The Bisexual Option Read online

  “Is it a boy?” “Is it a girl?” These are most often the first questions asked, in voices that suggest the gender of the infant has been determined by the birth itself. But it is in the sixth week after conception that the embryo begins to differentiate sexually. Until then, though genetically different, the “boy” and the “girl” look alike. During the sixth week the male gonads, the testes, begin to form. In the female the primitive gonad begins to develop in the form of ovaries as late as the twelfth week. The fetus is equipped with two complete sets of genital ducts–one male, one female. At some point during the third fetal month, one set of ducts proliferates while the other disappears, except for small remnants. Among all the various systems of the body, it is only the reproductive system that has two forms, or is, in a word, dimorphic.

  It is the XY (male) or XX (female) chromosomes that program the sexual reproductive organs to develop into either testes (M) or ovaries (F). When the person is conceived, it is male or female only in the difference of its chromosomes.

  So it is a boy, or it is a girl, as differentiated mainly by hormones and the male or female external and internal sex organs. Is that the end of the story? Does sexual identity and development freeze itself there in the moment of birth? No. In fact, the psychosexual development into male/female gender identity has not yet begun. It is post-natally that this boy or girl acquires self-identity. Gender identity is very much a function of biography–one’s early life experiences, upbringing, cultural and social surroundings, and so forth. Together with its prenatal sexual program, this early imprinting is the basis of self-gender identity.

  In 18 months, this gender identity has reached the point of no return. If, for instance, a mistake has been made and the baby is reared in the wrong sex, it is too late to change the rearing pattern because a new one simply will not take or, at best, will only partially take, and a confusion of gender identity is the inevitable result. If, however, the mistake is caught before 18 months, a sex reassignment can be instituted, and the boy or girl can be brought up in the tradition of the correct sex.

  If an infant is brought up as one gender, he or she will develop that gender identity, even if it is the opposite of the infant’s true chromosomal, gonadal, or hormonal sex.

  Gender identity, however, has little to do with attraction for the opposite or the same sex. A man can have a strong, even super strong, male gender identity and still be attracted to his own sex exclusively. People do strengthen gender identity throughout their lives through sex with others, but the “feeling” of being a man or being a woman does not necessarily come from making love with the opposite or with the same sex. The renewal of strength comes from many sources in a person’s environment, including intimate contact with a person, either male or female, whose own personal gender identity is nourished by the gender identity of the partner. A bisexual male, for example, having a deep relationship with a woman who lets him know in word and action that she loves the man he is, can in turn feel his inner maleness also with another man who is “turned on” by the same qualities the woman found exciting. What also should be put to rest is the idea that in homosexual activities there are male and female positions or acts, and that a specific position or behavior designates the person as playing the male or female role. A person’s gender role, the outward manifestation of the gender identity, is not necessarily bound by what he/she does in bed. A gender identity can be reinforced by the attention received by a sex partner, but it is in no primary way dependent on it.

  Gender identity, or how we see ourselves, is a cultural matter. Before that 18-month point of no return, any child can be programmed toward male or female self-identity, despite the child’s true biological nature. There are cases of sexual assignment in children who have been genitally damaged. A case in point is offered by John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt in Man and Woman, Boy and Girl.

  The extreme unusualness of this case of sex reassignment in infancy lies in the fact that the child was born a normal male and an identical twin, without genital malformation or sexual ambiguity. The idea of sex-reassignment would never have been entertained were it not for the surgical mishap at the age of seven months in which the penis was ablated flush with the abdominal wall. The mishap occurred when a circumcision was being performed by means of electrocautery. The electrical current was too powerful and burned the entire tissue of the penis which necrosed and sloughed off.

  As Money and Ehrhardt point out, the parents of the child were young, rural people with grade-school educations. “They were understandably desperate to know what could be done....” What they did, after much suffering and searching for answers, was consult a plastic surgeon familiar with the principles of sex reassignment, who recommended that the baby born a boy be reassigned as a girl. This was successfully accomplished through genital reconstruction. Hormonal replacement therapy with estrogen regulated feminization.

  All of the external and internal medical application to this problem would have been pointless, however, if the parents had not brought the child up as a girl, with all that that culturally entails. We treat girls differently from boys, and how we do so has as much to do with their being boys or girls as their gender assignment at birth.

  Is it a boy? Is it a girl? With what we now know about the imprint of culture on behavior, that question is no longer so easily or quickly answered.

  The reproductive system, being dimorphic, treasures remnants of both male and female, and these remnants–to whatever degree–remain in every living person from birth to death. This is in its way germinal bisexuality, and although it can be programmed out of the conscious mind, it remains in the person, dormant perhaps but very much alive.

