ABSTRACT
As Eve Sedgwick has argued so persuasively, the “epistemology of the closet” does indeed seem to structure modern concepts of sexual identity formation. But another aspect of the inside/out dialectic seems to occupy the margins of many bisexual texts-the dialectic of race. In Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, Catherine’s bisexuality seems at its height when she role-plays David’s African girlfriend and eroticizes her suntan, wishing to be the darkest that she can be. Then she introduces David to Marita, who is darker still, and who cuts her hair to resemble David’s African girlfriend as well. In Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, Frankie notices that Honey, a paradigmatic mulatto, appears to be a half-made boy to the other characters because of his lavender skin and his alternating use of high and low diction. And even other texts which thematize the problems in representing bisexuality (Nella Larsen’s Passing, James Baldwin’s Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life trilogy, among others), seem to gesture toward a common epistemological puzzle in the representation of bi-racial identity.
