Bisexuality Round Up
By William E. Burleson
Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics by Jennifer Baumgardner
Eros: A Memoir of Bisexuality and Transculturalism by Sereena Anderlini-D’Onofrio
Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics
Jennifer Baumgardner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / ISBN-13: 978-0-374-19004-0, ISBN-10: 0-374-19004-6
Hardcover $24.00, 244pp.
Through the dizzying social change over the past three decades for the GLBT community and the rapid changes in the politics of feminism, many bisexual women have struggled to find their place within both. That is the subject of Jennifer Baumgardner’s new book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. The politics of the title are those of the feminist movement and how bisexual women fit into third-wave feminism.
Baumgardner, co-author of Manifesta and Grassroots, and former editor at Ms, uses her own life, from her early relationships with men to her first girlfriend, her relationship with Amy Ray (of the Indigo Girls), to her current male partner and becoming a parent, to show the reader how difficult it is for bisexuals to stake a place between the great weight of a hetero-centric world and the cultural juggernaut that are the lesbian and gay communities.
Nothing new there; nearly all books about bisexuality discuss these challenges. What makes Look Both Ways indispensable is its generation. What is it like to have grown up watching Will and Grace? Indeed, Baumgardner writes of a world where bisexuality is becoming no big deal. “The exact date that bisexuality became common for younger women is hard to determine. In my view, it coincides roughly with the last days of the first Bush administration and Ani DiFranco’s rapid permeation of collegiate record collections.”
Meanwhile, this greater acceptance for bisexuality among young women is tied to the evolution from second to third-wave feminism. Faced with defending itself from attacks from the Right, second-wave feminism overtly and explicitly rejected lesbianism at first and has scorned bisexuality throughout, even though, according to Baumgardner, feminist icons Kate Millett, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Audre Lord all have had same-sex relationships. But come the ‘90s, in the age of Riot Grrrls and Drew Barrymore, tattoos and combat boots, all bets were off.
While this book is about bisexuality and feminism and how they relate at the turn of the century, there is, if not explicitly, an implicit comparison between how the bisexual experience is different between women and men. The stereotype is that bi women are more accepted in the greater culture than bi men are, a point with which Baumgardner would apparently agree. For example, Baumgardner talks about an evening of too many drinks at a bar with a woman she was attracted to, where by the end of the night they are putting on a conspicuous display of public affection for a gathering male audience. One would be hard pressed to imagine a similar scene with two men making out to a woman audience or, even more out there, in a straight bar to a male audience. Indeed, this element of sexism via objectification is key, for, as Baumgardner says, “Men’s ‘acceptance’ of women’s same-sex attraction contributes to its acceptance in the larger culture.”
Of course, greater acceptance for bisexual women is also connected to the successes of the GLBT movement in general. For example, she sites Dartmouth College, which she describes as a conservative. “By the spring of 2004, when I visited the campus, it had five GLBT groups, four queer studies courses, a coordinator of GLBT programming and advocacy, a GLBT resource room, and a network for out and allied students called Queer Peers.”
Still, in the GLBT community, “Bisexuals rate an initial, but there is no organizing around bisexuality.” Not quite accurate perhaps, but still. However, after reading Look Both Ways, one is left to ask if an organized bisexual community is needed at all if enough people, and communities, embrace sexual fluidity. For the generation Baumgardner describes, it appears, at least for women, that the decision has been made.
Eros: A Memoir of Bisexuality and Transculturalism
Sereena Anderlini-D’Onofrio
Harrington Park Press ISBN 13: 1-56023-571-2
Hardcover $29.95, 223pp.
On the other hand, in the memoir Eros: A Memoir of Bisexuality and Transculturalism we have a very different story. This is for many reasons, not the least of which is generational. Instead of coming of age in the 1990s, Anderlini-D’Onofrio was a self-described “second wave feminist in the 1970s.” Her story is one of working through rocky relationships with men, coming to terms with how to live in a world with AIDS, and ultimately crashing into a world of sexual exploration.
The book is in three parts, with the first beginning with Anderlini-D’Onofrio, Italian, arriving in the United States as a graduate student. This section is the bulk of the story, taking the reader along step by step as she navigates being a single, and often separated by an ocean, mother, her academic career, and finally her awakening to her bisexuality. “1986 to 1992-1993 were the years during which I also crossed the boundaries between sexual orientations, first mentally, then emotionally, then physically, and finally in a more spiritual way.” Having contemplated her attractions as early as her graduate student days, she eventually comes to explore not only bisexuality but also herself as an erotic being. After living in a number of places struggling through academic successes and failures, she finds herself living in San Diego, and there discovers a group, the Bi Forum. “…in the early 1990s, I came to enjoy group sex partly as a way to reconnect feelings and erotic expression in a polyamorous way.”
The second section takes us back to before she arrives in graduate school, through her marriage and divorce, and does it as if she were telling the story in a letter to her daughter. The third section is an epilogue, and tells of returning to Italy and her instruction in the ways of sex to a Mozambique-born priest.
Despite their similarities—both being first-person accounts about what it means to be a bisexual woman—Look Both Ways and Eros are very different stories. If Baumgardner’s story is confident, assertive, and perhaps even optimistic, Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s is one of loss and even depression. If Look Both Ways uses personal storytelling to illustrate her point, Eros is more a personal catharsis. One could perhaps imagine Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s selling the book proposal to her publisher as a story of redemption; and for me, I truly wish that that is the case. Unfortunately for the subject of this memoir, I see a story whose ending isn’t written yet, leaving me with a sense of melancholy.
William Burleson is the author of Bi America, Myths, Truths, and Struggles of an Invisible Community from Haworth Press. www.bi101.org