  For both the heterosexual and the homosexual, the interpretation of dreams is the master key to possible truth. It is a well-known psychiatric fact that in dream interpretation the manifest content of a dream represents and is symbolic of unconscious ideas and objects. W. Stekel states that “every dream is bisexual,” and in my own experience as well a very special facet of dream interpretation is constant–the heterosexual dreams from time to time of homosexual engagement, and the homosexual dreams of heterosexual engagement. “We can assert of many dreams,” Freud wrote, “if they are carefully interpreted, that they are bisexual, since they unquestionably admit of an ‘over interpretation’ in which the dreamer’s homosexual impulses are realized-impulses, that is, which are contrary to his normal activities.” This is not to say (and Freud states this in the same paragraph) that all dreams can be interpreted this way, though many aspects of dreams are indeed sexual in nature. To interpret dreams, one must explore the dreamer’s own associations to the dream’s content.

  A few years back a patient of mine, with a resolutely heterosexual manner and lifestyle, told me of a dream in which the thorn of a long-stemmed white rose pricked the palm of his hand. Although it had not been a nightmare, the dream woke him up, and he could not get back to sleep for the rest of the night. His revealing associations led us to a high school friend named Whitey with whom he had been close but not comfortable. From there the sexual nature of the thorn pricking his palm became evident. Another patient, proudly and exclusively homosexual, related a recurring dream in which he is performing fellatio on a wide-based penis with a small red glans. His associations not surprisingly led us to his mother’s breasts.

  In both of these cases, the men involved did not consciously want what their dreams represented. Those feelings and thoughts were in their unconscious.

  If the human animal has bisexual components in its conscious or unconscious nature, what about the lower orders of animal life? Why are they less inclined toward bisexual behavior? They, unlike human beings, are stereotypically programmed to mate and reproduce without the creative elaborations allowed by the superior inventiveness of the human brain. Even very primitive societies use the variable possibilities in sexual relatedness to worship their God, or to strengthen their family and tribal life. In the Western world, male homos
exuality was, until recently, seen as a negation of masculinity. Yet in some cultures male relations for the purpose of ingesting semen are esteemed activities. By the standards of the Kukukuku people of New Guinea, for example, such relations are an essential condition for growth into the complete man who is competent to survive as both tribal member and warrior. This practice of homosexuality is coupled with the practice and responsibility of heterosexuality, and helps keep the number of births in balance.

  Another example of socially sanctioned bisexuality is provided by the Batak people of Lake Toba in northern Sumatra, who have an unchanging tradition of homosexual relationships between men and boys before marriage. Once married, however–and no man is permitted to remain in the single state–monogamy is the rule.

  Being a man or a woman entails more than the ability to grow a beard or to menstruate. Studies of transsexualism and hermaphroditism show that a woman need not be genetically female in order to successfully mother in a female way an adopted child. The child will respond to what appears to be a woman if the human being behind the role believes herself to be a woman. She will succeed or fail as a mother not on her genetic reality but on the ability to give and to receive love.

  Just as we have seen that male and female gender identity and its public expression, gender role, are set after birth, sexual orientation is also established postnatally. Whether one desires or actually has sex with the opposite gender, the same gender, or both, is established during one’s lifetime. But unlike gender identity, which is fixed in early childhood, sexual orientation does in many cases change later in life. The cultural factors of bisexuality, as well as those for hetero- and homosexuality, are complex, and despite all the hypotheses, our knowledge of all the causes of sexual orientation is still by no means complete. That cultural factors play the dominant role seems beyond a reasonable doubt.

  CHAPTER 3

  “The Bisexual-Intimacy Level”

  In our society fear of intimacy is expressed in part through heterophobia and homophobia–the fear of the opposite and/or the same sex. The main cause of the fear and resulting confusion is that sexuality and intimacy, though closely related, don’t necessarily live together. They involve complementary but also strongly independent feelings and needs. Their compatibility is dependent on individual circumstance and social pressure.

  Being close with a good friend who is laid up in the hospital, for example, can reach a level of pure, 100 percent intimacy without sex being part of it at all. But, if when the friend gets better and the possibility of sex arises, the intimacy becomes more complex. Or suppose two people share the oneness possible within an intimate situation to the point where a simple hug (whether born of sexual feeling, or merely affection, or both) is the obvious next step. If that hug is denied out of individual inhibition or social pressure, then the two people are less than 100 percent intimate, in that they are not responding freely to all the choices possible within the situation.

  Sexual orientation obviously affects the nature of the sexuality. Everyone, however, has been oriented from childhood to think and behave sexually in a particular way; total intimacy is possible within that orientation, whatever it may be.

  All persons, irrespective of where they are on the sexual orientation continuum, need what we call love. The wisest heads have pondered the nature of love, and no one has ever defined it to the satisfaction of everyone. What is life? What is love? No attempt will be made in these pages to answer such lofty questions. But we will attempt to answer a humbler question that relates to life and love: What is intimacy?

