Love/Alters/Not: Bisexuality, History, and the Present

The following essay concludes with a review and critique of Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On Truth, Bisexuality, and Desire by Michael Amherst. But in order to ground that review, I must first provide context both personal and professional.

Personally, I am a bisexual man, and so approach the topic with deep conviction. Professionally, I have a PhD in early modern English literature, and my understanding of my own sexuality and indeed sexuality in general is deeply enmeshed with the practices of thinking and reading that academic queer theory and the study of same-sex desire in the early modern period have made available to me.

Reckoning with textual traces of desires that do not neatly align with modern categories of straight or gay was critical for processing my own fluctuating desire, a desire that was never wholly hetero- or homosexual (or rather, has always been insistently both of those things, indeed something that exceeded them). But this is also a methodological problem for the scholar, as we approach the past always through a lens of anachronism, with concerns and categories that in a historical context do not make sense. This is the case with the modern categories of sexual orientation and identity, which were invented during the medicalization of human sexuality in the late 19th century, as documented by Michel Foucault in his compendious History of Sexuality. To uncritically import these historically situated frameworks into the study of prior eras would be like hopping in a time machine to ask Isaac Newton if he wanted a Macbook, since after all he did his best work with apples: that is, he just wouldn’t get the joke.

And Amherst’s book goes some way toward explaining how even bringing these labels to bear on the present can do us a disservice. But it also, I think, confuses the matter, as Amherst advocates a sweeping categorical agnosticism that is suited to historical research but does not provide a grounding for contemporary queer movements and solidarity. I will return to this critique, but first, in accordance with the call his book represents, I should look critically at my own labels.

I. Love

There’s a sharing meme that occasionally runs through LGBTQIA social media:

Someone on Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr provides a prompt along the lines of “name something you did before even you realized you weren’t straight that in retrospect was a dead giveaway.” People then retweet or reblog this prompt with their anecdotes.

My version goes:

Near the end of my undergraduate career I was first becoming deeply interested in Shakespeare, figuring out that when I went to grad school this is probably what I would study.

One night, in something I was reading — I forget exactly what — a critic discussing the issue of sexuality in the sonnets made a metadiscursive move, pointing out how other critics tend to read themselves and their own predispositions into the overall tenor of Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle: heterosexual readers, that is, tend to think the poems are heterosexual in their effect, while queer readers tend to think the sonnets are more interested in same-sex attraction.

My immediate response to this assertion was to scoff. “That’s clearly not true,” I thought, “because I am straight, but Shakespeare was obviously bisexual.”

As a meme this is very sweet, and provides some melancholy insight into our shared experiences as people who, in many cases, took a long time to figure ourselves out in a world that’s not conducive to that activity. It’s also a way of building a narrative and an identity, retroactively taking the labels and norms we accept now and locking them into the past to legitimize them and, to an extent, save the poor creatures we once were. It’s redemptive.

I first found the word to describe myself — “bisexual” — in the year 2000, as an 11-year-old watching an episode of Ally McBeal. I came out in 2015. The story I just told, however, clearly has me identifying as straight when I was an undergraduate in college, approximately late 2009. So what happened?

In short, I was given a word and then spent 15 years thinking it might apply to me, but always backing away from embracing it as a sign of my self and my identity. It’s true that when I asserted my heterosexuality (to myself while reading alone in my dorm room) in 2009, that fear of being bi was probably somewhere in the back of my mind — but not in a pressing way. It was a sort of inactive knowledge; in psychoanalysis, it might be called disavowal, the avoidance of traumatic insight.

But psychoanalysis is very much invested in producing a coherent story from the objective mess of human experience, and to make this story work — that I am and have always been bisexual — the narrative I tell must do a curious thing: I have to be telling a lie to myself in 2009 in order to be telling the truth to you now. My bisexuality, that is, must be the “true” substance of my being, the place where I was always meant to arrive, the person I “always already” was.

This is not actually the case. It did not have to be this way. There is an alternate scenario where I did not ever come out — where I continued to live as a straight man, and I continued to discount my feelings toward and experiences with men in ways that incorporated them into a story of heterosexual selfhood. Or maybe in this alternate history I’m not so explicit about that and just remain an anxious mess — no matter.

My points is, had I avoided the label bisexual, we might imagine a situation where, for some bizarre reason, a future sociological historian is looking at me as a case study and finds herself faced with the quandary of my sexuality. Let’s imagine she has (this is terrifying!) access to a lot of my personal information — all that data Facebook and Google have stored on me, from my “liked” pages to my (gulp) browser history. So this researcher knows that, on the one hand, I “lived” as a heterosexual man, but my interests were not… strictly heterosexual.

