Bi Now, Gay Later?
A Closer Look at Bisexuality in the Philippines
By M.D. dela Cruz Tan

Tristan M. was supposed to have married his long-time girlfriend a few years ago.  “We’ve been together for so long I couldn’t imagine a life without her,” he recalls, smiling.  “For me at that point in my life, it was just as they say it would be, an incomplete life without her.”

Tristan M., however, is not a one-man/one-woman kind of guy – well, he almost is, except that he really isn’t, as he’s “more of a one-woman/one-man/another-man or men kind of guy,” he admits laconically.  “There’s the relationship between me and my fiancée; and then there’s my so-so (mainly sexual) relationships with men.”

Based on its most basic definition (the sexual and/or romantic attraction to both sexes), Tristan M. may be classified as bisexual.

DUAL PERSONALITY?

First used in the 19th century to refer to intersexed people – “Whose sex chromosomes, genitalia, and/or secondary sex characteristics are determined to be neither exclusively male nor female, (since people who are) intersex may have biological characteristics of both the male and female sexes,” Wikipedia.org states – bisexuality, as a term at least, gained wide acceptance in the early part of the 1900s, when, among others, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) used it in the “context of sexual orientation.” 

As discussed by psychoanalyst Joseph Merlino, senior editor of Freud at 150: 21st Century Essays on a Man of Genius, in Wikinews.org, the Austrian “maintained that bisexuality was a normal part of development; that all of us went through a period of bisexuality;and that, in the end, most of us came out heterosexual but that the bisexual phase we traversed remained on some unconscious level, and was dealt with in other ways.”

Interestingly, Merlino notes how Freud found bisexuals to be “totally normal in every other regard, except in terms of their sexual preference.  In fact, he saw many of them as having higher intellects, higher aesthetic sensibilities, higher morals –  those kinds of things,” he says.

In Freud’s words, people remain bisexual all their lives in a repression to monosexuality of fantasy and behaviour.  “(We) have come to know that all human beings are bisexual, and that their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.”

Fast forward to 1948, when Alfred Kinsey (kinseinstitute.org) came out with the landmark Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, wherein he noted that "46% of the male population had engaged in both heterosexual and homosexual activities, or ‘reacted to’ persons of both sexes, in the course of their adult lives.”  Thus, it is “impossible to determine the number of persons who are ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual.’  It (is) only possible to determine behavior at any given time.”

An even more recent study, this time done in 2005 by researchers at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, including Gerulf Rieger, Meredith L. Chivers, and J. Michael Bailey, looked at the results of penile plethysmograph tests, which purported that bisexuality, if it exists at all, is extremely rare, especially among men.  To complete the study, an experiment was done to 101 men (33 self-identified as bisexual, 38 homosexual, and the remaining heterosexual), wherein they were made to watch pornographic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.  With a sensor that monitors sexual arousal, the somewhat unexpected finding was for self-described bisexuals to show “patterns of arousal (not) consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women.  Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.”

"Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal (to one sex or the other),” says Rieger, the study's lead author, to New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/health/05sex.html).

The study actually strengthened the findings of past studies, i.e. promoting the notion that bisexuality doesn’t exists, and those “who claim bisexuality... are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted.  ‘You're either gay, straight or lying,’ as some gay men have put it,” the New York Times report states.  Among others, a survey done by gay publication The Advocate found that before identifying themselves as gays, 40% of gay men were self-described bisexuals.

An encompassing statement such as this is sure to get flaks.

In the same New York Times report, Dr. Gilbert Herdt, director of the National Sexuality Resource Center in San Francisco in the US, says that “to claim on the basis of this study that there's no such thing as male bisexuality is overstepping, it seems to me.  It may be that there is a lot less true male bisexuality than we think, but if that's true then why in the world are there so many movies, novels and TV shows that have this as a theme – is it collective fantasy, merely a projection? I don't think so."

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