The Kid Is All the Rage: (Bi) Sexuality, Temporality and Triangular Desire in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Abstract

This article studies bisexuality in terms of sexual instrumentality, instead of sexual orientation. In Silko's Almanac of the Dead, David's sexuality is not marked by a hetero timeline hinged on marriage, a homo timeline initiated by the “coming out” moment or a bi timeline validated by sexual experiences with both genders. Instead, David's paternal aspiration and his financial need govern his opposite-sex relationship with Seese and his same-sex relationship with Beaufrey. In this bisexual triangle, David's sexual instrumentality ultimately generates an epistemology of bisexuality with regard to time, paternity and prostitution. Reconfiguring bisexuality from a matter of sexual attraction to both genders to a desire for things that particular sexual objects can offer to the subject, this article, on account of filiation and finance, deconstructs the discourse of sexual orientation.

KEYWORDS:

• bisexuality
• hetero/queer/bi temporalities
• sexual orientation
• sexual instrumentality
• triangular desire
• hom(m)o-sexuality
• rough trade

Notes

1. See, for instance, Eng (2003) and Lewin (2009).

2. Olmsted (1999) is aghast by the “deviant” sexualities in Silko. According to Olmsted, “It's difficult to find instances of healthy, loving sexuality in Almanac of the Dead. … There is no question that the homosexual men in the novel are pathological or pathetic …, and heterosexuality doesn't fare well either” (p. 471). Olmsted's normative take on sexuality—heterosexual, monogamous, and happily married with children—renders monstrous any male desire beyond the pale of the nuclear family. St. Clair (1999), by contrast, reads Silko's representation of homosexuality as a metaphor for greed and brutality. But her conflation of homosexuality with capitalism entails a misleading term, “cannibal queers.” According to St. Clair, Beaufrey, Serlo, and Trigg—because of their involvement in the traffic of drugs, the production of torture videos, and the marketing of human organs—incarnate “the insane solipsism and androcentric avarice that characterize the dominant culture” (p. 207). Because these men also engage in grotesque sex with/to one another, St. Clair argued that they perpetuate the homosexual stereotypes of being “narcissistic, promiscuous, predatory, exploitative, amoral, and malicious psychopaths” (p. 208). Following St Clair's logic, Fischer-Hornung (2007) designated homosexuality in Silko's novel as an abject metonym (p. 109).

3. As the David-Seese-Beaufrey triangle eventually leads to a futile search for Monte, it is worth noting that Monte's name alludes to the gambling game, three-card monte. Just as the confidence trick designates one guy as the dealer to ask the victim, or mark, to identify the money card among three face-down playing cards, so too do Seese and David try to outsmart Beaufrey in locating Monte, but to no avail.

4. As the sexual imbroglio around David becomes knotty with issues of paternity, masculinity, finance, and jealousy, the representations of male sexuality in Almanac need to also consider incest, disability and race. Serlo's grandfather, for example, used to massage his orphaned, prepubescent grandson at night. Such nocturnal intimacy raises taboos of incest, homosexuality and child abuse. Trigg, another tycoon in this novel, is having an affair with a married woman. The paraplegic has sex with Leah Blue not only for the thrill of adultery but also for the testimony to his virility. This violation of heterosexual marriage, however, is not the worst part. To make money for his plasma center, Trigg fellates homeless men while draining their blood. Analogous to David's case, Trigg's bisexuality concerns less with his sexual orientation than with the sexual boost he needs to ensure his male ego and the financial profit he can obtain through sex with other men. Finally, Ferro—a broker of contraband firearms and Lecha's mestizo son—is sexually attracted to a White undercover cop, Jamey. For Ferro, interracial relationship is hot. The differences in their ages, body types and physical appearances only make Ferro want Jamey more. As sexuality is entangled with race, capitalism, masculinity and the discourse of repro-futurity in Almanac, accusing Silko of homophobia—on account of those negative representations of male same-sex relationships—would miss her message about the complexity of male desires.

