The New Criterion

Books like this remind me of a familiar bumper sticker: If you can read this, you’re too damn close. If you’re seriously interested in reading a six-hundred-page study of bisexuality (or anything else) by a professor of English at Harvard, you probably don’t care what this review says. That goes double for Marjorie Garber, whose previous books include Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, whose current dust jacket sports effusive quotes from Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (by their blurbs ye shall know them), and who is somewhat less than likely to lose many hours of sleep should she learn that The New Criterion got a bit huffy over her latest. So I’ll keep it short: This isn’t a book. It’s a bloated compendium of everything Garber knows, or thinks she knows, about bisexuality, with a bagful of literary theory stirred in like flour to thicken the drippings. The whole thing suggests a less, shall we say, heterodox version of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, and was doubtless intended to come across that way. (Dead giveaway: Garber dismisses Sexual Personae as “a hodgepodge of watered-down Nietzsche and warmed-over Jung.” You wish, baby.) Here endeth the sermon. But I do want to share a few cultural nuggets gleaned from the pages of Vice Versa—dispatches from the front, so to speak:

Bisexuality may be chic, but it is also politically incorrect. Many exasperated queer theorists view it as an underhanded way of obtaining “heterosexual privilege” while simultaneously savoring the joys of gay sex. As Garber reports: “When the San Fran- cisco Bay Times added the word ‘bisexual’ to its masthead, … becoming ‘The Gay/ Lesbian/Bisexual Newspaper & Calendar of Events for the Bay Area,’ not all its readers were pleased by the change. Letters to the editor, Kim Corsaro, demanded to know her sexual orientation and that of her staff members, ‘so that we can judge for ourselves if the SF Bay Times represents us,’ according to a letter signed by five lesbians. ‘For the record,’ Corsaro wrote, ‘I am a lesbian. I do not have a bisexual lover.’ Her staff was made up, she said, of ‘26 les- bians, 23 gay men, 5 bisexuals and 3 hets.’”

Some cutting-edge coinages: “biphobia”; “ambisexuality”; “L.U.G.” (Lesbian Until Graduation); “opposite-sex-same-sexuality” (meaning that you have heterosexual sex, but it feels like homosexual sex, so it’s P.C.).

Some journals of bisexuality: North Bi Northwest, Bi-Girl World, Anything That Moves (that one I like).

Last but not least: a group of trendy teenagers at Hunter High School, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has formed the 10 Percent Club. (Obviously, these kids don’t read the papers.) According to a story in The New York Times cited by Garber, none of the members claims to be exclusively homosexual. “Everyone’s bisexual,” the president explains. There’s just one catch: “Every one of the bisexuals interviewed said they’d [sic] never had relations with someone of their [sic] own sex.” To which the perfect comeback was supplied roughly a century ago by a noted bisexual who, not surprisingly, figures prominently in the pages of Vice Versa: “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.” Editor’s note: Readers are reminded that The New Criterion does not publish in July or August. Our next issue will appear in September.