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Overview
For the acclaimed author and activist Jennifer Baumgardner, bisexuality has always been more than the "sexual non-preference of the '90s." In Look Both Ways, Baumgardner takes a close look at the growing visibility of gay and bisexual characters, performers, and issues on the national cultural stage. Despite the prevalence of bisexuality among Generation X and Y women, she finds that it continues to be marginalized by both gay and straight cultures, and dismissed either as a phase or a cop-out. With intimacy and humor, Baumgardner discusses her own experience as a bisexual, and the struggle she's undergone to reconcile the privilege she's garnered as a woman who is perceived as straight and the empowerment and satisfaction she's derived from her relationships with women.
Part memoir, part pop-culture study, Look Both Ways connects the prominent dots of a bisexual community (Alix Kates Shulman, Ani DiFranco, Rebecca Walker, and, of course, Anne Heche) that Baumgardner argues have bridged feminist aims with those of the gay rights movement. Look Both Ways is a compelling and current study in bisexual lives lived secretly and openly, and an exploration of the lessons learned by writers, artists, and activists who have refused the either/or paradigm defended by both gay and straight communities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374706562 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2008 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 759,059 |
| File size: | 277 KB |
About the Author
Jennifer Baumgardner, co-author of Manifesta and Grassroots, frequently writes and lectures on feminism, activism, and popular culture for magazines and on college campuses around the country.
Along with Amy Richards, Jennifer Baumgardner authored Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (FSG, 2000) and Grassroots (FSG, 2005) and founded the progressive speakers' bureau Soapbox. Baumgardner is also the author of Look Both Ways (FSG, 2007), among other books.
Read an Excerpt
Look Both Ways
Bisexual Politics
By Jennifer Baumgardner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2007 Jennifer BaumgardnerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-70656-2
CHAPTER 1
FIRST LOOK
She was aiming for something beyond the usual, because the usual denied her full humanity.
—Ann Powers, from her 1993 liner notes for the Janis Joplin box set
Who invented typical girls?
—The Slits, "Typical Girls"
If you're walking down the street in London, you'll find helpful words stenciled on the street at most crosswalks: LOOK RIGHT, reminds one, where the traffic whizzes by on the left side of the street. LOOK LEFT, instructs the next, as cars zoom past on the right. Sometimes you stand on a curb poised to take a step, look down, and the street tells you LOOK BOTH WAYS.
In 1993, I stood poised at an unfamiliar intersection of attraction, sex, and love—and I looked both ways. My world was New York City, and it looked like this:
Dinkins was mayor. No one walked down the street or sat at a café or drove their car while yakking on a cell phone. There were no Starbucks. I bought fifty-cent coffee from vendors stationed in aluminum carts. I hadn't heard of the Internet or the Web, and when I did, I took to using that early-nineties überterm, the Infobahn (a German spin on information superhighway—fortunately, both terms fell out of use). Dot-coms had yet to be invented, much less to inflate and then implode. E-mail was something that a few VAX geeks at my college used, but it had nothing to do with real life. Ellen was not out, and "outing" (the gay community's version of a suicide bombing) loomed as potential annihilation, terrorizing closeted homosexuals. Grunge was but a year or two old; Riot Grrls were writing each other love letters and starting bands. Kate Moss was causing a sensation with her waif look. PC meaning "politically correct" was as popular a term as PC meaning "personal computer." A rakish and idealistic Bill Clinton had just become president number forty-two, seemingly a victory for the politically correct, myself included. Doomed, intelligent Hillary was still being presented as a partner, not a First Lady, and the Clintons still believed that the nation would see that as a good thing. Bill's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" idealism had retracted enough to squeeze out gays from the military. George Stephanopoulos was considered hot.
On January 10 of that year, at age twenty-two and half a year out of the safety of a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, I boarded a train in Fargo at 2:30 a.m. and, thirty-five hours and two Milan Kundera books later, arrived in Manhattan to start an internship at Ms. magazine. I carried just two suitcases and a Coach briefcase I would never use. What I didn't have was a paying job, a place to live, or friends—other than Michael Gardner, that is, a slightly older pal from my hometown who was fabulous, gay, and a dresser for the long-running Broadway phenomenon known as Cats. He had said I could stay with him and his boyfriend for a week until I found a room of my own. Michael had been instrumental in my deciding to move to New York; I had almost moved to Chicago. "Honey, Chicago?" Michael had said. "You need to be in New York. Why do NoDoz when there's crack available?"
