by Jan Clausen
Introduction
IN JULY 1987, in a war zone in northern Nicaragua, after a dozen years of intense coupledom with my lover Leslie Kaplow and slightly more than that of intensive lesbian feminist activism on literary and political fronts, I got involved with a man.
“I got involved.” How pale and nervous the words ring, like a gauzy cloak obscuring facts that ought to be more frankly stated. “Got involved,” “fell in love,” “became attracted to”—euphemisms all. But what are the facts? Some would say (have said) she left a woman for a man. Some would say betrayed her people.
At the time, I was thirty-seven years old. Since age twenty-five I had been firmly attached to Leslie, and to her daughter, Emma, who was now a high school senior. Both my extensive political commitments and my growing reputation as a poet and novelist were completely bound up with my lesbian identity. Any sex outside my “marriage” would have meant trouble, but lying naked with a male stranger in our family’s Brooklyn apartment while Les was at a New Jewish Agenda conference in L.A. was like deliberately embarking on a sea cruise off the edge of a flat Earth.
The upheaval that voyage occasioned has been incalculably more traumatic than my original coming out. More than a decade later, I continue to reckon with its consequences on a daily basis. I am still intimately involved with lesbian and gay worlds, their books and politics, their theoretical debates. I continue to write on subjects relevant to those worlds, to perceive my social surroundings in ways that owe much to my erotic and emotional bonds with women. Yet my settled, monogamous partner is a man, and my disinclination to be silent or apologetic about that fact has caused intense controversy, among lesbians especially.
I am someone who has staked a great deal on the proposition that sexuality is central to identity. But my own identity, viewed in conventional terms, now appears as little more than a bizarre succession of contradictory personas: the rebellious adolescent female, acting out through a series of unhappy liaisons with troubled or exploitative young men; the bravely iconoclastic feminist dyke, forging a world with other woman-identified women; the “hasbian,” rerouting her passion to follow the path of least social resistance. Or, if you prefer, the “really heterosexual” woman who works her way through the obfuscations of feminist politics to discover that her true erotic nature cannot be subordinated to ideology.
In my private view of things, I have refused these alternatives, have resisted construing my current relationship as either more or less authentic than the one I had with Leslie. Yet I’ve been obliged to concede that my life appears more fragmented than most. In the U.S. today—indeed, throughout the West in general—heterosexual and homosexual attractions are commonly understood to be radically distinct dispositions, a circumstance that places anyone who acknowledges desire for both women and men at a loss for a plausible explanation of some of the deepest parts of self. The world can understand adultery, divorce, nonmonogamy, sleeping around, falling out of love or lust—but infidelity to a gender remains a real scandal.
In my own case, a sense of unease at my inability to furnish a credible (never mind seamless) account of my past is heightened by the fact that the writing I published in my twenties and thirties was part of a lesbian feminist effort to invest with decisive political importance the great divide between women who love women and women who love men. I viewed lesbians as a guerrilla insurgency against the gender status quo, so much happier in our beleaguered camaraderie than the huddled masses of concubines and housewives who hugged the safer side of the erotic either/or.
The promise of our movement, in which real sex became the central metaphor for our hope of all that women could be to one another, was that of any revolution: all would be made new, the past would never return. And, indeed, the fond conviction that we were modern Amazons made possible achievements (individual and collective, political and artistic) that I remain intensely proud of. But because the new is the daughter of the old, all revolutionaries who live long enough encounter a season of reckoning. For me that reckoning began in painful earnest when I undid the metaphor by dallying with what a student of mine calls “a person with a penis.”
I had to ask myself some difficult questions, not only about my current choices, but about how I’d been telling the story of my life. My habit of stowing my early, pre-lesbian years in the sub-basement of my autobiography began to seem suspicious. My initial impulse, as far as my new involvement was concerned, was to insist that I hadn’t really contradicted myself—that I still loved women, had the same politics, in some crucial sense remained the person I was before. But could I simply append this latest chapter to the truncated account of a lesbian Jan Clausen that I’d elaborated over the last dozen-plus years? Wouldn’t I need to relate it to the existence of early boyfriends (which, without denying the facts of the case, I’d long considered simply irrelevant)—and, even further back, to the childhood that prepared me not only to be good at meeting gender expectations, but to despise myself for it?
I did not particularly want to remember where I’d come from, to recall the humiliation I associated with conventional femininity, or to revisit the frank contempt in which I’d once held woman-kind. But now the pain I was experiencing as what had seemed a solid identity unraveled, leaving a vertiginous absence of plausible narrative structure, made the project of reviewing all my sexual twists and turns far more urgent than it had been before my fall from lesbian grace. Surely it couldn’t put me through any more mental anguish than what I’d felt weeping in a shabby hotel room where my new male lover and I had spent an ardent weekend, as I bitterly confessed, “I hate the institution of heterosexuality—and I’m in love with you.”
