California Reaming - A Woman's Adventures In Polyamory

As a woman, I would like to say that my early forays into bisexuality were the result of a few excellent women friends, or lovers. But actually, my guides into this realm were male figures.

I probably first said, "Oh, so THAT'S what I am," in my English graduate seminar in D.H. Lawrence at San Francisco State. We're talking early 70s here. Our 15-or so member class and prof were ploughing through Women In Love, Lawrence's classic tale of two sisters who find love and destiny in the arms of two male friends. Each of the pairs is nearly a polar opposite in terms of Lawrence's overall intention. One couple is on the fast track to hell, the other is more mundane perhaps, but also more capable of finding happiness.

But there is a fly in their ointment.

The love of one person is not going to be enough. Birkin and Ursula are left alone together at the hearth in the novel's wistful yet contentious final scene, with Birkin mourning the loss of his friend Gerald. He has committed his own strange form of suicide, by crawling off into the snow and sleeping until death. At last Birkin is finally able to express his love for the man.

But Ursula is shocked, and immediately threatened. The man is dead, but she knows an attack when she sees one. Even if it is coming from beyond the grave.

"You can't want the love of both," she cautions him.

Her view is the typical heterosexual view of the gay world in general, as it turns out. The gays threaten us because of the ease with which they lead lives driven by libidinal impulses. It is absolutely hateful to the straight world. The fact that people could actually want BOTH is the sticker for most of the straight world. That is very threatening. At least when a gay man wants another man, that is more understandable than a man who is married to a woman and still desires sexual contact with other men. The one is something society can now deal with; the other is still a scary proposition from hell.

Marriage was erected in part I maintain to keep us in check and overcome potential personal chaotic impulses. But still, we're talking Katrina floodwaters here, we need to erect even more defenses.

A good dyke is not enough.

Society attempts to censure itself here, we cannot simply act mostly on our sexual impulses. Chaos would ensue. Channelling needs to take place.

This is what the character of Ursula is arguing.

Birkin would say in rebuttal that the trueness of the impulse will direct the arrow's flight, it will chart out its proper course as it goes.

Ursula longs for hearth and home, and children. She wants the storm of upheavals that brought her and Birkin together to be done. This is an image of womanhood as being more traditionally compliant, and able to bear children.

Her sister Gudrun is very different, more intellectual. Lawrence made her an artist as well, and quite a good one; this is the highest being in his firmament, the artist. And it is to Gudrun that we turn to in the story, at least as far as the women go. Personally, it is around her character that our interest and feelings coalesce.

I obviously felt a world of empathy with Gudrun, but very little towards Ursula.

Gerald is Gudrun's lover, the powerful tycoon who lives as the embodiment of Nietzche's "ubermensch" ideal, the blond alpha male who can only know the world, and himself in it, if he is dominating it.

Birkin is the smaller, slighter man, the dark one, sickly perhaps, since he is a stand-in for Lawrence himself here. But at least he is in touch with his need to live life in the physical moment, even if he is floundering at the novel's beginning in his attempts to achieve that.

Nowhere in the novel does the word "bisexual" creep out. But there is a fascinating scene of nude wrestling between the two men, wherein it becomes clear that the bond between them is flavored with the homoerotic.

Clearly, Birkin wants more from his friend Gerald. But even he does not quite know how to express that.

How many times was I with a woman friend, and I felt the vibe that said, "Let's take this one step further?" What would that have looked like? I was uncertain at the time. Like Birkin, I knew I had feeling for this person. But what exactly does it want to be? Where does it want to go?

My first forays into bisexuality were framed around issues like this. I didn't know what I was doing, so I looked around me for guidance. Literature was certainly a good start.

Soon, I would start writing "literature" of my own.

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