Headcase - Do bisexuals exist?

For years, little has made many gay men roll their eyes as much as having sex with a man who announces afterward that he is bisexual. The bisexual, in their view, is just another gay man who refuses to come out of the closet.

A recent study has given that argument an ostensible boost. According to a report in the July 5 issue of the New York Times, psychologists in Chicago and Toronto measured genital arousal patterns in 101 young men during viewing of erotic films. Of the participants, 33 identified as bisexual, 30 as straight and 38 as gay.

Gay men, as expected, only responded to men, and straight men were only turned on by women. But among the bisexuals, three-quarters responded identically to the gay men and the remaining responded like heterosexuals. Not a single man expressed actual genital interest in both sexes.

The study, the first to measure actual genital response, raises all kinds of questions. Nobody maintains that everyone claiming to be bisexual - 1.7 percent of all men - is intentionally misstating the nature of his desire. So the study suggests that the body’s physical manifestation of desire may be quite different from our subjective experience of attraction. People, in short, probably mean very different things when they talk about desire.

Bisexual activists have discounted the new study on that basis. They think that by reducing sexual identity to a genital definition, the Times reports, the study “is too crude to capture the richness - erotic sensations, affection, admiration - that constitutes sexual attraction.” The researchers themselves agree that a much larger study needs to be conducted before firm conclusions are reached.

I’m casting my vote with the bisexual activists, and I’m betting that any future studies that rely on pure genital measures are going to be equally inconclusive and, instead, fully demonstrative of the mystery of desire. Although the Times article cited Freud’s theory that humans are naturally bisexual and Alfred Kinsey’s collaborative surveys in that respect, it oddly did not mention simple historical proof of the fluidity of desire.

We know beyond any doubt that men are capable of enjoying sex with both genders. Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, men had sex with one another under various rules, none of which exempted them from having sex with women. The same thing has occurred in various indigenous cultures, such as Papua, New Guinea, and was rampant in the Italian community in New York City at the turn of the last century. And none of that includes the well-known transient turn to sex with other men in prison, prep schools and the armed services.

The difference in the encounters of these men and those of this new study is a lack of identification as bisexual - a category of identity, like heterosexuality, that was created after the category of homosexuality was identified. In other words, the categories of sexual identity are all based on the extent of homosexual interaction. And since psychology pathologized homosexuality and the justice system criminalized it, these categories also came to represent the spectrum of normality. Prior to the creation of these virtual sexual species, the gender of one’s sex partners was not a measurement of identity: Nobody attempted to pigeonhole a person in the way the culture and this new study do.

But, more than cultural history, personal experience taught me that sexuality is not purely a function of genital appeal. I was married for five years and had little interaction with men during that time. What I did have, toward the end of my marriage, was purely genital and never seemed very gratifying, compared to sex with my wife. Even after I was divorced, I used to split my time between hanging out in gay and straight clubs.At the time, I found sex with women more emotionally pleasurable than with men, although from a pure physical perspective, I found men “hotter.” So I know from personal experience that it is quite possible to have a strong physical attraction to men but still feel strongly attracted to women - and vice versa. That one’s pure genital response might be different from one’s general attraction - especially if you add in factors like the wish to raise children - seems self-evident to me.

But it is also true that the culture, including the culture of gay men, exerts enormous pressure to identify with a sole sexual orientation. My own decision to identify as gay only occurred when I fell in love with a man and did not feel so emotionally dependent on women. The experience of fusing my primary genital attraction with my broader emotional desires was liberating, despite the stigma it entailed. But many men do not have that experience. They remain in love with their wives and still strongly desire sex with men.

Sex remains the most mysterious aspect of human life. I have never met a person whose sex life and fantasies weren’t surprisingly outside the expected cultural norms. Although this new study offers fascinating information, it is too much an effort to reduce sexuality to those cultural norms. There is far more to sex than an erect penis.

cliff.bostock@creativeloafing.comCliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology.??