II. Categories Can Serve Constructive Purposes
A. Categories Can Broaden People’s Understanding of Identity
Nonetheless, categories also have a positive utility. The label “bisexual” can threaten a society that orders itself on neat bipolar concepts. The common stereotype of a bisexual person is one who always has at least two sexual partners. That stereotype arises out of the assumption that gay men, lesbians, and bisexual people are purely sexual creatures—at all moments being involved with all eligible sexual partners. (Society has trouble imagining a celibate or monogamous gay, lesbian, or bisexual person.)30
Naming bisexuality can broaden people’s understanding of human sexual experiences by acknowledging the existence of a fluid spectrum rather than rigid bipolar categories. “Rather than naming an invisible, undernoticed minority now finding its place in the sun, ‘bisexual’ turns out to be, like bisexuals themselves, everywhere and nowhere. . . . The erotic discovery of bisexuality is the fact that it reveals sexuality to be a process of growth, transformation and surprise, not a stable and know-able state of being.”31 Bisexuality is not simply another static category.
The terms “gay” and “straight,” by contrast, assume a sexual exclusivity—that a person always only has sexual partners of the same or opposite sex:
These terms [gay and straight] are convenient simplifications for the idea that most people engage in sexual relations with only one sex. To get a clear perspective on the part homosexual behavior plays in the total range of American sexual experience, we should first take a look at bisexuality to evaluate its significance in the gay (and straight world). There are certainly far more individuals with bisexual experience than there are lifelong exclusive homosexuals.32
For women, in particular, bisexuality often seems to be an accurate description of their feelings. In a 1976 Ms. Magazine article, a large number of women reported “that when they fell in love it was with a person rather than a gender.” 33
Gay and lesbian people have been defined by society so that they have little identity beyond their sexual identity within mainstream culture. As one of my students once said, if you are defined as a lesbian, you have a lesbian breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Or, alternatively, as a gay activist in Louisiana observed, “I often wonder what people think I do in the two minutes of my day when I am supposed to not be engaged in sex!” Bisexual people can also be defined in that way—as irresistibly sexual creatures for whom everyone is a prospective sex partner.
There are many ways to deal with this problem. One common method is to insist that the words lesbian, gay, or bisexual are modifiers rather than nouns. In the disability rights movement, that linguistic move is commonplace. The preferred term is “person with a disability” to emphasize that an individual is a “person” who also has a disability. Unfortunately, that construction is a bit awkward. One would have to say, for example, I am a person who is bisexual, able-bodied, Jewish, white, middle-aged, middle-class, androgynous, and so forth, in order to emphasize that no one aspect of our identity defines us. Such constructions, however, are often preferable to such shorthand phrases as “the disabled” which suggest that one’s entire existence is defined by one’s disability status.
Labels can also help overcome the practical limitations of storytelling. For example, when asked about my sexual orientation, I could say, “I am currently married to a man but find both men and women sexually attractive” rather than say “I am a bisexual.” That kind of storytelling could emphasize the fluid way that I define my sexual orientation. Unfortunately, such storytelling is not always practical. Moreover, in cases such as mine, most people probably just attach the label “married woman” to me with its assumptions about exclusive heterosexuality without even inquiring about my sexual orientation. Use of a simple category such as “bisexual” can force people to move quickly beyond their assumptions about my sexual orientation even if that label is problematic. One can hope that once a person learns that I attach the label “bisexual” to myself despite my married status that that individual would approach me and ask what the term “bisexual” means to me. At that time, I could try to describe the phrase’s fluid meaning to me.
If it is true that far more people have experienced a bisexual lifestyle than is commonly recognized, why is bisexuality so often ignored?34 Ignoring bisexuality allows society to perpetuate the stereotype that sexuality is rigidly dichotomous. That stereotype is male and white in that it hides women’s and African-American men’s sexual feelings and experiences.35 Theologian John J. McNeill describes the impoverishment of the bipolar imagery of homosexuality and heterosexuality which is prevalent in our society:
The tendency to identify oneself as a person with one’s sexual-identity image can, and frequently does, lead to a one-sided stress on certain qualities and the elimination of others. The heterosexual tends to define himself in contrast to the homosexual; the homosexual, in turn, tends to define himself in contrast to the heterosexual. The result is a narrow, impoverished, and dehumanizing self-image for both parties.36
McNeill’s argument helps emphasize the importance of defining bisexuality with regard to feelings as well as conduct. In the Ms. Magazine study, many women described their sexual orientation based on their feelings of attraction toward men and women rather than based on their experiences in sexual relationships. Similarly, Weinberg found a much higher incidence of bisexuality among women if he inquired about their sexual feelings rather than sexual behaviors.37 A more humanistic understanding of sexuality therefore would go beyond our conduct and try to understand our feelings. Since only our conduct is readily visible, this observation challenges each of us to verbalize our feelings about our sexuality in order to help society move beyond a narrow, noncontextual, and rigid understanding of sexuality. Saying the word “bisexual” aloud can help us begin to verbalize those feelings.
Finally, embracing the category of bisexuality would help society recognize that one can find an organizing principle other than biological sex to define sexual attractiveness. The labels homosexual and heterosexual are premised on the concept that biological sex is an organizing principle in the selection of a sexual partner. Only bisexuality challenges the significance that biological sex should have in one of the most important activities in our lives—our choice of sexual partner. As Weinberg reports: “instead of organizing their sexuality in terms of the traditional gender schema, bisexuals do so in terms of an ‘open gender schema,’ a perspective that disconnects gender and sexual preference, making the direction of sexual desire (toward the same or opposite sex) independent of a person’s own gender (whether a man or a woman).”38 This is a powerful message so long as people do not indulge in the stereotype that bisexuals are attracted to everyone. Bisexuals have organizing principles for determining whom they find attractive; that organizing principle simply is not biological sex.
Similarly, multiracial status in the United States is largely rendered invisible through our use of racial bipolar categories. As we will see in chapters 5 and 8, our legal system pervasively has insisted that people classify themselves as white or black with no room to check off a multiracial box. Accordingly, multiracial groups in the United States have begun to organize politically to proclaim their right to be counted as multiracial. In contrast to sexual orientation, however, no clear consensus exists that multiracial categories are appropriate or desirable. Because nearly all African-Americans are, in fact, of multiracial heritage, some people argue that recognizing the multiracial category will dilute the number of people recognized as African-American. This disagreement reflects the inherently political nature of such categories; the categories do not have any intrinsic meaning. If we recognize that categories are artificial
