Bisexual Forum Hosts “Bisexuality Across Cultures” Event

Bisexual Forum Hosts “Bisexuality Across Cultures” Event

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved


The Bisexual Forum of San Diego’s “Bisexuality Across Cultures” event May 27 at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center in Hillcrest was somewhat overshadowed by the response to the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8, announced the day before. But three speakers — Regina Reinhardt, Ph.D., managing editor of the Journal of Bisexuality, director of the American Institute of Bisexuality and co-founder of the Bisexual Forum, along with current Bisexual Forum board members CL and Jennifer Restle, offered some intriguing perspectives on the different meanings of sex, sexuality and sexual expression with partners of both genders not only between national groups but across other forms of human difference.

“Some cultures may not use the word ‘Bisexual,’ and even in those that do, many people may be unfamiliar with it or misunderstand it,” said Dr. Reinhardt. “I am originally from Germany, and as long as I remember I have been attracted to [partners of] both genders. The label ‘Bisexual’ was unknown to me then and continued to be so when I lived in Rome, London, Paris and Copenhagen. Bisexuality was usually referred to as ‘AC/DC’ or ‘swinging both ways.’ When asked, I usually said that I liked both men and women.”

Dr. Reinhardt said that it wasn’t until she moved to the U.S. that she heard the term “Bisexual” — and she immediately accepted it as a description of herself. “I felt it described my sexual orientation, and I feel comfortable with it to this day,” she said. Since she emigrated, she added, the term “Bisexual” has spread across the world and been adopted “all over America, Europe, Australia and South America.” She recommended a book by Robyn Ochs called Getting Bi, which features contributions from Bisexual people in 36 different countries.

One of the people profiled in Getting Bi is a Chinese woman named Xiao, who in an excerpt from Getting Bi which Dr. Reinhardt read at the event, told Ochs, “I grew up in China as a ‘normal’ girl. I dated a few boys in high school and college, but I always enjoyed spending time with my girlfriends. The first time I ever heard of homosexuality was when we had an English teacher from England. As China is becoming more open, homosexuality is gaining more understanding and acceptance. But still Bi people don’t like to expose themselves, except in a small circle.”

Restle discussed her own situation as a blind Bisexual woman and said there’s what she called “a hierarchy of discrimination,” in which some groups victimized by discrimination are nonetheless more socially privileged than others. According to Restle, racial and ethnic minorities are at the top of the hierarchy of discrimination; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people are in the middle and people with disabilities are at the bottom. To prove her point, she noted that people frequently say they’d “rather be dead” than have to live with being disabled, “so in a way we’re even below dead people.”

Even within the disability community there’s a hierarchy, Restle said, between people like herself whose disabilities are readily apparent visually and people whose disabilities aren’t visible. “I’ve been this way all my life, so it’s not like I had to come to terms with being one thing or another,” she said. “My sexual orientation is not the first thing people notice about me.” Indeed, Restle added, one of the stereotypes people with disabilities have to contend with is people who assume they’re not sexual at all. Restle said she doesn’t announce that she’s Bisexual because “most people don’t go around announcing their heterosexuality,” and also because it’s so hard getting people over the preconception that people with disabilities are “sexless” that “having an alternative sexual orientation doesn’t even register.”

Restle said that one of her ongoing disappointments is that people in the Queer community aren’t any more sympathetic to people with disabilities than people in the heterosexual mainstream. She recited a disturbing litany of Queer organizations that hold meetings in locations that people in wheelchairs can’t get in, and Queer libraries and publications that don’t offer materials in formats blind people can use. She sees signs of progress, though, mostly in the Center’s decision to use sign-language interpreters at many of their programs so deaf people can understand what’s being said. “President Obama said you have to change people’s minds and hearts before you can change the law,” Restle explained. “If I can change people’s minds and hearts about being disabled, there’s more of a tendency to think about whether an event is accessible or a leaflet is available in an alternative format.”

CL, who grew up in Juárez, Mexico and came to the U.S. when he was 22, represented something closer to what most people think of when they hear the phrase “across cultures.” Like Dr. Reinhardt, CL said that in his home country “there wasn’t much of a use for the term ‘bisexuality’ but there was a lot of Bi behavior going on.” He touched on a much talked-about aspect of Latin American male sexuality: that men are judged as “homosexual” only if they give blow jobs, get fucked or otherwise take the so-called “women’s” role in sex. Men who have sex with men — including ones who are simultaneously married to women and have active sex lives with their wives — aren’t looked down on or considered “Gay” if they only take the “top” role in sex.

With that cultural background, CL said he wasn’t prepared for the much greater rigidity with which people’s sexual orientations are defined in the U.S. Like many people with attractions to both genders, CL felt pulled by both straights and Queers to make up his mind and pick one or the other. “I’d tell people I was attracted to men, and I’d be told, ‘Just embrace your inner Gayness,’” he recalled. What got him to accept not only being Bisexual but asserting a Bisexual identity was meeting the late Dr. Fritz Klein, co-founder of the Bisexual Forum and author of the book The Bisexual Option, whom CL first encountered while he was on the rebound from a failed relationship with a woman.

“After that,” CL recalled, “I got into a relationship with a man for several years. Them I met a woman with whom I was in a concurrent relationship [with his involvement with his male partner]. By that time, I was 33 and I felt I was excluding my mother from a significant part of my life, so I decided to come out. I invited her to San Diego, left a lot of clues and told her about my same-sex relationship and my concurrent opposite-sex relationship. She didn’t understand it all, but she said she loved me.” After he experimented with polyamory (an open multiple-partner lifestyle in which each partner knows about the others) for two years, CL got into a mutually exclusive relationship with a man whom he’s now been with for five years. “But I am still very Bi,” he said. “At some point I rejected it and thought of it as a curse. Now I thoroughly embrace it. I enjoy checking out the girls and the boys.”

CL said sexual orientation is “much more fluid” within the Latino community than it is among whites. Asked by meeting moderator Dan Watman if it’s “acceptable” for a man who’s married to a woman to have affairs with men, CL said, “It’s not ‘acceptable,’ just as it’s not ‘acceptable’ for a married man to have a [female] mistress, but it’s tolerated.” The tolerance ends, however, if it comes out that the man is actually “bottoming” for his male partner, CL warned.

Asked by an audience member if there were any newer data than those from the pioneering surveys of Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his team in the 1940’s and 1950’s about the prevalence of homosexuality and bisexuality in the general population, Dr. Reinhardt’s answer was a qualified no. “We’re getting a lot of research done and articles written,” she said, “but we don’t have a number.” She praised Dr. Kinsey’s integrity as a researcher — it’s been much questioned ever since he published his ground-breaking studies on men in 1948 and women in 1953, but Dr. Reinhardt said that to the extent there’s been more recent research, it’s upheld his conclusions — and estimated that there are about 40 million Bisexuals in the U.S.

The conversation took an unusual turn when Restle was asked about the suicide rate among Queer disabled people — and her answer tapped into the whole controversy over euthanasia and assisted suicide. This debate is usually presented similarly to the contest over abortion — between support for people’s “right to choose” and opposition based on a “pro-life” religious or moral commitment — but, as Restle explained, many people with disabilities fear the legalization of assisted suicide because “a lot of people encourage us to kill ourselves.” She mentioned that within the disability community there’s an organization called Not Dead Yet, which mobilizes against laws allowing assisted suicide because they fear such laws will be used to pressure people with disabilities into believing they have, not a “right,” but a duty to die to spare taxpayers and society as a whole the costs of taking care of them.