Journal of Bisexuality, 9: 461476, 2009

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Copyright

ISSN: 1529-9716 print / 1529-9724 online
DOI: 10.1080/15299710903316695

BI BOOK REVIEW
WE ARE EVERYWHERE: A FIVEWAY REVIEW OF A
HISTORY OF BISEXUALITY, OPEN, BECOMING VISIBLE,
BISEXUAL SPACES, AND LOOK BOTH WAYS

Review essay by Jonathan Alexander

University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Serena Anderlini-DOnofrio
University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, PR

A History of Bisexuality. Steven Angelides. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2001. 281 pages (with index)
Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage. Jenny Block. Seattle,
WA: Seal Press, 2009. 276 pages (with works consulted list)1
Becoming Visible: Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan. Beth
Firestein, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 441 pages
(with index)
Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender. R. Clare Hemmings. London: Routledge, 2002. 244 pages (with index)
Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. Jennifer Baumgardner. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 244 pages (with index)
For this special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality on the intersections
among queer theory and bisexuality, we thought it would be useful to
review books that have substantively engaged this intersection in critical,
insightful, and provocative ways. Two such books, Steven Angelides A
History of Bisexuality (2001) and Clare Hemmings Bisexual Spaces: A
Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), are somewhat older texts
Address correspondence to Jonathan Alexander, Department of English, 435 HIB, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA (E-mail: jfalexan@uci.edu).

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that have not yet been reviewed in the pages of this journal. To correct
that omission, and in recognition of the importance that these two studies
play in so many of the articles in this special issue, we offer our review
and thoughts here. To set the critical theory of these books in a more
contemporary and applied context, we link them to three more recent texts.
Two, Jennifer Baumgardners trade book Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics
(2007) and Jenny Blocks Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage
(2009), memorialize various levels of personal experience as avenues to
theorizing bisexuality for the lay public, and they observe the ways in which
this trope deploys itself in ones personal life and in the life and culture of
our era. Finally, Beth Firesteins edited volume Becoming Visible (2007)
offers a store of applied research as well as theoretical knowledge directed
to professional counselors and therapists who intend to provide bisexual
patients with the mental and psychological health care they need. The
volumes subtitle, Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan, is emblematic
of the volumes intent to dispel the myth that bisexuality is a phase one
can overcome with proper medical attention. The idea here is that there
are no reasons to overcome bisexuality, though there are many reasons
why counselors and therapists, as well as society as a whole, should think of
bisexuals as very healthy, wholesome and valuable members of the human
community. An overview of these five books, we believe, will help readers
of this collection get a fairly articulate sense of where bisexuality stands
at this time in the realms of human knowledge and experience touched by
these books.
To start, then, Steven Angelides A History of Bisexuality offers a muchneeded historical and theoretical intervention in our thinking about the
history of what the modern era knows as sexuality, as well as our theorizing about the development of sexual identity categories. Co-editor Serena
Anderlini-DOnofrio, who was raised in Italy, brings to our reading of this
book the perspective of a Mediterranean education, where awareness of bisexual behavior registers across the cultural spectrum since antiquity. This
awareness has been articulated in a study of bisexual behavior in ancient
Greece and Rome by Eva Cantarella (1988/1992), a professor of classical
history at the University of Milan. The books title, Secondo Natura, encodes the concept that there is nothing unnatural about erotic expression
across genders: the title translates, quite literally, as According to Nature,
and even better, as Going Along with Nature, or Seconding Nature, as one
seconds a proposal in a meeting. The English elides the poetic aspect of
this and reads, objectively, as Bisexuality in the Ancient World. As might
be expected of a scholar based in Australia, where the legacies of Western
culture have arrived only recently, Angelides book focuses on the past
150 years. Oddly enough, however, Angelides perspective on the recent
history of bisexuality helps to explain why the title of Cantarellas book

