The Bisexual Option Read online

  The healthy homosexual has also repressed his or her sexual wishes for both parents. But for the homosexual, more repression is necessary to resolve the positive Oedipus complex. The gender repression for the homosexual is for the opposite sex–the boy not being able to transfer his sexual love for his mother onto other women, nor the girl hers for her father onto other men. The homosexual, too, is able to express and feel love toward members of the opposite sex on an uneroticized level.

  For the healthy bisexual male and the healthy bisexual female to resolve successfully the positive and negative Oedipus complex, it is necessary for them to repress their sexual desires for both parents. What is not repressed is the displacement of these desires onto others of both genders as sexual object choices.

  The degree of repression for all three conditions–bisexuality, heterosexuality, and homosexuality–is environmentally induced. Abram Kardiner puts it this way:

  Every person is equipped with an inherent genital apparatus for sexual arousal and discharge, and from this standpoint the sexual drive may be considered inborn. But we cannot say because we do not know to what extent there is in man an inborn need either for a sexual object in general or for a sexual object of a particular gender. We do know, however, that the particular choice of object that is made is markedly influenced by the growing child’s dependent relationship with his parents. In this sense, the ultimate choice of object is a learned pattern of behavior.

  Until recently ostracism for violation of the heterosexual standard through homosexual activity was the norm. The barriers have now been lowered somewhat. Gays and lesbians now march up Fifth Avenue on a Sunday afternoon just as the Irish, the Puerto Ricans, and the war veterans do. But more important, the American Psychiatric Association has removed homosexuality from its mental disease list (although the Association has kept listed as a disorder any sexual orientation if it causes persistent and marked distress).

  The bisexual barrier, however, is still up. Both the heterosexual and homosexual view him or her as suspect, not a fully paid-up member but someone whose allegiance is with the other group. I find it ironic that this should be so. It is the bisexual who has repressed the least. He or she is able to react to both men and women on an erotic plane and to love members of both sexes on an emotional one as well.

  The man who stood on the street corner is real. He is a stubborn fact, living under the same sun as you and I. He is not going to vanish. In the course of my life, I’ve met many bisexuals, both male and female. Some have been patients trying to improve their emotional relatedness to other people (as do some hetero- and homosexual patients), some have been friends, and some have been acquaintances. Paul is an acquaintance who became a friend, although we are not so close that I cannot describe him objectively. Paul’s lack of repression in choosing partners of either sex has led him to a normal bisexual resolution of the Oedipus complex.

  Paul is a handsome man in his mid-forties, about six feet in height, trim, clean shaven, with a dark intensity about the eyes. Although he is gentle, there is a kind of black Irish temper lurking behind his eyes, held in check by a keen intelligence. A first-generation American, he was only six months in his mother’s womb when his father left home, eventually to wind up in jail. The year was 1932. The Depression was peaking, and his mother earned seven dollars a week as maid and cook to the Hamiltons, a wealthy Boston family. Paul was known for the next 19 years as “Nellie’s boy.”

  Paul related his story in a series of taped interviews (four in all) over a three-week period. I asked him if he remembered much about his life between ages one and six.

  “Yes. I’m blessed and cursed that way. I remember everything from two-and-a-half on. In the beginning my mother couldn’t have me with her–she had to work–so she put me with a nice lower middle-class Irish family. I saw her only on Thursdays, her day off, and for years I had two mothers, the one who came every Thursday and ‘Mom’ Kelly, who was really a wonderful person. She had two teenage kids of her own, but I think she loved having a baby in the house. I called my mother ‘Mother’ and I called mom ‘Mom,’ and I loved them both very much but in different ways. What I mean is I loved Mom completely while I loved Mother the way you love someone who is loyal and you can trust. When I was about six, Mother made arrangements with the rich lady she worked for to have me stay with her each summer at the Cape.”

  “Did Mrs. Kelly have a husband?” I asked.

  “Yes. I called him Dads, but I don’t remember him at all except that he was quiet, gentle, and read the paper a lot. He must have been a good man because I never felt any bad vibes from him. He and Mom were very close, but honestly I don’t remember him at all except I know he was there.”

  “Were any male figures important to you in your formative years?”

  “Yes, there was one, but he served as a symbol more than a flesh-and-blood human being. But a powerful symbol. He was Mom Kelly’s son from a previous marriage. He came to live with her for a time when I was about five and we became close. He must have been about twenty-five, maybe older, but not much. He owned a red roadster and he used to take me everywhere with him. Sometimes there would be a girl with him and I would ride in the middle. His name was Steven. He took me for my first haircut,”

  “Would you say you loved him?”

  “I adored him. I don’t know if I loved him but I adored him the way a boy adores a movie hero or a baseball player. I wanted to be like him. Then he went away. To New York. He became a singer on the radio and I used to listen to his program every week.”

  “Were you happy as a child?”

  “Those first five, six years were really fine, and then, man, they sent me to school. No kindergarten, no nursery school, but right into the first grade. A Catholic school, nuns for teachers and, God, for the first time I came across really awful women. I mean, no one had ever hit me really hard until I went to school. I think they must have been a very sick bunch. I cried every day: I lived in fear of the strap and the ruler and I failed first grade.

