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                                                                                BEHAVIOR, Page 49

BISEXUALITY: What Is It?


In the waltz of love, where do bisexuals fit in? Are they really
straight or gay, or a category unto themselves?

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS -- With reporting by Hannah Bloch/New
York, Michele Donley/Chicago and Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles


    Happily married for 10 years, Richard Sharrard, a dance
instructor, and Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and writer,
blend in nicely enough with their neighbors in the middle-class
community of Long Beach, Calif. But the couple's life-style is
far from ordinary: Sharrard and Tessina are openly and
unapologetically bisexual. During their unusually flexible
marriage, Sharrard has enjoyed liaisons with half a dozen men,
while Tessina has taken two female lovers. "It's the best of
both worlds," declares Sharrard, who thinks nothing could be
more natural than bisexuality.

    In a world where sexual orientation is polarized into
heterosexuality and homosexuality, bisexuality comes as a
disturbing challenge, at once a riddle and a discomfort. "It
threatens rigidity," says Lani Kaahumanu, a bisexual activist
in San Francisco. "It threatens both sides of the framework."
Bisexuals often inspire nervousness, distaste and hostility in
both straights and gays and are all but ignored by scholars.

    Lately, however, bisexuality has been hard to overlook.
Bisexual characters are the newest twist in movies and TV shows,
most notably Basic Instinct and L.A. Law. PBS recently
broadcast a drama based on the lives of writers Vita
Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, both bisexuals.
Authors Camille Paglia and the late John Cheever have confessed
their sexual duality; recent biographies claim that Laurence
Olivier, Cary Grant and Eleanor Roosevelt had affairs with both
men and women.

    But the issue has been more than fodder for gossip
columns. The advent of AIDS has made bisexuality a matter of
medical concern. Bisexual men who practice unsafe sex with male
and female partners may help speed the spread of HIV through
the heterosexual community. "Up until the time of AIDS, the
term bisexual was hardly even used," says anthropologist Carmen
Dora Guimaraes of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,
"but with the spread of AIDS, we are now trying to flush out
this enigmatic character."

    Fearful of stigma and discrimination, bisexuals across the
U.S. and Europe are becoming more organized and politically
active, networking in such groups as BiNet and BiPAC. They are
also challenging gay organizations, with which they have had an
uneasy alliance, to focus more on bisexuality.

    The activism has sparked a new debate about sexuality in
general. Are people essentially either straight or gay, with
bisexuality being merely the unnatural by-product of confusion
and repression among some homosexuals? Or is bisexuality a third
distinct orientation? Is sexuality governed by biology or
culture? Is it fixed, an identity that is set early and endures
through life? Or is it fluid, shifting with time and temptation?

    In truth, sexual identity is a complex weave spun of
desire, fantasy, conduct and belief; pulling on any one thread
distorts the fabric. Even defining one's own sexual orientation
can be difficult. Avowed lesbians sometimes sleep with men, and
men who describe themselves as straight engage in sex with
other men. In many Latin societies, men do not consider
themselves bisexual or gay unless they take the
passive-receptive role during sex. Moreover, sexuality is as
much a state of mind as an act of body. People may be attracted
to someone but unwilling to act on their desires out of guilt
or shame; conversely, others may act contrary to their true
feelings.

    Statistics on the number of bisexuals are unreliable since
people who engage in such behavior often do not call themselves
bisexual. But the ability to respond erotically to both sexes
seems to be a common human trait. Bisexuality frequently occurs
among male and female adolescents in many cultures and is an
entrenched though unspoken practice among men in some Latin and
Muslim societies. Alfred Kinsey's classic surveys in the '40s
and '50s of American middle-class sexual mores found that about
46% of the men that were interviewed and 12% of the women
admitted to sexual experiences with both sexes.

    Despite its prevalence, bisexuality traditionally has not
been granted independent status as a category of sexuality.
Instead, the behavior has been explained away as a phase. For
instance, teenagers sometimes experiment with both male and
female partners on the way to establishing their sexual
identity. Among Sambia Highlanders in Papua New Guinea, boys
practice oral sex with one another as a formal rite of passage
toward manhood and adult heterosexuality. Dual sexuality has
also been seen as a pragmatic response, a way to fill a sexual
need when passion is thwarted by culture and circumstance, such
as imprisonment. Mixing between men and women before marriage
is strictly limited in some Muslim societies.

    The most common perception is that bisexuals are basically
straights with a taste for exotic adventure or essentially gays
who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge their true
orientation. To growing numbers of bisexuals, however, as well
as therapists and researchers, this is nonsense. They insist
that bisexuality is not a walk on the wild side or a run from
reality but has a legitimate identity of its own. Explains John
Craig, a 40-year-old writer in Amherst, Mass., who organizes
weekend retreats for bisexual men: "I want to experience contact
with a man's body and with a woman's body. That's just a basic
part of who I am."

    Because of society's reluctance to recognize their
existence, bisexuals often face an even more torturous struggle
than gays in coming to terms with their identity. Unlike gays,
bisexuals lack an established community or culture to help ease
the process. For men, the confusion seems to surface during
adolescence and early adulthood. Al, 38, of Chicago, recalls
that during his troubled college years "there was almost no
place I could go where bisexuality was part of the norm." Having
"bought into the myth that bisexuality was a political cop-out,"
he swung between describing himself as straight and gay. But his
distress was so great that "I went though a period of a year or
two where I called myself `unlabeled.' "

    Some bisexual women travel a similar path. Sarah Listerud,
a member of a large Catholic family, arrived at Oberlin College
believing marriage for her was a "given." During her sophomore
year, she fell in love with a woman. She had subsequent lesbian
liaisons but remained attracted to men. "I thought bisexuality
was a phase I was going through before joining the lesbian
community," recalls Listerud, now 29 and living in Chicago. But
then, she would "bump into a guy in the cafeteria who was really
cute or get a crush on a guy. Finally, it was like a little
light bulb went off. I thought maybe bisexuality is real. I was
absolutely terrified. It was undesirable; it was not politically
correct. I was sure to be ostracized from the lesbian
community."