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did not make it into English. Nature came to be studied scientifically in

modernity, under the aegis of Christian monotheism. At this time, bisexual
behavior came to be constructed as against nature, because nature itself
was now seen as the creation of a single deity. In the ancient world the
divine was ubiquitous; it was in the body of nature and not separate from
it. Bisexual behavior was just as natural as could be. Indeed, as Foucault
would put it, the focus was on acts, not identities, and only after the onset of
Christianity, with its separation between good and evil, certain acts came
to be seen as sinful. In pre-Christian Rome and Greece, Cantarellas book
exemplifies in great detail, amorous behavior was considered an art whose
forms and styles of expression were infinite, and the scientific concept of
sexuality did not exist. In the arts of loving, the young were being initiated
by those with more experience. For obvious anatomical reasons, if the
students were of ones own gender, those practical lessons in erotic love
would be much easier to deliver. With English being a major language of
modern scientific production (if not the most important one), no wonder
the original title of Cantarellas study either makes no sense or sounds
outright pedophilicthe kind of thing that gets one in trouble in todays
academe, where mind-centered learning processes prevail.
Angelides book helps one to see what has been lost in this scientific
modernization, and what a postmodern perspective can recuperate for itself and humanitys future, by way of bringing back a positive, sustainable
notion of the primitive. Angelides uses deconstructive strategies and a Foucauldian approach to the history of sexuality to trace the development of
the category of bisexuality, from psychoanalytical and sexological theories at the end of the 19th century, through postwar gay liberation, to queer
politics at the end of the 20th century. With critical sophistication and a
general command of his subject, Angelides rightly points out how seemingly central bisexuality was, conceptually, to early psychoanalytic and
sexological theory. For instance, Freuds theories of polymorphous perversity and naturally innate bisexuality serve as foundations for his theories
of sexuality, even as they ultimately position bisexuality as the immature
(e.g., perverse) state out of which sexual maturity (i.e., heterosexuality)
must arise. Angelides adeptly shows how bisexuality is cast in this role
ontogenetically and phylogenetically, namely in relation to the genesis of
each individual and that of the species. From this starting point, Angelides
deftly demonstrates how a series of controlling binary oppositionsman
and woman, but also, fairly quickly, heterosexual and homosexualcame
to dominate theoretical, cultural, and political constructions of sexuality
and sexual identity.
In the process, bisexuality becomes, in Angelides accounting, a kind
of ghostly other to sexuality itselfthere in the shadowy background,
but ultimately something that must be denied in the pursuit of more mature

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sexual expressions. In a way, the persistence of bisexuality in this ghostly

role embodies cultural fears that sexuality, per se, may not exist; that it
may be nothing but a cultural construct. Even with the rise of gay liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, when some gay liberationists advocated a
bisexual chic or a sexual freedom that would return us to our original
polymorphous-ness, bisexuality never seemed to gain traction, either as an
identity or a community or even a politics. Consider, for instance, Adrienne Richs famous lesbian continuum, which seemed to acknowledge,
explicitly, like Kinseys famous scale, a continuum of sexual, erotic and
intimate interest, from the fully lesbian to the singularly straight. In the
hands of gay and lesbian activists and thinkers, however, the two poles
become the focus of attentiongay and straight. The minoritizing logics
of identity politics figure gayness as another identity, like straightness,
and the in-between status of bisexuality seems to question too much the
nonthreatening innateness upon which much of gay politicking came to
depend. Were born this way, after all, so please dont discriminate. Bisexuality, by comparison, seemed too much the sexuality of choice, and
particularly in the advent of AIDS, it came to be seen as the dangerous sexuality that vectored disease from promiscuous homosexuals to an otherwise
pristine suburbia. So though bisexuality seemed to be the centerpiece of
much gay liberationist thinking, it was a bisexuality in name only, a very
theoretical bisexuality.
Angelides moves deftly from history into theoretical discussion, focusing on the work of sexuality studies scholars such as Michel Foucault,
Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickthinkers whose work dominated the study of sexuality in the 1990s. In particular, he uses the work
of Judith Butler, especially Bodies That Matter, to unpack the prevalence
of binarisms that made bisexuality a difficult subject to consider, even at
the headily questioning height of queer theory. Angelides pointedly asks,
Why is bisexuality the object of such consistent and intense skepticism?
[. . .] In short, why has bisexuality been rendered for the most part incidental and even irrelevant to the history, theory, and politics of sexuality?
(p. 190).
Following the lead of Foucault and Butler, particularly in their genealogical mode, Angelides ultimately situates his historical survey of bisexuality
less as a discovery of the truth of bisexuality or the revelation of a hidden
history (see Marjorie Garber, 1995, for that story), but more as a theoretical questioning of why bisexuality is a conceptually troubling category.
He writes,
[t]racking the epistemic path of bisexuality has been for me one way of
bringing into clearer view the failure of our epistemology of sexuality;

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465

that is, the impossibility of any attempt to posit this thing called sexuality, and its component identity-parts of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual.
(p. 196)

