ABSTRACT
The bisexual community I found in San Diego was the body that resurrected my buried lesbian self. As a second-wave feminist in the 1970s, I aimed for the goal of separating feelings from erotic pleasure. But the feelings would persist, and in the early 1990s I came to enjoy group sex partly as a way to reconnect feelings and erotic expression in a polyamorous way. I was in my late thirties, and learned to love all my lovers at the same time, together and separately, and to encourage each of them to love each other, with or without me, in the same way. It was a great liberation, for which, ironically, I have to thank the presumed AIDS epidemic. The fear of the fear of getting infected is what made safer sex necessary. Sexual players had to be open about their identities and practices. Everything had to be consensual, and risks were negotiated. Water-based lubricants, always at hand, replaced the body fluids that would not be exchanged. The erotic knowledge thus exchanged helped us find a healthy mode for our emotional, physical, and spiritual ways.
