Versatile Ladies: the bisexual option (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior)

by Lawrence Block

  Indeed, I cannot avoid wondering how much of the gulf in frequency between male and female bisexuality in swinging is to some extent the result of pornography and quasi-pornography. Perhaps this literature has reinforced the notion that lesbianism is sexy while faggotry is swishily contemptible. The usual arguments for the attitudinal distinctions notwithstanding, I suspect the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy is not entirely without influence.

  At any rate, I told Eddie that I would be very interested in learning more about his own situation, either through an interview or through correspondence. I gave him my phone number, and shortly thereafter he called and we arranged to meet at an outdoor café a few blocks from my apartment building.

  We met at the appointed time. Eddie is a thickset, good-looking man who looks several years younger than his fifty-one years. He has a strong, craggy face, an open expression, clear and straightforward blue eyes. He was dressed in good casual clothes and wore them with some flair. I ordered beer. He ordered white crème de menthe on the rocks—“an old pilots’ drink.” We chatted easily, and he mentioned that he had not been to Manhattan in several years, although his home in New Jersey was less than two hours away.

  Eddie came across as a very positive personality, guiltless but somewhat driven, a man who enjoys people and likes human contacts generally. His speech reminded me of somebody, but it was hours later before I made the mental connection. There was something in the way he talked, either the tone or the manner of delivery, which brought to mind the interviewee in a Bob-and-Ray routine. (Don’t ask me whether he reminds me of Bob or of Ray. I can never tell them apart. It took me years to remember which one was Abbott and which was Costello. I never had any trouble with Laurel and Hardy, except for a tendency to get their first names mixed up.)

  My original plans for this book—I was already well into it at the time of my meeting with Eddie—did not call for the inclusion of a chapter on male bisexuals. Nor did I expect at the time of the interview to use this material in this context. I have since decided that Eddie’s story provides a good counterpoint to the stories of bisexual women we have examined thus far. In addition, he presents a good picture of Kate, the bisexual woman who initiated him into swinging. This portrait of an aggressive bisexual female swinger is enough in itself to justify including this chapter in the present work.

  The material below derived entirely from a single interview with Eddie over an hour or so at the outdoor cafe. Our conversation was interrupted only by the waitress bringing further drinks and occasionally by Eddie, who several times turned to call a cheerful greeting to attractive female passers-by. (There is no better place in Manhattan for dedicated girl-watching than this particular café.) The girls consistently ignored him, which did not seem to faze Eddie in the least.

  Eddie was born in Toronto in the spring of 1919 and moved with his family to the United States when he was ten years old. He has one sister. “I had wonderful parents,” he said more than once, and characterized his childhood as a normal life with a “wonderful” family.

  Eddie had little to say about his early sexual experiences, not out of reticence but because they did not seem remarkable to him in any significant way. He served in the Air Force in the Second World War and again in Korea, and has worked as a pilot in civilian life. Before his marriage he had a full and active sex life, consisting almost entirely of short-term relationships with girls he knew only casually.

  • • •

  I was married right after the end of the war and divorced eleven years later. I have two wonderful children, really wonderful children. The girl is married and my son is in college.

  The marriage, what can I say, it wasn’t a good one. I have a terrific sex drive. I’m a very loving person. My wife was the other side of the coin entirely.

  Let me put it this way. In eleven years of marriage I didn’t have my penis inside of her more than maybe six times. She didn’t like to have intercourse. She didn’t like to have sex at all except when she wanted it, and then it had to be her way. She liked it between her legs, gripping my penis between her legs but not letting me get it inside of her. Or else she liked to be on top. She enjoyed that, getting on top and rubbing herself against me until we would both come that way.

  I had other women from time to time. Women I would pick up in bars. I like to go out drinking, go out to a bar and do some drinking and have some laughs. Kid around with some woman, maybe take her home if we hit it off, maybe not. I did this from time to time but it never led to anything serious, just a pleasant couple of hours and then I would go home to the wife.

  Well, it was no good for either of us. To make a long story short it ended in divorce and I was on my own again. At the time I was about thirty-seven years old. For about a year I went on in the usual way, having a fairly full sex life with women I would pick up but nothing spectacular.

  Then a year after the divorce I met Kate. She was a few years younger than myself. A very attractive woman, very positive personality, very sure of herself. A terrific figure, full in the breasts and hips but not fat. I met her in the usual way. That is I picked her up in a bar. We got to talking and I bought her a few drinks and we hit it off immediately. It was like the two of us discovering each other, and from that moment we were the only two people in the place. When it really happens that way it’s something.

  We went back to her place that night and the minute we were inside with the door closed we were all over each other. It was the most fantastic sex I had ever had in my life. Not just what we did but the intensity, the drive. The need we had for each other. It was just a tremendous thing. We couldn’t get enough of each other.