For Angelides, undertaking such a theoretical venture has real-world consequences, in a number of ways. Attending to the theoretical difficulties that
bisexuality poses to our conceptualization of sexuality mandates a complete theoretical reconsideration of sexuality; and indeed, Angelides calls
at the end of his study for a substantive rethinking of how we understand
the history of sexuality:
This deconstructive history has demonstrated that no analysis of sexuality can afford to ignore the category of bisexuality, which mandates
a critical rethinking of some of the central terms and strategies of Foucauldian and queer theories. While these theories have provided, and
continue to provide, cogent political and theoretical tools for antihomophobic and anti-heteronormative inquiry, it is important to attend
to their own structuring exclusions in order to strengthen their political
and theoretical promise. (p. 199)

Put another way, a queer theory that misses bisexualitys querying of

normative sexualities is a queer theory that is itself too mastered by the very
normative and normalizing binaries it seeks to unsettle; as he succinctly
puts it, [a]s deconstructive readers and cultural critics we need continually
to monitor the sites through which the reiteration of sexuality, and its
accompanying hierarchy of hetero- and homosexuality, is taking place (p.
201).
More interestingly, and speculatively perhaps, Angelides stretches the
implications of his critiques beyond the humanities into the social sciences and even the hard sciences. He suggests that science ought [not]
to abandon questions relevant to those things assigned to the category
of sexuality, but . . . scientists ought to pursue a different set of questions altogether (p. 206). For example, the much vaunted search for the
gay gene, which seems to dominate some scientific inquiry into homosexuality, seems misguided at best, if not seriously theoretically flawed
as an investigative project. Angelides urges that we not let our scientific
thinking be dominated by the same binarisms that have hampered psychological thinking. Rather, he argues, we should consider other, potentially
more interesting questions about the multiple and plural natures of desire, attraction, and intimacyquestions that would not simply replicate
the old, normalizing, and constraining hetero/homo divide, which doesnt

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do justice to the complexity of sexuality anyway, either theoretically or

experientially.
A History of Bisexuality is, in many ways, a stunning book, one that
scholars and lay readers alike can learn from, appreciate, and ultimately
enjoy. What partially hampers Angelides approach in positing such questions is his failure to account for some scientists and medical professionals,
such as Dr. Fritz Klein, who do exactly what he suggests they do. Indeed,
Angelides elisions of Kleins famous study (1978/1993) and treatise The
Bisexual Option seems grievous in this case, particularly since Dr. Kleins
Sexual Orientation Grid attempts to move questions about sex, sexuality,
intimacy, and eroticism away from identity and towards a complex plurality of modalities. Nonetheless, A History of Bisexuality still dazzles with
the scope of its historical sweep and its theoretical acumen.
Given such a sweep, Angelides text is well balanced by Clare Hemmings (2002) Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender, a
text that is as every bit as theoretically savvy as Angelides, but one that
also provides nicely drawn portraits of actual communities to ground the
theoretical consideration of bisexuality. Published just a year after A History of Bisexuality, Hemmings text examines bisexuality not just from the
perspectives of the history of sexuality and queer theory but also from the
analytics of cultural geography, which attends more to the lived experiences
of bisexuals in specific locales. Such an approach offers her, ultimately, a
somewhat more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of bisexuality.
Much like Angelides, Hemmings sees bisexuality as offering a theoretically rich way to interrogate and potentially destabilize the dominant
heterohomosexual binary:
if we consider bisexual meaning in spatial terms, it becomes clear that
bisexuality is not only a location between heterosexuality and homosexuality, binary genders or sexes, but also resides at the heart of lesbian
community, between lesbian and gay communities, and in parallel with
transsexuality within queer feminist terrain. As a result, a bisexual subject is capable of producing knowledge that is at odds with dominant
and community formations of sexuality and gender, and for that reason
alone is worth attending to. (p. 196)

Hemmings approach to bisexuality through cultural geography offers us an

acute awareness of the particularity of bisexuality as it is situated in specific
locales; she maintains, for instance, that where bisexual identity or community is the result of . . . struggles over bisexual meaning, it is frequently
at the expense of the specific nature of bisexual political and cultural location (p. 196). Hemmings details in her chapters, through interviews,

