Mills Uneven

Nine Lives that Redefined Bisexuality
Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-684-4
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

'Given bisexuality's all too frequent erasure, there is a need to represent [these] specific histories' Times Literary Supplement Uneven tells the stories of nine pioneering bisexual artists, writers and musicians that will change our understanding of the world's largest sexual minority. Bisexuality is often seen as something temporary, in spite of increasing openness around it: a sign of immaturity or a waystation on the road to a different sexuality altogether, rather than its own distinct entity. In this beautifully written cultural history, Sam Mills reclaims bisexuality as its own identity, interweaving her experience of being bisexual with illuminating portraits of a clutch of artists, writers and musicians, including Colette, Bessie Smith, Marlene Dietrich, Anaïs Nin, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna. Celebrating the resilience, diversity and spirit of the bisexual community through the ages, Uneven explores how each of these trailblazing figures have been misunderstood; how social attitudes affected their sexuality, their relationships and their work; how LGBTQ+ identities have been portrayed from the Victorian era to the present day; and how attitudes have progressed. Illuminating, personal and entertaining, Uneven paints a nuanced portrait of a sidelined community.

Sam Mills studied English at Oxford. She is the author of the novels The Quiddity of Will Self and The Watermark. Her memoir about being a carer, The Fragments of My Father, was published in 2020 and shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize. Sam has written for a number of publications, including The Guardian, The Independent, 3:AM and The London Magazine. She is the co-founder of the independent press Dodo Ink.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mills, Sam

Leseproben

I remember my first kiss with a boy. I was fourteen years old, dressed in khaki and surrounded by a circle of onlookers who watched us with wide eyes. We’d found a secret patch for our game. The moonlight shone soft on the grass and metallic on the roof of the ammunition hut that shielded us. I still had mud on my boots from the morning exercise, which had dragged us from our beds at four. My hands were rough from dismantling a rifle down to its vital organs. My uniform made me feel dull, its camouflage blending away my individuality, and I surreptitiously pulled my hair free from its band, letting it flow around my shoulders.

If we’d had a bottle, we might have spun it; instead, the bossiest member of the group played Eros-compere. She paired us off, clicking the stopwatch on her watch. She pointed at me; she pointed at Stefan. She demanded ten seconds of contact.

Stefan was a beautiful Black boy with an afro. Before this evening, I’d barely spoken to him. Now I hesitated. Was this the right setting for my first kiss – no chaise longue, no fancy Cadillac with leather seats? A first kiss had a butterfly life, could not be repeated once lost, and wouldn’t it be better to wait for the perfect setting? He was stepping closer, pupils bright, leaning in—

Many of the romantic books and films I’d read had promised a kiss as neat punctuation: the full stop on a date, played out against the poetic backdrop of a glorious sky. There was the rapturous kiss in , where Lucy’s repressed Victorian nature unravelled in a field in Italy, a terrace bathed in light and beauty, abundant in violets that beat against her dress in ‘blue waves’ as George ‘stepped quickly forward and kissed her’. The punctuation of that kiss is like a dash, its illicit nature made more delicious by its abrupt end when Miss Bartlett enters the scene, dressed in brown like a theatrical killjoy, calling sharply for Lucy. Then there was , where the French word for kiss, , is rarely used, where the embraces described have the feel of ellipses, made even more seductive through what is implied rather than what is said. And , the trashy high school series about two identical twins (of course, they are distinguishable by morals: one a good girl, one bad), where kisses only took place between characters who were obscenely beautiful, kisses as cartoonish as an emoji.

All these had layered my desire and made it idealistic. Because I went to a girls’ school, boys were elusive. They were like wild animals we saw through cage bars, glimpsed on buses, street corners, wondered how to tempt and excite. That was why I had joined the teen Army Cadets despite being a member of Greenpeace. I had no interest in learning how to fire an L98 rifle, or dragging myself through an assault course, or forcing my hair under an itchy beret. That morning we had been taken into the woods and forced to lie down for several hours, guns idle between our hands as the cold seared into us, and our sergeant advised us to piss through our trousers into the mud if we got desperate. I had saved precious Saturday-job money to endure this torture, but it had felt worthwhile when, on one previous camp, I had been kissed. His lips had awkwardly missed my mouth and landed on the edge of my lips before he ran away. And now I had this opportunity, this opportunity to kiss Stefan, but I wasn’t sure whether to be brave or flee, whether to wait for a setting where life could match art.

Our lips touched.

Ten seconds went by, then twenty. Sixty. We were separated by the leader, who looked a bit cross. Stefan and I smiled dreamily at each other.

