Document Date: September 25, 1995
Word Count: 1488
Originally Appeared in Black Sheets Magazine
All rights to reuse held by Cecilia Tan, ctan@circlet.com
Switch It On: A Pop Culture Map of My Sexual Psyche
by Cecilia Tan

1973: I'm six years old and my best friend (female) and I are taking turns being Catwoman and Batman, tying one another up and torturing each other with diabolical devices. (One particularly insidious invention we called "The Urine Trap" but I have forgotten the particulars of it.)

1974: I'm seven years old and spending a lot of time watching reruns of Star Trek. I have a few favorite episodes: the one where Kirk is enslaved by aliens, the one where the whole crew are enslaved by pseudo-Grecian god aliens, and the one about the empath where Bones is tied up and tortured. Is a common theme emerging?

1975: I'm 8 years old and I've imprinted on David Bowie as a role model at the height of the 70s bisexual chic. Androgyny and a penchant for fucking anything that moves seem to be the order of the day: these would be the hallmarks of bisexuality in my mind for years to come.

1982: Cable tv has arrived in our suburban town and MTV pumps videos into my highly impressionable, hormone-ridden teenage brain: The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Damned. I begin to recognize the two sides of the coin that made Bowie in the 70s and now has a certain kind of irresistible attractiveness for me: fey androgyny on one side, and a tortured, masochistic soul on the other. A goth is born.

1984: Cable tv has also made late night movies an essential part of growing up. I come home from a party in the wee hours and turn on Showtime to find The Hunger just beginning. Here it is all in one package: David Bowie and Catherine Denueve as a pair of androgynous bisexual vampires, a fantastically sadomasochistic blood sucking scene with Susan Sarandon, and the band Bauhaus, quintessentially goth, fronted by Bowie-wanna-be Peter Murphy, sing "Bela Lugosi's Dead." I go to bed with my panties soaked and masturbate for hours before I sleep. I'm sixteen years old, and now my sexuality is all one glorious hormonal ball of wax. My big turn ons for torture, partners of both sexes, forced sex, androgynous figures, and sadomasochistic themes are inseparable from one another, all part of the greater mystery of sex itself and part of the greater goth subcultural movement that I only have access to through pop culture media. It doesn't occur to me to separate out the elements or try to understand each one individually.

1985: I'm in college now, I've just lost my virginity to a fey young boy, and I've joined the campus lesbian and gay student group. Suddenly there's pressure to "come out," to politicize my sexuality and to analyze it. Something tells me to keep my trap shut about both my sadomasochistic leanings and my rampant bisexuality. I get a lot of ideology by osmosis: I'm not really a lesbian and therefore if my only interest in women is sexual attraction, I am a threat since sex for sex's sake is evil. Pornography is evil. Oh yeah, and men are evil. My male persona identification is a rejection of my true femininity and a result of the misogyny inherent in society. I do a lot of thinking about all the little parts of my sexuality, trying to decide if I can keep the "good" parts and get rid of the "bad" parts. It gets very fragmented, but in the end I give up on the LGSA as a source of wisdom and/or getting laid. Pop culture has deserted me, too. Androgyny has become poodle-hair metal bands and in the wake of AIDS the popular mind has completely forgotten it was ever hip to be bisexual.

1990: I move to Boston and get Usenet newsgroups for the first time and discover that there are several distinct subcultures I have been isolated from all my life. One, the bisexual political movement; two, the S/M underground. Here's message after message from bisexuals who refuse to be forced into either straight or gay roles. (And flirting with each other!) Cool. And here's message after message from people who practice S/M, and I do mean practice. The fact that there are people out there trying to get GOOD at bondage and flogging and so forth is the real proof to me that, contrary to the feminist theorists of my college days, there IS more to this S/M thing than putting up with abuse. Incidentally, now that I am in a big city, I start going out to goth night clubs and for the first time I am in real life, real time, meeting people who seem similar to me, at least in taste and aesthetic sense. I find myself three lovers. One from the S/M subculture: a girlfriend who identifies as lesbian and is a top. One from bisexual politics: a fey, tortured bisexuality crusader. One from a bar: a punk bi boy who happens to be into S/M, is a switch, and also hustles on the side. The three of them keep me busy for months while I emerge from the stifling cocoon of wrong-headed sexual rhetoric left over from my undergraduate education. And lo, pop culture begins to catch up. Suddenly, Madonna is spreading rumors about her own possible bisexuality and S/M leanings... and suddenly I'm not the outcast anymore. The age of the bisexual s/m switch is about to arrive and I am more than ready for it.

1995: Well, we all know how things turned out with Madonna and "Justify My Love," the book "Sex" and all that. Bisexual chic is back with pop stars like the London Suede, Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. making all sorts of open-to-interpretation statements. The biggest vampire sensuality movie since The Hunger, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, put Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise (of all people!) into a beautifully cruel embrace. And, whether thanks to Madonna or in spite of her, there's "s/m chic" too. Nine Inch Nails broke open the long implied sadomasochism in goth with "Happiness in Slavery" and a video so graphic it was banned from MTV. But whereas when I was a kid I was receiving images and ideas from the subculture through the popular media, now I am living in the subcultures. Now I watch the signs and signals of my every day life popping up on MTV. Is this what they call full circle?


Tonight: I am getting ready to play a coercive seduction scene on an innocent but secretly horny princess. I'm playing the part of the prince, and my boyfriend, the princess. Talk about full circle: here we are with little games of let's pretend once again. And perhaps if anything can be said to have come full circle, it is in my vision of my own sexuality. It went from being one gestalt thing, to being a lot of fragmented ideas and separate subcultures, now to being one thing again, only this time I can see why. I was never too upset by accusations that as a bisexual I was "stuck in the middle" "in transition" "on the fence." Why? Because that's exactly what being bisexual is for me. I prefer to be neither here nor there, neither gay nor straight. I prefer to confuse people and force them to judge me as an individual, not as a member of a well-defined group. Likewise I am neither feminine nor masculine, not femme nor butch, striving for a balanced androgyny that can confound people no matter which gender they think I am at first glance. I am fluid, I am movement, I am neither here nor there. When I discovered S/M, my overall fluid sexuality made it easy to enter that world, the leather community, the S/M lifestyle, by being open to change and not being locked into any sort of "vanilla" role, I could experiment and find places to be within the leather community with ease. And here I discovered more middle-ground to inhabit: the domain of the "switch" who could be either top or bottom, dominant or submissive, sadistic or masochistic. So now, when my bisexual boyfriend and I do the captive princess scene, there is the male identity in me coming forth, there is my attraction for women at work (as he has become she, and it is her that I get so hot for, the sweet, innocent thing), and there is dominance and submission defining our relation to one another... It is all there, all rolled up in one, androgyny, multiple attractions, sadomasochism. It is the basic fluidity of bisexuality that allows me to move in all these dimensions at once. I would not have it any other way. Gotta go now, princess is waiting.

---

This page authored and maintained by ctan@circlet.com
Return to List of Rants/Essays

Return to Cecilia Tan's homepage