  The crossing into the territory of intimacy is as natural–if less momentous–a crossing as the first vital breath taken on entering this world and the last patch of air breathed before leaving it. On the question of life or death we have no choice. Birth and death, no matter how gentle the passage, are the two great shocks of life. The first we view as generally positive, the second as generally negative. Before we were one with our mother; life begins with a kind of death–the traumatic termination of this unity. Intimacy, then, is strongly related to the experiences of birth and death. Since–in my view–we do not consciously remember birth, and don’t return to this life to remember death, intimacy, the striving for unity with another human being, is our strongest link with the two most extraordinary events of our life. The feeling of liking or loving another person with complete trust, and the action of sharing emotions and experiences with that person, are seen and often described in relation to the two events. How often have we heard someone say, in the springtime of love, “I feel reborn”–or at the end of a relationship, “Part of me has died”? It’s the great paradox. We welcome it. We fear it. We experience it to the degree that we welcome it. We deny it to the degree that we fear it.

  The possibility, then, of a pure, 100 percent intimacy becomes a question of being willing to lose in order to win. What do I mean psychosexually when I say 100 percent intimacy? Imagine ten people, five men and five women, living in an isolated setting, sharing, liking, and loving in complete trust, but each exclusively with his or her opposite sex, or exclusively with his or her own sex. This could be said to represent 50 percent intimacy. If, on the other hand, each member of such a group were open to complete intimacy with both sexes, 100 percent intimacy would then at least be possible.

  Motion is the condition, continuum the framework in which we can see and judge our capacity for intimacy. Within this framework, though, are three stages of intimacy–minimal, circumscribed, and complete. Every human being is born with the psychological potential and need for intimacy. A person’s environment, neuroses, or both, can bring about an almost total inability to be intimate with other people; this reflects a minimal capacity for intimacy. Circumscribed intimacy goes beyond minimal but is eventually blocked because of an absence of complete trust in sharing experiences and emotions. “Trust” is the bridge word from circumscribed to complete intimacy. Once over this bridge a person is capable of selective feelings of liking and loving, and actions of sharing emotions and experiences completely with another person.

  In addition to the degree of intimacy, the possible situations of intimacy are as varied as life itself. Still, we can divide intimacy into two broad types: sexual and emotional. The currency of sexual intimacy is physical satisfaction, sexual gratification. The closeness of the infant state is achieved once again but this time as a sexual adult. The need and desire for this type of intimacy is powerful, and its achievement usually starts at an early age and lasts into old age.

  Emotional intimacy situations range from infant-mother, to child-parent, through social settings, to acquaintances and friends. Our earliest experience with intimacy is with our mothers–first in the womb and later as an infant. We’re petted, rocked, embraced, fed, snuggled–our every wish fulfilled with mother love. Every human infant needs this experience to grow up capable of closeness and intimacy with other people. Next in the life of the child comes the intimacy of both parents and the family as a whole; separated from oneness with the mother, the child now shares in the emotional intimacy of the family. Until adulthood, ideally, the child loves and is loved by the family, and shares each member’s experiences and emotions. He or she is, in other words, the beneficiary of complete emotional intimacy. The emotionally stunted adult was an emotionally traumatized child–the child who did not fully achieve total familial intimacy, whether as a result of having divorced parents or having a family unable to give and receive complete intimacy. The latter was the case with a patient of mine, an attractive, intelligent middle-aged woman who had never married, though she had had numerous relationships with men. She came to therapy because a man she loved very much wanted to at least live with, if not marry, her. She found the proposal terrifying. While she was growing up–on a farm in a small town in Pennsylvania–neither her parents nor her grandparents, who lived in the same house, had demonstrated emotion of any kind. “My parents slept in separate rooms, and I never saw them hug or even quarrel
. When I was twelve I had my first period and I was afraid, but I couldn’t go to my mother or my grandmother. And if it weren’t for a teacher in school I wouldn’t have known what was happening. My father was worse. Real American Gothic. We never said more than two words to each other and he never touched me. Never. When he died a few years ago my mother expressed no feeling at all, and when I asked her if she would miss him she said, ‘Was meant to be, that’s all.’“

  Adults experience emotional intimacy every day in one degree or another. Three important social settings where intimacy is either expressed or implied are social gatherings, work, and play–for example in the form of sports. In social gatherings it’s the chemistry of the people involved that allows for the sharing of emotions without fear. This sharing of sympathetic affections is at times so moving that even in social situations between strangers it can be meaningful. True, the very form, or formality, of some social situations–such as cocktail parties–makes meaningful intimacy with a stranger unlikely indeed. Yet it can and does happen. When it does we’re not likely to forget it, even if we never see the other person or persons again.

  At work, intimacy is the mortar of relatedness that builds the structure of accomplishment. Whether it is the pat on the shoulder for a job well done, the sharing of an agreeable lunch with a client, or your fellow employee helping you hold the cable in place, work situations often produce that quality of oneness between people that words can’t describe. Many a job has been given up not because of the pay or the work itself but because emotional intimacy was lacking.

  Think back to the emotional highs of sharing with your teammates an important victory or defeat on the playing field. Spectators, too, may share with others these emotional highs and lows. However, actual participation in sports allows for a closer intimacy because not only are emotions and experiences shared, but trust and usually friendship as well.