Looking back as an adult, it’s easy to project awkwardness onto the scene. But, once the magical kiss had begun, I was no longer worried about the imperfect setting, the gap between life and art, and I wasn’t embarrassed by having an audience. The group around me didn’t feel like voyeurs, because they knew as little as I did about sex. I was grateful that I wasn’t paired with anyone but Stefan, that we got to kiss for a second time that night.

Some weeks later, a boy walked up to me on an evening meeting at Cadets and asked if I wanted Stefan’s phone number. Suddenly my feeling for him made me vulnerable. I laughed uncertainly and lost the moment.

A few more weeks on, and I heard that Stefan and a group of others would be attending a fair. When my mother told me I wasn’t allowed to go, I wept and begged, but she was anxious that I was too young. And so I had to spend the evening writing about him, giving him life in my imagination. I never saw him again.

*

I remember my first kiss with a girl. I was seventeen years old. It was around three in the morning; I was squashed onto the back seat of a car, dance music reverberating. As I was dropped off at my house, my friends waved and blew kisses. We were still fizzy from an evening of clubbing; bubbles of cocktails, flirting, dancing, hilarity were floating inside me. Amelia, my best friend, got out of the car. I assumed we were going to hug and I opened my arms—

She planted a kiss on my lips.

We’d seen the film a year earlier, on a ferry, on the way back from a school trip to France. We’d felt such a thrill when we succeeded in talking our way in to see an ‘18’ film in the onboard cinema, the boat lurching and rollicking as we watched. Sharon Stone was as glossy and cool as a Hitchcock blonde, beautifully dressed and always poised, lighting her cigarettes with languor, telling Michael Douglas’s cop that he was ‘in way over your head’, as though she was a cliff-face and he was about to drive over her edge. While some actors are known for their alter egos, becoming Sherlock, Fleabag, or an Agatha Christie detective, some characters become the shadows of their actors. Stone’s charisma shone so brightly that I can’t even remember the name of the character she played, a writer who may or may not have murdered her ex. She had a female lover, also blonde, who emitted a snarling, predatory energy, angry about having to share Stone with Douglas. The film was loathed by the critics but loved by audiences, who devoured it as a trashy delight. Madonna was so impressed by it that she made a film called that was practically a remake, in which Madonna effectively played Sharon Stone mark II.

Madonna was one of our first insights into the world of bisexuality. A queen of metamorphoses, she suddenly swerved into her sexy phase in the early nineties. Her infamous book, , shocked us all. Her music shifted from the religious controversy of ‘Like a Prayer’ to the erotic controversy of ‘Justify My Love’. I saw the banned video that accompanied the song late one night on , my parents asleep upstairs. It is a beautifully shot black-and-white affair which begins with Madonna slinking down a hallway in a shiny black mackintosh, entering a secret room, embracing several lovers, male and female, cis and trans. The song has an eerie, smoky quality. Madonna doesn’t shine in movies, but in pop videos her acting comes to life beautifully, and the end shot of ‘Justify My Love’ left an afterburn in my mind: she leaves the secret room and hurries away down the corridor, laughing in guilty ecstasy, ashamed, savouring her shame. What has now become the norm in female pop videos was Madonna’s innovation. She suffered a visceral backlash, and we admired the way she stood strong, proud to be a woman exploring her sexuality.

At that time, I had only ever once seen two girls kissing in real life. It happened at a teenage house party; it felt like a spectacle. The girls had boyfriends and the moment their lips touched, heads turned and whispers rustled. Their kiss concluded with viperish smiles; they seemed to relish their transgression. That memory is definitely flavoured by Sharon Stone and Madonna. They framed bisexuality as something daring, dangerous and cool. And so when my best friend kissed me outside my house that night, I interpreted it as affectionate. She was grinning. Her eyes were sparkling with happiness. There was nothing edgy in her behaviour, which I had come to regard as a signifier of female seduction. We had bruised each other in netball, shared a double bed on holiday. We were always hugging, tactile in the way that teenagers at a girls’ school are. On our school exchange trip to France, we walked around a square holding hands, amused by French passers-by who did double takes and whispered that we were . I thought the kiss was an exuberant celebration of our friendship; maybe. I never mentioned it to my friend, though I never forgot it.

I cannot remember the moment when I first knew that I was bisexual. I feel it ought to be accompanied by a lightning flash of revelation, but there was none. I don’t remember being conscious of it at Oxford University, a dry place that was all work and no play, where everyone around me seemed far too busy making contacts in their quest to become the next prime minister to have time for romance. All I know is that some time in my early twenties, I had various crushes on famous women. It seemed safer to be attracted to fantasy icons than real-life women, perhaps; a cautious way of tiptoeing into this newfound sexuality. Kiera Knightley; Kate Moss; Saffron Burrows; Zadie Smith: all women I was wild about. I discussed these crushes with a male...