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COVERAGE OF BISEXUALITY IN THE LESBIAN AND GAY PRESS
The treatment of bisexuality in The Lesbian and Gay Press in the 1980s and 1990s shows several patterns. The most dramatic pattern is a historical one. In the 1980s, the issue was constructed in terms of lesbians or gay men having heterosex. Not until the late 1980s or early 1990s did bisexuality per se emerge as an issue. Some lesbian and gay publications made this transition earlier than others. Publications also differed from each other in the degree to which they presented the issue as important or controversial. Some portrayed bisexuality as an issue with important implications for lesbian and gay politics in general, devoting a great deal of space to articles about bisexuality and subsequent letters from readers. Other publications gave bisexuality little more than passing mention or treated it as an uncontroversial news item. Finally, once bisexuality per se became an issue, different publications identified the source of controversy differently and gave voice to different interest groups.
With its long publishing history, The Advocate provides a rare opportunity to observe the construction of bisexuality as an issue through the 1980s and early 1990s. In the 1980s, The Advocate published articles bearing titles like “Gay Men, Lesbians and Sex” by Pat Califia (July, 1983), “Yes, I’m Still a Lesbian—Even Though I Love a Man” by Harriet Laine (July, 1986), and “Unresolved Harmonies: The Ups and Downs of Not Quite Coming Out” by Mark Chaim Evans (November, 1989). None of these authors felt that the term “bisexual” described their experiences, although the theme of each article was the fact that the author had sexual desire or actual sex with members of both sexes. Califia acknowledged the possibility that her behavior might appear bisexual to others and explained why she could not identify herself as bisexual. In the same article, she offered an analysis of the social construction of sexuality and identity politics that placed bisexual identity on a par with other sexual identities. Laine did not mention bisexuality once. On the contrary, Laine considered herself no less a lesbian because she was having sex with a man and would “like to think that the definition of lesbian is not so constrained” that it excludes sex with men. Likewise, Evans referred to bisexuality only once, commenting that “I find it hard to believe in bisexuality.”
The articles by Califia, Laine, and Evans represent the opinions of Califia, Laine, and Evans, but the letters to the editor that followed these articles represent the opinions of The Advocate’s readers. These letters indicate that, to the extent that The Advocate’s readers felt there was an issue at all in the 1980s, they accepted the authors’ construction of the issue as one of heterosex among lesbians and gays; none reconstructed the issue in terms of bisexuality.
For example, subsequent to Califia’s article, The Advocate printed one brief letter to the editor in which a male7 reader expressed his appreciation of Califia’s ability to “share bodies with other-gender partners without suffering identity crisis.”8 The letter did not use the term bisexual, but implicitly applauded Califia’s ability to resist such a classification. Three years later, Laine’s article generated a more lively response. Two male readers applauded Laine for her humanity and humanism and chastised those who would demand that she conform to narrow sexual scripts, and one female reader reproached Laine for presuming to call herself a lesbian and expending her energy on a man instead of using it to support womyn and the lesbian community9—exactly the attitude the male readers had condemned. None of these readers used the word “bisexual;” the male readers complimented Laine’s “humanity,” and the female reader informed Laine that she was “at least during the act, a heterosexual. Not a lesbian.” Evans’s article generated no controversy, possibly because as a man, Evans was not subject to lesbian identity rules and because, unlike Laine, he did not seek to defend his choices as informed and intentional. Instead, Evans invited readers to understand his story as an unfinished process of coming out, a familiar and politically unthreatening construction of his experience. Regardless of what accounts for the differences in the vigor of readers’ responses to these three articles, one thing is clear: the issue for all three authors and their readers was not bisexuality; the issue was people who identify as lesbian/gay having sex with members of the other sex.
But some of The Advocate’s readers were beginning to think about bisexuality as an issue and to communicate this view to the magazine. In 1985, two letters to the editor criticized the magazine’s previous year-in-review issue for missing opportunities to refer respectfully to bisexuality. One female reader asked why the word bisexual was put in quotation marks in a paragraph about Elton John and asked the magazine’s gay readers not to trivialize bisexuality.10 In a similar vein, a male reader pointed out that an article on Jacob Holdt referred to him as heterosexual and then quoted him talking about the experience of sex with a man. This reader challenged the magazine to tell the truth, which, in his opinion, is that Holdt must therefore be bisexual.11 In 1989, Brian Miller wrote an article that bore a title similar to those published earlier in the decade, “Women Who Marry Gay Men.”12 Two issues later, a letter from reader William Wedin, Executive Director of the Bisexual Information and Counseling Service in New York City, criticized Miller for failing to acknowledge bisexuality as an authentic orientation. Wedin explained why this particular criticism came in 1989 but no earlier by commenting that Miller’s “bi bashing” had come “at a time when bisexuals and their partners are just beginning to find a measure of self-respect.” Miller defended himself by pointing out that the men he had interviewed were self-identified as gay, not bisexual. But apparently Wedin was not the only reader who perceived the men in Miller’s article as unacknowledged bisexuals. In the next issue, a female reader offered her marriage to a bisexual man as an example that, contrary to the message given by Miller’s article, such marriages can work.
Pat Califia was the first regular contributor to The Advocate to identify bisexuality as an issue and focus an article on it. In November 1990, she published a letter in her “Advisor” column from a reader married to a bisexual man, and although bisexuality was not the central issue in the letter, Califia took the opportunity to assert that there is such a thing as bisexuality. She gently dismissed the narrow definition of a bisexual as someone who “is always equally attracted to men and women and has exactly equal numbers of male and female sex partners” in favor of a broader definition of bisexuals as “men and women who have strong sexual or romantic feelings about members of both genders, who are capable of having sex or relationships with either men or women.” 13
Thereafter, bisexuality per se made infrequent appearances in The Advocate. In June 1991, the magazine printed a one-page article written by bisexual activists Lani Kaahumanu and Loraine Hutchins entitled “Do bisexuals have a place in the gay movement?”14 Kaahumanu and Hutchins, who had just published the anthology Bi Any Other Name, argued that bisexuals had always been involved in the “gay rights movement.” They demanded the recognition of bisexual existence and the end of intolerance on the part of gays and lesbians in the movement. In July 1992, Lily Braindrop documented the growth of the bisexual movement and community and the push for explicit bisexual inclusion in the lesbian and gay movement, and challenged lesbian and gay attitudes about bisexuality in “Bi and Beyond.” The Advocate’s letters to the editor column gave no indication that readers noticed the striking contrast between these articles’ intentionally political approach to bisexuality and the approach that marked the 1980s, nor that readers had much of a reaction to the articles at all.
Meanwhile, The Advocate continued to publish articles about people who had sex with both sexes that referred tangentially if at all to bisexuality. For example, in 1990, Sandra Bernhard discussed her relationship