In my mind, I had arrived simply by making New York City—Manhattan—my new address. You don't have to be from a small landlocked town with six months of winter to know that New York is one of those places—where mystique and myth and overpopulation and opportunity mix to create the frantic cocktail known as freedom. Growing up in Fargo, I had always feared that I was missing out on the party. My hopes for myself in the Midwest were grandiose, but they were often at odds with my earnest feminist proclivities. I wanted to be a fashion model, at least for catalogues; I would meet Bernadette Peters and become her understudy, or perhaps her personal assistant. Merely being in a place where the high rollers of those ambitions lived and worked and debauched and grocery shopped made me feel this close to a contract, a gig, a job, the glamorous life. A journal entry from January 19, 1993, 1:30 a.m., reads:
List of things to do while in the Big Apple
1. Letterman
2. Click and Elite
3. MOMA, Met, Whitney
4.Les Miserables
5. Audition for Cats
6. Check out Sassy, Rolling Stone, Details, and Premiere
7. Buy shoes on 8th Avenue
I have yet to "do" Les Miz or Letterman, but I did subject myself to the humiliation of drop-in day at Elite and other modeling agencies. I even suited up for a Cats cattle call. I visited museums, too, and learned that the shoe stores are on Eighth Street, not Eighth Avenue. That list, full of misunderstood directions and out-of-hand rejection, might have been all I came to know of New York had I not had the grounding experience of entering the world of Ms., which demanded new skills from me (faxing, clearing paper jams) and provided a social milieu not so different from a 1970s consciousness-raising group.
Yes, I was an unpaid intern at the one big feminist magazine. Ms., where the letters-to-the-editor section ran for pages and tended to drip with gratitude. Ms. of the "no ads, please, we're feminist." Ms. of the all-female staff and no dress code. Ms. of the (who knew?) male owner with vexing financial problems who also owned Sassy, the avant-garde teen magazine with great style and cool young editors such as Kim France and Christina Kelly. Gloria Steinem's Ms.—that one. To a just-graduated, intense college feminist who spent her undergrad years planning antipornography forums, when not drinking the free beer at frat parties, Ms. was Mecca. We even did a pornography issue a few months into my tenure that had all the range of opinion I had mustered at my college porn forum—which is to say, from Andrea Dworkin to Andrea Dworkin. Being in the Ms. offices, even as an unpaid lackey, meant entering the serious, real work world. I would never have to say "Hospitaliano!" or any other Olive Garden/Chili's/Red Lobster greeting again.
Or, not exactly. Since I was an unpaid intern, to pay the bills, I got a job waitressing at a macho West Village writers' haunt called the Lion's Head, on Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue. It was garden level and murky—even at noon—with a huge oak bar and the kind of air that is best described as visible. In 1993, the Lion's Head was a New York institution, albeit a crumbling one, where old newspaper guys such as Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill drank, or maybe they were sober then but they still hung out in the bar, holding court beneath their framed book jackets adorning the walls. The bartenders were dyspeptic old guys with beards who wrote poetry, took themselves very seriously, and treated me like shit: "Whatayastupid? 'Up' and 'neat' are the same thing!!" Like shit, that is, until the next new girl was hired. Then, according to some tribal New York restaurant code, they loved me: "Sweetheart, make sure you get home safe—alright, Fargo? Where's that dim-bulb new girl?"
Grizzled white men poured drinks and dispensed dubious wisdom. Young white women in tight clothes delivered the food and the smiles and said "sorry" all the time. Short brown men cooked it all and cleaned it all up, and still managed to rise above the racial oppression of the United States to make kissing sounds at us waitresses whenever we were in the kitchen. The Lion's Head was nothing like Ms., where an editor apologized to an intern for five minutes before sheepishly asking her to make a photocopy.
I lived downtown from Ms. and east of the Lion's Head, in the twenties, just shy of tony Gramercy Park and a few blocks from a playhouse where Oleanna, David Mamet's drama of PC feminism run amok, was playing. My friend Karen had seen the play and reported that after the climactic scene in which the professor punches the witch-hunting female student who ruined his life, the audience became positively barbaric: "Kill the bitch!" one woman yelled. Grumpy bartenders and David Mamet, modeling agencies and walking down the street to a catcall serenade of "Mami" and "Give me a smile, sweetheart"—it all struck me as exciting and sexist. So satisfying to be furious about. So teeming with sexual politics. "Figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked fury and hunger to please," as Jon Krakauer writes in Into the Wild. I was furious. I was hungry.
