfortable being too vocal or too loud, and there are those of you who, given the nature of the culture we live in, have excellent reasons not to be comfortable being that visible or that confrontational. But if you are in this room, chances are good that you, too, are a fence-sitter. You are an opportunist, an inbetweener, one of those “confused” people who some of our homosexual brothers and sisters like to believe would rather be gay but can’t get up the strength of will to relinquish heterosexual privilege. You’re going through a phase, poor dear, and you just want to be different, just like everyone else... or maybe you just want to be fashionable (and if so, I have news for you: bisexuality is so, so early 90’s. All the hip kids today are in their secondary virginity.). Or maybe you were just warped by early exposure to Rocky Horror. What I mean by that is that if you are in this room, there is a very good chance that there is something in your nature that, without your having to do a thing, works some of the same magic that powerful words and incantations can create. There is something about you that is not built to code, something that has the potential to make people very uneasy, to make people feel confused, confronted, defensive. There’s something about you that generates dissent, brings up tricky issues, something that can make some people feel tremendously – even violently, and I do not use that word lightly – insecure. You are an enormous vibrating question mark sitting in a room full of enormous vibrating question marks. Some of you, my fellow question marks, are probably pretty comfortable with the idea of being question marks. For some of you this is still new, and probably still terrifying. For a lot of you, this probably brings up a lot of things, a lot of discomfort, a lot of wishing that we question marks were better accepted, more included, more recognized, that we could find a comfortable, dry place where we could easily come in out of the rain. Because we question marks have issues. You know, things like bi invisibility. Does it make you mad that people only seem to see you as queer when you’re with someone of your own gender or sex, and then they read you as homosexual, and that when you’re with someone of another gender or sex, you turn straight so fast it makes your head spin? Or biphobia. Does it irritate you when you see “no bis” in a personal ad? Do you ever feel left out or marginalized when you try to participate in your local women’s or men’s community and you realize that there isn’t a whole lot of room for the part of you that is attracted to the so-called “opposite” sex? And have you ever gotten just a little irritated when you’re in a relationship with someone of another sex or gender and your mom – and this is something my mom only recently stopped doing – asks you “So, um, are you still bisexual?” Or when a friend gets exasperated with you and tells you you’d be easier to take if you could just pick a side and stick with it? Now, right this minute, all of this is a lot easier to take. It’s easier to shrug off the slights when you’re at a bi conference. Having a bunch of other people around you with whom you share that fundamental question-mark status is awfully nice. It’s a pleasant change. But on a daily basis, in our daily lives, for a lot of us, I think being neither heterosexual or homosexual probably feels a lot like being permanently stuck out in the rain... feeling like there isn’t really anywhere that welcomes us to come inside that also has enough room to keep some part of us from getting wet. The problem is, if you want to come in from the rain, you have to hold still. Simply put, the straight world doesn’t have enough room for some of our loves, and the gay world doesn’t have enough room for the others. As our trans and intergender brothers and sisters have discovered, the efforts of both gay and straight communities to include us have been limited by their very serious lack of ability and willingness to accept and work with indeterminacy, unpredictability, changeability, fluidity. To be included in those spaces, in those cultures, you have to hold still. And you know, we question marks have tried to hold still. We really have. We wave this banner that says “bisexual” and buy ourselves vanity license plates that read "KINSEY3." We have as a movement, forged a name, and gotten it included in many queer spaces. We’ve pulled together enough of a collective identity that a certain amount of politics have formed around it like an oyster forming a pearl. As Dr. Fritz Klein mentioned in his talk the other evening, [the untitled Friday night keynote speech at the conference -- HB] we’ve come a long way in a very very short time – but as far as we have come, we still have a long way to go. But our successes have been limited. Gays and lesbians have become pretty mainstreamed, yet we question marks have not. There is no bisexual Ellen DeGeneres... but the fairly obviously bisexual Anne Heche sure did get dragged through the muck in the gay press for “going back to men,” didn’t she? