ABSTRACT
Originally published under the name Fred Klein: Klein, F. (1978) The Bisexual Option: A Concept of One Hundred Percent Intimacy, New York: Priam Books. Reproduced by permission of the author. The Bisexual Option was published at a particularly complex moment in the history of bisexuality. On the one hand, the gay liberation movement of the 1970s had placed sexual preference and identity firmly on the agenda as political issues, with a heavy emphasis on the personal and political importance of ‘coming out’. This new wave of energy in sexual politics included a burgeoning bisexual movement and community, particularly in the USA, where a number of bisexual community groups were established (Donaldson 1995; Raymond and Highleyman 1995; Udis-Kessler 1995). The mainstream US magazines Time and Newsweek both ran cover stories on bisexuality in 1974 (Garber 1995), and bisexuality achieved a certain cachet as an exciting or ‘trendy’ lifestyle. Indeed The Bisexual Option is one of a relatively large number of significant discussions of bisexuality published around this period, including Margaret Mead’s ‘Bisexuality: what’s it all about?’ in 1975 and Charlotte Wolff’s Bisexuality: A Study in 1977. On the other hand, members of medical, psychiatric and therapeutic professions were often hostile to the idea that bisexuality might be regarded as a viable adult sexual orientation. Far from sharing Stekel’s view that bisexuality was both normal and healthy (see Chapter 3), some psychoanalysts and psychotherapists maintained that adults who claimed to be bisexual were really just in denial about their homosexuality (or, less often, their heterosexuality). Ruitenbeek, for example, writing in 1973, dismissed bisexuality as a ‘myth’ which was not only useless to psychotherapists but positively harmful for patients, who needed ‘to commit [themselves] to making a genuine sexual choice’ (Ruitenbeek 1973:204).