  “Summers became a haven away from school, and the Cape was beautiful except I was ‘Nellie’s boy’ in a WASP environment. Mrs. Hamilton became a sort of closet mother to me, though. She had three children of her own, but she took me shopping with her. I liked her a lot. She was a terrific snob, but she took me to the public library for the first time, taught me music, and introduced me to a culture I never would have seen or felt otherwise. Now I loved her in another way. Very romantic. And she liked me too. But God, it hurt when there would be parties and picnics, and I couldn’t go because I was the maid’s son. I could play with the kids during the week, even wander into the living room, but when Mr. Hamilton came on weekends I had to stay in the servants’ quarters or in the kitchen. I only saw him half a dozen times in seven years but, God, he loomed.”

  “Did you hate or dislike him?”

  “I think I did hate him, yes. Hate is a strong word though. I more than disliked him. I never knew the man really. His children didn’t like him. I think they hated him. He was that kind of Victorian gentleman who makes everyone uptight.

  “So, anyway, I never knew where I stood at the Cape. Then after the second summer my mother planted me in a boarding school for boys. No warning, nothing. Suddenly that September I didn’t go back to Mom Kelly but to this Catholic school, taught by Brothers this time, and they were worse than the nuns. I never saw Mom again. I pined for her for years. I nearly went crazy that first year. Mother admitted years later that she was afraid of losing me to Mom. That’s why she did it.

  “She was forty-one when I was born and, well, you can’t blame her. I was all she had. She did her best for me considering the situation, but it hurt and I hated boarding school. The Brothers were brutal, and the kids were for the most part from broken homes and were pretty crazy. It was violent as hell. Sports, fights, constant bumping and shoving and hitting and hollering, endless conflict between the Brothers and the boys and between the boys themselves. Really awful. I wa
s there for eight years. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter I spent with Mother at the Hamilton house in Boston, and then summers on the Cape. I lived in two very different worlds at the same time. I didn’t fit in at school because I wasn’t really a lower-middle-class kid, and I didn’t fit in at the Cape because I wasn’t an upper-class kid.”

  “What were you?”

  “A kind of hybrid, I think. I mean, I didn’t want to be either. The kids on the Cape were more confused than the kids at boarding school. They had no love in them, though I think I liked them better as companions because at least you could get into the area of ideas once in a while. You see, I had no trouble with loving or being loved. I’ve always had a best friend or friends, and I’ve always had a woman in my life to love and be loved by. I did have friends at boarding school. Bobby O’Hearn was my best friend. I loved him a lot. Then I loved Joan, Mrs. Hamilton’s daughter. We were the same age, and I had a crush on her from the age of nine to the age of fifteen. She cared for me as well, but I was ‘Nellie’s boy’ and that was the big separation.”

  “Did you have sex with Joan?”

  “No. No. I didn’t have sex with anyone until I was twenty-two. I began masturbating at eleven, and I did it and did it and did it all through my teens into my early twenties.”

  “What did you fantasize when you masturbated?”

  “Girls. Sometimes I used magazines, but mostly I just thought about girls. They were such a mystery to me. When I did finally have sex at twenty-two, it was perfect. Two weeks of constant lovemaking. I didn’t tell her she was my first. I did later, though. She was very experienced and I was good with her. I remember before I entered her for the first time I said to myself just as I felt myself enter, I’m not going to be a priest.’ It was good. It was really good.”

  “Had you dated in high school?”

  “Oh sure. In high school and in the Air Force. I dropped out of high school and after then went into the service at nineteen. I would neck with girls. From fifteen to twenty-two, I would neck and masturbate. Not at the same time of course.”

  “Had you had any homosexual experience at all up to this point?”

  “No, unless you count the time with this kid Bill when he and I were twelve. We were in a closet together hiding. Some kind of game, and I got an erection. I asked him to suck me off, although I don’t think I put it in those words.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. But I think he wanted to. I know I wanted him to.”

  “Did you continue having sex with women after twenty-two?”

  “Oh yes. I met Nancy. I was working in the rare book field. Doing pretty well freelance. Mrs. Hamilton influenced me there. They had a magnificent library. Anyway, Nancy and I married. The baby girl came a year later.”

  “How was sex with Nancy?”

  “It took about five years to get good and about ten to get really good. Now, after eighteen years, it’s above high C. For the past five years every time we make love we come together. To me she’s very sexy in a Gothic kind of way. And we love each other. She works at a private school. I work freelance. We’ve never had much money, but we live well and our daughter, seventeen now, is a nice person and a good friend to us as we are to her. We’re happy, the three of us.”

  “Have you been ‘faithful’ to Nancy?”

  “No. I’ve had four or five affairs–two major. One lasted four years. I loved the girl. She was different from Nancy. Big, warm, earthy. Sex was beyond description with her. I got myself into the Mother/Mom Kelly situation for four years and resolved a lot with it. Nancy knew about it. She has had affairs too. Not as heavy as mine, I don’t think.”

  “Do you have an open marriage?”