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media analyses, community profiles and theoretical explorations, how the

particularities of lived experience shape different understandings of bisexuality. In some communities, such as in lesbian communities in Massachusetts, bisexuality becomes figured as a space between lesbianism and
straight male desire, so as to demarcate it as separate from lesbianism. In
this way, bisexuality seems a masculine threat to lesbian safety (p. 13). In
contrast, in San Francisco, bisexuality becomes part of a fantasy of radical
inclusiveness, a way to recognize and value the multiplicities of queer desire. Given such differences, Hemmings ultimately argues that bisexuality
can be perceived both as subversive of gender norms and as a reinscription of dominant (i.e. heterosexist) gender and/or sexual discourse
(p. 117). Put another way, engaging in bi-erotic behavior can prompt us to
question what a real man or woman should do; at the same time, other
versions of bisexuality practiced by some people might allow men and
women to maintain dominant heterosexual relationships while playing
around with homoeroticism in the privacy of a bedroomwithout having
really to confront what it means to be openly queer.
Hemmings is perhaps most convincing about such complexities, theoretically at least, when comparing bisexuality and transgenderism. She
notes, for instance, how there are a number of similarities in the ways that
bisexuality and transsexuality are given and give meaning within queer
and feminist studies currently (p. 99). On one hand, bisexuality and transgenderism are increasingly seen among queer theorists and activists as the
new frontier in sexual rights advocacy. Trans studies in particular has a lot
of current theoretical chic. On the other hand, however, bisexuals and the
transgendered strike many as embracing heterosexual privilege, particularly because transsexuals are viewed as reifying norms of gender as they
seek to become real men or real women. Ultimately, such attention to
the complexity of lived bisexual experience prompts Hemmings to call for
an approach to bisexuality that is aware of its potential (theoretically) and
its limitations (experientially):

A focus on bisexual knowledges found elsewhere, those not fully circumscribed by dominant formations of heterosexuality and homosexuality, . . . provides a strategy for resisting the narrativization of heterosexual and homosexual histories that rely on a denial of bisexual
specificity. Instead of celebrating dubious bisexual transgressions of
sex, gender, and sexual positions, I advocate an approach that insists
that bisexualitys capacity to generate radical reconfigurations of those
oppositions resides not outside but within social and cultural meaning.
(p. 197)

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As such, Hemmings approach, we feel, builds nicely on Angelides call

for research that historicizes bisexuality in ways that deconstruct older
and limiting conceptualizations of sexuality while also paying attention to
the historical particularity of how individuals and communities negotiate
their relationships, both among themselves and in relation to controlling
paradigms, including sexuality.
Although Angelides and Hemmings offer us robust histories and theories
of bisexuality, Baumgardners and Blocks books come in the feminist tradition of theorizing from the personal, namely of using personal experience
to extrapolate theoretical propositions that are not exactly macropolitical
but nonetheless provide insights applicable well beyond mere identity politics. Although Baumgardners (2007) book uses the personal as a springboard to offer comments on the media and cultural politics, Blocks (2009)
book is organized as a personal narrative, which, complemented by the
authors reflections about her own story, has the ambition to offer itself as
an encouragement for any readers personal and political transformation.
In their methods and intents, these books are a refreshing statement about
what it means to have had several decades of womens and gender studies as
an official part of higher education. One can see these disciplines in action
as one reads how these authors take pride in their gender and acknowledge
the importance of female genealogies in their livesintellectual, political
and biological. Still, Block and Baumgardner come to bisexuality from
different perspectives: Block defines the space of her bisexual expression
within the open marriage she and her spouse gradually create together, an
amicable space where their daughter is raised with abundant parenting;
more faithful to the feminist communities with whom she works, Baumgardner defines her profile as that of an independent professional whose
choice to be a single parent is supported by her communities with abundant affection and help. For both authors, embracing bisexuality is related
to their sense of interconnectedness between women, and between generations of women. Via different forms of self-affirmation and feminist
practice, these interconnections ground Blocks and Baumgardners determination to own their sexuality, to proclaim their sovereignty over their
own bodies and selves and to honor their multiple desires.
Jennifer Baumgardners delightfully accessible and narratively driven
call to Look Both Ways in her exploration of, as her subtitle puts it, Bisexual Politics, serves to show us how much academic theorizing about
bisexuality has, as it were, hit the streets. The answer, surprisingly, is quite
a bit. We are not certain that Baumgardner has read either Angelides or
Hemmings books (though she does cite Fritz Klein, 1978/1993), but Look
Both Ways is nonetheless an often astute and clever look at bisexuality that
is aware, as is Hemmings, of its seeming liberatory potential and its lived
nuisances.

