This month we take a look at books centered on bisexual themes, including Rebecca Walker’s new book on motherhood, the classic Henry and June, and The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe, which explores the ins and outs of bisexuality and “bi pop culture.” Did you know, for example, that swans and dolphins are among many in the animal kingdom to exhibit bisexual behavior? Neither did I.
Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence by Rebecca Walker (Riverhead Books)
The daughter of acclaimed writer Alice Walker and civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal, the openly bisexual Rebecca Walker detailed her complex childhood in her 2001 memoir Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. Now the roles are reversed as she tries to understand her place as a mother rather than a daughter, and to create a solid, loving family for her own child.
Her new memoir, Baby Love, is appropriately dedicated to her son, Tenzin, who, she writes, “made it real.” In the pages that follow, Walker reveals exactly what she means by “real” as she discusses her emotional and physical journey into the world of motherhood.
Walker previously spent several years in a relationship with musician Meshell Ndegeocello, but is now partnered with a man named Glen. The book begins with the discovery that she is pregnant. “I was ecstatic for about ninety seconds,” she writes, “and then it hit me: an avalanche of dread that took my breath away. Pregnant? A baby? What have I done?”
Walker is haunted by several questions. She worries about her independence. In the process of having a child, will she lose her own identity? How will she afford to clothe, feed, educate and house this child? Will she ever travel again? “Is this elixir of ambivalence and anxiety the universal experience of motherhood,” she wonders, “or is it just America , circa right now?”
Walker uses diary entries to record the particulars of her pregnancy – debates over the child’s name, hospital or home birth, the first time she hears the heartbeat, whether to immunize or not, the bliss of “falling in love with this baby inside of me” and, alas, the declining relationship with her own mother.
Though she tackles personal anxieties and joys, she also addresses important topics such as the use of antidepressants during pregnancy and the unfair stigma that many women who suffer from depression experience. “The first thing depression takes from me is hope, and I am pretty sure I can’t have a baby without that,” she writes.
In between the entries, Walker expounds upon a variety of subjects in longer chapters, from past loves (including a section on her relationship with Ndegeocello, referred to as “my rock-star girlfriend”) to an abortion at 14, to the role men play in today’s society.
It is in one of these longer chapters that Walker introduces perhaps the most controversial idea of the book. When discussing her relationship with Ndegeocello’s teenage son, Solomon, whom she co-parents, Walker writes: “It’s not the same. I don’t care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your nonbiological child isn’t the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood.”
Initially it is hard to place that statement – and others like it – against Walker ‘s support and respect for different family structures. When she is in the hospital after Tenzin is born, she notices a boy who was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother. “Couldn’t we bring him home?” she writes. “Who did I know who wanted a baby? I was sure I could find a nice gay couple that would shower him with love.”
Would that gay couple love the boy as much as his drug-addicted mother? Is it relevant that Walker is cast off by her own (biological) mother by the end of the book? Would Walker ‘s statement about adoption be different if she used “I” instead of a generalized “you”?
It’s a hot topic, and Baby Love is an interesting exploration of these paradoxes. It is also a thoughtful study of how many women today are both pulled toward and petrified of motherhood. In the end, Walker offers the advice she wished she’d received earlier: “Trust me, they could have said, barring disease, famine, and the potential for life-threatening violence or financial ruin, no matter what your trepidation, just do it.”
The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe: Quips, Tips, and Lists for Those who Go Both Ways by Nicole Kristal and Mike Szymanski (Alyson Books)
Though the title of Nicole Kristal and Mike Szymanski’s new book is called The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe, it is actually, as they write in the preface, for “fence-sitters, chameleons, switch-hitters, pansexuals, omnisexuals, whatevers, and all those who loathe labels.”
Nominated for Lambda’s inaugural bisexual book award, The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe is funny, informative and insightful. Divided into useful categories — Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced — the chapters explore the world of bisexuality from every possible perspective.
Kristal and Szymanski’s lists incorporate the practical “You’re Probably Bisexual If” to the hilarious “Bisexual Myths We Wish Were True” (e.g., “everyone’s bisexual when they’re drunk”) and include helpful questionnaires such as “The R-U-Bi?”
The book also contains a history of bisexuality, seduction tips, bi figures (“A 2006 California State University study shows that women are 27 percent more likely than men to be attracted to the same sex”) and a catalog of bi animals (add dogs, oysters and flamingos to the list) and cartoon figures (Popeye, of course).
One of the more interesting chapters breaks down how to come out to different people (for example, “radical-right dad” or “hippie mom”) in your life. The suggestions range from “do consider not telling him at all” to “do tell her anytime” and combine advice with handy facts: “Do mention that Leviticus, aside from condemning homosexuality, also supports the notion of selling women into slave labor.”
The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe is a sexy, comprehensive and entertaining read regardless of where you rate on the Kinsey scale. (And by the way, most people fall somewhere in the middle.)
Henry and June: From “A Journal of Love” — The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) by Anaïs Nin (Harcourt)
“The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it.” Thus begins Henry and June, Anaïs Nin’s chronicle of the year she met and fell in love with writer Henry Miller and his wife, June.
She begins her diary in Paris. Married to a man named Hugo, their relationship is somewhat open as Nin searches for opportunities to evolve — in her body, mind and art. Henry is aware of Nin’s attraction to his wife, but when June returns to the States, the two begin an intense affair.
Nin’s prose about both lovers is lyrical and exhaustive. “I’ve met Henry Miller,” she writes in December. “He’s a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.”
Later, when she returns from meeting June, she writes: “Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.”
In letters to Henry and June as well as inspired diary entries, Nin is candid about her emerging sexuality and examines her lovers and herself with a meticulous eye. She illustrates the beauty and fluidity of her sexuality in several passages, including: “I need two lives. I am two beings”; “How can I deceive myself about the extent of Henry’s love when I understand and share his feelings about June?”; “In a different way, I am devoted to both, a part of me goes out to each of them.”
Nin’s analysis of how men and women differ as lovers is also intriguing. “Men need other things besides a sexual recipient. They have to be soothed, lulled, understood, helped, encouraged and listened to.” With women, on the other hand, she writes: “I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the ways, the hands, the senses that only women have.”
Like life, the narrative takes several unexpected turns, and Nin records them all. While striving to understand her identity as a sexual being and an artist, however, she applies one important lesson: “Writers make love to whatever they need.”
