Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/497

So, the bisexual in society is both healthier (in that he expresses the relaxed safe state of the animal) and unhealthier (in that he is inefficient, anxious, nervous, temperamental, saint-psycopathish, inspired-depressed, and restless) in society than the unisexual. But because the bisexual exhibits the anxiety of living in a society of which he is very aware—nothing less in America than a unisexual-bisexual culture—he seems unhealthier. His troubles and discontents are always rippling over him. Yet, as much be remembered, the bisexual somehow endures, always lives longer than one expects, bounces back when one is least prepared—the unisexual caves in sooner or later before an inner crisis.

Given their respective human and social natures, the unisexual (who is social) is better in action, no Hamlet he, better in war, better generally at succeeding, but he has in his rigidity no capacity to take the shocks of psychic life—so his body rots or breaks or dries up. The bisexual—often so inept in social life—is yet brilliant in it, and I say he lasts, he does not die of cancer nearly so often (not unless he or she is a bisexual who strangled half-consciously their nature, and enforced it into the unisexual mold—but that is the condition of half the Americans alive) and what is most interesting, is that the bisexual is now beginning to be successful in the business world, mainly because America above all countries I know (except Mexico perhaps) is developed and progressively more permissive to bisexuality. (Perhaps that is the secret of its “strength” as Life Magazine will always declare to us radicals.)