To the latter group, the courtesans or Hetairai, the Athenians offered respect, adoration, and intimacy. They were distinguished by their wit and intellect. As Clive Bell further describes them, “They were as much admired in public as adored in private. They flirted with Socrates and his friends and sat at the feet of Plato and Epicurus.”
The story is told of a young man who did not get up from his place before Dercyllidas, the famous but unmarried Spartan general, saying: “You have begotten no one who will later make way for me.” His attitude was typical; in Greek civilization marriage was regarded as a duty to the gods so that the citizen left behind descendants to ensure the continued existence of the state. In fact, a law promulgated by Lycurgus punished unmarried men.
Not only was the love of man for woman exalted in this culture but also the love of man for man, which was widespread and idealized. In Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, Hans Licht writes:
To facilitate the understanding of the Hellenic love of boys, it will be as well to say something about the Greek ideal of beauty.... Antiquity treated the man, and the man only, as the focus of all intellectual life. This explains why the bringing up and development of girls was neglected in a way we can hardly understand; but the boys, on the other hand, were supposed to continue their education much later than is usual with us. The most peculiar custom, according to our ideas, was that very man attracted to him some boy or youth and, in the intimacy of daily life, acted as his counsellor, guardian, and friend, and prompted him in all manly virtues... it is by no means surprising if the sensual love of the Greeks was also directed towards their boys and that they sought and found in intercourse with them community of soul. There was added to the ideal of beauty the richer and more highly developed intellectual talents of the boys, which made rational conversation possible….
Plato has this to say in the Symposium:
... For I cannot say what greater benefit can fall to the lot of a young man than a virtuous lover and to the lover than a beloved youth.... If then there were any means whereby a state or army could be formed of lovers and favorites, they would administer affairs better than all others, provided they abstain from all disgraceful deed and compete with one another in honest rivalry.
The love of the Greeks for youth was elevated and sacred. So was Sappho’s inclination for her own sex. A favorite philosophical subject in the ancient literature is the question of whether the love of a man for a woman should always be preferred to the love of a man for a boy. In Erotes, Lycinus answers the question in the following words:
Marriage is for men a life-pressing necessity and a precious thing, if it is a happy one; but the love of boys, so far as it courts the sacred rights of affection, is in my opinion a result of practical wisdom. Therefore let marriage be for all, but let the love of boys remain alone the privilege of the wise.
Many historians feel that bisexuality was an important factor in Greece’s grandeur. At least in antiquity we note a civilized culture that did not feel threatened by the bisexuality of its citizens.
The thread of bisexual history does not end with the fall of Athens, but as a civilizing influence it becomes nearly invisible after the death of Alexander. Though always practiced, bisexuality was never again accorded a recognized role in the nurture of Western civilization. But some 2200 years later, one small comer of Western civilization proved exceptional.
One day in 1904 the young Lytton Strachey, who would achieve fame and critical acclaim as the biographer of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, came to tea at 46 Garden Square in Bloomsbury, invited by Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, the daughters of Sir Leslie Stephen, who had died in February of that year. Thus began what came to be called the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa would marry Clive Bell and Virginia would move to a house nearby, 29 Fitzroy Square. She would later marry Leonard Woolf. “If ever such an entity as Bloomsbury existed,” Clive Bell wrote, “these sisters with their houses in Garden and Fitzroy Squares were the heart of it.”
It was in the ground-floor study of Virginia’s home that these friends assembled on Thursday evenings for whiskey, buns, cocoa, and conversation. The mood of these congregations was fed by the awareness of those present that they were living at a time when all the benefits of breeding, education, intelligence, financial independence, and leisure could be mobilized to the fullest. They developed a standard of masculine and feminine values directed toward an ascendancy of enlightenment; no man or woman would be seen in the stereotypical roles thrust upon them by society. No member of the Bloomsbury Group was without some degree of bisexual experience. That they produced an enormous body of important work attests, in part, to the bisexual and androgynous ideals by which they lived.
No true godhead existed for the Bloomsbury Group. But G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher and author of Principia Ethica, was held in a kind of reserved reverence. His philosophy also embodied the androgynous ideal so dear to the hearts of those who gathered together on Thursday nights. Reason and passion that excluded violence were seen as equally important ideals. The purpose of the Cambridge humanism behind Moore’s philosophy was simply “the spread of civilization.”
It is with wonder that we look today on the whole group, both for how much these bisexual writers, thinkers, painters and critics accomplished intellectually and artistically, and for the reconciliation they achieved between the masculine and feminine aspects of being.
Who were they, this group that held that the external world of action and material things, however, important, was but a single candle next to the sun of the spirit, the virtues of courage, tolerance, and honesty, the individual expression of emotion and intellect? They were friends before they were famous, before any of them had learned to do much more than nourish one another with brilliant conversation that supported and fed their individual talents. Virginia Woolf was to write in her book The Death of the Moth, “The only criticism worth having is that which is spoken over wine glasses and coffee cups late at night, flushed out on the spur of the moment by people passing who have not time to finish their sentences.”
