Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life

Garber's erudite, provocative study of bisexuality challenges the easy polarities of heterosexual and homosexual, straight and gay. A Harvard professor of English whose books include Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, she argues that bisexuality can be a mature, adult, sustainable way of living one's sexual life. Instead of being a ``third'' category, or a period of confusion, oscillation and experimentation, as is often supposed, bisexuality, in her theory, reveals human sexuality to be a continuum, a process of growth and transformation. Many readers will be intrigued by her candid look at the erotic and romantic lives of dozens of notables identified here as bisexual-Georgia O'Keeffe, Cary Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Laurence Olivier, blues singers Bessie Smith and Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, painter Larry Rivers, Virginia Woolf, John Cheever, Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, rock star Kurt Cobain, etc. Garber devotes chapters to androgyny, marriages between bisexuals, sexual conversion narratives, bisexual love triangles, with close analyses of bisexual themes in Henry James, James Baldwin, Anne Rice's vampire fiction and movies like Basic Instinct and Personal Best. (June)