It is, then, precisely because my own experience has been so dramatic and difficult that I’ve composed this memoir as a way to understand the fragments in relation to one another. In some sense it’s an effort at mending a broken identity. At the same time, I believe my seeming inconsistencies have something crucial to reveal about the limits of our current sexual categories. Although I recognize that most people are less dissatisfied than I with an either/or approach to eros (even when they are properly enraged by the unfair advantages it currently affords to heterosexuals), I do not think that justifies forcing everyone to choose between column A and column B. Nor do I believe that wide acceptance of the labels “gay” and “straight” signifies that mixed experiences like mine are particularly uncommon. Rather, I’m convinced that many people who identify as homosexual or heterosexual in fact experience some attraction to both women and men.
As someone who’s excited by others’ excitement, I’d like to propose that sexually aroused women are to sexually aroused men as apples are to oranges. From one point of view, they’re dissimilar enough to make comparison seem foolish. From another, both are delectable fruits, having far more in common than do, for instance, an apple and a handgun, or an orange and a lunar eclipse.
Perhaps my difficulty in furnishing a coherent account of my sexual past should be read as an index of the radical confusion endemic to a society obsessed with sexual sorting, and with the conviction that the bodies and minds of men and women are not merely different but diametrically opposed. For on what other grounds would attraction to one logically preclude attraction to the other?
To put it another way, I think we need to ask: What, after all, is gender? What is sexual desire? In mainstream media and popular culture in general, the former is often equated with anatomical difference plus some mental disposition assumed to accompany it; the latter emerges as the subjective aspect of an “instinct,” “imperative,” or “drive,” supposedly related in some clear and simple fashion to the need to reproduce the species. In contrast, my experience in queer and feminist circles, where ideas about gender and desire are constantly debated, parodied, and bent out of shape in every medium from casual jokes to doctoral dissertations, has taught me never to take either term for granted.
This perspective is sharply at odds with a biological determinism th
at seeks to explain sexual orientation as a function of some physical attribute: a tiny cell group in the brain, or a gene on the X chromosome. Champions of such explanations rarely bother to delve beneath the surface of commonsense notions about what is involved in being attracted by “men” or by “women.” They do not inquire, for instance, whether what we call sexual attraction is in fact a single, easily defined experience, the same for everyone in all times and places. Nor do they puzzle out the implications of the fact that the attributes thought proper to each gender vary enormously from culture to culture, a circumstance that casts grave doubt on the proposition that a biological factor could orient people to some universal essence of man- or womanhood.
I side with those who use the term gender to indicate the social significance that groups of people attach to the physiological differences between males and females, and who view human sexuality as a function of meaning no less than of biology. In this view, gender is always culturally specific, involving complex alignments of beliefs and practices that are capable of nearly endless modification (including as a logical though not a likely possibility the complete disappearance of social distinctions relating to people’s reproductive equipment). Bodily processes create the preconditions for pleasure, but by themselves explain almost nothing. Sexual behavior is to be understood in light of the participants’ fantasies and feelings, which are never simply private but bear a relationship to culturally shared notions of what is desirable, dirty, normal, perverse, butch, virginal, virile, truly feminine, and so on.
The great question, then, is why certain sets of meanings (expressed at times in the leaning toward one gender or the other, but also in the preference for any specific erotic stimulus: voluptuous or anorexic bodies, huge dicks or tiny feet, Chantilly lace and a ponytail, or leather and nipple rings) come alive for particular people, while others do not. Why am I turned on by both men and women? Why, in either, do I so fancy a certain bruised stoicism?
Throughout my life, questions about desire and struggles with its consequences have connected to my sense of my own gender as a problem. The conviction that being a girl doomed me to a second-rate existence emerged very strongly at a point in my teens when I began to identify sexual expression as crucial to who I thought I was. Since then my erotic life has always been enmeshed with shifting feelings about womanhood. It’s not that I’ve ever felt my internal gender sense was out of sync with my physiology (an experience reported by many people, some of whom seek sex-change operations), but that what “feeling like a woman” means to me has evolved over time. My confrontation with what I call “the problem of being a woman” is the common thread connecting my teenage misery, my twentysomething intoxication with a brave new world of lesbians, and my ultimate discovery that I could neither live comfortably in that world nor leave it except as a backward-looking exile deeply nostalgic for its defiant energies and creative companionship.
My evolving thoughts on these issues have been heavily influenced by grassroots gay and lesbian perspectives of the sort that Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, editors of the classic anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, call “theory in the flesh,” as well as by “queer theory” emanating from academic settings. This broad body of work has sensitized me to the historical and cultural dimensions of sexuality, suggesting that different eras approach the erotic in vastly different ways; it has shaped my thinking with convincing arguments that one’s sense of a sexual self is profoundly inflected by race and socioeconomic class.
Despite its privileged place in our cultural imagination, I do not believe that sexual desire differs greatly from other powerful predilections that often help to mold people’s lives: the yearning to raise children, for example, or the drive to develop an artistic talent. Rather than sharing the widespread notion of sexuality as an uncontrollable force that defines a person’s nature, I view it as an instance of human self-making, a creative force never fully under conscious control yet one that commonly involves what I can only call choice. Because that is such a loaded word in the context of gay sexuality, I should hasten to add that people often have little say over which choices they are able to make.