Together with Roger Fry, Give Bell first introduced the postimpressionist painters to a scandalized London. John Maynard Keynes, another Bloomsbury Group member, became the economist of his age and, according to some, of ours as well. Lytton Strachey has been called the biographer’s biographer and the most readable writer ever to have worked in that form. Leonard Woolf made the Hogarth Press into one of the most impressive publishing houses of all time, and he himself was a gifted and socially conscious writer. There was E. M. Forster, whose credits need hardly be enumerated. In the National Portrait Gallery in London hang, testimonies to the impressive talents of painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. At the center of the Group was the illuminating genius of Virginia Woolf. They were extraordinary, individually and collectively, and like the Greeks their bisexuality was a concomitant to their achievement. The “Bloomsberries” were almost all–if not all–bisexual not only in action but in psychological outlook. As with the Greeks, it is this outlook that is of special interest. The sexual polarization common to the “Bloomsberries’” time–and essentially to ours as well–was viewed by the Group as undesirable and even destructive, and remarkably, they managed to transcend it.
In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, Carolyn G. Heilbrun writes of Lytton Strachey:
He at least understood that sweetness without intelligence and forcefulness is as powerless as masculine domination without the balance of femininity is destructive. In those who accomplish much, the elements are frequently so mixed that mankind might stand up and say: there is a human being.
It is the vision of this extraordinary balance in every man and woman that distinguishes the Bloomsbury Group and gives it a strong place in the history of bisexuality. Ms. Heilbrun also writes of Virginia Woolf.
Holtby’s particular contribution as a critic of Woolf is to have perceived Woolf’s central vision as embodying less an inner tension between masculine and feminin
e inclinations than a search for a new synthesis…. The sight of two people, a man and a woman, in a taxi, which seemed to Woolf a metaphor for the conjoining of the two sexes rather than the separation of them into antagonistic forces, was seized upon by Holtby to stand for Woolf’s androgynous vision.
Thousands of years passed between the Greeks and the “Bloomsberries.” Nearly a century separates Oscar Wilde from Gore Vidal. In digging into the bisexual past this very amateur historian has for the most part hit bedrock only a few feet down. That there is treasure beyond is certain. Whether it can be unearthed eventually will depend, I suspect, upon our present and future commitment to discovering the truth of human sexuality in general. Only half a century separates Sigmund Freud from the Kinsey report. The near future seems promising.
THE BISEXUAL AS PORTRAYED IN THE ARTS
There has been considerable ambivalence toward the figure of the bisexual in the arts, including literature and the cinema. Consider two highly successful films of serious intent, Women in Love and Sunday Bloody Sunday. Both have a visibly bisexual axis at the center of their narrative lines. Sunday Bloody Sunday, from an original screen-play by Penelope Gilliatt, deals with people and events. Women in Love, an adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel, deals more with ideas. Women in Love portrays bisexuality more convincingly than Sunday Bloody Sunday because of its focus on the bisexual idea as opposed to the bisexual in action, in “reality.” All too often, the “realistic” treatment of a subject merely means the unwitting assumption of present-day prejudices and myopia–such as the myth of nonexistence. It is the artist who seeks the truth, rather than the artist who shows the reality, who has given bisexuality its most convincing credential.
The bisexual role in Sunday Bloody Sunday falls to the character of Bob, a shallow, vapidly attractive young man who controls simultaneously the love of two people, a respected London doctor who is also homosexual and a woman in her mid-thirties, divorced and nothing short of fascinating in her unrelenting search for direction and purpose in a stagnant existence. Both the doctor and the woman are full-blown, beautifully realized characters, sympathetic and invested with intelligence and charm. The weak link in the film is the character of Bob, the bisexual who is portrayed as so deficient of feeling one cannot help but wonder why the woman and the doctor are so enamored of him. Within the story he is pale, self-absorbed, and flimsy almost to the point of not being there, though without him there is no story at all. In short, he is a major character whose ambiguity reduces him to minor effect. He is, in short, and in the sense of character, nonexistent.
The combined talents of the people who made this film are impressive. It is an intelligent, compassionate film, put together by people normally associated with creative, responsible work. To every other character, they give proper definition. Why, then, do they come a cropper when dealing with the bisexual? Is it a conscious hatchet job? I don’t think so. The film and its makers are too honest for that. But, as stated above, even gifted, well-intentioned artists are conditioned by the same all-pervasive myth of nonexistence as their audience.
Women in Love succeeds in conveying its bisexual idea through the character of Rupert Birkin (based on D. H. Lawrence himself), a young man who seeks the love of the girl Ursula on the one hand and his friend Gerald on the other.
Set in the early 1900s, the final scene of the novel and the film has Ursula and Birkin sitting in a country mill quietly talking:
“Did you need Gerald?” she asked….
