Since pinpointing her bisexuality as a young 20-something in the early ’90s, Jennifer Baumgardner has worked at Ms., dated an Indigo Girl, co-written two successful feminist handbooks and given birth to a baby boy. I asked her some questions on the eve of her tour for Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, newly published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

AB: After collaborating with Amy Richards on your first two books, what was it like tackling this one on your own?

JB: Lonely, in a way. It’s funny, though, because it ended up being the most collaborative process of all. I had three assistants over the years and because I was pregnant and then had a baby during the journey to finishing this book, about five other people were intimately involved in the process. Having said that, I was excited but scared about writing a book without Amy. I knew it was crucial for each of us to step out on our own (and that it would help our collaboration and our relationship grow) but I rely on our rapport—to soothe the smarting of a bad review, to motivate me and to firm up my own thinking.

AB: How did writing Look Both Ways affect the way you view your own sexuality?

JB: Well, I don’t know if it affected my view of my sexuality so much, but it forced me to think about my relationships—and I did feel like I was validated when Amy and I would go out on the road and meet young women who felt similarly that they were not exactly gay or straight.

AB: The book focuses on bisexual women. How do their experiences generally differ from those of bisexual men?

JB: I think that women’s sexuality is taken less seriously in general and therefore them fooling around together is taken less seriously (i.e. tolerated), whereas men face more outright revulsion, violence, outrage and prejudice. On the other hand, there is so much energy focused lately on insisting that girls kissing girls is just a put-on and so stupid, which I chalk up to misogyny—people love to point at girls and say they are doing something wrong.

AB: I’ve never thought of my equality and partnership with my boyfriend as the result of “gay expectations.” Does the term apply to straight people as well as bisexuals in heterosexual relationships? Or do we 21st century straight girls merely benefit from “feminist expectations”?

JB: I guess you could call them feminist expectations, but I think women have been changed more by feminism than men have and thus you are more likely to have those feminist expectations met by a woman. I’m glad you have an equal partnership with your boyfriend. No doubt some of my troubles are a result of my own pathologies and not patriarchy (and I argue as much in the book).

AB: You write about the problem some people—both straight and gay—have with taking bisexuality seriously (as evidenced in Pheobe’s song on Friends, the New York Times article “Straight, Gay or Lying?” et cetera). Why can it be such a difficult idea to accept?

JB: I think straight people resist the idea of bisexuality because a lot of their acceptance of same-sex relationships is based on the belief that gay people are “born that way” and can’t help who they love. A bisexual person appears to be able to have a heterosexual relationship but doesn’t always opt to. I guess I would say that I can’t help that I am attracted to both sexes—and I don’t want to have to choose to be either gay or straight.

I think lesbians have issues with bisexual women because a lot of the lesbian-feminist endeavor was—and to some degree still is—about joining together and choosing each other over men and male attention. In the book, Jan Clausen is quoted saying that one her lesbian friends said that the fear was of being “the only one left”—meaning, the only woman still playing by those rules.

Both straight men and lesbians have been hurt by bisexual women, so some of the resistance comes from broken hearts. The trouble is, bisexual women have their hearts broken all the time, too. Love hurts.

–
See Jennifer Baumgardner on tour:

DePaul University Bookstore, Chicago, IL, March 7
Women & Children First, Chicago, IL, March 7
Book Passage, San Francisco, CA, March 11
Alexander’s, San Francisco, CA, March 12
Cody’s Books, Berkeley, CA, March 12
Powell’s Books, Portland, OR, March 13
Village Books, Bellingham, WA, March 14
University Bookstore, Seattle, WA, March 15
Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA, March 16
KGB Bar, New York, NY, April 3
Bluestockings, New York, NY, April 5
Harvard Book Store, Boston, MA, April 10