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Baumgardner focuses primarily on womens experience of bisexuality,

which is not surprising given her previous publications and strong interest in feminism (Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future and
Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism). However, shes also
savvy about the influence of popular culture in shaping our understanding of sexuality and in suggesting alternative trajectories for desire and
affiliation. She writes several times about the impact of Ellen Degeneres
and Anne Heches former relationship on her own thinking about plural
sexualities, and she recounts with glee a tension-filled movie theater in
which young women expressed discomfort with hunky Matt Damons portrayal of the quite queer Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley; scenes
of nearly missed kisses between Damon and co-star Jude Law elicited
youthful squeals of discomfort. For Baumgardner, such scenes show us
how bisexuality and bi-eroticism permeate pop culture, offering many
models for different trajectories of desire while still eliciting, among many
others, unfortunate reactions of biphobia. But thats reality, as either an Angelides or a Hemmings might point out; as Baumgardner puts it, [t]hese
subconscious and conscious images of bisexuality in ads, on TV, and in
erotica reflect the lives of real women and girls (p. 9). And shes quite
good at tracing such images and accounting for their personal impact
on her life, all the while rooting them in their historical contextsfrom
considering bisexuality and second-wave feminism, to writing humorously about what she calls the Ani [DiFranco] Phenomenon,
to musing about communal tensions among bisexual women and
lesbians.
Admittedly, though, this is a popular text, and in comparison to A
History of Bisexuality and Bisexual Spaces, Baumgardners analyses can
seem at times too optimistic. She seems at many points to grind the familiar
axes of visibility: Visibility is crucial to making bisexuality a political
force, because it could take straight people from being the majority to
being a minority (p. 222). Were not exactly sure what is meant by taking
straight people out of the majority, per se, especially since, desirable as it
might be, a wave of massive bisexual self-outing seems so unlikely at this
time. Also perplexingly, she writes that
what is still usually invisible, within all of the rampant visibility that gay
rights has achieved, is the insurgent role of bisexual people. Because we
are part of the mainstream, the alternative margin, and the gaystream
(the mainstreaming of queer life), we have empathy for an insight into
the straight and queer worlds. Bisexual people are the primary conduits
for the cultural conversation that America is having about gay rights.
(p. 35)

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Yes, we agree in part: bisexuals are often invisible within straight and gay
communities; but we are still left wondering exactly how bisexuals are
at the center of cultural conversations between straights and gays about
gay rights. Indeed, the subtitle is misleading: theres not much politics
here, unless its the politics of the personal, which is an important politics,
granted. Wed hoped, though, for more macropolitics, more consideration
of how larger conversations, beyond pop culture, are taking shape around
bisexuality in particular and around sexuality in general. In accordance with
prevalent styles in the trade book industry, the promise of such analysis is
never quite fulfilled.
But there is meaty stuff here, nonetheless. One nearly throwaway passage in the books final chapter gave us much pause for thought:
What Anne [Heche] symbolizes to me is the great what-ifwhat if it
were okay for gay people to have straight expectations? Not to pass,
or become palatable, or go back in the closet, but simply to expect
what Heche took for granted: to not have to be careful and quiet about
her love life. Heches cluelessness and her sense of entitlement were
annoying, but they were also her weapons against fearfear of being
gay in a homophobic society and in a very homophobic (though very
gay) industry. (p. 217)

The insight here seems smart and dead on: perhaps what is necessary at
timesnot just to increase bi-visibility, but to help create a world of greater
sexual freedomis a bit of cluelessness, a willingness to claim a sexual
empowerment even when such may not be willingly offered by those
around you. This is dangerous territory, but Baumgardners willingness
to provoke discussion about a bisexual politics is dangerous, to gays,
straights and even some bisexuals too. And though one may not be as
theoretically provoked, as is the case with Angelides and Hemmings
books, a reader of Look Both Ways may find him-, her-, or ze-self personally
provokedand that might be the most effective kind of provocation of all.
Similarly provocative, but in more subdued ways, is Jenny Blocks
Open (2009), a narrative about the authors personal journey through her
meanderings of social prescriptions, expectations and cliches, and her
endeavor to define herself as a bisexual, polyamorous subject, a woman
capable of loving men and women and of sustaining more than one amorous
relationship at once. Blocks narrative is presented as that of a modern
every(wo)man, who, in the United States, tries her best to meet social
and familial expectations while at the same time continuing her search for
what is fulfilling on a deeper level, as well as honest and authentic. The
literary quality of the book is quite impressive, which also speaks well

