COMMITMENTS : A Different Kind of Love Affair : Bernard Cooper’s and Bia Lowe’s 20-year relationship breaks all the ‘rules’ of male-female friendships--especially since these former lovers are gay.

Bernard Cooper and Bia Lowe call each other at least once a day. They eat at each other’s house, schmooze, argue, watch TV, endlessly discuss their work as writers. They also celebrate holidays together, and recently went on vacation to Hawaii as a foursome with their respective lovers.

Cooper’s gay. Lowe’s a lesbian. In college, they were briefly a heterosexual couple. Twenty years later, they are best friends.

This kind of enduring intimacy is rare enough, but Cooper and Lowe also break every stereotypical rule about non-sexual relationships--between men and women, gay men and lesbians, even between partners long since separated--where sex or hostility is assumed to be a barrier.

They are, instead, a testament to the glorious complexity of human connection. Yet they also are celebrating something essentially old-fashioned: a profound and loving friendship.

One rainy afternoon, the two friends sit on opposite sides of the dining room table in the immaculate 1940s Franklin Hills ranch house Cooper shares with his lover of 11 years, therapist Brian Miller. Cooper and Lowe are trying to define their relationship--not for the first time.

Their separate essays on the subject recently appeared in the anthology “Sister & Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together” (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), edited by Joan Nestle and the late John Preston, in a public commemoration of their bond that seems most appropriate for two careers on parallel tracks.

Cooper at 42 and Lowe at 44 are both respected literary essayists. Cooper is a warmhearted chronicler of human relations who finds truth in the accumulation of detail. Lowe is an edgy stylist, a nature-lover, with a metaphysical bent.

Both have books of essays coming out soon. Lowe’s “Wild Ride” (HarperCollins) is already garnering admiring reviews. Cooper just won a 1995 O. Henry Award for “Truth Serum,” his essay about Lowe, also the title piece of his book (Houghton Mifflin). For another essay collection, “Maps to Anywhere” (University of Georgia Press, 1990), Cooper won the 1991 PEN/Hemingway Award. And he’s published a well-received novel, “A Year of Rhymes” (Viking, 1993), based on his boyhood in Los Angeles.

Cooper is a gracious host and uproarious jokester. Lowe practices the art of deadpan. Today, they complete each other’s sentences like an old married couple, and tease each other like siblings or the roommates they once were. Typical writers, they analyze everything--serious one minute, squeezing silly meanings out of innocent comments the next.

“It’s going to be hard to describe my relationship with Bernard,” Lowe begins slowly. “I mean, we talk to each other at least once a day, sometimes more. And there are times when there’s not even a conversation going on, where it’s just . . . “

“Sounds . . , “ Cooper starts laughing.

” . . . chewing . . , “ Lowe mimics eating lunch.

“Sometimes we just make weird noises . . . gibberish . . . “

“Singing,” Lowe contributes. “Weird songs.”

Now Cooper is roaring with laughter.

“Just take our word for it, OK? It’s really silly stuff.”

*

Verbal playfulness, along with trust, are foundation stones on which they built their friendship--and subsequent relationship. She is his “compatriot” in the country of writers. He is her “twin,” a reminder of her bond with three older brothers. Most of all, Lowe says, they are always “there to support each other through whatever comes up during the day.”

These days that means agonizing over writing dilemmas. In the past, there were also relationship problems. These included Lowe’s two difficult girlfriends--one mentally ill, the other a lesbian separatist who saw in Cooper “the hirsute embodiment of patriarchy”--and Cooper’s “absurd” affairs during his coming-out period, when he was “so hungry I felt a little bit like a duckling who would follow whatever moved.”

Now they are both in solid relationships.

Living proof of the all-encompassing nature of that much-abused term “family values,” the two couples send each other Valentine cards, visit and fight over the remote control. Cooper is usually the cook at these gatherings because of his strict adherence to a low-fat, no-salt diet.

They usually spend holidays together as “surrogate family,” although their circle also includes such relatives as Cooper’s 89-year-old father; his recently widowed sister-in-law, Nancy, and Lowe’s brothers, mother and stepfather.

Cooper and Lowe met as art students at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In her essay, Lowe writes: “I like to say the Earth shook the day I met him.” That was Feb. 11, 1971, the day of the Sylmar earthquake. Fleeing her apartment for the companionship of the dorm, Lowe was introduced to Cooper that night at a local restaurant in the midst of aftershocks.