    For other women, bisexuality is a late discovery. "Many
never had any sexual attraction to other women," notes
psychiatrist Tim Wolf of San Diego. "But now they are in their
30s or 50s, and they fall in love with a particular woman." Lani
Kaahumanu was a typical San Mateo, Calif., housewife, wed to her
high school sweetheart for 11 years and the mother of two
children. With the women's movement of the '70s, "all of a
sudden there was this freedom to love women," says Kaahumanu,
48. She divorced and for four years lived what she calls a "very
public lesbian life." But by 1980 Kaahumanu had fallen in love
with a man. Wolf speculates that women come to a realization of
their bisexuality later than men do because women tend to be
more physically affectionate with each other throughout their
lives and this closeness camouflages the sexual desire. Women
also seem to show more sexual flexibility than men and switch
their sexual focus more often, he adds.

    What causes the duality of desire? Most experts believe
sexual orientation develops from a mix of nature and nurture,
but the recipe remains a mystery. Gender may be fixed prenatally
by a chromosome and a wash of hormones, but does a flood of
chemicals prime the fetus for a particular sexual preference?

    Scientists are discovering differences in brain structure
-- at least between straight and gay men. UCLA researchers
reported this month that autopsies showed that the anterior
commissure -- a bundle of nerves that connects the left and
right hemispheres of the brain -- appears to be about a third
larger in homosexuals than in heterosexuals. Another study,
published last year, revealed that a segment of the
hypothalamus, which influences sexual activity, seems to be half
as large in gay men as it is in straight men. A recent survey
found that when one twin is gay, an identical sibling is three
times as likely as a fraternal twin to be gay as well.

    Although such findings suggest a strong biological
influence, they are hardly conclusive. One problem: Are the
differences in brain tissue the cause or the result of
differences in behavior? "You've always got to keep in mind that
experience changes the brain," stresses June Reinisch, director
of the Kinsey Institute. And if nature is paramount, why don't
identical twins always have the same sexual orientation?

    Freud believed that human beings are bisexual to begin
with -- polymorphous perverse, as he put it -- but become
heterosexual or homosexual because of their early experiences
of love and sensation. Bisexual as well as gay men often report
having distant, aloof fathers, leading to speculation that
homosexual behavior is in some aspect a search for male
nurturing that has become eroticized. Researcher John Money of
Johns Hopkins University compares the acquisition of sexual
orientation to learning to speak. "You did not have a native
language on the day you were born," he explains. "But by the age
of five, you'd got it. When it's set, it's set, and there's
nothing you can do about it."

    Culture is undoubtedly important as well. "It's a lot like
eating," says Richard Parker, professor of medical anthropology
and human sexuality at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.
"We all have an urge to feed ourselves. But whether we like Thai
food or American meat and potatoes depends on where our tastes
and appetites develop. Some cultures develop a taste for spicy
food, and it is largely the same for sexuality."

    According to Kinsey, sexuality is a continuum. On the
heterosexual-to-homosexual scale of 0 to 6 that he devised, only
50% of male subjects can be classified as exclusively straight
and 4% exclusively gay. Sharrard falls right in the middle of
the Kinsey scale, equally attracted to men and women, but such
balance is rare. Tessina calls herself a 2, mostly heterosexual.

    Some bisexuals have a stronger physical passion or
romantic longing for one sex. Eric, 31, a journalist in San
Francisco, has sex with women and men, but "I experience more
emotional intensity with men." Other bisexuals, like John Craig
or Sarah Listerud, find that attraction varies over time, even
taking on an almost cyclical quality.

    To Eric, bisexuality "enhances the human experience. You
get a fuller, richer sexual life. Other men plow through life
without understanding the parts of themselves that are
feminine." Bisexuals often claim to be more sensitive and
empathic lovers. "There is some truth in that," says
psychologist William Wedin, director of New York City's Bisexual
Information and Counseling Service. "Part of being bisexual
means that you see things from more than one perspective. You
can't be comfortable in stereotypical ways of thinking and
reacting."

    Still, many bisexuals, especially men, are racked by
discomfort and conflict. About two-thirds of bisexual men are
married, notes Wedin, and discovery that a husband is involved
with other men can easily wreck a marriage. The husband feels
humiliated, and the wife betrayed, not so much by his having sex
with men as by his having gone outside the marriage.

    Jason, 37, a Seattle architect, avoided deceit by
disclosing his bisexuality before his marriage. "We talked about
our marriage vows because I did not want to say `I will forsake
all others.' I couldn't vow monogamy." But he is faithful to his
wife in one sense: his outside liaisons are limited to men, and
only one at a time. "Besides, I can't handle too many emotional
relationships at a time. You can get burned out."

    That is a common complaint. "Your feet are in both camps,
but your heart is in neither," observes Eric. "You have the
opportunity to experience a kind of richness, but you constantly
feel you have to make a choice." But forcing a selection may not
be the wisest course. "You create a sexual neuter if you attempt
to wipe out one set of feelings over the other," warns Wedin.
"The more you attempt to repress it, the greater the disruption
it tends to cause in the other set of feelings."

    Answers to the puzzle of bisexuality are becoming more
urgent. As the threat of AIDS intensifies, more precise
information regarding bisexuals' prevalence and practices is
desperately needed. As agitation for bisexual rights increases,
a clearer understanding of sexuality's origins is pivotal to the
debate. One thing is already evident: more even than gays,
bisexuals used to live in the shadows. Now they are entering the
spotlight.