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of where bisexual and polyamorous communities are at in the ways of

nurturing talent beyond what is merely effective. The prologue, written
in the third person, gives a summary of this every(wo)mans story in
paragraphs that then repeat at the opening of each chapter. The story that
particularizes the person to whom these things happened comes alive as the
first-person narrative of each chapter unfolds. So we learn about Jennys
liberal parents, about her desire and determination to own and explore
her sexuality as a young adult and in college, about her socially acquired
goal to find Mr. Right and marry him, about her wisdom in choosing the
person, about her first sexual experiences with women and her first affair,
while married, with another married woman, Grace, whose husband was
possessive and homophobic.
What is most moving about this book is the way the narrator explains
how these events affected her personal life and the relationship with her
husband Christopher, including the different styles of communication and
affection that enabled the couple not only to survive, but to grow, and
become more deeply related. For example, we find out that when Graces
husband threatened to tell Jennys husband about the womens affair, Jenny
not only accepted to talk to this man, but also, eventually, when all danger was averted, decided to tell her own husband the whole story as well.
Clearly, Jenny wants to be appreciated by her partner for her honesty and
takes the risk of honesty even when the facts could be easily and conveniently concealed. In another situation, we learn that via communication
and negotiation Jenny and Christopher have agreed to open their marriage,
and that the chosen person is a female friend of Jennys whom Christopher knows as well, Lisbeth. The description of the lovely threesome, the
trepidations that anticipate it, the act itself, the feelings and afterthoughts
are quite discreet and gracious, yet concrete and palpable enough for any
reader to get a sense of how joyful and intense these experiences can be.
As Block remembers:
I couldnt keep from smiling as I watched my husband run his hand
over Lisbeths breasts and down her hips. He looked awed, as if this
were the first time he had ever touched a woman like thatnot just her,
but any woman. It was amazing to watch them together. It was hot, but
it was also sweet. She was lost in him, and he in her. I was able to see
Christopher as a human being for the fist time in years . . . as a man, as
a sexual being, a person who needed to be wanted. (p. 140)

Even though Jenny was the one who suggested opening the marriage,
and even though Lisbeth was primarily her friend, when Lisbeth decides
to continue the sexual relationship with Christopher and not her, Jenny

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is obliging in a dignified, self-sustaining way. She respects them, as she

explains:
After the three of us had been together for several months, my husband
continued to sleep with Lisbeth, but I didnt. It was her choice, not
mine. But I respected her interest (or lack thereof). . .. I missed having
sex with her, but it was important to me that she was honest about how
she was feeling. (p. 144)

The author comes across as a woman with integrity, love, intelligence and
determination, a person one would want in ones life, and one who is
ready to fight her battles to define herself and her circumstances in her
own terms. Toward the end of the memoir the author goes back to some of
the dramatic moments in the story to offer her reflections on how she and
Christopher made it though the most difficult times. She clearly knows how
to establish the terms of a negotiation with her partner, as a person who
chooses marriage rather than feeling obligated to accept it as a womans
biological destiny.
Christopher and I recovered from our first debacle almost instantly,
simply because we decided we would. So much of navigating a new
lifestyle involves letting go of the norms and meanings to which
people have grown accustomed. We were figuring things together, and
we had to learn to talk to each other and to listen . . . we continue to
work at that. (p. 228)

A capable negotiator, she is also compassionate and empathetic. As she

explains:
even though we know that talking is paramount, its not always easy, especially for Christopher. For example, when things ended with Christopher and Lisbeth as we all went back to being just friends, it was tough
for all of us, as any change is. But Christopher suffered a different kind
of loss than either Lisbeth or I didand, I believe, a more difficult
one. She and I fell back into our friendship easily, but he had no real
relationship with her before our sexual one started and so he was left
feeling like an outsider . . . he was back to being the husband of her best
friend. (pp. 228229)

Eventually, the life narrative Block presents in this memoir ends with the
formation of a three-way relationship that has Jenny involved with Christopher and Jemma, the younger woman who accepts to be her exclusive