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I think three years in a highly public same-sex relationship at least qualifies you for a toaster and a complimentary rainbow flag bumper sticker... and the acknowledgement that you might, just possibly, be bisexual. And how about those nice same-sex American Express Traveler’s Check ads? I want to see a two-page spread in Vanity Fair that has, let’s say, a bi woman who on one page is with her male lover, signing over a his-and-hers traveler’s check at the TKTS booth in Times Square... and who then, on the next page, is shown shopping at the Michigan Women’s Music Festival with her girlfriend, arm in arm as they sign over a hers and hers check for a copy of the latest Butchies CD. Wouldn’t it be nice to see that? To have that umbrella of public acknowledgement be available to us? But no dice. We think we’re holding still enough for someone to be able to hold the umbrella over us, we bisexuals. We have a name. We have an identity. We have support groups and conferences. But it seems that even when we hold still, we still encompasses too many possibilities, too much range. Part of this is about time. We place a demand on people that they consider our sexuality not just in any given instant – or any given glimpse at who might be sharing our bed that night – but over time. We may think we’re holding still, but in the eyes of our sound-bite culture, whose patience with things that are not reliably either/or, and that stay that way, is notoriously short, we roam unacceptably wide. You see, no matter how unobtrusive our lives, no matter how normal our jobs, our relationships with our friends and families, our physical selves, and even, sometimes, our superficial appearance of nice, safe, predictable homo- or heterosexuality, we disrupt. That’s the other part of the equation: this is about flux. In a culture where sex, gender, and sexuality are presumed to be binary in nature, an identity based on insisting that you be permitted to choose neither, either, or both, at any time, without asking for permission or changing stances in order to do so -- is so fundamentally rebellious as to be an act of outright anarchy. It is autocratic. Because our bisexualities come in an enormous range of flavors and tints, they are unpredictable, and any consensus we can form is acknowledged at the outset to only go so far. Our question-mark sexuality is not only resistance to the pick-a-side binary, it is an act of fiat in a culture where acts of fiat are incredibly scary. Our consistent inconsistency makes us outlaws. In some ways, this can be said of anyone in this culture who desires openly. When we desire whom we desire, love whom we love, and fuck whom we fuck, we present the world with a fait accompli. But when we also make it clear – and this is one of the few places where our identity politics truly serve us – that our fait accompli may or may not be replicated the same way twice, we turn on the neon in our question marks and they become unmissable, unmistakable, unignorable. This scares people. They don’t know where to place us, whether they can love us without fearing that they’ll be supplanted by someone whose different gender or sex is an attribute with which they cannot compete, how to empathize with our spectrum of wants and needs and desires when they run in directions with which they have no experience. We make them question their own boundaries and reactions, responses and desires; we make them wonder what it would be like if things were different... if they were different. We are tricksters, shape-shifters, heyokas, protean, liminal. We wriggle around a lot, and with a lot of different people, in a lot of different communities. We don’t get a lot of chances to rest and take it easy, if we want to be recognized for who and what we are. We don’t fit easily under the umbrellas that have been erected, or at least not for very long. To which I am forced to ask: what’s so bad about that? |
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No, really, I’m serious. For thirty-odd years now, we’ve had this thing called the Gay Liberation Movement. It’s expanded, as I think we’re all aware. It includes lesbians, too, and latterly, it at least in some ways includes bisexuals, transsexuals, and genderqueer people. All of those identities are important, because we’ve needed to establish that those possibilities, those modes of existence and interaction, exist. We’ve needed to create space for culture, for celebration, for sharing and forming resistance to hetero-normative and gender-prescriptive oppression. Identity politics have been crucial to that project, and I am not here to undermine identity politics – they can be incredibly useful, particularly in our American culture. What I am here to do is to ask you to consider this: that having an identity which is constantly the subject of negotiation is a good thing, that not resting, not having a fixed dwelling place, keeps our queerness – and all queerness – vital and alive. I am here to ask you to consider that the cultural consolidation of identity limits one’s ability to become liberated from a culture whose practice is to only recognize consolidated, group identities. Consider for a moment that there are ways to establish identity and community without sacrificing mobility, flexibility, change, and challenge. This is why I conjure with words. This is why I use words like “queer,” and “fencesitter,” “dyke” and “faggot.” This is why, as a writer, I write about the subversiveness of desire, the unruliness of our appetites – it’s why I do a lot of sex education, and why I’m working on a book about age-disparate sexual relationships. I demand to put these things, these realities