The Bisexuals

Bernhardt J. Hurwood

Sexologist, sometime film critic, coattail-jumper, and definitive Burt Reynolds biographer (YOU figure it out) Bernhardt Hurwood made his name in the quick-buck business in the early seventies with the legendarily obscure The Girl, The Massage, and Everything. He followed it up with The Bisexuals before the quick-sex-book market petered out, no pun intended. (He has since made his living, when not writing about Burt Reynolds, editing anthologies about the supernatural. All of them went out of print equally as fast as did The Bisexuals.)

The book is a series of long interviews Hurwood conducted with people (almost all women) who identify themselves as bisexual, within the context of the book. While there is stuff of substance to be found therein, tantalizing glimpses at what could have become a solid, worthwhile sociological study, that wasn't the market Hurwood, nor his publisher, was after; the book wants to tread the line of prurience (without actually overstepping the bounds), not wallow in the watering holes of academia.

Those looking for the sexually explicit are advised to look elsewhere. So are those looking for a serious treatment of bisexuality. For that matter, just about everyone is. Worth a read if you want to sift through the chaff to find what little wheat there is and see what might have been.