  “Not in the modem sense. We tell each other everything, Nancy and I–but we time it. I’ve never given to anyone, man or woman, the part of me that belongs to Nancy. Let’s say you love someone, but they don’t like ice cream and you do. Well, no problem. You find someone who does like ice cream, and you share it with that person instead of driving your mate crazy with accusations because she won’t share everything with you. It’s not possible to share everything with one person, but you can share the experience if you time it right.”

  “Have you had close male friendships in your life?”

  “Yes. One lasted fourteen years. We loved each other as friends. Jim and I were as close as two people can get without being lovers. It was sexually a very straight relationship.”

  “When did you have your first sexual experience with a man?”

  “I was thirty. Nancy was out of town one summer weekend with the baby, who was about five then. I was lonely, I guess. I took a walk around the city. This guy picked me up and we went to his apartment. Guys had been trying to pick me up for years but I had no interest.”

  “Why did you go with this man?”

  “He was gentle and I liked his eyes. He had merry eyes and I suppose I was ready and just lonely enough. He had a nice place. Very tasteful. That helped. He gave me a drink. Two drinks. Then he said right out that he would like to go down on me. He did. It was so good, he was so good and loving at doing it that I stayed all night. He went down on me about six times.”

  “You remained passive?”

  “Yes, except I responded. Really responded. Well, that was the beginning. I would call him once a week or so, and he would go down on me and we would sit around naked and talk. That was nice. I had never sat around relaxed and naked with a man before. And he told me things about my body that I had never heard from a woman, like I had good legs. Now I do have good legs but women don’t tell a man these things. I tell women if it’s true. For instance, Nancy has a beautiful neck and a sexy ass and an absolutely perfect pussy. I tell her that. A lot. Just as I have told other women about how I feel about their bodies. This girl I loved for four years had a marvelous odor and great tits and I told her, but it never occurred to her to tell me, for instance, that I had a nice cock. If it weren’t for men, I would never know I had a well-shaped cock. It’s not important, but it is.

  “For about three years, I went through a number of men who wanted to go down on me. Then I met a boy about twenty-two. He cruised me on the street. We went to his apartment and it evolved into a sixty-nine.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It took me a while, but now I like it a lot. Going down on a man you like physically or emotionally is very exciting. I can get very into it now.”

  “Have you ever loved a man?”

  “Yes, I’ve loved Jim like a brother, friend, buddy, a lover with-out sex. Sexually, I came close once with this boy I met about a year ago. I felt something with him that I have only felt with a woman. I can’t explain it, but in any case his job took him to Europe. If we had had more time, I think I could have loved him. I was never sure of his mind. I intend to fall in love with intelligent people, and to this day I’m not sure if he had as good a mind as he had a body. Also, men don’t excite me as much as women do. Or I should say they don’t excite me in the same way. I can become one with a woman if it’s good between us. I have never been one with a man. It’s hard to imagine, as a matter of fact. Sex with a woman is special to me. Sex with a man is wonderful, but somehow it’s not special. Maybe because it’s so easy to get, and I’m a man with a man’s body and there’s no mystery there. Women are very mysterious to me and I find that special. I’m happiest when I’m with a woman I love, just the two of us having a good time. But then again maybe I haven’t met the right man. He would have to have a really good mind, a gentle way about him, and a nice body.”

  “What is a nice male body?”

  “Trim, not too hairy–I’m hairy–and, well, I find myself very attracted to Oriental men. Though I’ve had good times with hairy men, so it really depends on the person. That’s true of women as well.”

  “Do you think of yourself as bisexual?”

  “Yes, but I don’t advertise it.”“

  I did not ask Paul why he does not “advertise it.” I
knew why. So do you. Although he might label himself a bisexual, others would condemn his behavior as neurotic. So he lives quietly, and from my observation after having met and spent time with his family, they and he are indeed happy people.

  To the extent that the desire for members of one whole gender is not repressed, it is possible to erotically love both sexes. Little boys and girls learn what is expected of them early. Their traits and behavior patterns are reinforced as “male” and “female” not only by mothers and fathers but by the total environment. A successful resolution of the Oedipus complex does not include an identification with the parent of the same sex. That is a separate process.

  Paul has, it would seem, successfully resolved his Oedipus complex by repressing sexual desires for his mother as well as male and female parental substitutes. As a bisexual he has not repressed his eroticism toward men or women.

  This new look at the successful Oedipus complex resolution explains how not only the heterosexual male resolves it but also how women, bisexuals, and homosexuals do. It is simpler. It explains more. And more important, we now can understand the healthy heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual much better.

  Repression is necessary for a sane life. When a road sign says no left turn, we obey whether we want to or not, because our life or our neighbor’s life depends on our choice. But surplus repression is not helpful or necessary. To continue not making that left turn when the sign has been taken down and the traffic pattern changed is to be a prisoner of habit.

  Repressing incestuous desires toward the mother and father resolves the Oedipus complex successfully. The desire to be loved by both parents and to love them in return on an uneroticized level remains, enabling the person to displace his or her love onto others. Whether we end up healthy heterosexuals, healthy homosexuals, or healthy bisexuals depends on many factors. But the health involved depends on the successful resolution of the positive and negative Oedipus complex.