and possibilities, out there in the world and have them seen even though they are difficult, even though they make people uneasy or embarrassed. This is why I relish the opportunity to stand up here and tell you that I love getting my cock sucked as much as I love sucking cock, that I love fucking my partners regardless of their sex or gender, that I cherish the tender intimacy of feeling parts of the warm, soft, clinging body of a person I love and desire surrounding parts of my own body as I thrust and probe and explore, that hearing a partner of mine beg me to take them and ravish them and rip them to pieces gives me a hard-on the size of Lake Michigan... and makes me as wet. I like to rub people’s noses in the fact that the only thing fixed about who I am, as a sexual being, is that I’m a top – everything else is open to negotiation. And who knows, for the right person, the whole top thing could be negotiable, too. I think it’s valuable to be a question mark, a person who reminds people that their predictions are as likely to be wrong as right, that their expectations are as likely to be unmet as met, that the sum of my parts is greater than any momentarily complete version of me you might encounter in any given relationship or passing through any moment in time. This is also why I recently decided that I no longer feel comfortable identifying as a fencesitter. For starters, sitting on a fence only permits you two sides, and in my erotic and emotional life, there are quite a bit more than two sides. But sitting on a fence also means there’s still a fence there, and I’m not so sure I find that fence to be all that helpful, or even accurate, a concept. The older I get and the more time I spend working on issues of sexuality, the more I seem to be seeing real life sexuality – my own and other people’s – not as an either/or phenomenon, but as a matter of spectrums, gamuts that run from extreme to extreme but, by definition, are mostly made up of middle ground. But the real reason I no longer am interested in identifying as a fencesitter is that I am no longer content to define myself by other people’s categories, even in my resistance of those categories. It’s about liberation, and about freedom. As I have struggled with the work of accepting my own sexual autocracy, as I have worked to explore it personally and intellectually and erotically, as I have done different kinds of work, both directly political and not, to help enable others enact their own sexual independence, I’ve given a lot of thought to what the end game of sexual liberation could be, might be, and should be. What on earth would a sexuality liberated of consensus identity be? What would it look like? How would you describe it? Well, try this on for size: my sexual identity is “sovereign.” “What the hell does that mean?” I hear you cry. Well, for one thing, being sovereign means that I have absolute power to determine the boundaries of my own sexual self, without question or appeal, at all times. It means I have not only the right, but the obligation, to defend my boundaries – boundaries are not pre-existing natural features like mountain ranges or oceans, they are lines we draw in the sand. (When you travel from Canada to the USA, nothing about the land itself changes; it isn’t like the way it goes from black and white to color in The Wizard of Oz. The border is there because we say it’s there.) It means that I may choose to form allegiances and alliances with other sovereign entities based on their willingness to enter into a contract of mutual support of one another’s sovereignty. It means that I may characterize my sovereignty in whatever manner seems most appropriate, using any and all of the words and names that seem to fit: bisexual, pansexual, queer, kinky, polyamorous, femme, right-handed, female, feminist, whatever. It means that while I may, from time to time, share an umbrella with an ally, I also undertake the responsibility for opening my own...or not. Because to me, part of being sovereign means learning to love the rain. |
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It is useful to learn to love the rain. It is useful not to be afraid of being outside. To become sovereign in my sexual identity – and this, I think, is an ultimate queerness in our culture, where what we desire, how we desire, whom we desire, how we fuck, whom we fuck, where and when and even why we want to fuck are all so policed and overdetermined – I have had to look long and hard at what it means to opt not to be covered by the big, established umbrellas of straight society and mainstream queer culture. I have had to learn to take a long view of what exclusion, such as bi invisibility in the gay community, really means. I have developed a profound appreciation for the radical politics of visibly insisting on both/and rather than settling for either/or. I have struggled to make my own internal sorting mechanisms more flexible – because becoming sovereign requires the ability to recognize other sovereigns. I want to say that this process has been fundamentally aided by my work and my friendships among genderqueer, intersex, and transgendered people. When neither sex nor gender are givens, and the history of an individual life becomes elemental to speaking of that person’s gender and/or sex, most notions of how identity and orientation work suddenly beggar definition. Thanks to many