“But from time to time I wonder what would happen, you know, if I got something steady going with a girl. You know, some girl that I really dug and that I could get it together with her in an intense way. I was rapping before about Easy Rider, and I’ll think what a groove it would be, you know, me and a chick, with the two of us really digging each other completely, and each of us on a motorcycle and just cutting across all that space together. And being completely into each other, and never staying one place too long, going here and going there and hanging together, and like balling each other constantly.
“I suppose if I had that and it worked out perfectly I would never want to go with a fag. But the way things are now, there’s nothing like that. I’ll see girls but I don’t spend that much time chasing them because it’s so much easier with the faggots. It really is.
“The way things are now, if I had a girl I could screw any time I wanted, not that I was in love with but that it was always there for me, I’m tempted to say they would never see me on Times Square again. But I’m not positive that’s the truth. Not that it makes me queer, that I can dig it both ways. I don’t know. The thing is, when you learn to like something like that, how are you going to stop liking it?”
Derek
“You know, if I were inclined to be picky, and if I weren’t so egocentric as to take immeasurable delight in being interviewed, I’d have to take exception to this project. You want me as an interview subject for a work on homosexual prostitution, and according to my own lights I fail to qualify on either count.
“I’m not a homosexual. I’m a bisexual. Though even the article is objectionable, don’t you think? A homosexual. A bisexual. These terms should be adjectives. They should describe rather than categorize. Human beings have such a compulsion to fit everyone into a drawer, and the more uptight one is, the greater the necessity...
“I am a bisexual male. Or, as the unisex contingent prefers it, a bisexual human being who is genitally male. ACDC, if you will. Versatile. Select your own euphemism, it mattereth not.
“But of course everyone is bisexual, you know. An infant scarcely cares whether the hand tickling its genitalia is attached to a body which is in turn equipped with a penis or a vagina. Which is not to say that there’s no difference between men and women. Of course there’s a difference. And vive la difference, as our French friends say.
“As I see it, to describe a man or woman as bisexual is simply to state that he or she is open to the full range of human sexuality. When one is exclusively homosexual or heterosexual, on the other hand, one is the victim of a more or less damaging neurotic condition. A homosexual is a person who, because of various personal hang-ups to a greater or lesser extent induced by society and personal environment, is solely capable of responding sexually to members of his own sex. And a heterosexual individual is one who, because of personal hang-ups of another sort, is capable only of responding to members of the opposite sex.
“Not that there’s anyone quite like that, however. I don’t think there’s ever been a faggot who hasn’t occasionally looked at a girl and found her attractive. And the straightest of heterosexual males will recognize others of their number as attractive. But hang-ups get in the way to the extent that these people may not even think of doing anything about it, let alone going through with it.
“If this limitation makes either of these sets of people normal in any sense other than a purely statistical one, then a button’s a birdcage. The Gay Liberation people are doing very important work, but they insist that homosexuality is not neurotic, and I disagree. I think it is neurotic in precisely the same way that heterosexuality is. Life is short and life is beautiful and people who place limits on themselves are foolish.
“And this is all changing, you know. That, as much as anything else, is what the counterculture is all about. It’s the real expression of the sexual revolution. The more obvious manifestations that you’ll see are reactions to generations of repression. The excesses of pornography, the wild behavior of some swingers. Theaters with public fucking. All of this is a passing phenomenon. What will be enduring is a genuine attitudinal change, and that’s most apparent with the young. Not all of them, of course. Some of them are every bit as uptight as their parents. Boys are scared to urinate in a public men’s room because someone might steal a peek at their cocks.
“More and more of them, however, consciously open themselves to new experience. They aren’t afraid of homosexual relations, and as a result they don’t take it for granted that an inevitable consequence of an enthusiasm for penises is an antipathy toward vaginas.
“You know that button? If it feels good I’ll do it. Now there is the credo for the Aquarian Age in what? Seven words? Words to live by. Animals know instinctively that anything that makes them feel better is good for them. That’s why wild animals will automatically select the foods their bodies need. Human beings have spent millennia developing their intellects at the expense of their instincts. That’s why civilization has invariably led to a deterioration in diet, because the overdeveloped brain tells the belly what it wants, and makes the wrong choice. You never see fat animals, you know. Only in zoos...
“The new culture, the counterculture, is turning away from a whole body of past experience. What is being rejected, you know, is not merely the value system of a few generations but the social directions of several thousand years. All of this is bound up in all the rest of it. The ecology movement, the return to natural foods, the investigation of the occult sciences, the appeal of mysticism. The rejection of the state and the return to the tribal unit. The emphasis on developing self-sufficiency, on performing for oneself the tasks needed for one’s survival rather than doing a specialized type of work to obtain money to purchase what one requires. And this is happening not in any animal way, not through a rejection of the intellect, but through an expansion of the intellectual vision into newer ways of seeing.
“I’m sure drugs have a great deal to do with this. They encourage new perspectives, cut through ritualized thinking. And no doubt McLuhan can attribute much of this to television, although we can hardly be sure until some dedicated soul takes on the job of transferring his writings into English.
“In twenty years, barring some dramatic planetary tragedy, bisexuality will be statistically normal. This is already true in certain circles, especially for females. You’ve spent a great deal of time yourself with swingers and swappers and orgiasts. I’ve read a couple of your things. The New Sexual Underground. A little sensationalistic, I thought, but I was able to see your own attitudes lurking between the lines and felt at the time that you were not merely reporting, that you understood what is happening. So of course I don’t have to tell you that in large areas of this underground, if you will, the bisexual female is the norm. And the exclusively heterosexual woman is almost becoming a curiosity. Isn’t that your experience?”
I agreed that it was.
“To the point where some couples are unwilling to swing with other couples unless the wife is bisexual. True?”
“True.”
“Would you agree that this is fairly recent? And that it’s very much an accelerating trend?”
“Definitely. I’ve written as much.”
“And male bisexuality is beginning to follow the trend?”