Four months into New York City, life changed. I was hired full-time by Ms. magazine to be the internship coordinator for a sum of four hundred dollars a week; I kept my restaurant job one night a week. By day, I faxed contracts and research to the likes of radical-feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon, at work on a piece about rape camps in Bosnia. By night, I brought Kaliber nonalcoholic beers and steak au poivre to people like Lou Reed and fended off guys who'd show up to walk me home at the end of my shift at 3:00 a.m. My days and nights were like night and day—feminist enclave versus masculine den—so different, but each with its own extreme charms and allure.
New York City was big enough to hold both worlds and many more. I marveled at the gargoyles on the architecture, at how every residential building looked like a giant advent calendar and I could peek into each window to observe a new diorama. I had found my way to Eighth Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues) and bought a pair of Dr. Martens boots to wear waitressing and walking to and from the magazine. My love life was still a one-way street. I made out on a pool table with a long-haired guy from college named Tom. I slept with a WASP named Jim, who took me to my first black-tie affair. I pined after my doe-eyed exboyfriend, Brian, even though he was kind of a loser, pot-smoking pizza delivery boy. I passive-aggressively fended off Greg, the reporter who rammed his tongue down my throat every time he saw me. I sort of returned the affections of gorgeous, smart lawyer Charlie from college. I got attention from Hank and guys from the Lion's Head who seemed gay but kept asking me out. There were plenty of men in my life, but no one I really connected with, no one that great.
So that was 1993.
Here's what I saw when I looked the other way:
Alongside images of Tom, Jim, Brian, and the gang, imagine that Ms. intern I mention on the first page of this book. She had black curls and poreless skin and the extravagant name of Anastasia Higginbotham. She worked at the Paramount Hotel as office manager of housekeeping, even though she was just twenty-one, fresh out of Vanderbilt University, and had no previous experience. If you know anything about the Paramount in the early 1990s, you know that it was and still is a chic yet cramped Ian Schrager hotel with interiors designed by Philippe Starke and frequented by rock stars and Johnny Depp types when they were in the city. One of Anastasia's jobs was to rent porn for the guests, which we found totally repellant. ("Correction," Anastasia used to say. "Thirty percent of my job is to rent porn.") She, too, wore chunky black boots every day. They may have been in style in general or in style only at Ms.; either way, we regarded them as vital tools in our fight against the patriarchy. They were tough-looking, good for your feet, and easy to get around in. Critiquing high heels as something the patriarchy had invented to keep women helpless was a big part of my feminism then.
I met Anastasia one Monday in the Ms. intern vestibule, surrounded by posters touting BETTY concerts and prochoice rallies. Ms. may have been chic philosophically, but its offices were dingy. Stacks of manuscripts under every chipped brown Formica desk, cast-off chairs, and no natural light—a lessthan-cushy setting I have come to think of as typically feminist. (I.e., if it's comfortable, it's not feminist—unless of course we're talking about shoes.) Anastasia had just begun her internship (while I was away on a family trip), and I had been intending to introduce myself before tackling the slush pile, which was usually two feet high and filled with incest narratives.
Anastasia was answering a phone call when I walked in. As she turned around, I felt a zzzt!—a pang of something electric and alive. She had silvery blue eyes and a slightly shaggy pixie cut with errant tendrils curling around her ears. Her teeth were noticeably adorable, and she smiled with her mouth open a little bit, as if she were about to bite into a blueberry. I remember that I didn't go through my usual female checklist ("Her hair is cuter, but mine is blonder," etc.). I just loved looking at her. It turned out she was very funny and drew comic strips with alternative Barbie scenarios (nine frames of female masochism with the tagline "And you thought her tits were scary!"). She was also extremely earnest—a word I never truly understood until I worked at Ms. Vanderbilt and her Catholic upbringing had driven Anastasia to cut off her long hair and invest in the boots. At school, she'd taken an off-campus witchcraft classdisguised as a Women and Religion course, though its goddess-y name—"Cakes for the Queen of Heaven"—gave away its true nature.
