Happily married for 10 years, Richard Sharrard, a dance instructor, and Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and writer, blend in nicely enough with their neighbors in the middle-class community of Long Beach, Calif. But the couple’s life-style is far from ordinary: Sharrard and Tessina are openly and unapologetically bisexual. During their unusually flexible marriage, Sharrard has enjoyed liaisons with half a dozen men, while Tessina has taken two female lovers. “It’s the best of both worlds,” declares Sharrard, who thinks nothing could be more natural than bisexuality. In a world where sexual orientation is polarized into heterosexuality and homosexuality, bisexuality comes as a disturbing challenge, at once a riddle and a discomfort. “It threatens rigidity,” says Lani Kaahumanu, a bisexual activist in San Francisco. “It threatens both sides of the framework.” Bisexuals often inspire nervousness, distaste and hostility in both straights and gays and are all but ignored by scholars. Lately, however, bisexuality has been hard to overlook. Bisexual characters are the newest twist in movies and TV shows, most notably Basic Instinct and L.A. Law. PBS recently broadcast a drama based on the lives of writers Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, both bisexuals. Authors Camille Paglia and the late John Cheever have confessed their sexual duality; recent biographies claim that Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant and Eleanor Roosevelt had affairs with both men and women. But the issue has been more than fodder for gossip columns. The advent of AIDS has made bisexuality a matter of medical concern. Bisexual men who practice unsafe sex with male and female partners may help speed the spread of HIV through the heterosexual community. “Up until the time of AIDS, the term bisexual was hardly even used,” says anthropologist Carmen Dora Guimaraes of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, “but with the spread of AIDS, we are now trying to flush out this enigmatic character.” Fearful of stigma and discrimination, bisexuals across the U.S. and Europe are becoming more organized and politically active, networking in such groups as BiNet and BiPAC. They are also challenging gay organizations, with which they have had an uneasy alliance, to focus more on bisexuality. The activism has sparked a new debate about sexuality in general. Are people essentially either straight or gay, with bisexuality being merely the unnatural by-product of confusion and repression among some homosexuals? Or is bisexuality a third distinct orientation? Is sexuality governed by biology or culture? Is it fixed, an identity that is set early and endures through life? Or is it fluid, shifting with time and temptation? In truth, sexual identity is a complex weave spun of desire, fantasy, conduct and belief; pulling on any one thread distorts the fabric. Even defining one’s own sexual orientation can be difficult. Avowed lesbians sometimes sleep with men, and men who describe themselves as straight engage in sex with other men. In many Latin societies, men do not consider themselves bisexual or gay unless they take the passive-receptive role during sex. Moreover, sexuality is as much a state of mind as an act of body. People may be attracted to someone but unwilling to act on their desires out of guilt or shame; conversely, others may act contrary to their true feelings.
