purplerabbits

The Wraeththu Series and Other Grumbles
First Published in Bifrost # 28, October 1993

Science fiction fans often declare the merits of their genre using for example its famous tolerance and diversity. SF writers seem to have fewer problems with sexuality than lesser mortals, and so you are more likely to find bisexual characters there than anywhere outside the Gay Times book list.

This may be so, but most authors limit bisexuality to one or the other gender. Storm Constantine, Anne Rice, Robert Heinlein, Tom Robbins, Ursula leGuin and Anne McCaffery are all, I suspect, straight.[1] You can tell by the fact that no bisexual or gay characters of their own gender ever appear. I shouldn't be assuming this of course, Mary Renault was a dyke who wrote about gay men all her life[2], but there's something going on here.

All Tom Robbins' and many of Heinlein's heroines express an interest in other women[3], which at first you might put down to the simple voyeurism that straight men often seem to go for. But some of their characters are actually very good[4], and the phenomenon is not limited to men. Anne Rice's vampires are also bisexual, but she sticks with the males for love interest. Ursula leGuin says everyone is bisexual in The Dispossessed, but only one gay character appears, and he's a bit sad. [4]

Anne McCaffrey is a bit of a fag hag, and her gay characters reflect this, being mostly stereotypical queens, throwing tantrums and wanting the heroine (McCaffrey?) to sort out their love lives and in one story have their babies. She steers clear of actual sex[5]. So for instance the Pern books contain no steamy gay scenes of dragon induced passion in spite of around 90% of dragon riders being male.

Storm Constantine, on the other hand, seems to advocate sex with men as a cure for all ills. Sex magick features in all the books - dominating Hermetech - but it's only ever male-female or male-male. There are bisexual men in Hermetech and bisexual male vampires in Burying the Shadow, but most turn out to be mainly gay and all the young men in the Wraeththu series turn into perfectly formed androgynous beings with extraordinary genitals at an early stage in proceedings.

I was particularly disappointed in the Wraeththu, as I had been told they were a bisexual must. But this turned out to be the most mysogynistic book by a woman I've ever read. Wraeththu can't have sex with humans without killing them (their semen is poisonous, I guess they never heard of condoms), and women are inexplicably incapable of partaking of the mutation that turns a man into a wraeththu. So where does this leave the women? Stuck with a rapidly dying out and violent male population and yet with seemingly no desire to do it with each other whatsoever. Odd, that.

OK, so we do get a belated and different mutation in the very last part of the last book that can grant women the advantages of long life and perfect skin, but even then it's only for a tiny percentage of them, and they don't get the enviable power of reproducing as easily as dropping an egg - literally. This seems more than unfair after all the time women have been having to do it the hard way. I do like the idea of children growing up at four times normal speed, thus avoiding nappies and screaming. But they don't breast feed, which conveniently makes wraeththu like slightly nicer young men in appearance. It's a shame, because it could have been a good idea; but I'm sorry Storm, perfect skin or no, I'm just not interested in androgynes without tits. [6]

* The Wraeththu trilogy is: The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirits, The Bewitchments of Love and Hate, The Fulfillments of Fate and Desire. [7]

Now for the 21st Century bit.

[1] Wow, I was arrogant - assigning sexualities to authors without even having an internet to check my facts with (not that I've found anything to say I was actually wrong).

[2] Mary Renault did in fact have some lesbian characters, but they are very much outnumbered by her predominantly gay heroes

[3] I feel I should do penance for mentioning Robbins and Heinlein in the same sentence, but I'm not going to. It could also be argued that Robbins isn't science fiction. Tough.

[4] I didn't at the time mention The Left Hand of Darkness, even though every BiCon SF workshop went on about it at length. This is because I felt it was very much about gender and not sexuality. The Gethenians are hermaphrodites who spend the majority of their time asexual, and their sexuality is not much explored in the book. When it is mentioned it seems that actual sex consisted of a set of male genitals and a set of female genitals, which is a pity. (The book does what it was trying to do with gender rather imperfectly as well, and leGuin has apologised for that, but I still love it).

Two years after this article (though it took me longer to find it) leGuin wrote Coming of Age in Karhide. A beautiful, joyous look at Gethenian sex with all its complication. It is published in The Birthday of The World and other stories, and I can't recommend it enough. Of all the authors I mention in the article leGuin has learned and listened, not least to her own daughter.

[5] I meant gay sex - there is plenty of heterosexual dragon induced passion

[6] This statement about my personal tastes may not be strictly true :-)

[7] There is now more Wraeththu. I have no idea whether it is any good or not.

