On my sexuality (part 4)

In 2013, the Pew Research Center published a study looking at the ‘coming out experience’ for different LGBT groups. According to their research, 77% of gay men and 71% of gay women are out to ‘all or most’ of the important people in their life. For bisexual women, that figure drops to 33%. For bisexual men, it’s 12%.

In 2014, I wrote a series of blog posts called ‘On My Sexuality’. Re-reading them now, what really stands out is how light they are on any actual analysis of who and how I love. I think they still hold up pretty well as pieces of writing – and as pieces of decidedly erotic writing in places – but the title is definitely misleading. Whether intentionally or not, I skirted round ‘sexuality’ as a serious topic, in favour of a set of scenarios that make one thing clear without really putting it into words: given the right opportunity, I would fuck – and indeed have fucked – other men.

But what does that mean? In the six years since I wrote those three posts, I’m not sure I’ve come close to figuring out an answer to that question, mainly because I’ve never sat down and approached the whole subject of sexuality head-on. As a result, I’ve always unthinkingly described myself as straight, and no-one – even the people who know I’ve had sex with men – has ever challenged that. Even if it was a socially acceptable thing to do, why would they? I’m married to a woman, all of my significant exes are women, I only date women now, and the overwhelming majority of the erotica I write is F/M in some way. In most respects, I am about as straight-presenting as it gets.

And yet, and yet… Am I really straight or not? To what extent do I get to answer that question myself, based on how I feel, rather than allowing the answer to exist as a function of what I do and how society sees me? And is this really an area of my life where I should allow people just to assume?

Perhaps more importantly, I’ve been thinking recently about whether I have a moral obligation to stop reflexively using a label that obscures or downright erases an important facet of my sexuality. I carry around with me a helluva lot of privilege: I’m a white, able-bodied, educated, middle-class, cis-gendered man – in many ways, it would be hard to find someone more privileged than me in the sex blogger community. By referring to myself as straight, I’m missing an opportunity to talk about men’s sexuality in a way that might help people, and I have no good reason to avoid those conversations.

It’s true that my freedom to live and love exactly as I please, without fear of backlash, is inhibited by how society still views polyamory, but even the impact of that is mitigated by the other markers of protected status that I carry with me. It’s also easy to hide, though again there’s a not unreasonable argument that by concealing our lifestyle from family and certain friends, Liv and I are contributing to the stigma around non-monogamy, when we’re exactly the kind of people who should be using our privilege to normalise it.

That feels like a more complicated issue to unpick, especially now that we have a small child, who will necessarily feel the impact of any decisions we make regarding the way we present our relationship to the world. On sexuality though, I can see a much clearer, more linear connection between the ability I have to speak up, and my responsibility to do so.

On the other hand, I empathise a lot with the sentiments expressed by Molly, Honey, and Violet in this Twitter thread on a new blogging meme for trans and queer writers. Even when I’m writing or fantasising about sex with other men – even when I’m actually having it – I still can’t shake the feeling that it would be performative, or (worse) appropriative, to claim any sort of queer identity. That the privilege I have as a straight-passing, white, cis man is exactly why I shouldn’t go round making grand statements about the various facets and nuances of my sexuality. I haven’t put in the hard yards, I haven’t suffered, and if I did tell people that no, I’m not straight, I have almost total confidence that I’d face no meaningful negative consequences whatsoever; in fact, I’d probably get praised by the same people in my life who’d feel (at the very least) uncomfortable talking to an openly trans person or watching two heavily-pierced, leather-wearing men kiss in the street (for example).

If I’m honest, I also feel like a bit of a fraud whenever I start to talk to people about enjoying sex with men. I’m hugely inexperienced, for one thing, and while that shouldn’t matter in the slightest, it just makes me more aware of how heavily both my fantasies and my actual encounters are skewed towards women. Yes, I fancy men – but not often, and rarely to the extent that I fancy women.

All that said, by any standard definition of the word, I am bisexual. I am not solely attracted to people of one gender. I may not have had any romantic feelings toward men, but I’ve definitely had, and continue to have, strong sexual feelings about people of other genders, a few of which I’ve acted on, and many more which I’d love to act on in the future. I’ve just never known whether I’m bisexual enough to claim it as a label, however ridiculous that sounds.

I think that’s ultimately why the ‘12%’ stat had such an impact on me. For all my doubts and misgivings when it comes to how I should use my voice, the fact remains that if someone in my position can’t hold up his hand and say “no, actually, I’m not straight”, is it any surprise that 88% of all the other bi men out there don’t feel comfortable doing so either? Rather than continually questioning whether I meet some arbitrary behavioural standard for claiming any kind of non-heterosexual identity – a standard I wouldn’t dream of imposing on anyone else who told me they were bi – I should probably recognise that normalisation is most rapidly achieved by enough people sticking up their hands and saying “this is me.”

Certainly those of us who aren’t at risk of being attacked or marginalised for our sexuality have no reason to hold back. When I look at my life – the people around me, the social circles in which I mix, the events I attend and the place I visit – I can’t think of one plausible threat to my safety that would result from telling someone that I’m not straight. There are family members and perhaps some friends who would feel uncomfortable knowing that about me, but I don’t believe for one second that I’d be attacked or ostracised for it. Not given all the other ways in which I present as sexually conventional; as an entirely unthreatening adherent to social norms.

So from now on, I shan’t be referring to myself as ‘straight’. Not here, not on official forms, and not if asked about my sexuality by friends or new people I meet. I haven’t fully decided how I will respond to those enquiries, or to what extent I feel qualified to claim labels like ‘queer’, but for the first time I’m happy to think of myself as bisexual, and to put aside for now any questions of what that means or how I want to express it.

I’ve had sex with men. I think about having sex with men. I hope to have sex with men in the future. If that doesn’t make me bisexual, I’m not sure what does!