What does the researcher do with this information? Does she relabel me as bisexual (or pansexual, or polysexual, or whatever suitable term has availed itself to her)? To do so would be tendentious: how can labeling someone’s sexuality, especially at such a historical remove, be accurate when you’re not sure whether the terms you’re using would have meant anything to the subject?

II. Alters

This is not a hypothetical, but a problem facing scholars and researchers now. It’s especially pertinent in cases — such as Shakespeare or other early modern and premodern figures — where the 19th century sexual categories and identities we take for granted simply didn’t exist. Therefore in the strictest possible sense anyone saying Shakespeare was straight, gay, or bi is flat-out wrong: he wouldn’t understand those terms as referring to anything like his notion of identity, let alone sexual identity.

One of the odd effects of this, of course, is that Shakespeare’s desires — or at least the desires of his characters, and especially the speaker in his sonnets — are unconstrained by the ways of knowing and recognizing desire and sexuality that we’re often taught are innate and timeless. Let’s take for example Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

As far as sonnets go, this one is pretty famous. It’s often held up as a love sonnet, for what may seem to be obvious reasons. Indeed, a man could read this to his wife on their fiftieth wedding anniversary and no one in the room would bat an eye.

The problem, however, is that in the full context of Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle, this poem is not from a man to a woman but from one man to another. It is part of the “Fair Youth” sequence, the largest portion of the cycle by far, and home to some of Shakespeare’s most famous poems (including Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…”). In this subset of poems, the speaker addresses a younger man with whom he has a deeply intimate relationship — providing advice, sometimes criticism and even scorn, and also praising again and again the young man’s beauty in what even today we recognize as romantic terms.

In Shakespeare’s time (and drawing on his time’s love of Hellenistic precedent) the idea of a relationship between an older man and younger man that combined elements of tutelage and mentorship with amatory and sexual activities was not terribly unusual. In modern terms, think of the arrangement as something like a social sugar daddy: the older man educates the younger about the world, inducts him into cliques, fosters professional connections, and, yes, sometimes they write love poems and have sex.

There is no heterosexuality to be thrown into crisis by this: it is simply acknowledged that in some cases men are attracted to other men, it’s just a thing that happens. This attraction is not seen as unnatural — for some it’s actually seen as more natural than a man’s attraction to a woman, since the misogyny of the time assumes two men are more capable of being equal intellectual partners than a man and a woman. In early modernity, same-sex desire in no way represents an “identity” for the desiring or desired party outside of, perhaps, a general sense of Christian sinfulness that all human flesh is heir to. (Indeed, ‘sodomy’ in this time included not just anal sex between men, but potentially also oral sex, as well as anal and oral sex between men and women, and that’s still true in some US states with sodomy laws today — hooray for progress!)

So what are we to make of Sonnet 116? It’s a strange thing, partly amatory, but also to some extent a sort of meditation or piece of advice — we can imagine the speaker offering the poem to the Youth as a lesson on the nature of love, broadly construed. Yet the final line — what fellow early modernist Anthony Oliveira has called “the world’s saddest dangling modifier” — where the poem should be neatly sewing everything up, unravels that reading: “If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.” That is, if what I am saying is incorrect, and if you can prove that to me, well, then I didn’t write this poem, and…

“No man ever loved” can be read in two ways: “If I’m wrong, then I didn’t write this poem, and furthermore, no man has ever actually been in love” or “If I’m wrong, then I didn’t write this poem, and furthermore, I have never loved a man.” In both cases the formula is ironic: clearly the poem has been written, so the speaker takes his words to be true, which means… people have indeed loved, or he has indeed loved a man. What’s remarkable about this poem is that it scans perfectly for same-sex and other-sex desire. It has it both ways.

There are two more sequences within Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle, a shorter one about the “Rival Poet” and one of middling length about the “Dark Lady”, a woman with whom speaker is by turns erotically involved and deeply disenchanted. In Sonnet 144, finally, she seems to seduce the Fair Youth for herself, which is clearly complicated for the speaker.

In the earlier poem the speaker extols the virtues of a love that is “ever-fixed” or that “alters not when it alteration finds.” A love perfect and unchanging, in other words, immutable and immovable, comparable to the North Star by which the sailor steers his ship. And for all that, Sonnet 144 happens anyway: both the speaker and the Fair Youth bed the Dark Lady, with all the emotional turmoil that entails.