I did not choose to be capable of sexual feelings for both men and women, any more than others choose more exclusive orientations. I cannot will my own desire to be just anything, any more than I can choose to acquire the capacity to be a great opera singer. But at any given moment I exert a shaping influence; out of possible paths, I take one and not others. And there’s a logic to my erotic choices that relates very closely to what’s happening in other areas of my life. At the time I “fell for a man,” for example, my roles within a lesbian family and a rather ingrown counterculture had come to seem predictable, restrictive; while, as I’ve written elsewhere, “heterosex ironically represent[ed] for me the anarchic power of the erotic.”
That acting out the culturally dominant form of desire could for me come to signify rebellion and defiance was possible only because I belong to a social order that insists even more firmly on erotic allegiance to a single gender than it does on the specific (heterosexual) form of that allegiance. This insistence is so pervasive and successful that it tends to make either/or categories seem both natural and inevitable, obscuring the fact that many groups in many eras and locations have taken ambidextrous sexuality in stride.
When one reviews the historical and cross-cultural evidence, our local obsession with sexual pigeonholing begins to look both quirky and peculiarly compulsive. The great Sappho herself is said to have swung both ways. Mary Wollstonecraft’s eclectic passions are more solidly documented (though she, too, has been claimed as a lesbian foremother). As the historian Jonathan Ned Katz points out in The Invention of Heterosexuality, Walt Whitman was not only a “man-lover” but a “trailblazer of a publicly silenced, often vilified lust between the sexes.” In much of Latin America today, the great divide of male sexuality has to do not with the gender of one’s partners but with preference for penetrating or being penetrated; only those who assume the so-called passive position are seen as compromising their masculinity. A similar arrangement prevailed in ancient Greece and Rome. In Suriname, working-class men and women of African descent commonly engage in “mati work,” involving same-gender sexual relationships that may alternate or coexist with opposite-gender relationships.
Even in the U.S., the either/or model has not gone completely unchallenged. Among its critics are a small but feisty bisexual movement, a number of whose leaders are women who at one time identified as lesbians. While I respect their efforts, which have helped many people cope with societal incomprehension of their eclectic desires and have raised consciousness in gay communities at least to the extent of persuading a number of groups to add “bisexual” to their titles, I do not think that the problems stemming from our habit of classifying people by the gender of their sexual partners will be resolved by adding a third menu option. Nor do I think that “bisexual” is going to be able to compete with gay and straight as an identity, that is a designation that confers a badge of membership and constructs plausible links between our personal pasts and futures. In fact, bisexuality is widely understood by gay and straight alike to be another name for sexual confusion, the failure to make the commitment to one gender that is thought to constitute a “real” identity.
The drawbacks of the either/or model are not confined to its inadequacy to describe the experiences of people who actually want to go to bed with both men and women. The model also ignores the significance of subtle forms of arousal that those committed to either/or identities experience in the company of the “wrong” gender without feeling a need to question their sexual selfhood. (I’m thinking, for example, of the homoeroticism that pervades gender-segregated sports and military organizations, powerful precisely because it is a group phenomenon, a connector of those whose official erotic interests are elsewhere; I’m thinking, as well, of the attraction that sometimes flows between gay men and lesbians
, and has recently given rise to esoteric debates about whether sex between such pairs should be considered “queer.”) Fixation on the issue of whom people actually “do it” with diverts attention from, among other things, the ways in which we all participate in the polymorphous eroticism of the mass media, which ceaselessly tout the sexual allure of both male and female bodies.
Problematic at every level, the either/or framework presents especially grave problems for anyone trying to understand the range of women’s erotic experiences. A number of studies and voluminous anecdotal evidence indicate that contemporary U.S. women in large numbers experience flexible, fluid attractions of the sort recognized by the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who, working in the 1940s and 1950s, considered it unhelpful to label anyone hetero- or homosexual and instead devised the “Kinsey scale,” a system for representing an individual’s degree of desire for and erotic activity with partners of either gender. The scale runs from zero to six, with six representing someone who reports exclusively same-gender attractions; a three would be about equally drawn to men and to women.
Richard Pillard, a prominent gay psychiatrist who has been researching possible genetic influences on sexuality, expresses the gender comparison in this way:
I think women’s sexuality is different [from men’s]. Not being a woman I can’t talk about this with the same kind of inner assurance that I can about men, but I think women are much more flexible in their sexual orientation—they don’t as often label themselves as gay or straight. Usually when you ask that question of men . . . most will say they’re gay or straight; they dichotomize. Women often will say, “Well, it depends on whom I’m with, on what sort of relationship I’m having . . .” And they’ll often have had relationships that are lesbian and relationships that are heterosexual. They’re quite functional and quite involved in both these kinds of relationships. You might want to call more women bisexual, which we [researchers] end up doing, but I think women’s orientation is really much more complicated than men’s sexual orientation. I think it’s really a harder thing to study in the quantitative way that we’ve been doing.