  I had lost a lot of my sex drive during my marriage. Not lost it. You could say I misplaced it. By this I mean that, oh, when you’re with a woman who doesn’t like sex it has to have the effect of turning the man off, too. But during that time I would dream of meeting someone like Kate, someone who turned me on and more important someone that I really turned on in a big way. Now I actually had what I wanted and it was very exciting to me.

  The funny thing is that Kate and I were never in love or close to it. It was never like that at all. And we never lived together, either. She had her place and I had mine. Eventually she gave me a key and I could go over there whenever I wanted, but that’s a far cry from living together.

  Actually all we had was the good times and the sex. Nine years of drinking and sex is what it all added up to. We would have conversations and tell each other things, but our whole relationship focused on drinking and sex.

  The first time we got into what you might call a swinging situation happened after we had been going together for about a month. I was over at her apartment and we were drinking, and she had a girlfriend of hers over, a woman in her early thirties. A very attractive woman also. We were hitting the sauce pretty good, and at one point Kate turns to the other girl and says, “You know, Eddie won’t believe my breasts are bigger than yours.” And with that she pulls her sweater right over her head and she’s sitting there in her bra.

  I didn’t know what to make of all this.

  The other girl just stared at her for a minute, then at me, then back at Kate again. Then she stood up and went to the john. I thought she was probably embarrassed or something and I wanted to say something to Kate but she made herself busy freshening the drinks.

  Then the other girl—her name was Susan—came back from the john. Kate’s still standing around in her bra. Susan gives us each a look again and what does she do but take her own sweater off, and she’s also standing there in her bra.

  I’m tremendously excited. I’ve never been in anything like this before. All kinds of sex with women but never scenes with more than one other person at a time. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen but I know it’s going to be something exciting. I thought—it’s hard to remember what I thought. That I might get to have intercourse with both of them, one right after the other. That I might get to screw Kate while Susa
n watched, which I suddenly realized would be tremendously stimulating for me. I don’t know what else I thought.

  Kate had a record playing. She went over to Susan and the two of them began dancing and rubbing their bodies together. I stayed where I was and stared at them. They went on dancing and Kate kissed Susan, not a peck on the mouth but a regular soul kiss. She took off Susan’s bra and Susan took off Kate’s bra and they danced with their arms around each other and their bare breasts pressed together and went on kissing. They gradually undressed each other completely and wound up necking on the couch.

  I had an erection like a steel bar. Susan was stretched out on the couch and Kate was bending over her kissing her breasts. I thought I was supposed to sit there and watch. I didn’t honestly know what I was supposed to do and was too excited to think straight.

  Kate motioned me over to the couch. I knelt down and started going down on Susan while Kate went on kissing her breasts. Then I got my clothes off and Susan sucked me off, and the rest of the night was just a jumble of bodies. I screwed them both and watched them with each other and we all did everything imaginable.

  It subsequently turned out that Susan was married, although this was not mentioned at the time. Two weeks later Kate invited me over and Susan was there, along with her husband Jim. We sat around drinking for awhile with nothing said about what had happened between me and the two women. I had no idea that Jim knew anything about this.

  Then after awhile Kate said, “Come on, let’s put on a show for the boys.” Whereupon the two women got undressed and began doing a sixty-nine right there in front of us. I was watching and of course highly excited. Jim unzipped me and took out my penis and began stroking it while I watched the girls. I enjoyed having him touch me, and when he knelt in front of me and took me in his mouth I just relaxed and enjoyed it. When he finished I had the desire to do the same to him and did. I sucked his penis and took his come in my mouth and enjoyed it immensely.

  This was an absolute first for me. I had never before had any contact with my own sex. Not even fooling around as a kid. In the service there were a lot of homosexuals and bisexuals but I had never had any contact with any of them, nor did I ever go to the gay bars looking for a blow job as do a lot of servicemen who consider themselves to be completely straight. No homosexual had ever gone on the make for me, really, so I can’t say that I would never have tried it if it had come up. But I never had to make the decision. In fact I never even had any thoughts about homosexuality. About having sex with other men. I enjoyed relations with women tremendously throughout all of my adult life and it never occurred to me that I could have similar pleasure with men.

  And yet in that first instance I took to it like a duck to water. I never held anything back. Now maybe it would have been different if we were not drinking fairly heavily, because drinking will let you get into something without having to think about it as much as you might otherwise. That may have had a lot to do with my being able to accept it so readily, not only to have him go down on me but to go down on him as if it were the sort of thing I did every day.

  I don’t know how I felt about it afterward. The next day, the next couple of weeks. Maybe I felt it was something that had just happened once because we were all drunk and would not happen again. I guess I didn’t think too much about it for the next little while. I knew I enjoyed the hell out of it but I didn’t know what it meant.

