My friend Paul (not his real name) is bisexual. Or should I say he is a bisexual? The difference the article makes is important: it is the difference between whether one considers bixsexuality an adjectival condition, as a mere appendage to a noun, or a state of being existing in its own right. Another way to state the difference is the gulf between toleration, with its varying degrees of sufferance, and acceptance, which implies some level of equality.
Paul, who lives in California, is tying up the loose ends of Ph.D. on bisexuality, specifically the effect of bisexuality on families. He does part-time counseling work at a center for bisexuals and has done other counseling work with homosexuals and lesbians. He is also in two relationships, one with a man and the other with a woman, who, in the fashion of French farce, met one evening at a party given by Paul. While it may be true, as Woody Allen says, that being bisexual doubles your chance for a date on Saturday night, it also doubles the usual miscommunications between humans. Oh well, so it goes. Paul is happy, living as he does in a community which accepts and nourishes him, and that is what matters most.
Of course, however, where he lives is not quite representative of the rest of our society, either in population or thought patterns. And that, to some degree, is a shame. For whatever hysteria the AIDS news causes, no matter the number of Time-type articles on the changing homosexual lifestyle, the fact remains that people who do not fit the mold of the typical American male and female nonetheless have a chance to live there openly and with some degree of dignity and power. This may gall some, infuriate others, but it is simply what membership in a democratic society promises. The fact that many people, who would consider themselves staunch supporters of democracy, can not stomach the thought and act of tolerance for certain groups broadcasts a great deal about how much farther we have to travel as a society before we give up the false saintliness of tolerance and blossom into the true democratic virtue of acceptance.
Of course, tolerance, to some extent, is necessary in life. It is something like social oil that lubricates the passing frictions of many unlike people occupying the same space and time. Politeness is another term for this sort of tolerance, a holding off from the more visceral reaction to punch the bus driver in the nose when he won't take your transfer, a holding open of doors for people we don't know. Yet, as Herbert Marcuse showed many years ago, tolerance can be repressive when its primary purpose is to disenfranchise a group from sharing power. Women, for instance, were tolerated in the work force as long as they kept their mouths shut and did the work they were told to do, and this, according to Marcuse, is just as repressive as outright political imprisonment because it infects them with a sense of futility and takes away any desire for political redress.
Homosexuals in today's society must also suffer this repressive tolerance, feeling forced for the most part not to divulge themselves for fear of an Anita Bryant-style purge. It's a betrayal of our democratic heritage and rhetoric for this to happen to any group in society, and yet we betray ourselves all the time. We do not look to the more honorable course of acceptance but instead give in to the laziness of prejudice. The fact that Jerry Falwell can state in all seriousness and be believed that AIDS is a spanking from God (his word) of a society that has lost its moral compass is a disheartening fact. It shows a drawing away from the inescapable vigilance democracy entails into an egotism that many defend as their inalienable right to privacy but which is simply meanness of sprit and pettiness of mind. Tolerance, after all, reduces our capacity for responsiveness, cauterizes the willing of a better nature.
Rose K. Goldsen, that perdurable fount of common sense residing at Cornell University, recently gave a talk on the social effects of the new information technology. She made some very prescient remarks about the nature and possibility of democracy. She said that the thrust of this new technology is to "privatize" personal time, that is, make everyone draw into himself or herself more strongly since there will be less and less impetus to engage the world directly, even through such mundane activities as grocery shopping. The effect of this would be to devalue democracy. To her, the essence of democracy is empathy, the ability to be in the place of those people who are not like us, and to accept their existence as valid and equal in importance to one's own. Without this vital elixir, democracy shrivels down to tolerance, to neighborhoods of sealed-off emotions and thoughts suffering barely the existence of one another.
The issue of homosexuals presents us with the same challenge. Either we accept them into this society as equal participants, or we do not have a democracy worth the name. A good test of this principle will be Gerry Studds, the recently censured Congressman from Cohasset. In his televised speech before the House he made an important distinction. On the one hand, he said, it was no one's business what he did with his private life, least of all the Congress. Yet it was clear that he meant by this that it was not anyone's business to know and then condemn, to use the knowledge as a buttress of prejudice. Instead, he implied, it is our business to know and then understand, to have, in Goldsen's words, empathy with those who are not like us. If people can understand that, if they can refrain from making his future political campaigns referenda on his homosexuality and instead vote him in because he's a good politician and a decent human being, then we all will have gained a measure of maturity and our democracy will have gained another corroboration of its worth.