Hybrid. Ruth Colker
Blasingame provides excellent insight into the bridges that must be crossed if people of color are to feel more welcome in the “gay” movement. When we can start talking about people who have sex with people of the same sex without making any assumptions about whether they also have sex with people of the opposite sex, then we may have a more racially inclusive politics. Our bipolar orientation about sexuality therefore contributes to a misunderstanding of how people experience sexuality and also makes people in various ethnic communities feel alienated from the gay rights movement.
How can we make more visible individuals who lie between sexual categories? One way is to embrace individualized storytelling rather than categories such as “bisexual”:
To compensate for the lack of an adequate label, which I know would have its limitations anyway, I find myself telling my story, or as much of it as the situation warrants. It gives people the chance to hear, not defector or fence-sitter, but process, struggle toward self-understanding, self-claiming. It gives them room to hear about feelings and to tell their own. It gives me—and all of us—room to be larger than a name.16
Categories suggest stasis whereas storytelling reflects our changing life experiences. The way for individuals’ sexual identity to become fully visible is not to embrace the new category of “bisexuality” but to explain fully the content of their sexuality. Sandra Bern embraces this perspective when she says that she has been involved intimately with a particular man for three decades but would not describe herself as having chosen him as a partner because of his biological gender. Her life description does a more complete job of explaining her sexuality than the label “heterosexual” or “bisexual.” This perspective does not force us to agonize over whether Bern properly could be considered a “bisexual” given the monogamous nature of her sexual relationship of the last three decades. Applying or not applying the label “bisexual” to Bern’s situation would not add to our understanding of her sexuality. Individualized storytelling, however, makes it clear how her sexuality differs from another woman who has also been married to the same man for three decades but who openly acknowledges that she organizes her sexuality around the biological sex of her partner.
There are times when we need categories for constructive purposes. The fact that categories may have pragmatic advantages in certain situations, however, should not make us forget that categorical thinking can also seriously misstate human feelings and experience. Where individualized storytelling is possible in addition to or instead of categorization, we should seek to promote storytelling.
Individuals who lie between racial categories often face similar dilemmas. As I will discuss further in chapters 5 and 8, some17 individuals feel that they have to make a false choice on job application forms, census forms, or even birth certificates about their racial identity. Parents complain that such false choices undermine the self-esteem of their children. Although we do not usually think of race as a thought process based on our feelings in the same way that we think of sexual orientation, these stories reveal the element of conscious choice of racial category for certain individuals. Our dominant view of race as a biological category (which, itself, is inaccurate according to scientists and anthropologists) is undermined when we see the ways in which some individuals can move between racial categories or make choices about the racial categories to which they belong.
Nonetheless, sexual orientation and race have basic dissimilarities. Most of us are told as young children, either implicitly or explicitly, that we are heterosexual. It is only through a conscious thought process that we can move beyond that bipolar category. Similarly, most of us are told our race at a young age and few of us ever question our racial identity. However, some individuals discover new information about their racial heritage later in life through comments from their parents or official public records such as birth certificates. Irrespective of whether an individual has been informed of her multiracial background from a young age or whether she discovers it somewhat later in life, she may make a choice as to whether to identify with a multiracial category or, instead, to maintain a monoracial identity. (Most individuals, however, who have multiracial backgrounds do not make a conscious choice about racial identification, because the “one drop of blood rule” has defined them as fitting a monoracial category.) Racial identity, like sexual orientation, can therefore have a cognitive component for some individuals. That component becomes particularly apparent when we focus on certain individuals with multiracial backgrounds.
B. Bipolar Classification Reinforces Pejorative Values
Both the gay and straight communities often use the bipolar classification scheme to disparage bisexuals: “Switch-hitter. Swings both ways. Fence-sitter. AC/DC.”18 The term “has-bian,” developed by the gay and lesbian community, reflects this disparagement. Stacey Young offers this critique of the term:
I object to the expression because it defines a person only in terms of what she once was. To refer to a woman as a “hasbian” implies that all one need know about her is her relationship to that exalted state, lesbianism. The term “hasbian” also, of course, evokes the word “has-been” which Webster’s defines as “a person or thing which was formerly popular or effective, but is no longer so.” What interests, then, does this term serve? Who has the power to define here, and at whose expense?19
These negative connotations detract from the desire of bisexuals to work politically within the gay and lesbian community, thereby depriving us of valuable political energy and leadership. For example, the poet Nina Silver felt torn whether to come “out” to her lesbian editor, Tori, who was to visit soon.20 When she wrote to Tori and told her that she was living with a man, whom she had also married, Tori wrote back and said that she could no longer have a working relationship with Nina, nor could Nina read her lesbian love poetry at a woman’s bookstore. (The poems no longer genuinely reflected love for women.)
In a more public example of bisexual exclusion, the gay and lesbian community in one city decided to drop the word “bisexual” from the title of its lesbian and gay pride day march. A bisexual, Micki Siegel, had strongly supported the inclusion of the word “bisexual” in the march’s title. Two lesbians responded to Micki’s arguments in a gay newspaper by calling her “Mrs. Siegel” and criticizing her for trying to attach to the lesbian community rather than create a community of her own.21
An anonymous male political activist, who now identifies as gay rather than bisexual, summarizes the anti-bisexual sentiment that he has observed in the gay male community. Gay men, he reports, often believe that identifying as bisexual is:
a phony period of being pressured into conforming to society’s standards, and it’s a giving in to this pressure, therefore it’s a lie; it’s immaturity. . . . Another belief is that straights run the world and oppress gays. Gays are finally making progress. Progress is fragile, so you bisexuals shut up and let us gays have our time now. . . . Also, there is the belief that homosexuality, not heterosexuality is what people are really discriminating against, so bisexuality is a nonissue.22
My own experiences parallel those described by others. I was hurt and baffled when two lesbian friends explained that they would no longer be able to vacation with me once I became involved with a man. They had never met my male partner so they were speaking entirely from an abstract position; they could not imagine any man with whom they would want to share social space in a vacation setting. Oddly enough, they had repeatedly vacationed with one of their sisters and her husband. My friendship, however, appeared to be contingent on my being a “pure lesbian.”23 Similarly, I was shocked and dismayed when a feminist activist referred to me as a “hasbian” after I married a man, thereby erasing my feelings toward and experiences with women.
Ironically, the lesbian and gay community often criticizes female bisexuals for sleeping with men and diverting energy away from the lesbian community,24 but it is sometimes the actions of lesbians and gay men rather than our male partners that keep us from working politically in the lesbian community. For example, when I was asked