  Two weeks later, the same scene. Kate and I are drinking over at her place and Jim and Susan drop in. Once again it’s Kate who’s the instigator. She was always the one to get the ball rolling. “Okay,” she says, “this time I think the boys should put on a show for us.”

  Well, I was frankly a little nervous about this. I didn’t know just how I felt about it. The first time it was something that happened spontaneously, like in the heat of the moment when we were already hot and bothered from watching the girls together. The idea of doing it now with them watching, just plunging in cold, put me off a little.

  But also I was excited. So we got undressed and did a sixty-nine while the two girls watched, and they got undressed also and it wound up a four-way orgy, with everybody doing things to everybody else. As for precisely what was done I don’t remember. I do know that once again I found everything exciting.

  About this time I began to worry about myself. Here I was perfectly normal up to age thirty-seven and all of a sudden I’m enjoying sex with another man. I didn’t know what all this meant or where it would lead and I was anxious about it. I went to a psychiatrist, just the one visit, and I told him what had happened and various things about myself. He heard me out and then told me I was bisexual. I asked what he meant and he said it meant simply that I could enjoy sex either way, with men or with women. I asked was this normal and he said what matters isn’t what’s normal for the world but what’s normal for an individual. I asked how come I would suddenly become bisexual after all these years of never even having the vaguest sexual thoughts about another man. He said this happens more often than people realize it. That maybe I was not ready for it before, or maybe the conditions had never been right. But that I seemed to feel good about it. He said I wasn’t bothered by it so much as I felt I ought to be bothered by it, which seemed to hit the nail on the head for me.

  I only saw him the one time. He straightened me out, not by telling me much of anything or making me see anything, but just by telling me not to worry, to accept myself for what I was. That was what I wanted to hear, and once he told me I was able to accept myself without any further hesitation, and to enjoy my sex life fully.

  • • •

  Eddie’s experience with a psychiatrist so closely parallels that of Monica (Chapter Four) that I cannot avoid calling attention to the fact. One hears so many stories of psychiatrists either actively screwing people up or else putting them through an endless regimen of therapy or analysis that it is gratifying to encounter instances like these in which well enough was left alone. This is not to suggest that therapy is not very often warranted. Still, I suspect many persons would profit more by the straightforward assurance that they are “normal” and “sane” and can continue to function in the way that is natural to them when this happens to be the case.

  One shudders to think what might have been the results had Eddie gone instead to a psychiatrist who would have attempted to “cure” his homosexual impulses. There are men currently practicing a form of reward-punishment therapy, a Pavlovian approach in the course of which the subject receives an pleasant electric shock when shown pictures of members of his own sex and stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centers when shown pictures of the opposite sex. Militant homosexuals find this whole therapeutic approach singularly revolting; they may be assured that one need not be homosexual to be distressed at this type of “treatment.” The concept of “curing” homosexuals is uncertain at best, but to do so with methods one might use to make a dog walk at heel is outrageous.

  • • •

  I went on seeing Kate for a total of nine years. Nine years of drinking and screwing. She was the most highly sexed person I ever met. It’s funny that I never learned very much about her background. She didn’t talk much about the past. In a way it’s remarkable how little I know about her in that we were together off and on for nine years.

  As far as group sex was concerned, it was usually very much the same as the first night with Jim and Susan. We never answered ads or ran ads of our own. Never engaged in correspondence of any sort. What would happen is that contacts would come about through Susan. She and Jim were swingers, and when they met another couple that they liked they would give them Kate’s number and the other couple would get in touch with us. Always it would be a case of all four of us being bi, and I would have sex with both the man and the woman.

  I always found this to be very exciting. The experiences with other guys were always enjoyable. I got a tremendous charge out of going down on another guy, taking his come in my mouth, swallowing it. I never considered
any of this to be disgusting or offensive. I also enjoyed and still enjoy getting fucked. You know, in the ass. There was tremendous pain the first few times. You have to learn how to make room for a penis in there. But after the first five or six times it didn’t hurt any more. Even when it was painful it was also exciting, and there was pleasure mixed in with the pain.

  It was funny with Kate. I was her regular guy but she also had a sex life on her own. I remember one time going over there, I had a key to her place at the time, and I let myself in one afternoon and there she is in bed with a woman. A real butch type, male mannerisms, deep voice, the whole bull-dyke bit. I was not jealous at all. I was never jealous as far as Kate was concerned. It wasn’t that kind of relationship between the two of us. Nor did Kate mind the fact that I was there, but the butch got very upset over my presence. Kate told me that it might be a good idea if I left, so I agreed and got out of there and went home, leaving the two of them together. I don’t think we even discussed it later on.

  The thing with Kate ended four, five years ago. It’s hard now to know exactly why. Maybe we got tired of each other. For one reason or another we lost interest in each other and broke it off. Also it was just sex and drinking and you can get tired of that sooner or later.