5. Gibian (1992) called the fixity of sexual orientation “sexual stasis”: “We basically buy the notion not only that we are who we sleep with, but also that we are who we sleep with today. Lesbian communities accept and perpetuate this as much as the heterosexual world does. And what a narrow definition it is: it invalidates past actions, past feelings and present feelings. It doesn't allow conflicting feelings to coexist, denying the possibility of paradox and discouraging ambiguity. It says: you must stay still so we can see who you are” (p. 5). As Gibian points out that lesbians who fall in love with men are unfairly labeled as traitors to their gay community, Eadie (1993) addresses bisexuals’ anxiety about the legitimacy of their sexual identity. According to Eadie, “Monogamous people [bisexuals] feel they should be having more relationships, and people in multiple relationships feel they are perpetuating a stereotype. People who have had primarily same-sex relationships feel they are expected to have opposite-sex relationships, and people in opposite-sex relationships feel they have not proved themselves until they have had a same-sex relationship” (p. 144).

6. In addition to the accusations of promiscuity, exploiting heterosexual privileges, and betraying the gay community, bisexuality has prompted tons of other issues. Anderlini-D'Onofrio (2003a) draws a parallel between American playwright Lillian Hellman and her character Karen Wright in The Children's Hour. According to Anderlini-D'Onofrio, just as Hellman passes as a nondescript American and heterosexual woman despite her Jewish identity and her bisexual desire in a time of homophobia, bi-phobia, and anti-Semitism, so too does Wright in The Children's Hour establish herself as a survivor in the Darwinian, homophobic society (pp. 91, 108). Dollimore (1996), by contrast, showcases an erotic threesome wherein a bisexual man watches another man having sex with a woman. According to Dollimore, this scenario generates a wishful theory of multiple identifications across gender for the bisexual male voyeur. Although the bisexual subject may want to have/be the man/woman directly and/or through his/her partner, his sexual charge is intensified by the mutual attraction between the couple (p. 529). Following Dollimore, Alan Sinfield (2004) explains this loop of bisexual fantasy in terms of “desire-to-be” and “desire-for”: that is, the voyeur has desire-to-be the man because he has desire-for the woman; he also has desire-to-be the woman because he has desire-for the man. According to Sinfield, “Bisexuality is usually glossed, quite simply, as a static split: desire-for both genders. This is not an adequate account of the positionings of Dollimore's protagonist: he is performing an elaborate psychic loop through the possible permutations” (p. 41). Even posited in the context of monogamous, heterosexual marriage, bisexuality still involves numerous ethical dilemmas. A bisexual subject, for instance, would have to choose between his or her same-sex and opposite-sex partners. A married husband may be cheating on his wife and having an affair with another man. Or, a lesbian decides to marry a man because bisexual people are castigated as a bridge between heterosexuals and homosexuals during the AIDS epidemic (Däumer, 1992, p. 94).

7. As bisexuality does not necessarily mean sexual attraction to both genders, critics also start to see masturbation and celibacy as particular kinds of sexual subjectivity in defiance of the homo/heterosexual binary. See Dodson (2004), Francis (2004), and Kahan (2008).

8. On the discourse of repro-futurity, see, for instance, Edelman (2004), Halberstam (2005), and Dinshaw et al. (2007).

9. In the wake of the Kinsey scale—which rates individuals from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (extremely homosexual) based on their sexual experiences and reactions—the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid further specifies such variables as sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, self-identification and hetero/gay lifestyle (Klein, Sepekoff, & Wolf, 1985, p. 39). For an assessment of the Kinsey Report, see Cagle (1996, pp. 236–238, 240–242, 246).

10. On the history of the polyamory/polyfidelity movement or a personal account of nonmonogamous partnership, see, for instance, Robins (2004) and Ray (2004).

11. On recent scholarship on queer historiography, see, for example, Halperin (2002), Hammond (2002), Traub (2002), Vicinus (2004), Marcus (2007), Chauncey (1994), Houlbrook (2005), Cole (2003), and Kunzel (2008).

12. On queer temporalities, see Dinshaw (1999), Jagose (2002), Edelman (2004), Halberstam (2005), Love (2007), Doan and Waters (2000), and Dinshaw et al. (2007). In particular, Halberstam questions the Bildungsroman narrative as a normative genre that endorses a hetero, linear transition from childish dependency through marriage to adult responsibility (p. 153). Instead of seeing queer/adolescent subcultures as a stage prior to mature adulthood, Halberstam contended, “For queers, the separation between youth and adulthood simply does not hold, and queer adolescence can extend far beyond one's twenties” (p. 174). Halberstam speaks to the modernist discourse of sexology and psychoanalysis, which depicts sexual and gender deviants as infantile, primitive, regressive or backward in favor of the teleological timeline of heterosexual reproduction. In addition to the critique on sexual maturity, queer temporalities also begin to tackle such ugly feelings as shame, loneliness and withdrawal to attest to “the experience of social exclusion” and “the historical ‘impossibility’ of same-sex desire” (Love, p. 4). If subjects of hetero, teleological temporalities have to outgrow their perverse infancy and rebellious adolescence for a reproductive adulthood, those of queer temporalities are not only eager to attach meanings to past experiences and set up queer communities. They are also more willing to register unwanted feelings and account for the sexual subjectivity of bachelors, celibates, homosexuals, and other nonheteronormative individuals. Even though they may still write off their opposite-sex relationships in line with their gay identity, they are more aware of the illogic of sexual temporality than most heteronormative people.

