Queer for a year

Our sex guru Sasha rhapsodizes on her
recent life as a lezz

by SASHA

This was going to be a playful, chirpy piece about my first long-term (long-term in the neoteric sense, so a year) relationship with a woman. Hilarious anecdotes about the trip to Provincetown! Gut-busting tales of the realization that I was to spend my anniversary with my girlfriend and her ex-girlfriend! Gripping, erotic epistles about the wedding where I was seated at a table with four of her ex-lovers! You know, ye olde lesbian sagas of yore. It turned out to be something quite different. For me, anyway. For some time my thoughts have turned frequently and obtrusively to something that I never give much thought, which is the fact that I am bisexual.

It's not that I didn't know I was so inclined. I was a child of the '70s, when television was a budding bisexual's dream, and my polymorphous feelings were well attended to by all the networks, especially ABC. But I seldom consider it in more detailed terms than that. I sleep with men and women. Bravo! I had been at times, when the world was full of gender and orientation unrest, a little insecure about how I was perceived, since most of my relationships took place with men and I kept my dealings with women sexual.

Understandably this does not make you especially popular with some women, even if you are forthcoming about it. This does make you popular in a dubious way with some men, and I wouldn't call it misguided because it does occasionally pay off in the way they imagine it will. You just wish people would see bisexuality as a genuine sexual orientation, rather than a kick - a choice made by free-spirited degenerates like Tallulah Bankhead or delicate crackpots like Anne Heche, or wannabes like Drew Barrymore - even though your own habits as one point to it being a little difficult to classify. In other words, you too, are caught up in the idea that a relationship with someone of your gender would provide some credibility.

Toronto's bi attitude

This is actually not my first relationship with a woman, but it is my longest. I also happen to be dating a woman, DJ Denise Benson, who is well known for being queer, among other things. We are in the public eye in the way that one can be in the public eye in Toronto because it is a city that is anxious to broadcast its indigenous vitality (you've seen our mayor wowing international audiences with his Algonquin Room wit, I'm sure). As such, there are a lot of people who are famous in Toronto for doing nothing but having a far-out style and driving a vehicle festooned with garbage. It's the kind of star treatment usually reserved for drag queens, but bless Toronto's vulnerable little heart, they hand it out generously to nearly all who step up to the plate.

As a result of my girlfriend's and my minor eminence in Toronto, I've had to talk about being queer to people in a way that I never have before. People who are public and queer are usually acquainted with discussing their orientation, often quite articulately. I am not. Not in official or sociopolitical terms anyway. My press release is sorely lacking in thoughtful opinions. I have been on various mainstream television shows, admitted I was bisexual, and couldn't get past the titillated "Wooo" that the host musters out of the audience. People seem to feel that they are required to have this delirious reaction, and it's silly. This has made me think harder about my opinions, if I am permitted to voice them. I don't want to give into prosaic commentary, like how yes, gay people are just the worst when it comes to us bisexuals, and how bored I am about a remark on Sex and the City about bisexuality, about it being a pit stop on the way to being gay, or something foolish like that. Whatever. I lambasted Sex and the City in a national publication and I watch it with the remorseful infatuation of a self-proclaimed sex addict. I do not watch it for romantic guidance.

Pleased to be perverted

Margaret Mead said that extreme heterosexuality is a perversion and I'm going to have to go with her on that - and include homosexuality - and also qualify it with a Spinal Tap-like, "What's wrong with being perverted?" Despite my open-mindedness about peoples' extreme perversions, I'm someone who thinks everyone has a touch of the gay in them, that given the right circumstances, we'd all go for a lick, have a suck, take a poke, no matter what the prevailing ideologies. I came of age bisexually in a double-edged era: the '80s. So on one hand, there I was, lurching and looming and pitching about the Sphinx being bisexual and then there was that damning '80s feminism squashing everything and busting it open all at once. The funny thing is, when I was bisexual at the Sphinx (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, fuck off, I'm not that old), I wasn't really being the real bisexual I was. I was being the bisexual that the Sphinx fostered, which was saying you were bisexual and then going home with pretty boys who were also bisexual (so gay then), and waiting patiently in bed while they did drugs in the bathroom with their roommate. And frankly, I wanted nothing to do with the lesbians of the era. No one makes you feel more like the nugatory little ninny that you are than a disciple of Concordia women's studies, class of '86. Working in strip clubs, I felt very conscious of the fact that I was the pervert. It was there that it was confirmed the most, around women who were straight-identified but had flings with other women - good Catholic girls who had learned to live with a certain comforting amount of hypocrisy. I hadn't felt like such a lezzie since I wore a Penthouse baseball cap to Hat Day in Grade 8. Of course it paid off too. I'm not going to lie, the dressing room at the Chateau du Sexe was way better than anything ABC had to offer.

My girlfriend asks me, as we sit watching the sunset at a cottage on Sturgeon Lake (I know, ew, but there had to be some romantic con) when I am turning all of this over in my head, "What stands out to you the most about living as a dyke for a year?" My response is how normal it feels. And this is, of course, the point.

Sasha writes a weekly syndicated sex column that was born at the Mirror