 Vice
Versa
by Marjorie Garber
Order this Book
A path breaking study of bisexuality as an erotic,
social, and cultural phenomenon, guaranteed to challenge settled
notions about love, desire, sex, gender, and identity.....Exploring
such topics as schoolgirl (and boy) crushes, sexual threesomes, the
possibility of a "bisexual gene," and the compatibility of
bisexuality with marriage, Garber prowls high culture and low,
including film. psychoanalysis, biology, and classical myth. The
result is a landmark of scholarship and a riveting challenge to
conventional beliefs.
Review:
"...I must confess that Garber's very multiplication of examples
browbeat me into wondering whether I myself might not have been
bisexual had I lived in another era. When I was a young man in the
sixties, before the beginning of gay liberation, I was always in
therapy trying to go straight. I was in love with three different
women over a ten-year period, and even imagined marrying two of
them. But after the Stonewall uprising, in 1969, I revised my
thinking entirely: I decided I was completely gay and was only
making the women in my life miserable. Following a tendency that
Garber rightly criticizes, I denied the authenticity of my earlier
heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity.
After reading 'Vice Versa', I find myself willing to reinterpret the
narrative of my own personal history." Edmund White |
Also:
 Bi
Lives: Bisexual Women Tell Their Stories
by Kata Orndorff.
In-depth interviews with several dozen bisexual
women, women in monogamous relationships; women in open
relationships; women in a group marriage; women who are very "out";
others still in the closet; an HIV+ woman; women into S&M; mothers;
professionals; artists; office workers; midwives; etc.
Topics include sexual awakening; life and
relationship histories; sexual practices; being "out" to friends,
family and co-workers; dealing with the lesbian, gay male, straight
and bi communities; differences between relationships with women and
with men; body image issues; feminism and bisexuality; and the
political implications of bisexuality.
 Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out
by Loraine Hutchins, Lani Kaahumanu |
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Review:
"A learned, witty study of how our curious culture has managed to
get everything wrong about sex." Gore Vidal
Review:
"Garber argues in this intelligent and entertaining book that the
question of whether someone was 'really' straight or 'really' gay
misconstrues the nature of sexuality, which is not fixed but fluid,
a narrative that commonly changes over time in an individual's
life....'Vice Versa' is a valuable corrective to the western world's
tendency over the last century to squeeze everyone into the descrete
categories of gay or straight. Garber presents an eloquent argument
in a postmodernist vein, destabilizing our pat notions of
homosexuality and heterosexuality, forcefully challenging the
complacency inherent in our binary way of looking at sexual desire."
Washington Post Book World, 06/18/1995 Liillian Faderman
Review:
"[The word bisexuality] encompasses too much. It does not try to
resolve contradictions but to accept them. It tells, we might say,
too many stories, when what is so ardently desired is 'the real
story.'....Ultimately...the object of scrutiny will escape even the
most vigilant and searching eyes. Bisexuality undoes statistics,
confounds dimorphism, creates a volatile set of subjects who will
not stay put in neat and stable categories. No calipers will fit the
shape of desire, which remains, thankfully, unquantifiable by even
the most finely tested instruments." Boston Book Review,
June/July 1995 Marjorie Garber
Review:
"MTV and fashion advertising, pumping out fetishized images of men
and women, have created a climate that Harvard professsor Marjorie
Garber, author of the provocative new book 'Vice Versa: Bisexuality
and the Eroticism of Everyday Life', calls 'virtual bisexuality':
the only way to watch these naked torsos, male and female alike, is
erotically....As Garber puts it, 'We are in a bisexual moment.'"
Newsweek, 07/17/1995 John Leland
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