Dispatch #4
Fisher Price Bisexual…

I suppose it started with the Fisher Price Family Castle - 1974-ish, plastic, with the moat, the secret passage and the dungeon. There was a carriage, a queen, a king, a princess and a prince. It had four turrets, a plastic pennant and smelled so artificial. I remember playing with the Queen and she always had to have a Prince and a Princess next to here - but they weren't her children, according to my stories. No, the Queen kissed them both, and the King sat ignored in the carriage, or rolled under the couch. The Queen had to have a boyfriend AND a girlfriend. She got to "play" with the both. "Playing" consisted of the Queen and one of her friends making smooching sounds (supplied by yours truly), while horizontally rubbing up against each other. And it was so much fun…

Barbie had a lot of girlfriends, and Ken. Barbie lived her life mostly half naked, in her cardboard box apartment building, while Ken mostly stayed in the car. He really wasn't much fun, but he looked good. Meanwhile, Barbie took baths with her girlfriends, swapped clothing and slept in the same Barbie bed. Oh yah, if Ken only knew about Barbie's bizarre 69's and how far her legs could bend back. But Ken was mostly her driver. Still, he always got to take her home.

All of my larger dolls were girls - Wendy Walker, the teddy bears, the baby dolls. When they got lonely, the kissed and hugged each other, being in a constant state of undress. Plastic flesh and hollow limbs surrounded me and it smelled like new shoes.

My first crushes happened at the same time - Jennifer, Ms. Cook and Steven - a mirror of the holy trinity of my Fisher Price Castle. Jennifer and Steven were two luminous children in my grade one class - he had a mole on his face and a gap between his teeth and she was a blonde haired, sad eyed angel who huddled with me at recess time. Ms. Cook had long brown hair, brown eyes, olive toned skin and worn caftans with bead necklaces. I was over stimulated - so much to look at, between the three, and everyday was wonderful.

But then Jennifer moved away, Steven became a horrible teaser and grade one was over. No Ms. Cook to comfort me. How confusing it all was to be so smitten and then so alone in such a short period of time. Grade two wasn't very much fun, except for Katja - my lord, she was pretty, and she enticed me to steal from the store, play lots of Twister and draw for hours at her house. Twister meant lots of contact, giggling and falling all over each other. Meanwhile, David, a dirty blonde with a freckled face and cute smirk, replaced Steven. Or maybe not replaced, but added to my list of crushes.

My first kiss was with a girl. My favorite kiss was with a boy. My best orgasm was with a boy; my longest, a girl. Most fun I had during sex - a girl, while the most passionate was with a boy. Best oral sex was with a girl, while involuntary multiple orgasms occurred with a boy. Both sexes make me horny, make me cry, make me wet and break my heart.

High school - a fine time mostly. A great boyfriend who loved sex came into my life, but I still looked at girls. I had a summer love with a girl, but still flirted with boys. I moved to New York, and realized neither camp liked me much, if I told them I was bisexually inclined. At first, men found it kinky and exotic. Then they became suspicious of my girlfriends - key word here is FRIENDS. So I stopped telling and made everything sound like it was in the past, while my eye roved over both sexes equally. I never really got into a relationship too long with a girl, just because it was never quite a comfortable fit. I felt pushed to be monogamous with a man. Why do I have to choose?

Choices come along that sometimes dictate how you will live your life. I met a man and we married. He was a good man, but the marriage failed after 5 and a half years. Not because of girls but because of the complexities of communication, which led to the lack of any sex and lots of crying. We parted friends and I went back to kissing both girls and boys. Everything tasted delicious. I still couldn't decide. Did I have to?

My taste in women is very basic - pretty, feminine girls with athletic bodies and full lips. Men are dark haired, dark eyed and have large noses. Both have to be intelligent, witty, sexy, good kissers and enjoy playful wrestling. But it's not about the genitalia or the sexual orientation - I just fall in love with a person. I kiss a person, no a gender, and one at a time. Why is that always so hard to believe?

Am I greedy? The assumption is bisexuality is a non-committal half-out gay person or someone who is trendy and experimenting - it's all just a phase. My phase started with my early memories and I have a feeling they won't change much anytime soon. Am I just covering my bases? I never thought of my sexuality as a playing card - as if my social status depends on whom I deal my final card to, when there is a deck of 52 and none of them mean much without the other. I am attracted to both sexes - and neither the straight nor the gay community is really comfortable with that. Neither has sole political ownership over my sexual orientation - and I like it that way. I am a woman who is free to choose who I want to have sex with - I don't have to limit my scope to a gender, a race, a religion, or nationality. So that means I have a larger pool to choose from, right? Wrong.

Men don't handle bisexuality in women very well. It creates a level of competition that is unfamiliar, as if they cannot fully dominate my desires, like bulls fighting for a cow. I am a wild card - they expect at any moment I will toss them out like the trash and become a full-blown dyke. On the other hand, lesbians eye me suspiciously as if I am one of those bi-curious day-trippers into being gay, who sullies their image and their progress thus far. They seem to suspect there is a man behind my desires, pushing me to fulfill his fantasies. That eventually, I will prove to be a traitor and switch back to a hetero lifestyle. So each side watches me and waits for me to screw one of them over. They are waiting for vindication, to out me one way or the other, to out myself. To choose a side and wave a flag.

So what's a girl to do, when she loves people, not genders? I guess many folks on both sides of the fence find it hard that a person can truly be attracted to both genders, in a way that doesn't resemble an episode of the Jerry Springer show. The frat boys among us will use this as fodder for their limited imaginations, and the militant among us will try to run me out of town on a rail. So this isn't easy, revealing this sort of thing, which makes me a target for anyone with a sexual grudge, hetero or gay. Hedwig quotes Aristophanes when (s)he sings about humans being originally joined as one, (actually, Aristophanes said it was three sexes, male, female and androgynous - but that's just semantics), in a beautiful tune "The Origin of Love". How does the tale go? Zeus decides the humans as whole beings were too proud and in making war against the gods, needed to be punished, so he smote them with a mighty thunderbolt and separated them into the two genders, while losing androgyny completely. Now man and woman seek each other out in order to become whole, as do man seeking out man and woman seeking out woman. The missing link they seek as the third is androgyny, which by no means is a cosmic ménage a trios.

The story has one lingering threat - if we further anger the gods, Zeus will split us again. One leg, one eye and half a heart - how many ways can we try to reassemble ourselves from that aspect to become whole? What comes of the lack of love, desire and joy that pride and avarice create? I think there are plenty out there in the wide world that better keep their heads low and invest in lightning rods.

By Melissa Ulto
© multo.com 2002