Gloss

A few weeks ago I received an email from an editor friend of mine at a major women’s magazine with the subject line: “Need A Bisexual Woman.” Turns out that an editor at the online version of the magazine wanted to do a piece by a bisexual woman who has chosen to be with a woman.  My friend suggested I might write it under a pen name.

Actually I’m the perfect person for this, I told her.  Not only have I had relationships with both men and women, but I ended up with a woman, and in fact we got married last month.  Jackpot. How much would it pay?  (And, by the way, I didn’t ask, why would I want to write it under a pen name?)

The online editor called me back the following day.  She said someone had agreed to do the piece but had then backed out for undisclosed reasons.  She was desperate.  She was envisioning a headline along the lines of: “I Chose to be Gay.”  This sounded a little National Enquirer to me, but I kept listening.  She had been talking to her “heartland mothers” about how the generation coming up was so much looser about sexuality: Lady Gaga, Madonna talking about what woman she was going to publicly kiss next, all those TV shows.  Kids are now much more accepting of the concept of falling in love and choosing who they want to be with, not by gender, but by who the person is.  Soul mate stuff.

I didn’t tell her that I’d wanted to write about bisexuality for a long time.  A few years ago I wrote a treatment for a memoir.  My agent at the time balked.  Granted, my treatment wasn’t that great – too self-conscious – but the idea had real potential, I thought. I sensed his discomfort with the subject.  He gave it to another agent at the agency to critique – a woman.  It was dropped.  To this day it sits in a folder in my file cabinet.

But suddenly, the subject is sexy.  Sexy to the Heartland.  Bisexuality has legs.

Okay, maybe I’d do it, but I’d have to get paid enough.  And I’d want to do it under my own name – no self-protection, no shame, no lies.  Years ago I wrote women’s magazine articles and had the experience more than once of being censored, although of course they never used that word.  I’d get an assignment from Mademoiselle or Harper’s Bazaar and work hard at finding real women to interview, who had done real things, and lo and behold, they didn’t want real -- they wanted a composite, a fake.

What kind of composite bisexual person who ended up with a woman fit the women’s magazine ideal circa 2012?  The online editor didn’t mention Whitney Houston, tragic possible bisexual of the week/month/year when we spoke, but I read this into the urgent subtext.  We’d lost a beloved middle-American crossover singer and wholesome sex symbol who sang like an angel, was Kevin Costner’s love interest in The Bodyguard.  The voice that ripped open The Star Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl during the Persian Gulf War was, as Oprah called it, “a national treasure that happened to reside within her.”  How could she do that to us and sing like that and still be bisexual?  Or, heaven forbid, gay? 

I asked for two dollars a word, and a minimum of 1500 words, and permission to see her final edits.  I didn’t hear back.  Apparently I asked for too much.  An online story by a little known bisexual woman with the headline “I Chose to be Gay” isn’t worth the going print rate.  As I checked my i-phone with trepidation, I realized that I was glad. I didn’t want to do it.  It had been a knee-jerk, ex-freelance magazine writer response that had made me jump.  Besides, what would I say?  That I’m bisexual?  That I’m gay?  The inevitable edits and margin comments were already hovering in my awareness. Could I say, I’m in love and I’m happy, and now I’m married – as long as New York State doesn’t snatch my rights away – and what the hell do the labels matter?  Or would they want me to say, or at least hint, that I still missed sex with men (I don’t).  Would they want me to say, or at least hint, that I ended up with a woman because no men wanted me (they did).  

I’d be so worried about my truth getting misshapen, I probably couldn’t write a word.

And then there’s Whitney.  So talented, so beautiful, so passionate.  The world asks, why on earth would she be gay or bisexual when she could get any man she wanted?  A friend of mine met Whitney Houston when they worked the same charity event in the mid-1980’s, at the beginning of Whitney’s career.  My friend was struck by her shyness, her sweet awkwardness, worried how she was going to handle the life of celebrity that obviously lay ahead of her.  Whitney was there with Robyn Crawford, friend and ex-manager. My friend had heard rumors, and something about seeing them together confirmed those rumors for her.  Not that they were outwardly romantic but they were so attentive to each other; attentive in a way that seemed to go beyond friendship or professional concern.

Maybe Robyn was the person Whitney wanted to be with, the person who would have made her perfectly happy.  Maybe she didn’t know her own truth and the world wouldn’t let her figure it out.  And now, of course, it’s too late.

People will keep coming forward with their truth or their veiled truths or their lies.  The press will keep on speculating.  Family and business associates will keep wanting to quash rumors – she’s still selling records, isn’t she?  In fact her sales soared at the news of her death.  But some truth seems clear.  For whatever reasons, Whitney was driven to numb herself with drugs and alcohol, and ultimately to check herself out.  If her sexuality was part of it, we should not be surprised.  But people want to be told what they want to hear, and magazines offer a glossy reflection that makes America comfortable.  The truth isn’t always so glossy. 

I’m still left with the question: Why did my friend suggest I write the essay under a pen name?  Because she couldn’t imagine that I would want to tell the truth?  Or because she was sure the truth would be edited out of my comfort zone?

We keep our pockets of mystery intact because we are forced to.  We tell our family, but not everyone in our family.  We come out at work, but not to everyone, because the complete story is complicated.  We fear being misunderstood.  We fear being judged.  We go where our hearts take us.  Why shouldn’t we?  Gay?  Straight?  Bisexual?  Maybe labels matter less to the new generations, however old labels still stick.  Bisexuality may sell copy, but bigotry still has legs.