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It’s normal now to bat for both sides
Veronica Lee17 Apr 2009
Perhaps it was Desperate Housewives, that beacon of modern sexual and social mores, that signalled a shift with its recent flirtation with the idea of bipartisan attraction.
Then this week we learned that novelists Stephanie Theobald and Jake Arnott, who both previously defined themselves as gay, are an item. To me their union simply offers further proof that sexuality can be a moveable feast throughout our lives — and raises the question: are we all bisexual at heart?
Sexuality is a continuum: when researchers have charted people's sexual preferences, a classic bell curve distribution results — a few 100 per cent homosexuals and heterosexuals at either end and the great mass of the rest of us somewhere in between.
Plenty of us know or hear of people who were once straight and are now gay, or once gay and now straight: some of us even manage to flit between the two with the greatest of ease. Add to the mix “situational gay” — straight people who find their boarding school or prison confrères temporarily attractive — and one quickly appreciates that, given the right circumstances, many of us are capable of fluid sexuality. As Gore Vidal once said: “There are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts.”
Many straight men have happily embraced metrosexuality and openly admire the thing of beauty that is David Beckham. And even that most macho of male preserves, Liverpool FC's Kop, proudly unfurls a banner in honour of striker Fernando Torres — “Turning Kopites gay since 2007”.
It's perhaps easier for women to acknowledge actual bisexual behaviour, at least in part due a commonly held (if wrong) view that women are more emotionally complex than men and for them sexual experimentation is therefore more understandable.
Harvard academic Marjorie Garber points out that before the 18th century, bisexuality was the norm in Western culture, and in some modern societies still is.
Theobald and Arnott have reached a rather sophisticated view of their sexuality in accepting that it is a person, not a gender or sexual label, they have fallen for. And I suspect that in a perfect world many others would love to take their pleasure where they find it, too: as Woody Allen said, bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.