I hadn't really had any conscious attraction to women up until that point in my life. I didn't know then what I know now: that sexual and romantic same-sex relationships are very common among straight-identified women of my generation and younger, and that feminism (in the form of our raised expectations and our freedoms) probably has a lot to do with that. I didn't yet know that my best friend in college was having an affair with her female roommate for three out of our four years. Or that my old voice teacher from Fargo was now living with a woman. Another pal hadn't yet called off her engagement to a guy and moved in with a single mother/cabaret star. I couldn't have foreseen that in 2000 my college roommate's mother would get divorced and marry a woman in Hawaii. I didn't have the vision to look back at all of my own moments and put two and two together. All those massages with the neighbor girl in high school; how bereft I felt when my friend from dance class (the ditzy blonde who slept over every night in 1985) had to go live with her dad for the summer.
In my memory, my two "serious" boyfriends had dominated ninth through twelfth grade. First there was John, with whom I behaved like some crazy Joan Collins viper instead of admitting I didn't know how to French kiss, much less how to have a good "relationship." Then there was Tim, who was shorter than I and had a beautiful tenor voice. There was also sexy-but-cheating Brady, whom I couldn't stay away from in college and is now a very trustworthy father of three in Madison, Wisconsin. In New York, there was plenty of attention from and fun with guys. No one I was writing home about, but people to kiss and get flirty with.
But perhaps I was more invested in what women were all about than I remember. That same journal entry I quoted earlier, about the Cats audition, also includes this glimpse into my twenty-two-year-old 1993 psyche: "Ms. is fucking cool. The office is 75 percent lesbian. I am in the minority as a straight Midwestern girl."
I think it's safe to say I was a little titillated by the Sapphic traffic at my new job. Ms. was at no time 75 percent lesbian—maybe 30 percent, tops. I don't think I was in the minority being from the Midwest, actually, and, as it turned out, I was hardly the straight girl I envisioned myself to be. Ms. was my first contact with lesbians—and these had cool girlfriends and good jobs (i.e., lives I related to and pined after). Even the straight women on the staff didn't spend a lot of time gossiping about men. It was the first time I truly saw women without men as being successes, not failures. I had mouthed this rhetoric before, but had always secretly felt a little vulnerable without some guy around to demonstrate that I was lovable. Women without men loomed large in my new world. Maybe that's why I thought so many of them were lesbians.
The whole Ms. staff loved Anastasia because she was competent, sexy, and delightful, and she brought in homemade snacks during tough closings. I wanted to cut to the front of the line of people getting her attention. And I did. By the time her three-month internship was over, she and I had spent so much time together that we were best friends—possessively so. The type who showers people with love and attention, she drew an extended series of cartoons about us called "Lengthy and Squiggly," based on Lenny and Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley, poking fun at our height difference. She wrote me hundreds of letters and faxes and cards with goddess imagery on them. She also quoted The Simpsons the way some people quote the Bible, in order to prove any point, and I loved that she thought TV could be funny and philosophical, just as I did ("Alcohol is both the cause, and the solution, to all life's problems." —Homer Simpson). She always seemed to be playing with my long hair or refilling my water bottle or getting cookies for us to share after 4:00 p.m., when they were three for a dollar at the overpriced Italian restaurant across the street. We researched the porn issue together and cased the sex shops that used to line Times Square. We danced at a kiss-in for the Lesbian Avengers in Grand Central. We walked home arm in arm from work, laughing and singing Barbra Streisand's hit "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)" at the top of our lungs. ("It's raining, it's pouring, my love life is boring me to tears, after all these years.")
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Look Both Ways by Jennifer Baumgardner. Copyright © 2007 Jennifer Baumgardner. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
CHAPTER 1 - FIRST LOOK,
CHAPTER 2 - WHAT IS BISEXUALITY?,
CHAPTER 3 - THE WOMAN-IDENTIFIED WOMAN: BISEXUALITY AND THE SECOND WAVE,
CHAPTER 4 - BISEXUALITY NOW: THE ANI PHENOMENON,
CHAPTER 5 - GAY EXPECTATIONS,
CHAPTER 6 - BUT IS IT SEX?,
CHAPTER 7 - MEN: CAN'T LIVE WITH THEM ...,
CHAPTER 8 - SEXUAL TENSION: BISEXUAL WOMEN AND LESBIANS,
CHAPTER 9 - ON BEING ENTITLED: BISEXUAL POLITICS,
ALSO BY JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER,
LOOK BOTH WAYS,
PRAISE FOR LOOK BOTH WAYS,
NOTES,
INDEX,
Copyright Page,