From Issue 2.4 - February 1996


By the Bi

I'm feeling very vulnerable as I write this -- and in my decade-plus career as a big, tough sadomasochist, that's a feeling I don't get much any more. But this is the column in which I officially come out as bisexual. (Does this mean I have to change my column header, Kiki?) And I'm having feelings of timidity, defensiveness, and uncertainty that I thought were part of my unlamented past.

A lot of people will read this revelation and say, "Well, yeah -- we knew it all along." One might be the lovely lady with whom I sat, flushed with excitement, in a Sacramento restaurant in 1987 or so, as we negotiated our first-ever female/female sexual experience. Others might be the couple of dozen wonderful women with whom I've done SM and/or had sex in the intervening near-decade. But, honest, I haven't been deluding myself, or pretending to be something I'm not... I've just been moving steadily along a continuum of activity and identity, and wound up here.

The first draft of this column included a chronology that started with my life as a vanilla wife and mom in another city, and took me through all the phases -- vanilla het, perv het, het-who-plays-with-women-sometimes, het-identified bisexual, and now just plain old unornamented bisexual -- that brought me up to this moment. But that got kind of confusing: suddenly, I realized that each of these later steps, which felt so epochal to me at the time, looked about the same to an outsider.

I have, and love deeply, a male primary partner, but I've been playing with women and getting turned on by it. What made the difference, then? It was all in my head and body. When I felt myself to be a het who played occasionally with women, my woman-woman play was basically an experiment. A lot about it was off-putting: I felt a little claustrophobic lying next to a body so similar to mine. I found giving pain to a woman to be guilt-inducing in a way I'd never experienced with my male partners, and -- horrors! -- I didn't like the taste of pussy. So, obviously, I wasn't bisexual.

But slowly, some of that began to change. I found myself a couple of delightfully masochistic women whose pleasure in my nastiness was so manifest that the guilt started to fade away. I became fascinated with cunts -- so similar, and yet so different, so delicate and responsive -- and I discovered that breasts feel just wonderful! I fisted my first woman and felt like something out of "Fantastic Voyage" -- people aren't supposed to be able to get inside other people! I still didn't like the taste of pussy, but I realized in a blinding flash of insight that I also wasn't all that hot on the taste of men's jism either.

But some combination of stubbornness and honesty kept me from fully claiming the label "bisexual" -- I loved my women friends, but I didn't think I was capable of falling in love with a woman. So? I was wrong. I met a woman -- smart, kind, brave, gorgeous, and the slut pig masochist of my dreams -- with whom I am at least a little bit in love. So now I'm bisexual, and I'm enjoying it tremendously and I'm scared to death. I love a lot of it. I like women's parties -- they feel like teenage slumber parties with perverted sex. My affect seems to have shifted in some subtle unintentional way -- women are hitting on me now, whereas before I guess they recognized my basic reluctance and left me alone. I'm having a great time "discovering the butch within" -- giving free rein to the part of me that cut her hair to an inch long in 1973 (but wore lipstick and nail polish for fear of looking "masculine"), that bought a pair of men's Converse high-tops in 1977 (but teamed them with pink jeans -- goddess forbid some man might find them unattractive!), that felt like kicking in the TV screen during "I Enjoy Being a Girl" (but didn't).

I'm also discovering some of the advantages and disadvantages that my bi friends have told me about for years. As Woody Allen said, being bisexual doubles your chances of a date on Saturday night; on the other hand, the all-too-common prejudices against bis (if you have an opposite-sex partner, you're a traitor, and if you have a same-sex partner, you're an exploiter) are still very real, and worse than I'd imagined.

But damn, this is scary. I lost my first primary relationship, to my spouse of fourteen years and the father of my children, when I came out into SM. I am deeply in love with my current partner (we'll be celebrating our sixth anniversary at about the time you read this), and he is being spectacularly patient, honorable, and accommodating as I go exploring new territories. But a part of me is whimpering in panicky fear that I could lose the best relationship I've ever had... that my life could change in ways I can't foresee... that things will be, well, different.

So if you see me, be nice to me. The big, tough dominatrix is feeling as shaky as the first time she bought a copy of Penthouse Variations (hiding it carefully in the middle of a pile of other purchases). The river of my life, never a straight one, has taken yet another turn, sending me careening against the side of the boat and grabbing for the gunwale, and it may be a while before I encounter calm waters again. But I know I will encounter them; I always do. Maybe someday I'll even learn to like the taste of pussy.

Lady Green is the author of The Sexually Dominant Woman: A Workbook for Nervous Beginners and the co-author of The Bottoming Book: Or, How To Get Terrible Things Done To You By Wonderful People (under the name Catherine A. Liszt). She also publishes a newsletter and teaches classes for novice dominant women and their partners. For a catalog please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to 3739 Balboa Ave. #195, San Francisco, CA 94121, or send her e-mail at verdant@crl.com.