“I was first stuck by his voice--earthy and masculine but buoyant, playful, almost musical,” she writes. Later, “when he sat cross-legged on my bed and listened to gospel records with his eyes closed, I could stare shamelessly at the length and curl of his eyelashes.”

Cooper was intrigued, first by Lowe’s artwork--”long hieroglyphic columns” made out of fragments of Time magazine--then by her “translucent skin and hazel eyes.”

Their first move toward real intimacy was sharing family histories. They were, Lowe says, “veterans of upheaval.” Her father was an abusive alcoholic who committed suicide. Cooper, a Los Angeles native, is (like Lowe) the youngest child with three brothers. But his brothers have all died--Robert and Gary from cancer long ago, Ron of heart failure last year.

What really drew them together, however, was confiding their mutual suspicion, their terror, that they might be gay.

They spent evenings recounting taunts they had both endured at junior high and high school and sharing secret crushes--Cooper for Robert Conrad in “The Wild, Wild West” and Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, and Lowe for Greta Garbo. Lowe had never had sex, Cooper only one fraught encounter with a woman. In the charged atmosphere of shared confidences, they decided to go to bed.

“And why not?” Lowe writes. “I trusted Bernard more than anyone I knew. We were best friends and we were attracted to each other. It was perfect.”

Says Cooper: “The only word to describe our first sexual encounter is premeditated .” They gave themselves weeks to get used to the idea, “like a couple catering a large party.” Now, like an old couple, they squabble about details.

Cooper: They spent the morning of The Day “arms about each other” at Descanso Gardens.

Lowe: Descanso Gardens? No way. They decided to have sex the moment it occurred to them, then had ritual showers in preparation.

They are agreed, though, that in their three years of living together, they loved each other dearly. There was also relief in joining “the grand adventure of heterosexuality” and seeing their love validated by “movies and billboards and books.” They had sex that was “both playful and pleasurable,” Cooper says.

Yet heterosexual sex only opened up the floodgates of their homosexual desire, especially for Cooper. Lowe urged therapy. Cooper, in his essay, gives a funny yet troubling account of a doctor’s attempt to use sodium pentothal and Ritalin to eradicate his homosexual yearnings. They only grew stronger.

The inevitable breakup was miserable for both, although six months later they were seeing each other again--as friends--needing support, advice and their old camaraderie as they explored their new lives.

Now, they can make a joke of that time. “I’d say, ‘Do you want to go to a movie?’ ” Cooper says. “And she’d say, ‘Not until you’ve had therapy!’ ”

The sexual aspect of their relationship is definitely history, they say. And they reject the label bisexual.

“Sometimes ‘bisexuals’ tend to be--if they’re with the yin, they’re looking for the yang. It’s sort of a statement about how committed they’re willing to be,” Lowe says. She’s not opposed to the idea of having sex with a man again, but her attraction to women is “something older, less articulate,” something that makes her feel organically connected with the natural world.

As for Cooper, “I admire Bia’s beauty and physicality, and my sexual relationship with Bia was this formative, seminal time in my life, but I also feel that the experience of coming out was so monumental and overwhelming--a different kind of sexual awakening.

“For me it’s not a matter of sex being unsatisfying with a woman but that it’s more gratifying with a man.”

*

Being secure in their sexuality and their friendship, they’re baffled by the few negative reactions they’ve had, often from gay people who can’t understand a connection between a gay man and a lesbian.

As for those who would perhaps have married them off and condemned their homosexuality, Cooper says: “That sort of bigotry really drives me crazy. One of the blessings of my relationship with Bia and with my lover, Brian, is that I know how fine and valuable those people are. I feel my life is filled with the living contradiction to what fundamentalists might think of us.”

Of course, every close relationship has its pitfalls. Cooper and Lowe have some instinctive, limit-setting rules that include being less physically demonstrative with each other not only to keep some distance between them, but also out of respect for each other’s lover.

“It’s hard, even for (her partner) Susan, who loves Bernard,” Lowe says. “She knows that there are ways in which she can’t have the kind of intimacy I have with Bernie, that I consult him all the time about writing matters, and even talk about her.” For this reason, they say, the friendship is a living work in progress, continually being redefined.

One sure thing is that it is a “lifetime partnership,” Lowe says. Recently, she was considering a move back to San Francisco, where she grew up. But Cooper says: “Over my dead body!”

Says Lowe: “The irony of it is that Bernard and I still have each other, and we accept each other more than we did (as a couple), when who we were seemed to threaten the relationship. Now who we are enriches it.”