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Bisexual Men in Culture and Society edited by Brett Beemyn and Erich Steinman
Reviewed by TammyJo Eckhart
Co-published as the Journal of Bisexuality, Volume 2, Number 1, Bisexual Men in Culture and Society, edited by Brett Beemyn and Erich Steinman, is not a book you read for amusement but instead to look at fairly serious questions about cultural representations of human sexuality. This means that the audience for this book is relatively small, though it could have been larger had different subjects been chosen by some of the writers.
After a very standard introduction to the essays in this book, there are five articles of various reading levels and quality. There are two illustrations that do not require real commentary here in this review, so we’ll instead focus on the five articles.
Jo Eddie’s “In Dialogue: Problems and Opportunities in Together Alone’s Visions of Queer Masculinities” looks at one independent film’s use of dialogue as the basic format for discussing the sexual encounter of one gay man and one bisexual man. Let me be really honest here: if you haven’t seen the film, most of this article is going to be inaccessible. At the end, I felt as though the real purpose of the essay was more to point out how poorly it portrayed male sexuality than to really focus on how the film reflected or affected culture and society.
“Bisexuals Who Kill: Hollywood’s Bisexual Crimewave, 1985-1998” by Jonathan David White looked like it would offer us more about mainstream films than Eddie’s essay. It does, by looking at Basic Instincts or Showgirls, but none of any of the films were what I would call wildly popular, and many were marginal even if released in the theater. So not only is the issue of how these movies reflect or affect society brief, but the article also soon turns away from the topic of bisexual men to the topic of bisexual women.
Brett Beemyn’s essay also requires that a reader be familiar with the subject in order to get full value from his work. In “’To Say Yes to Life’: Sexual and Gender Fluidity in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Another Country,” the focus is on one author’s work. Frankly, the negative image of bisexuals in these two books that Beemyn looks at did not make me want to even check the books out from the library.
“Invisible Lives: Addressing Black Male Bisexuality in the Novels of E. Lynn Harris” by Lisa Frieden is the best essay in the collection. Not only does she give us a balanced look at Harris’s work, she also steps beyond the literature into the society which formed the author’s world. She tackles the “reflected” question well, though how these books might change society is still up in the air.
Marshall Miller’s essay is the one which looks at popular culture and therefore may be the most accessible for readers. “’Ethically Questionable?’: Popular Media Reports of Bisexual Men and AIDS” uses television news shows and popular magazines to see how the advent of AIDS awareness on a national level played into a stereotype of bisexual men as dangerous to both straight and gay cultures. It would have been even better if Miller had included a wider range of media in his study and analyzed the changes or similarities more fully.
Overall I was disappointed with Bisexual Men in Culture and Society, because I was hoping for a readily engaging series of essays that would look at popular culture and offer us information about what is happening and how it might be changed. A few of the essays did indeed look at enough easily accessed films, books, or magazines that each topic was understood by the average reader. Most, however, did not, and this leaves the audience very small. |
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