It’s possible for us to read this narrative, granted to us piecemeal from 15-line snapshots, as a bisexual love triangle, and certainly from a certain frame of reference that’s what it is. But it also is not, because the word “bisexual” means nothing in the 17th century. Instead we have a story of fluid desire, a variable set of attractions and inclinations that, no matter how much we (or those who experience them) want them to solidify, shift and change, even as we drift along with their currents.

III. Not

If there is something powerful for me in moments like this, in thinking about literary crystallizations of polymorphous desire, it is the notion of a world where I would not have had to discover a special word for myself and then spend almost half my life trying to sort out the implications. And let’s be real: the very fact that I am writing this right now shows I’m still sorting it out.

So when I think about this — about how exhausting and uncomfortable discerning, and then performing and defending my own sexuality has been — I am more than a little sympathetic to Michael Amherst’s Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On Truth, Bisexuality, and Desire. A common question asked of bisexual folks is something like “Where do you fall on the Kinsey scale?” The scale isn’t always directly invoked but the thought is the same: bisexuality can and must be quantified. Are your homosexual experiences incidental or are they predominant? Do you balance every same-gender relationship with an opposite-gender dalliance (and where and how do you tally your attractions to nonbinary or gender noncomforming folks)?

Amherst and I hate these questions. They are impossible to answer in the same way it is impossible to answer the question of how heterosexual you are: if you have had more sex than someone else who is heterosexual, are you therefore more heterosexual than them? Amherst’s book feels deeply validating in moments where he takes issue with these tendencies in our sexual discourse, or when he describes his attractions and, for the first time, I see another man explain desire in a way that feels true to me: “My experience, and that of many others commonly termed bisexual, is that desire waxes and wanes,” and furthermore, “[e]ven within that, I can meet someone who contravenes my usual sense of what I desire.”

There is not some transcendental calculus by which my bisexuality can be measured, and were we to chart my desires and fantasies from sexual awakening to now I’m not convinced the results would tell us anything about any other bisexual or pansexual or polysexual individual. I simply find a variety of people attractive, and for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. One of them I was lucky enough to marry! And this, I think, is probably true of monosexuals: though you might have a “type” do you not find a variety people attractive based on a panopoly of characteristics?

Yet for all these insights, I also find Amherst’s book disappointing. Part of this is my sense that the use of “bisexuality” in the title was not his choice. I think this because he quite openly isn’t too hot on that label himself. On the fourth page he writes:

If I must have a word, I prefer the word queer. It is an acknowledgement of my exclusion from exclusive heterosexuality, without claiming a certainty as to where my sexuality sits amongst straight, bisexual or gay. It is an admission, while at the same time a refusal to engage in the policing of my past relationships in search of my “true” orientation.

“If I must have a word.” Labels are a thing Amherst accepts only grudgingly — and of course, why not? I’ve admitted already to the appeal of the queerness of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the uncaring mishmash of same-and-other that does not require a word aside from “love” and, sometimes, “hate.” And yet as a man who also calls himself queer, I find it interesting that Amherst takes that term for very different reasons.

True, I say I am queer in certain situations to avoid arguments about how bisexual I “really” am, or to avoid bad-faith debates about whether or not the word “bisexual” is transphobic, and to circumvent arguments that I’m “actually” just gay, or a straight man stealing valor. But this is about picking battles: I simply don’t have the time or resources to combat biphobia every time I might encounter it. I also say I am queer to signal my solidarity with people who do not share my exact situation — lesbians and gay men, transgender and intersex folks, asexual people, and those whose identities straddle these categories— that are nevertheless marginalized in similar or parallel ways.

“I appreciate,” Amherst writes early on, “an anxiety that, in refusing to identify, individuals disavow solidarity with others,” but he adds that he is suspicious of “the imperative to label and identify, […to] force an identity upon an individual they have not chosen themselves. Such an act results from several different forms of presumption, failing to describe the fullness of an individual’s lived reality.”

Very well! I also do not think labels should be forced, but I am suspicious of the tacit (and I think incorrect) admission that solidarity, personal fulfillment, and identity may be mutually exclusive. To be clear, the sort of situation Amherst is concerned about is, for example, a man or woman who has identified as homosexual their entire life suddenly being attracted to someone of another gender — and discounting that desire out of a fear of losing their identity as gay or lesbian. So too for avowedly heterosexual people who find their desires straying into unexpected territory. All desire, for Amherst, is like the desire of Shakespeare’s sonnets: variable, fluid, given to change, and he understands modern sexual identity labels as stifling this innate and amorphous human drive.

