The imperfect text: bisexual transgression in Score (1974) and Both Ways (1975)

ABSTRACT

Pornographic cinema would seem perfect for producing unambiguous images of bisexual attraction, as it makes explicit what non-pornographic cinema implies through stereotypes, tropes, and narratives: that is, subjectivity neither homosexual nor heterosexual. Yet, in spite of this advantage, the imaging of bisexuality in pornographic cinema remains entrenched in cultural frameworks that shape its construction and signification. To examine this claim, we perform a close reading of two erotic movies from the 1970s, a historical moment in which bisexuality emerges in American mass media as a force to be reckoned with. We find that bisexuality functions as a transgression in these texts, but that its transgressive value depends on the sexual economy organizing the story. Together, Score (1974) and Both Ways (1975) illuminate the attraction of – and repulsion to – bisexuality in American culture of the 1970s, and demonstrate how the transgressive value of bisexuality remains contingent and limited, even within the explicit world of pornography.

KEYWORDS:

• Bisexuality
• cinema
• pornography
• sexual representation
• bisexual coding
• transgression

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jacob Engelberg for the opportunity to revisit these movies. His patience, flexibility, and guidance as an editor proved invaluable to the production of this article. An earlier draft benefitted immeasurably from the editorial ministrations of Eduardo Sundaram, as well as from the critical responses of Frank Tomasulo and Michael Torke. Comments from the journal’s reviewers no doubt improved the final draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘We’re the Thorn in Everyone’s Side: An Inquiry into Bisexuality’ (Gross 1973); ‘Bisexual Life-Style Appears to Be Spreading’ (Brody 1974); ‘Sexual Chic, Sexual Fascism, and Sexual Confusion’ (Harrison 1974); ‘The Bisexuals’ (Klemesrud 1974); ‘The New Breed of Homosexual Has an Understanding Wife’ (Trecker 1974); ‘The New Bisexuals’ (1974); ‘Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes’ (1974); ‘[One Woman Gives Her Answer to] The Question of Bisexuality’ (Hurwood 1974); ‘Bisexuality: The Newest Sex-Style’ (Margold 1974); ‘Bisexuality is Not Succotash’ (Starkweather 1974); ‘Bisexuality: What Is It All About?’ (Mead 1975); ‘Bisexuals: Where Love Speaks Louder Than Labels’ (Schwartz and Blumstein 1976); and ‘Bisexuality: A Choice Not an Echo’ (‘Orlando’ 1978).

2 Bisexuality was ‘rediscovered’ as a cultural phenomenon in the 1980s and again in the 1990s, although in vastly different social contexts. Women’s magazines of the 1980s focused on bisexual men as AIDS vectors, offering tips on how to tell whether your man is on the down low. Weekly news magazines of the 1990s featured serious-looking bisexual women and men on the cover, the better to sell the story of an emergent sexual minority, one related to but distinct from the lesbian and gay community.

3 Over the past 30 years, contributors to Bisexual Studies have catalogued, analyzed, and evaluated instances of these, primarily in film and literature. Readers not familiar with this discourse may wish to consult Bryant (1997), who provides an encyclopaedic account of bi characters in a wide range of films, organized around cultural ideas about bisexual attraction. Examining the critical work produced in Bisexual Studies, Roberts (2011) addresses the limitations of textual analysis based on stereotypes, tropes, and narratives.

4 He directed as well as wrote Both Ways; Radley Metzger directed Score. Jerry Douglas was something of a Renaissance man in twentieth-century American gay culture. A few years before his death in 2021, he gave a lengthy interview in which he reflected on his work as writer and director of plays and films (Nastasi 2017). In addition, he created and edited Manshots magazine, wrote books on directing and acting in pornography, and published a novel and story collection.

5 As the reviewers for the journal pointed out, neither movie fits easily into the category of pornography, despite their graphic depictions of sexual activity. Indeed, researching Score’s distribution and reception, Hook (2017) shows how the movie occupies a ‘liminal space’ among three erotic film genres: sexploitation, softcore, and hardcore. I thank Jacob Engelberg for bringing this article to my attention. Its ambiguity may also have to do with the fact that Score began its life as an Off-Broadway play, written and directed by Jerry Douglas. In the New York Times review, Mel Gussow (1970) sounded ambivalent about the value of nudity and simulated sex in the theatre: ‘But beneath the pseudo-sophisticated surface, the play is not very different from a pornographic paperback. Except that the price of tickets runs as high as $10.’

