How Cool Is This?
July 24th, 2006The weather here in San Francisco is unbearably hot right now, but something really cool happened last month that I didn’t find out about until just the other day: I was in a big article about bisexuality that appeared in a newspaper in San Diego. Here’s an excerpt:
San Francisco-based sex educator, writer and filmmaker Amy Andre makes a similar observation in regard to the film Brokeback Mountain. Writing in American Sexuality Magazine, Andre takes issue not with the screenplay or director but with critics who praised the movie as a story of two closeted gay men stuck in heterosexual marriages. The fact that few, if any, critics considered that the characters might be bisexuals who happened to fall in love with each other is telling of an invisibility that routinely enshrouds bisexuals and bisexuality, Andre said.
“Even though that gay potentiality exists, I felt that nobody was talking about the bi potentiality,” said Andre, speaking with the Gay & Lesbian Times about the film. “The only time I think anyone in the movie [used] a sexual identity label to describe themselves was when the Ennis character says, ‘I’m not a queer,’ right [after] he has sex with Jack….
“If we’re going to ascribe identity to fictional characters,” Andre said, “I have as much right to do that as anybody else, and they seemed as bi to me as they might be gay.”
…Citing the research of professor Paula Rust, Andre said bisexual women tend to consider their relationships throughout their life when forming their identity, while lesbians are more focused on their current relationship status and what’s happening in their lives.
“For example, a bisexual woman will be more likely to say, ‘It doesn’t matter who I’m in a relationship with now, in my lifetime I’ve been with men, I’ve been with women, and that’s what makes me bisexual,” she said. “By comparison, lesbians are more likely to say, I’ve been with men in the past … or maybe I could see myself having sex with a guy sometime in the future, but because I’m dating a woman right now, therefore I’m a lesbian.”
Andre said she sees both ways of interpreting one’s life and sexuality as equally valid.
“I think that the trouble comes in when judgments are made,” she said. “There’s a lot of biphobia, unfortunately, within the lesbian and gay community…. That fluidity and that kind of changing how gender is important or salient can be very threatening to people. For bisexual people, having that mindset can be very liberating.”
For more information or bisexual resources, visit www.amyandre.com or www.bisandiego.org.
And in further coolness, check out this hilarious short from The Daily Show.
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