I don’t disagree with these thoughts precisely, but I do not think the issue is quite so simple as Amherst suggests. Later he claims that the constant demands for sexual disclosure — the cultural demand to have an avowed sexual identity and a publicly performed past to validate it — are part of a normative drive, and that “the idea of a public sexuality is a demand placed only on those outside of the normative.” This is patently false. Reading Foucault would tell you that, and Foucault’s study of the confessional nature of post-Reformation European sexuality is even cited here. Indeed, the sort of sexual authentication Amherst decries is a direct descendant of the confessional tendencies Foucault excavates, as over the course of the Renaissance and Enlightenment sexuality becomes an explicitly public, socially rehearsed role — and yet Amherst seems to think that this did not and does not happen for “normal” (ie, straight) people.

But for Foucault, everyone goes to confession. Heterosexuality is performed every day by those who identify as such and it is demanded in ways big and small from all of us, even if we refuse it. Our society is largely set up to make the performance of heterosexuality seem easy, natural, transparent — even when the reality of human experience shows us it is not. And perhaps Amherst is attempting to make this point, suggesting everyone fails at heterosexuality, even the straights. Indeed, at one point he says that straight, white men “describ[ing] themselves as queer seems […] a victory. It rejects distinction, and any underlying value judgments, about straight sex. Queer is a denial of the terms of the question, a denial of its validity.” The invalid question for Amherst is the very idea of a labeled sexual orientation and the baggage that label carries. But my problem with the idea of “queer” as a rejection of categorical definition is that it enjambs “queer” as a maginalized identity with “queer” as a conceptual tool for describing the strange, disorienting, or non-normative.

And the fact of the matter is, there is no normal.

Every straight man fails at being a straight man, whether that’s because he’s “too emotional” or because he enjoys his girlfriend massaging his prostate. This does not make his identity queer (as in marginalized), because he has still largely been the beneficiary of the systems of cisheteronormative patriarchy that are far more materially dangerous to people unlike him in a multiplicity of ways. The US sodomy laws I mentioned, currently unenforceable only due to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, certainly include sex acts between men and women under their purview — but in practice it is acts between men that are their target. All sexual labels are socially conventional and arbitrary, yes, but they are also made materially real through the enactment of everyday life. Similarly, a straight man recognizing how he measures himself against toxic heterosexist ideals — and that he does not have to — is a positive. And he is still not queer, because he still benefits from the material systems in place that favor his identity.

To put it another way: even though a medieval knight’s free movement was constrained by a heavy suit of armor, wearing it still meant he was less likely to get dismembered.

The normative is an idealized projection in the same way labels like “gay” or “straight” or “bi” or even “queer” are idealized projections, and these things can never be wholly fulfilled by lived material and psychic reality. Foucault knew this, and it is why he conceptualized power as an immanent force: power belongs to no one, we move through it like an atmosphere. It is both destructive and creative, it both constrains and enables movement. Society is a result not of a top-down implementation of an autonomous power’s ideological plots, but rather the consequence of a negotiation between between institutions and individuals, where the former are the aggregated and ossified past actions of the latter.

But when The History of Sexuality is cited Amherst reduces the argument to the idea that in “Foucault’s theory systems of power […] prescribe rather than describe experience[.]” That’s correct as far as it goes, but it greatly undersells the magnitude of what Foucault was up to, since he unpacks how these prescriptive tendencies are themselves an outgrowth of the early modern period’s emerging empiricist, scientific descriptive practices, filtered through Christian and Enlightenment assumptions about what was “natural” and “unnatural” and then abstracted into supposed universals.

Perhaps I am demanding something from this book that is unfair: it is a small press volume for a general readership, and I’m coming at it as an academic. But the approach is necessary in such instances as when, later, Amherst says (again on the question of labels and identifications) he “can understand the political expedience of solidarity, yet at the same time [he] question[s] what we sacrifice for it.” My own 15-year experience of grappling with calling myself “bisexual” was certainly not a process of “political expedience”, and I very much doubt the vast majority of other queer people would see the realization of their identities as an expedient process. And here again, the idea that solidarity somehow might harm the individual rears its ahead. A strange individualism threads through the account, even when Amherst claims to follow Foucault in knowing he cannot step outside the systems that are necessary for the modern concept of the “individual” (with its attendant rights to happiness and privacy, which Amherst accepts as given) to exist in the first place.

