the Lesbian and Gay Community represented by Out/Look, bisexuality is a very controversial issue with important implications for lesbian and gay discourse. In 1990, Clausen established a connection between “lesbians who sleep with men” and “bisexuality,” thereby constructing bisexuality not as a new issue to be added to an existing repertoire, but as a challenge to ongoing lesbian and gay discourse. Lesbians’ objections to bisexuality were aired generously and taken seriously, not marginalized and dismissed as they were in The Advocate. But by 1992, these objections were replaced by the voices of bisexuals themselves. The debate among lesbians about the place of bisexuals in the lesbian community had become a debate in which bisexuals themselves were an interested party and had an active voice. Bisexuality as an issue had been replaced by bisexual issues, for example, the development of a bisexual politic and the relationship between bisexual politics and lesbian and gay politics. Whereas The Advocate’s “Bi and Beyond” had framed the issue as one of bisexual inclusion in the lesbian and gay movement, Out/Look had gone one step farther to construct not only bisexuals, but a political bisexual voice.
Meanwhile, in the conservative world of 10 Percent, the issue of bisexuality—let alone bisexual issues or the bisexual voice—barely exists at all. 10 Percent came closest to tackling the issue of bisexuality in its second issue, published in Spring 1993. “My girlfriend is becoming the man of my dreams” was written by Kate Bornstein, a “bisexual heterosexual lesbian gay male transsexual woman who is in a committed relationship with a lesbian man named David.”23 She pointed out that bisexuals gained recognition by inclusion in the name of the 1993 March on Washington but transgendered people did not, thereby portraying bisexuals as members of the gay establishment that excluded transgendered people. Judging from the lack of letters to the editor in the next issue, readers had no opinion on the subject. The word “bisexual” appeared again a few issues later when Eric Marcus wrote, “I’m not even all that comfortable being grouped with bisexuals, let alone transsexuals, transvestites, and queer straights” because “we have different lives, face different challenges.”24 Two letters to the editor in the next issue disagreed, arguing that Marcus’s attitude was divisive and phobic. Neither reader mentioned bisexuality except when quoting Marcus; the issue constructed was a general one concerning appreciation of diversity.
In lesbian and gay publications, the issue of bisexuality—which is primarily of interest to lesbians—competes for space with gay issues such as AIDS. In lesbian publications, more time and energy can be devoted to hashing out the details of lesbian ideology, including the political meaning of bisexuality. Dedicated to the discussion of issues that are relevant within lesbian feminism, Lesbian Contradiction provides a receptive audience for discussions of lesbians who have sex with men and bisexuality.
Like general lesbian and gay publications, Lesbian Contradiction initially constructed the issue as one of lesbians who have sex with men. In issue number 2, “Many Lesbians Are Going Straight Now . . .—A Conversation” consisted of thirteen comments written on a wall in a women’s bathroom, one in response to the other. The women had thirteen very different opinions and perspectives. Some discussed their feelings about lovers who leave them for men or offered opinions about whether lesbians who “go straight” are capitulating to compulsory heterosexuality or whether they were never lesbians to begin with. Others acknowledged their own attractions to men and wrote about the isolation they felt because they feared censure by lesbians. Voice #11 mentioned that she was just beginning to find support from other bisexuals and asked others not to judge her. Voice #12 agreed that “We should all be free to be who we are,” but Voice #13 revealed that liberal views are not always accompanied by understanding, “[e]ven if some people can’t make up their minds who they are!”25 A year later, Gwen Fay expressed her exasperation over the fact that lesbians can be as prejudiced as anyone else, and deplored the fact that there are so few opportunities for us to air our differences that the conversation had had to take place on a bathroom wall.26
These opinions were echoed in 1989 after Lesbian Contradiction published “Desire and Consequences: Sleeping with a Strange Man” by Juana Maria Paz, “A Second Coming Out” by Stephanie Sugars, and “I’m Still a Lesbian” by Jane Dwinell.27 One reader blasted the magazine for printing Paz’s description of “women and men fucking each other.” She did not “[condemn] Juana for having heterosexual sex” but she resented Juana’s claim to lesbian identity and Lesbian Contradiction’s decision to give space to heterosexuality when space for lesbian expression was so limited already.28 The editors defended their decision by reiterating the newspaper’s mission to serve as a broad forum for discussion of feminism by all women, not only lesbians.29 Dwinell wrote about her life as a lesbian-identified woman in a long-term committed relationship with a man. The response to Dwinell was even more vehement than the response to Paz had been. Lesbian Contradiction printed three letters from readers who denounced Dwinell for calling herself a lesbian, denying heterosexual privilege, trivializing the importance lesbians attach to the genders of women’s sexual partners, and comparing lesbians’ criticism of heterosexuality to society’s condemnation of lesbianism.30 The editors expressed their gratitude for a fourth letter, an “anonymous response from a woman whose way of relating to men and to lesbians reminds us how many more variations there are in these matters than we might think.” The gratitude of the editors suggests that this was the only letter sympathetic to Dwinell received; this fact, and the anonymity of the letter’s author, say as much as her letter itself does. Whereas the readers of The Advocate applauded humanism and characterized lesbian feminist objections to bisexuality as intolerant and outdated, the letter-writing readers of Lesbian Contradiction were almost universally antagonistic toward bisexuality. As much as the editors of Lesbian Contradiction wanted to present the other side of the debate, they could not because their readers apparently did not share the liberal humanist attitudes that dominated the pages of other lesbian and gay publications.
Although Lesbian Contradiction’s readers continued to debate “lesbians who sleep with men” through 1989, they also began discussing “bisexuality” in 1987, sooner than the more mainstream lesbian and gay publications. In “Thinking about Bisexuality” Marilyn Murphy and Irene Weiss argued that “non-lesbian” is a more appropriate term than “heterosexual” for women who live heterosexual lives, because “heterosexual” cannot be considered a sexual preference in a heterosexist society.31 Lesbians are lesbians because they have chosen to live lesbian lives and identify as lesbians; most women who live heterosexual lives never chose to be heterosexual. The argument has interesting implications for bisexuals. The authors rejected the concept of bisexuality as a sexual/affectional preference. They argued that when a bisexual is with a man, she is heterosexual because she enjoys heterosexual privileges. But when she is with a woman, she is not lesbian because heterosexual privilege remains an option for her. She is, in fact, the only woman who consciously chooses heterosexuality because she is the only woman who ever lives a heterosexual life with full knowledge of the other option; the bisexual woman is, therefore, the only true “heterosexual.”
The next issue of Lesbian Contradiction carried two letters from readers. One thanked Murphy and Weiss for giving her a good laugh by exemplifying the absurdity of the identity debates.32 The other documented her own journey from political lesbian feminist dykedom, through her politically correct dismay as she realized she was attracted to men, to her current opinion that “[b]eing attracted to one sex or the other is not good or bad, it just is what it is. Political integrity is not based on whether we sleep with men or