The second of my Bi Archive posts, this was originally my paper for IBIS 96, the International Bisexual Symposium in Berlin, in May 1996, and was then published in BCN

When I first volunteered to talk about the UK bisexual community, I was still a very heavily involved member of it. I was the editor of Bifrost, which was the national bisexual magazine at the time; I was running, or attempting to run, a Bisexual Resource Centre in Edinburgh which held a library and archives; and as a member of the Edinburgh Bisexual Group I had also just helped to organise the 12th National Bisexual Conference. The paper I would have presented at that time would have gone something like this:

"We have a national magazine and the beginnings of a resource centre. There are over twenty local bisexual groups in the country and many other specialised groups. Our national bisexual conference is in its fourteenth year. We have t-shirts and badges, phonelines and television appearances. We are a large and diverse community."

It would have been accurate, but perhaps very dull.

Then I decided to close Bifrost and the Bisexual Resource Centre, because I felt I had been working for no money and with little support for too long. The reaction of the community surprised me. First they were angry, and then they forgot about me. Any paper I had presented at the time would have gone something like:

"Half the groups never reply to letters. Organisations can't get volunteers. BiCon has had the same number of people coming to it for the last five years. Our bisexual movement is stagnant and people are not interested."

This might have been more interesting, but it didn't exactly sum up the way I wanted to be remembered by the bi movement ...

After I'd got over my initial burnt-out feeling, I thought that I shouldn't run this workshop at all, that others who were involved in the new national newsletter, and who were still enthusiastic about their groups and projects, should be the ones to describe their community. But then I realised that I still had many questions. For instance, how come my feelings - and the level of appreciation I felt I was getting from my community - could change so fast ? How come the community isn't growing - and that some people who come to a few meetings never feel welcome ? Is it a failing in us that we can't cater to everybody ? Do we in fact need a community at all ?

The change I have noticed the most in the bi community recently is a desire to move to more answerable organisations. I feel that this trend may be a good one in the long term - it would certainly be good to hear more of what's going on, although it could also be another burden on our diminishing stock of volunteers. I also worry that some of the complaints about projects not representing the community are aimed at people who volunteered their efforts before there were any rules about how they should go about it. It is also sometimes difficult to see how anyone can be answerable to the bi community. After all, we don't have a national bisexual organisation, and even the conferences have been handed on very informally each year to whoever volunteers to do the next one.

The biggest problem with answerability, though, is who we are answerable to. There are many bisexual communities, even if we are just talking about the UK, and they have very different needs. The one I am most used to talking about is centred around our national conference and the local groups, which meet weekly or monthly. But this community is really very small: certainly, if you count only those who attend semi-regularly, you are talking about a few hundred people. This community can be characterised roughly as young, moderately well-off, mostly confident in their sexuality, and containing a higher-than-average number of people involved in alternative sexual practices (non-monogamy, SM and so on). If you extend this group to include people who attend groups or BiCons only once or twice, you might double the numbers, and if you add on those who read newsletters but don't attend you might get the same number again. There are also those who contact the bisexual phonelines or write to the groups asking for help. If our numbers include all of these we could be looking at several thousand, and if we also include people who practice bisexuality but who have not contacted anyone, for whatever reason, I would no longer be able to estimate numbers and I don't know of any reliable surveys that could help me.

So which of these ideas of community should we be attempting to reach ? My answer to this is probably very different to the consensus of opinion in the UK, which seems to suggest that because we are, or should be, a diverse community, it is therefore the duty of all groups to welcome all comers. In theory this is a beautiful idea, but in practice I have seen it lead to great difficulties in local groups, and I feel it may be one of the reasons that our community is not growing.

There are several problems for groups which welcome all newcomers. One is to do with some of the newcomers you get. I'm sure everyone reading this has been in a group with at least one 'difficult' member. This person may not be evil or bigoted (although I have seen an extraordinary amount of sexism put up with in the cause of 'not putting people off') - they could be opinionated, from a different background to the rest of the group, or just be unaware of what the group is for. They could also have deep psychological problems that the group simply can't handle. This factor is often underestimated by new groups which, because they are small, can easily be totally unbalanced by one person. The problem of the person who persistently makes offensive or inappropriate remarks is dealt with in some groups by guidelines, but the majority of groups in the UK operate on a more informal basis and have no set rules of conduct. Besides, dealing with difficult people is a difficult skill, and one which many groups or group members are unwilling to take on.

Another problem is the difficulty of being unable to please everyone all of the time, and this is closely related to the question of how long-term discussion can progress when new people are constantly joining a group. This is less of a problem at conferences, which are large enough to provide a huge variety of workshops and where, in the last few years, people in the UK have started to state much more specifically who a group is intended for and what it will cover. For a local group, however, particularly one with meetings once a month, a couple of meetings on arcane topics or which require a certain amount of knowledge or agreement from participants, can cause many people to leave and never return.

All of these, and many more, are problems for anyone wanting to run a bisexual group. But I don't think they need be insurmountable. The problem, I feel, with the solutions that have been offered so far, and the reason that the bisexual community is stagnating, is that they are all based on the same model. Groups are expected to run to a similar agenda, each catering to bisexuals just coming out who (the consensus is) need help, support, and organised events. This is not my idea of a community, and from the number of people I know who don't go to these events, isn't that of many other people either.