“Yes,” he said.
“Aren’t I enough for you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.”
“Why aren’t I enough?” she said. “You are enough for me. I don’t want anybody else but you. Why isn’t it the same with you?”
“Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”
“Well–” he said.
“You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”
“It seems as if I can’t,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”
“You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said.
“I don’t believe that,” he answered.
Birkin’s is, so to speak, a bisexual voice in the wilderness. We feel for him as we do not for Bob in Sunday Bloody Sunday, even if our personal view of sexual intimacy is dictated by an “either-or” stance, because the bisexual idea here exists a meaningful distance away from the bisexual reality: in Sunday Bloody Sunday we see Bob in love scenes with both the doctor and the woman; Women in Love shows only heterosexual sex directly. The bisexual extension is represented in a wrestling match between Birkin and Gerald in which the idea of sex between them is expressed only in repression. It is a powerfully erotic scene. In it we see Birkin’s bisexual nature struggling to express itself. It fails and that failure becomes the basis for the success of the film’s idea.
When attempting to deal with bisexual reality in another novel, The Fox, Lawrence, it seems to me, fails the idea by creating a bisexual female whose end is tragic because she considers herself a failure in love. The bisexual is often portrayed directly as such in novels, films, and plays–and moreover, and regardless of story plausibility, as mean, neurotic, destructive, shallow, haunted, lying, two-faced, and at times not as bisexual at all but homosexual, with all of the negative characteristics society attributes to that condition.
With rare exceptions, then, the bisexual in action, when portrayed at all, is seen negatively. Appendix A, delineates a number of story lines and analyzes in detail how our culture views bisexual “reality.”
Table 1, below, lists the works covered in the appendix and indicates how the bisexual is seen.
Thomas Geller’s Bisexuality: A Reader and Sourcebook (1990) has a list of some other films and plays from around the world that deal with bisexuality.
It seems clear, then, that when the arts treat bisexuality truthfully, with balance, they do so on the more abstract level of idea than in the realistic or pseudorealistic depiction of characters and events.
In Orlando, for example, Virginia Woolf assumes the role of biographer to create a rich allegory for the union of the male and female principles in each individual. Because the story works on the level of fantasy, the transformation of the young nobleman Orlando into the noblewoman Orlando appears natural, acceptable. (For a detailed analysis of Woolf’s treatment of the bisexual “idea,” see . Despite its imaginative play with gender and time, Orlando portrays a recognizable world inhabited by people whose first question on the birth of a newborn baby is the perennial one. Orlando’s change from man to woman is sequential: once the change is complete, he remains a she and is referred to by others as a woman. Woolf never suggests that Orlando can change back into a man, or back and forth, at will. Furthermore, Orlando is forced to play a conventional male role while a man and a conventional female role while a woman. In his/her world, the permeability of the gender barrier is severely limited: it is only breached the one time. And it is like our world insofar as what is masculine is seen as strong and protective, what is feminine is seen as weak and in need of protection. An in such a world pure respect for the human being as human being is at best difficult.
For a glimpse of a society where people are more than “man” or “woman,” where indeed the mother of several children may be the father of several more, we have to go to another world–as Ursula K. LeGuin did in her award-winning science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.
The bisexual idea in The Left Hand of Darkness (a summary of the story line and its relation to bisexuality is found in ) lies in the contrast it draws with the sexual dualism that pervades thinking in o
ur own world, where men and women play the assigned male and female roles from birth. This includes the bisexual, who also on meeting another person casts him or her in the role of Man or Woman while him/herself adopting one or the other preset role. Were the roles not so rigid, we might find ourselves in a world with more room for true humanity, for people to grow, change, explore themselves and others.
That is, after all, what bisexuality is: simply another dimension of sexuality itself. Its only true distinction from the other sexualities is that the bisexual eroticizes both genders. In works of fantasy, such as Orlando and The Left Hand of Darkness, the bisexual idea can sometimes soar. In reality our sexual repressions are still very much with us–and the reality does carry over into artistic representations. Even in the hands of artists of genius, the bisexual often remains fenced in.
In Women in Love, the characters of Birkin, Ursula, Gerald, and Gudrun are set against the small colliery town in the midlands of England called Beldover. They are flesh-and-blood people living in the very real world of unrelenting Victorian repression. To all external appearances, they are heterosexual: Birkin is paired off with Ursula, and Gerald with Gudrun. Yet Lawrence develops between the two men a mutual ache for each other that is expressed in sometimes oblique, sometimes direct, but always close embroilment.
Consider this scene during a wedding party, in which Lawrence shows two men drawn together inexorably as though by the very tension between their irreconcilable values:
“You don’t believe in having any standard of behavior at all, do you?” he challenged Birkin, censoriously.
“Standard–no. I hate standards. But they’re necessary for the common ruck. Anybody who is anything can just be himself and do as he likes.”
The Bisexual Option Page 17