TRY SEXUALITY
By Luis Amate Perez

Today more than ever, Black women are declaring their sexual independence with confidence—and they’re flipping the script on men who think they have a lock on being on the DL.

Techno music blares from the speakers of an on-campus nightclub at the women’s liberal arts college that Nzingha attends. After hours of studying, she was up for some chit-chat, a little bump-and-grind on the dance floor, and maybe even a weekend fling. She’s barely through the door when another Black female student steps to her, saying, “Hi, I’m Cori. Do you have plans for the night?” After politely letting Cori know that her sexual preference does not include women, Nzingha makes her way to the ladies’ room to freshen up and get into groove mode for the night. But after emerging from the restroom, Nzingha’s jaw drops when she peeps that Cori had already made a connection—but now she was pushing up on a man! What in the world was going on...?

Variations of this scenario have been playing out with increasing frequency on college campuses, in nightclubs, and even in corporate boardrooms throughout the nation. According to Antoinette Quarshie, a Black woman in her thirties with bisexual experience, it’s not so much that the percentage of bisexual women is on the rise; rather, it’s the newfound cultural acceptance of the lifestyle that is bringing more bisexual Black women out in the open.

“Everything’s a fad!” says Quarshie, a gender studies doctoral candidate at New York’s Columbia University, in response to the growing number of bisexuals among Black women. “When you read popular publications, it seems to be a trend. These things have always been going on, but now, you can bring it in the open.” Indeed, society at large, spurred along by the media and entertainment industries, has become increasingly more nonchalant (if not more tolerant) in its response to the bisexual lifestyle, so it was only a matter of time before the Average Jane began to follow suit. But the apparent increase in the number of openly bisexual women can only lead one to wonder if bisexuality is an established way of life, a fad, or just an excuse to wild out sexually.

There are many women who will say that bisexuality, or “fluidity,” is not a mere trend, but a new stage of evolution. Traditionally, it’s been considered unseemly for women to take pleasure in their bodies, but there’s no happy medium: too much pleasure and they’re sluts; too little, and they’re prudes. Fluidity allows the blurring of sexual demarcations and the shattering of taboos because it makes it okay for women to enjoy sex, and with anyone they like, regardless of gender.

Bisexual singer/songwriter Robin Renée, 38, doesn’t see her lifestyle as a trend at all. “Every couple of years, people come up with the idea that sexuality is trendy now,” she says. “If anything, people are freer to realize who they are, whether that means falling in love with another woman or just trying it out.”

Such views aren’t unknown to the scientific community, as evidenced by the comments of renowned sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, recently the subject of Kinsey, a biopic starring Liam Neeson: “It would encourage clearer thinking on sexual matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds.”

Continued in Jewel Magazine Issue #1 - Subscribe Now!