Bisexuality: 'Person, not sex, attracts’

The following article was written by my father in 1979 and published in the National Catholic Reporter in December 1979 as well as Today's Parish, of which he was editor, in the January 1980 publication.

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By ROBERT BARR

AS I GET OLDER, I find my sexual capacity on the wane. (I'm told I can stop saying it's only temporary. It's been several years this time.)
But only in my body. My spiritual capacity for sex is on the increase. I mean the physical drive is becoming more integrated with the rest of me. What Father Leonard tried to tell his concupiscent sophomores at good old Spalding High 35 years ago (and we thought it was just pious pap to keep us pure) — that orgasm and altruism mix as you mature — turns out to be true after all.
We didn't want to buy his propaganda.
Naturally! For a child, it is more blessed to receive than to give. But now I see it and I feel it. Sex is for person-to-person.
Thus the sex object became more than just a shiny centerfold; one does grow up to be 15. And then it became more than just luscious, living shapes; one does get to be 25. And now that I'm still more mature, and my loins are cooling down a bit, the object of my sexuality turns out to be even more than just the female as female. It turns out to be: her whole person. One does get to be 48. My sex object has become a subject: she.
Persons - young and old, Hollywood beauty and spiritual beauty — have all become sex "'objects" for me.
So why not male and female?
Physically - both anatomically and, especially, hormonally — it turns out that men and women are far more nearly identical sexually than we thought.
Psychologically ... Sure I had a mother I loved and a father I identified with. But I had a father I loved, too, and a mother I identified with, wanted deep within me to be like. Yes, in the balance my psychology ended up shaped like my anatomy: male.
But in another upbringing, perhaps a perfectly loving upbringing, couldn't it have been otherwise?

X and Y chromosomes by Nathan Devery. Licensed through Adobe Stock.

I mean to say, I ended up preponderantly male psychosexually. Surely not 100 per cent. Who's 100 per cent? Everybody knows there aren't any emotionally healthy machos older than, say, their 20s. Isn't it likely that everybody is bisexual, both physically (in the hormones), and psychologically, being the offspring of parents of different sexes? Really, now — to appeal to those of you who have had lots of experience of life — how often does human reality end up all black or all white? Isn't it likely that human persons are all ranged along a continuum, a spectrum, in this area as in so many others — from 100 per cent heterosexual to zero per cent heterosexual, with nobody exactly on the 100 or on the zero?

Sexuality Spectrum. Licensed through Adobe Stock

Surely each of us is, at least a little bit, bisexual — capable, in the proper circumstances, of lovingly and rewardingly expressing our sexuality with a person of either sex
Ann Landers knows. They can be married, with eight kids.
If I'm really honest with myself, I can see and feel — via a kind of extrapolation, interior and visceral and not just mental from teenage fantasy to real live bodies to the female person as female to the female person as person — that it's really the person as person that I desire sexually, or could, or ought to, in my mind, heart, and loins. So why not the male person?
The law of God, you say? Come on, let's grow up theologically too. We say we don't hold an anthropomorphic God, a kind of great puppeteer, old, male (and hetero-sexual, may one suppose?), so let's really not hold one. No, God works the wonders of his providence, of his love and his laws, right down inside the concrete, living, individual natures he creates and sustains.