6 Note the tautology at work in this code. If the representation of bisexuality requires visible evidence of same-sex and other-sex attractions in order to be legible (Roberts 2013), then bisexual characters can only ever be seen as insatiable.

7 To be clear: at stake in the current competition is Elvira’s seduction of Betsy. But with time running out, Jack and Elvira meet privately later that night and make a side bet. If Elvira has not had sex with Betsy before midnight, Jack is free to fuck Eddie. Unlike the wife, they view the husband as there for the taking, an assumption we will return to later.

8 In a detailed analysis of this code, Roberts (2013) explains how the spatial and temporal dimensions of bisexuality intersect with those of the cinema. With bisexuality and in the cinema, presence, duration, and order determine how meaning is expressed and understood.

9 For Foucault, there exists no space apart from, or outside of, the social space, which may explain why politically motivated critics find his formulation of transgression frustrating (see, for example, Wilson 1993).

10 Investigating the contentious discourse around bisexual transgression in Anglo-American scholarship, Engelberg offers a measured perspective: ‘[T]he identification of bisexuality’s alignment with and enactment of transgression does not necessarily spell its capacity to be celebrated, its political or social radicalism, or its operation outside society and culture. Instead, it is with acknowledgement of this alignment through which we can trace bisexuality’s illumination of certain rules of social epistemology, not from the outside, but from within’ (2022, 40).

11 Some of this textual analysis appeared in separate critical reviews of the movies (see Roberts 2017, 2022). My consideration of bisexual transgression and appreciation for imperfect texts here are the outcome of examining them together.

12 As Hook astutely observes, ‘match-on-action cuts […] shift us between the pairs so as to suggest continuity between the two couplings and actively work to structure the viewer into what might be called a truly bisexual gaze’ (2017, 293).

13 For Hook (2017), the release of ‘dual cuts’ (one with and one without graphic male-on-male action) indicates the role heteronormativity plays in the division of erotic film categories.

14 This scene takes place earlier the same day. Seen from Betsy’s point of view, the mirror reflects Eddie’s physical self while eliding her own, perhaps suggesting (to her) his preference for the homoerotic.

15 Unlike Score, swinging in Both Ways is a strictly heterosexual affair. At a neighbourhood party, Janet and Don each have sex with the other-sex partner of another married couple, but there is no sexual contact between the female participants, and the other male participant firmly removes Don’s wandering hand from his buttocks.

16 That is, the mirror is where the fictional world of the movie and the historical world of its viewers converge. In replicating part of the diegesis as a moving image within it, the mirror hails us as spectators, proffering images of same-sex or other-sex coupling for our recognition and gratification. The thing is, while these images may be construed as homosexual or heterosexual, the gaze the mirror structures is bisexual. In other words, its effect is not unlike that of the cross-cutting in Score.

17 Consider, for instance, a professor deciding whether she should include Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915) in her film history course. If she does, she risks the perception that she condones its use of pernicious racial stereotypes. That no matter how many warnings and how much contextualization she provides, students will still be outraged by its inclusion on her syllabus. If she does not, she forfeits an opportunity not just to examine one of the first examples of cross-cutting and continuity editing in early cinema, but also to explore the intricate relation of artefacts and the contexts that produce them. Upon reflection, however, she realizes that there is another option: present Within Our Gates (Micheaux 1920) as the primary text and Birth of a Nation as a secondary one. Each film uses cross-cutting to generate ideas about race relations in America during this period, but to very different ends. If students are to understand Micheaux’s film as a response to Griffith’s (Siomopoulos 2006), both must be seen in order to appreciate their cultural conversation.

18 Indeed, these movies have shown us just how unreliable mirrors are as reflectors of reality. In Score, the bathroom mirror presents Betsy with a reflection of her marriage in which her husband’s same-sex attractions may exclude her. In Both Ways, the bedroom mirror reflects for viewers a space of intimacy in which either same-sex or other-sex attractions can exist. What mirrors offer, then, is a partial or selective image of what they reproduce.