friends and colleagues, crushes and lovers who were or are not conventionally gendered, I have been shown that what might look like a crisis is not. When definitions fail you, in the moments where you are forced to know that you simply do not know, you are forced to look at people differently. When you are faced with genderqueerness, there is a moment of panic: “Is this person male or female? What culture do they belong to? What can I expect? Am I supposed to be attracted to this person? Is it okay for me to be attracted to this person, if I am? Is this person going to be attracted to me? Is it okay for this person to be attracted to me?” But when the fundamental answer there is not forthcoming, or doesn’t fall to hand easily, you’re forced – unless your insecurity is so great that you can only react with violent rejection -- to come up with other ways to evaluate the person. “Is this person kind to me? Does this person seem capable, intelligent, honest? Are they amusing to talk to? Is this, in point of fact, the kind of personality I like to be around?” Bisexuality is not so different. Faced with bisexuality, there is a moment of panic: “Is this person attracted to men or women? What culture do they belong to? What can I expect? Is it okay for me to be attracted to this person, if I should find them attractive? Is this person going to be attracted to me? If so, what do I do about that?” And when that fundamental answer is not forthcoming, and again, unless your insecurity is so great that you can only react with violent rejection, you come up with other ways to evaluate that person. You evaluate that person as a human being. Not as a gender, not as a sexual orientation, not as an exemplar of this kind of socialization or that set of expectations, but actually as an individual, a sovereign entity with its own borders and climates, language and law. A Zen meditation teacher I know once put it this way, “One of the hardest things I know of is to try to bite into an apple without expecting it to taste like an apple. That is why first encounters with new things are so revelatory. When you bite into a piece of unfamiliar fruit, you have no expectations of what it will taste like – you are forced to let it be what it is.” You are, in short, forced to allow the unfamiliar fruit to be sovereign, and to interact with it in its moment. It is unique and vital, autocratic, singular. It is an exercise in detachment, acceptance, and openness. It is a challenge. It is radical and vital. And, particularly when it comes to sexuality, it’s something that we as individuals and as a culture desperately need. Just to be completely clear, I’m not advocating a sense of sovereignty as a replacement for organized and collective political work; I would hate to see the ground the queer liberation movement has gained be lost because “every man for himself” became the cultural watchword. I am, however, advocating sexual sovereignty as a corrective for the kind of entrenchment that becomes prescriptive, as a means of protecting us from our own tendency to canonize, to start making decisions about who can and can’t join in our reindeer games based on the degree to which their actions, affiliations, and sympathies resemble our own. I offer you sovereignty because I too am tired of not being accepted for all the things I am. I offer you sovereignty in the face of every one who ever asked “am I really bisexual if I....” or made you feel that you weren’t bisexual enough, or queer enough, or gay enough, or whatever enough to fit into their version of what the people they gave those labels to ought to look like and act like. I offer you sovereignty as the only crown fit to be worn by the rebel, the outcast, the heretic, the renegade, the in-betweener, the I-don’t-know-and-you-don’t-either, the one who takes their half out of the middle. I also offer you the concept of sovereign identity as a shield, as a form of armor and empowerment. Here, at a bisexual conference, solidarity is powerful. We can come together under the aegis of allowing one another this latitude, this tolerance, this freedom, mutually understanding that it is precisely this range of possibility that makes us what we are. We hoist our own umbrella, for a while – bisexual sovereignty, if you will – and maintain the boundaries of our own temporary autonomous zone. But soon we will go back to our everyday lives, though, and when we do, this tangible solidarity becomes a memory. We’re back to either looking for shelter under some other large umbrella, holding our own – or trying to build one – or simply getting wet. As people who are neither homosexual nor heterosexual, we will all sometimes end up in the rain, either partially or wholly. I don’t know about you, but I’m not nearly sweet enough to melt if I get a little wet. What I am – and what I think we all are, here – is sovereign enough to stand in the rain for a while and let it nurture us, let it teach us to love it for its willfulness, its unpredictability, its ability to send other people scurrying for cover, its tendency to come when it wants to, and yes, its nourishing, sensual, life-giving fluidity. Not so unlike us ourselves, when you think about it. Besides... as I’ve said to many people before in my life: You’re
so damned sexy when you’re wet. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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