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girlfriend. This configuration can be described as a bisexual/polyamorous

triad.
Through the empathy for her partner(s) and her affirmation of multipartnering as a practice of love that enhances amorous relationships, the author
successfully presents open marriage as a viable alternative between conventional monogamy and more liberal ways to practice alternative lifestyles,
as in solo players and group marriage (also known as polyfidelity). As
presented in this memoir, open marriage involves various degrees of bisexuality and responsible nonmonogamy, with secondary relationships including something as fleeting as Jennys brief flings while out of town, and
something as stable as Jennys exclusive relationship with Jemma. Open
marriage comes across as a viable option for open-minded people in a society like the United States, where the nuclear concept of a family is prevalent
enough in the culture at large to determine things as basic as retirement
and health insurance. When understood in these terms, open marriage is
a cultural construct that challenges two of the most important paradigms
upon which the accepted concept of marriage in the West is predicated:
monogamy and monosexuality. Open marriage, demurely concludes Jenny
Block, is just a variation on an institution that is desperate for a remodel
(p. 221). Today, when gay marriage, as a frequent centerpiece in debates
about queer politics, is often understood as a variant that only remodels
the gender of the other person, her statement is especially poignant. And
indeed, with her genuine story, Block has persuaded us that most people
involved in open marriages are honest, open-minded, and intellectual (p.
216).
Last but not least, we consider the collection Becoming Visible (Firestein,
2007), which was put together for the purpose of empowering the counseling profession to provide health services to people like Jenny, Christopher,
Jemma and others, to help them actualize their ideal amorous configurations rather than make them feel guilty for desiring them. The collection
takes the lead from what manifests as the urge that most clients bring to a
counselors table, rather than what the counseling profession at large might
consider appropriate. As editor Beth Firestein announces at the onset of
her introduction, our clients are no longer coming to us because they want
to be normal. They are coming to us because they want to be whole (p.
xiii).
As a person who, in principle, does believe in psychotherapy, and who,
out of a desire for integrity with her own chosen communities and identities,
has practiced individual forms of individual therapy only in the context
of co-counseling with members of queer, bi, and poly communities, coeditor Serena Anderlini-DOnofrio could not be more supportive of this
kind of endeavor, and hopeful that the very serious studies and research
contained in this volume make a significant impact in the profession of

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psychotherapy, so that more counselors are available to help people like

her. Whole stands of course for fulfilled in ones aspirations in creative,
imaginative, unique ways, regardless of any normativity, and, in particular,
heteronormativity. It is a tall call for any therapist, because ones personal
experiences have an effect on the span of ones imagination, and that
tends to trace the contours of ones belief systems as well. So, though
one cannot imagine how counselors who believe in converting gays to
heteronormativity (like those the film Bruno makes fun of in a crucial
scene) could be affected by this book, one can certainly see how many
liberal therapists open to the idea of wholeness as the goal of a counselors
work can find in the books pages the data, information, tools, and evidence
to become more effective in their job. Besides this, the book also of course
empowers those accustomed to coaching, co-counseling, self-counseling,
sharing with confidantes in support or social groups, pillow talk, and other
informal ways of accessing emotional resources, to find out what it is that
they need to get over a stumbling block in their psychological progress and
development.
The books sections include an overview of critical issues in counseling
bisexuals; a central section, Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan,
that establishes bisexuality as a viable sexual identity acceptable to clients
and therapists no matter for how long and at what age it is adopted to
describe oneself; a section on the psychological situations faced by bisexuals who are part of cultural, racial, or ethnic minorities; and a section on
diversity of lovestyles among groups of bisexuals.
For the sake of this review, we focus on three chapters in the volume.
Chapter 11, Addressing Social Invalidation to Promote Well-Being for
Multiracial Bisexuals of African Descent (pp. 207228), by Raymond
Scott, emphasizes the challenges people of African descent face in the
United States when they identify as bisexuals. In the context of critical
race theory, the author emphasizes how, when in the culture at large one
is exclusively or at least primarily defined by color, any other nonnormative self-definitions become fraught with the risk of being considered too
deviant to be taken on, with the ensuing consequences of forced duplicity
and closetedness, as in what is known as the down-low lifestyle. This
situation in turn tends to produce self-destructiveness, loss of voice, invalidation and all the severe emotional and psychological challenges these
entail. It is very important, the article claims, to begin with a self-defined
notion of race. The author models this by describing all people of African
descent in the Americas as multiracial, including African Americans who
live in the United States. Historically, by definition, this is the country
where Whites and only Whites have been defined by purity. Once this
multiracial, self-defined multiple notion of race is recognized, affirmed

Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-DOnofrio

475

and embraced, the coming-out process of a multiracial bisexual client can

begin to take place.
Chapter 17, Counseling Bisexuals in Polyamorous Relationships (pp.
312335), by Geri Weitzman, focuses on the segment of the bisexual population that defines itself as polyamorous and whose members practice
some form of responsible nonmonogamy or multipartnering. The chapter
makes good use of a wide spectrum of data collected in well described informal online surveys. It offers an articulate typology of the polyamorous
population and the kinds of discrimination it faces. Further, the chapter
explains why poly people believe that practicing polyamory contributes
to their stability and mental health; it describes their main concerns in a
world unfamiliar with their orientation and reports the incidence among
polaymorists of individuals who identify as bisexuals: 51% of the total
sample according to the survey (p. 317). Weitzmans research also contributes to dispelling the myth that polyamorous bisexuals behave like what
Fritz Klein (1978/1993) calls concurrent bisexuals, namely that they need
to be involved with a male and a female at the same time to be whole.
Another dispelled myth is that polyamorous bisexuals are more at risk for
sexually transmitted diseases than others. The report is that 71% of respondents affirm that their lovers gender does not matter. It was also found
that enhanced awareness of safer-sex practices have successfully protected
polyamorous bisexuals from being more affected by STDs than the general
population.
Finally, Chapter 18, Playing with Sacred Fire: Building Erotic Communities (pp. 336357), by Loraine Hutchins, focuses on counseling
participants in social or friendship networks that include sharing of sexual experiences between network members in various combinations (p.
336). The author adeptly introduces the concept of erotic communities.
This trope shifts the focus not only from the sexual to the erotic, but also
from the private (from what is supposed to happen behind closed doors, the
famous primal scene that would be cause for childhood trauma according
to Freud) to the public, or at least to an open space where erotic energies
can be shared by multiple participants in an amorous game. With her subtle awareness of and respect for erotic communities based on notions of
tantra and sacred eroticism, Hutchins engages a queer terrain indeed, as
she proposes that counselors revise the prevalent notion of the orgiastic as
the ultimate primitivism and negative loss of self, for a positive notion that
revises this experience as one deeply connected with the divine and the
sacred. What happens to the cultural construct of sexuality, with its embedded paradigms of monosexuality and monogamy, when multipartnering
in an eroticized space is revised as a religious experience? Hutchins examines three sacred-sex communities, Carol Queens San Francisco based
Queer of Heaven, the Pennsylvania-based Body Sacred and The Body

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Electric School, also based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She points
out that leadership in the creation and development of these intentional
communities has consistently been bisexual, and that the effect of the work
of these communities in the culture at large has been that of teaching anew
forms and styles of the arts of loving, some of which were quite well known
in cultures ancient or other than the West. In other words, when all life is
recognized as a form of the sacred, as it was in classical antiquity and still
is in Tantric Hinduism, then bisexuality, like other plural forms of erotic
expression, are every bit according to nature, or, in Secondo Natura, as
Cantarellas original title explains. This erotic knowledge, we would like
to add, is indeed part of the sacred, as it helps to assuage pernicious fears
that stand in the way of practicing love sustainably. This knowledge helps
to control risks involved in producing love in an age of uncertainty like
our own, when production of this essential element that all life shares is
especially necessary.
The breadth of topics and disciplines, as well as the range of interests
and perspectives deployed in the books reviewed here, suggests that the
intersection of bisexuality and queer theory is a space populated with
multiple minds that vibrate together as their intellectual visions examine
and gradually transform our cultural notions of the sexual, the amorous
and the erotic.
NOTE
1. Winner of the 2009 Lambda Award for Bisexuality.

REFERENCES
Angelides, S. (2001). A history of bisexuality. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press.
Baumgardner, J. (2007). Look both ways: Bisexual politics. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Block, J. (2009). Open: Love, sex and life in an open marriage. Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York:
Routledge.
Cantarella, E. (1992). Bisexuality in the ancient world. Yale University Press. (Originally work published as Secondo natura, 1988)
Firestein, B. (Ed.). (2007). Becoming visible: Counseling bisexuals across the lifespan.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Garber, M. (1995). Vice versa: Bisexuality and the eroticism of everyday life. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Hemmings, C. (2002). Bisexual spaces: A geography of sexuality and gender. New York:
Routledge.
Klein, F. (1993). The bisexual option. New York: Harrington Park Press.

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