13. The emergence of queer historiography reconfigures sex between men in Western society. Chauncey (1994), for instance, challenged the myths of isolation, invisibility and internalization in contemporary thinking of homosexuality by elucidating the culture of “fairies” in New York at the turn of the twentieth century (pp. 6–8, 47–63). Similarly, Houlbrook (2005) explored the “amorphous bachelor subculture” among working-class men in London before the mid-20th century (p. 168). Halperin (2002), taking his cue from Chauncey, argued that terms like “effeminacy,” “paederasty,” “friendship” and “inversion” have their particular historical and cultural meanings incommensurable with what we know as homosexuality today. Effeminacy, for example, describes womanly men who “liked to be fucked by other men,” but it also denotes womanizers who “preferred the soft option of love to the hard option of war” (Halperin, p. 111). Before the gender of sexual object-choice became the defining principle in the discourse of sexuality, age, class, social status, gender style and/or sexual role, according to Halperin, all unevenly contribute to the incoherent definitions of homosexuality today (pp. 134–136).

14. Chauncey (1994) and Houlbrook (2005) contended the prevalence of gender hierarchy before the homo/heterosexual axis took ascendency in mid-20th century, for working-class bachelors—immigrants, sailors, and hustlers, in particular—in fin-de-siècle New York and London could have sex with other men as long as they did not behave like women and compromise their masculinity. In other words, provided that they retained the active, penetrating role during sex and avoided womanly demeanor, they were exempt from the stigma of gender deviance attached to female-identified inverts, flamboyant fairies and effeminate pansies. Interestingly, the fairies, though regarded as an anomaly, were rarely a threat to the gender order in working-class society. According to Chauncey (1994), “He [the fairy] was so obviously a ‘third-sexer,’ a different species of human being, that his very effeminacy served to confirm rather than threaten the masculinity of other men, particularly since it often exaggerated the conventions of deference and gender difference between men and women” (p. 57).

15. Although the Greek paederasts’ interest in both genders resembles the libertines, rakes or roués in later Western society, they have different cultural meanings: the former are honored in antiquity (despite/because of its implication of sex as hierarchy), whereas the latter imply excessive sexuality.

16. According to Storr (1997), “For both [Henry Havelock] Ellis and [Richard von] Krafft-Ebing, bisexuality is an original physical state—both phylogenetically, as a primitive state of ‘species,’ and ontogenetically, as a predisposition of the foetus—from which the mono-sexuality of two distinct and coherent sexes, male and female, ultimately evolves” (p. 84). Instead of following the logic of transition in addressing individual sexuality, bisexuality here takes on an imperialist charge: The more advanced a race is, the less likely for its people to be bisexual.

17. Garber (1995) also refers to the lesbian coupling in Terry Castle's reconfiguration of Sedgwick's triangle. For Castle, the woman-man-woman triangle can be the pretext for female homosociality/homosexuality.

18. Also see Messner (2001). According to Messner, straight and gay men would boast about their sexual conquers of women in the locker room, not only to demonstrate their manhood by objectifying women but also to hide their feminized homosexuality in a homophobic group (pp. 261–263).

19. On transnational gay tourism, see, for example, Padilla (2007), Schifter (2000), Boone (1995), Holden and Ruppel (2003), Van Esterik (2000), and Ryan and Hall (2001).

20. Although I focus on the elusive sexuality of trade men in the postwar sexual taxonomy of sexual orientation, the boys in ancient Greek paederasty and the sex workers in contemporary Dominican Republic provide historiographic and ethnographic counterparts. Yet the Greek paederasts are not susceptible to the gay shame to which the straight-identified trade men and the sex workers in the Caribbean are often subject. See Halperin (2002, pp. 113–117) and Padilla (2007).