If the structure of the book seems unclear in my relation, that is because there is not much of a structure. It is fragmentary, a mixture of ruminations on literary and historical figures (especially James Baldwin, who grants the book its title in a 1984 interview with Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein), overviews of how the contemporary press has handled the queer sexuality of popular athletes, summaries of sociological research on bisexuality, and personal reflections and anecdotes. Rather than launch a rationalistic argument, Amherst is content to meditate in myriad ways on the sheer weirdness of sexual desire, the way it tends to escape the parameters we construct for it and for ourselves. I appreciate this, and yet the lack of rigor bothers me in passages like the following:

I don’t believe we can be reconciled to our own, inherent contradictions as long as we speak of ourselves like political actors. Political expediency requires a denial of them. Yet the contradictions that exist within us, as with all people, cannot be resolved but simply held. To deny them is also a compromise, a distortion of who we really are.

Along with the recurring bugbear of “political expedience” and his concern for a decontextualized individual, Amherst is worried about the “distortion of who we really are” — by society, its sexual categories, and so on, as if there can be a person who exists without these things. It’s odd to suggest that being a “political actor” is a slippery slope to misrepresenting sexual identity, given that politics could be construed as nothing more than the collective arbitration of the varieties of human need and desire, and this is to say nothing of the decades of arduous work by queer activists that have enabled us to have this discussion to begin with.

Even when we can step aside from our given systems we cannot step outside them; we only recognize ourselves with the mirrors that culture provides, even when this is a negative maneuver, a self-recognition asserting that something does not reflect us. Of course this doesn’t mean we should discard contradiction and ambivalence in favor of the faux uniformity of labels, but recognize that any and all labels always harbor variety, contradiction, and ambivalence within them. Several times Amherst says we need to respect a universalized “human dignity” — not considering that “human” itself is a fairly recent label, as Foucault again tells us, and one that has never been applied equally or consistently.

We are a collection of labels left by those who came before us, none of them perfect, all of them complicated. Labels can be harmful, yes, but they are also reparative: we need to fashion the instruments of our fulfillment with what an imperfect world gives us. We cannot undo the epistemic shift that Foucault uncovered, the cataclysmic turning point from sex as an activity to sex as an identity. Indeed, Amherst’s repeated assumption that there is some essential “truth” about our identity in our desire, even when that truth is fluid or rejects a label, is bound up in the discourse of power Foucault documented.

The notion of truth in desire first of all posits such a transcendental desiring self even exists. It is an Enlightenment variation of the Christian concept of the immortal soul, an eternal subject outside society and culture that simply, naturally is. This character-less entity is then stitched to sexualized and gendered criteria (men should desire like this, women should desire like that) and its “truth” is posited retroactively (because men desire like this, and you desire like this, then you are a true man — or alternatively, you desire like that and are therefore a deviant). This thinking produces the situation it takes as axiomatic, assuming current behaviors confirm a true, a priori desiring-being only initially hypothesized on the basis of those same behaviors. To break this loop, we would have to unchain desire and sex from identity as we currently understand and experience them, and that’s much easier said than done.

Thus while reading I half-suspected Amherst might prefer — as I sometimes think I might — the world of Shakespeare, where these labels didn’t exist and we were all merely horny sinners. But he concedes (as do I) that it was not perfect. Amherst uses the rigid Classical and Renaissance distinction between the older and younger partners, where the older man is uniformly what we would now call a “top” and the younger a “bottom” — with an avowed goal to reproduce something like the heteronormative pairing of an “active” man and a “passive” woman — to launch into what is perhaps the book’s strongest section, a meditation on how contemporary sex between men (where top and bottom, active and passive, are much more nebulous things) can pick away at essentialist notions of masculinity, and sex between a woman and a man who also has sex with men even more so.

In the end, Amherst has anticipated me: the closing sections of the book imagine those who might balk at a queerness that simply is, that resists a further breakdown and classification, that repels definition. Those who balk are guilty of prescriptive behavior, saying one must do this or that to identify as such and such. But I am prescriptive only insofar as I think words, however imperfect, are attempts to name and describe real practices with material effects. To act as if we must each invent or guard our own language of desire — rather than acknowledging the fact that desire, while experienced as idiosyncratic, is always a shared and socialized language, and a language always open to renegotiation— does nothing to aid those of us who are lost, who are looking, who need the labels we adopt to recognize each other as fellow travelers in a deeply hostile world.

There is an atomism in Amherst’s book, the sense that the individual is a sacrosanct entity that precedes all systems and rituals that might employ it. It is not a timeless unity, as Amherst wants to provide us with the flexibility to develop and grow in any number of directions. I think this is admirable, but the book’s reticence to engage with the question of power and its necessarily relational, social character is a profound flaw. We are instead left each of us alone, a wandering sailor, following our own unique North Star in search of a love that we, apparently, can never name.