By Jane Barnes
When I came out as lesbian to my father he said, “To me it’s like two left shoes.” If heterosexuality was a regular pair of shoes, bisexuality must be a third shoe positioned between the regular pair, in my case an exact three on the Kinsey scale—equally heterosexual and homosexual. Colette had such erotic and beautiful things to say about women; I simply felt the same way. I didn’t think of it as going over some invisible line. Women and men both were attractive to me—their sameness and their difference. Are these evil thoughts? Not to me. I said to myself, I have an open mind, I’m willing to live on the edge, sometimes teeter on the edge, sometimes fall off. I’ve had crushes on both sexes all my life. I did fall off, and it was thrilling. And terrifying.
Sappho talked me through it (I prefer the Mary Barnard translation). I came out through my own literary magazine Dark Horse in 1976 with “Look, Passion.” I had a short liaison with an honest, generous woman, a complete and sweet surprise which I preserved in “Swinging,” a story published in the Boston lesbian magazine, Focus. Two of my poems “How to Dress Like a Scary Dyke,” and “How to Dress Like a Femmy Dyke” were published and anthologized. Google lists me as lesbian as did other anthologies except Getting Bi, edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley and published in 2005. A few more were published right here in Bi Women.
In the beginning, at about six, I was in love with Pixie; we played “marriage,” switching roles from “wife” to “husband.” At twelve, I had fallen for a girl, and we made love protected by the ignorance of her Catholic relatives; then someone threw a girl-boy party where I lost at spin the bottle and had to kiss Tommy, icky kisser. Abused by my intelligent father, I got crushes only on simple boys, and was stalked daily all one summer through the redwoods by the older brother of a girl pal. I tried to escape by staying home and doing endless laundry. A few years later I fell in love with Donny, but grew restless, dumped him and then pined for him anew when he found someone else. He came back to me, then left me. I took a handful of aspirins, telling no one; my ears rang for a week, but that was all.
I went off to college in Oregon, where I joined a poetry group, and marched for equal rights. I published a poem in the student newspaper edited by my English professors, the well-respected poets, Vern Rutsala and William Stafford. Marla, my first lesbian friend, introduced me to books on sexuality. Bored again, I traveled to Peru for half a year before returning to Francisco State as a transfer student. After a year, I ran away with an older, red-headed man, who took me to Atlanta, where I got my BA. We moved to Boston, and I studied the viola da gamba. Thanks to the women’s movement, I left Red, and worked my way out of my Stockholm Syndrome.
The feminists in our “consciousness-raising” groups sometimes kissed each other, and looked happy. I fell in love with a male (bisexual) music buddy, Lewis, a divine cook, and a great wit. After three years happy, I fell for a woman, straight, who played me. A cancer scare turned me into a writer and I published in little magazines (including my own) and came out in Dark Horse with a lesbian poem called “Look, Passion.” I broke up with Lewis to find a “real” lesbian love. Virginia Woolf and Colette were my literary heroes; Woolf also bipolar like me, Colette writing many novels drenched in sensuous, silky language, woman-centric. She lived with a woman for 15 years or so, then married a man.
I got sober and years later I fell in love with my best friend, a lesbian. Step by step we became a couple, found a nice apartment and worked on her music career and my writing career for a decade. Then she fell in love with someone else and we broke up. I went out to Seattle to help nurse my very ill mother and decided there to move to New York City, finding a studio in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, and getting a college teaching gig or two, settling in and hanging out with my best pal, Gordon, a brilliant young gay composer.
“Would you like to write an autobiography?” asked a lesbian editor. I was bi now, I told her; was this a problem? Yes. I read poet/writer Jan Clausen’s Apples and Oranges, about coming out bi after identifying as lesbian. I read Marjorie Garber’s brilliant Vice Versa: Sexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life.” Had poems in the anthology Getting Bi; Voices of Bisexuals Around the World. More poems in Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lori Kaahumanu.
Do I look bi? Who knows. Would that be having a man on one arm, a woman on the other? Not my thing.
On paper, pronouns and first names help: you can refer to your lover, Jill, and your ex, Jeffrey. I say I’ve had three husbands and two wives. I’m monogamous, and life has brought me a few deep loves, a gift that I appreciate. Women and men: I hope to be available to love. Period.
Jane Barnes has published poetry in Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Bi Women, Wormwood Review, River Styx, and Massachusetts Review. Her stories have been published in a dozen magazines and collections and have received three literary prizes. The tribeweaver, a collection of Jane’s poetry over 25 years, is in manuscript.