So do we need a community ? I think we do - or at least that many bisexuals are looking for a way to meet each other and for a place where they can freely talk about their sexuality. Group discussions, though, don't meet many people's needs in this respect, and are only one way of getting bisexuals together. One reason I think that the UK bisexual movement has ceased to serve me, at least, is that I no longer find many of the traditional topics of discussion interesting. And coming up with new subjects is only a partial solution, as some people - perhaps the majority - don't see much point in discussion groups at all, and don't see bisexuality as the most important part of their identity. For myself I already have the sort of community I want. It consists of my friends, mostly ex-students, many of whom are bisexual, non-monogamous, or both. They are punks and goths, science-fiction fans and SM-ers and anarchists. They like the same music as me, and we visit clubs where a surprisingly large number of the people we meet are also bi - or become so shortly after meeting us ! I would like other people to have communities similar to mine, where their bisexual friends are within walking distance every day instead of just at a discussion group across town once a week; and where they share other interests with these people. And in the mean time I would like to see the bisexual community move away from the workshop model and work more towards creating bi space in bars and clubs and parties - perhaps we could even create a change from the type of music usually played at gay events ...

I am glad that some things have changed, and we have had and do now have Bi coffee meetings and clubs, but I think a lot of this still stands to some extent.

I have decided to start posting a lot of my writing from my early days as a 'bi activist' and pretend they are a bi blog. This is mainly cos I have them lying around and want them to go somewhere, and cos I secretly think I used to be quite funny.

So here is a Bi Mate of the Month Interview I did for BCN back in 1999 (I did briefly think of sorting this stuff into date order and then I thought sod it)

Alison Rowan - Bi Mate of the Month October 1999
(Now subtitled, this is what we did before we had online meme kids)

Which Olympic sport (current or wished for) could you represent your country in?

Hmm. Sport? I seem to remember something called sport, but only in a very vague way because I've walled up all the more horrific memories in a distant part of my mind.

I could definitely bunk off P.E. for my country, though, no problem, specialising in arcane excuses (I got out of it entirely for a year because a horse trod on my toe) and hiding in plain sight (I avoided playing tennis by hiding behind a tree...)


What's the best collective noun for bisexuals?
A faff, in my experience.

What's your favourite film?
I don't know about favourite, but The Pillow Book gets my nomination for most bisexual film, cos Vivian Wu and Ewan McGregor are both gorgeous and both get their kit off. The Phantom Menace is shite, by the way, I don't think even Ewan McGregor getting his kit off would have saved it, though it would certainly have been interesting.

When did you know you were bisexual?
From the age of nine, when I got in trouble for sending Valentine cards to a boy and a girl in my class, but I was only really convinced after my first threesome.

What's your favourite sexual memory?
None of your bleedin' business.

What's your favourite thing about being bi?
It made it more fun watching The Pillow Book.

What's your favourite sex accessory?
I hardly ever take handbags to bed with me.

Who do you respect most in the world?
People who are prepared to use their brains for more than 30 seconds at a time.

What/who has inspired you the most?
I often ask myself that. Or at least, I often ask myself, "How the hell did I talk myself into volunteering for this?" which is probably the same thing. The answer, I think, is that I keep thinking that I can do things better than other people, and then, having foolishly said so out loud, I have to go ahead and do them or else look a bit of a prat.

Which historical person would you most like to meet?
I don't really go in for historical personages, but Peter Kropotkin would be nice to have round for tea.

What makes you smile?
Little kids saying, "Look Mummy, that lady's got pink hair".

What is your most unlikely-to-be-fulfilled sexual fantasy?
Shagging G'kar out of Babylon 5. Unlikely because he is alien, fictional, and 260 years in the future.

What should people try?
LSD. And Aldous Huxley said it, so it must be true.

What are you most proud/ashamed of?
Proud of: Some of my writing, passing exams again at the age of 30, being organised, the BiCon guidelines.
Ashamed of: Well I'm quite embarrassed by some of my more outrageous lies, and there were a couple of occasions when I read someone else's letters...

What about your life would most surprise your 16 year old self?
The sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and pink hair would probably pale into insignificance beside the fact that I can now actually like spinach.

Please write a mini autobiog, things you'd like BCN readers to know about you, eg you might give your age, location, bi community stuff, current/past relationships etc. Say about 50-150 words.
I'm 32 (probably 33 by the time this come out), have been doing bi community stuff for the last 13 years and living in Edinburgh for the last six and a half. I helped organise BiCons 10 and 12 and did far too much work (i.e. most of it) on BiCon 17. I ran Bifrost from '91 to '95, and have also worked on two other zines and a fetish club, all of them called Permission. I've just moved house and am working on building a housing co-operative, since I want to live like this for the foreseeable future.

Who would you like to see as a Bi-Mate?
Dave Stone, that'd be a laugh.

So there you go. That was me at 33. The Housing Cooperative never got off the ground, and my hair is now more respectable red than pink, but the principles still stand...