Come As You Are

I think I first figured out that I might be bisexual when I was in college. It’s hard for me to say when or how, as various alternate tales compete in my mind as the “official” truth. The first time I saw gay porn? When I realized my masturbation fantasies involved me switching parts, being the woman, then being the man? My identification with the gay movement? All of them sound equally silly, embarrassing and worse, perhaps just a personality hiccup and not a real “truth” at all. None of them sound like anything that approaches a realization of Identity with a capital I. And that, more or less, is indicative of my entire life as a bisexual: dubious, occasionally embarrassing, obscured.

    Being a bisexual guy, as the term exists at the moment, is an exercise in frustration and confusion, and while I stand by that confusion as truthful and great (get me drunk and I’ll say it’s everything from the basis for art that I like to what I’d like America to stand for) I think it’s a basically flawed identity in sore need of some fixing.

    Oh, some details might be called for here. The pertinent facts of my life are these: I am twenty-nine years old and incredibly happily married to a woman. I’ve dated and slept with exactly the same number of boys as girls. My feelings about the two sexes break down somewhat like this: I more easily form emotional attachments with women but because of that have found men mysterious and intriguing the way I’m sure my more hetero counterparts must find women. If I were to put it in those terms, I’d say I’m 70% into girls and 30% into boys. There. Done.

    Now, back to what I was saying. Bisexuality is a disappointing, suspect, utterly chaotic identity. It seems to exist in only the foggiest regions of people’s brains, like Pol Pot the geographic location of Myanmar. They’re not sure what it is, but they’re pretty sure it’s lame and/or bad.

    Gay men that I’ve dated in the past, the most recent being five years ago, were terribly suspicious. Aside from a few unexpected trysts with fellows, the first guy I officially dated was the president of an LGBT campus organization I decided to join. I should have known at the stunned silence on the first day when, delusioned by the supposed redemptive power of coming out, I offered that I was bi. The president of the group still decided to go out with me, but the majority of our time together consisted of long, accusatory conversations on car hoods. I broke up with him a few weeks later and was tearfully informed that I wasn’t able to love, to let myself really commit to a relationship with him, which I accepted as code for my waffling, noncommittal nature as a bisexual.

    A few other fellows were more explicit in their condemnations. It became clear that if I mentioned that I was bi rather than full-on gay to people in broad daylight, problems were bound to ensue. It was one thing when a person was drunk and trying to pick you up, but in the light of day, their HRC political consciences would begin to prick at

them and their eyes would narrow. Relentless questions about the exact nature of bisexuality, like “If you’re with me you’re gay, if you’re with a woman you’re straight, so what’s bisexual about you? You’re just afraid to admit you’re gay.” It’s a compelling argument which is hard to argue with, except that it isn’t true for me at all. I’m bisexual. Period. Which seems kind of like saying Definitely Maybe.

    I know this about myself due to some inexplicable feeling that it is true, backed up by certain facts. I’m attracted to men and women, for one thing. Dating a man never felt wrong or weird, but it fit in my life in a different way than dating women. My relationships with men were much more mysterious, much more charged with all that mystery that one sees in old movies between men and women. To me, they were inexplicable creatures whom I wanted things from and feared in some way and this was the source of a lot of the sexual excitement and attraction. That mystery of what might happen.

    Incidentally, I’ve never really felt comfortable around men as a group, any of them, which is curious. I feel fine in mixed groups, but alone things get a little tense for me, particularly if they’re straight men. There’s something about the absence of romantic potential that confuses me even more and leaves me without any clear signposts. For example, if I touch a lady or a gay man on the arm, I’m aware of the fourteen things that could mean. If I touch a straight man on the arm, beats the hell out of me what that means or doesn’t mean.

    These feelings and this excitement of dating men I could only experience in fits and starts with the gay men I dated. I simply couldn’t catch a breath from being suspected to find any kind of cohesive Identity. Bisexuality just doesn’t seem to realistically exist in the gay movement where, despite those optimistic Bs everywhere. It’s a curiosity akin to gay republicans. Among gay people, I was Gay Until Graduation, in the closet or a sexual dilletante, taking the fun parts of gay identity and leaving off the hard part of existing in a society that hates you to run to the safety of hetero relationships.

    As time went on, the sense became that I was as much “in the closet” to them about liking girls as I was in the closet about liking boys to girls. Not that I made much of a secret of it to either. But over time, I did start to use shorthand. I just started saying I was
gay as I was dating boys at the time and left out the unseemly truth. In the way that these things often do, however, this stopped working when I started dating a girl I had completely fallen for. I lied to her when we first met, the same way I was lying to everyone, for simplicity’s sake only, I had convinced myself. Later I had to retract my gayness in order to date her, thereby becoming an incredibly tired hetero cliché in the process.

    I tried to believe the things I read in Bi/Queer Theory textbooks. I truly wanted to believe in third-sex-escaping-dual-thinking, range-of-sexuality stuff, but the reality was I could seem to do nothing but become a cliché of one group or another. A walking definitely maybe.

    The reaction from straight people shared most of the same concerns and suspicions, although with a less political and more personal bent. (I say this as a male. If you’re a bisexual woman, there’s the added weight of the tons of semen spilt over the idea of you rather than the reality that can be an additional disappointment.) In my case, my admission of my own bisexuality to women I’ve dated suddenly carried the distinct possibility of AIDS that they hadn’t ascribed to me when they assumed I was straight. Then there

were their accumulated memories of the boys they all seemed to have taken to the prom who were curiously disinterested in kissing and later came out as gay.

   I don’t mean to disparage these worries or experiences, however. Regardless of one’s individual feelings on the subject, social definition of heterosexuals is so old and codified that it’s hard to expect anyone not to opt out of the real or perceived snickers people will have at their expense. A common nightmare of a straight person dating a bisexual, the whispers of “Oh my God, how can he not see that she is totally a lesbian! Their relationship is such a sham! Tee hee!” As I went along it became clear that, be my date gay or straight, my bisexuality seemed to elicit in everyone a groan-inducing tale of woe. Without the understandable and ever-present politics that existed in my relationships with men, however, my relationships with women tended to be more satisfying. I’ve always liked just being around women, hanging out with them. I can work with them more easily, spend time with them more comfortably. What my relationships lacked in mystery, they made up for in connection.

    Different from my relations with straight women and gay men, were my poor experiences with the actual self-proclaimed bisexuals I’ve hung out with over time. I make the self-proclaimed distinction to point up the difference between being bisexual and being whatever it is Anne Heche claims to be. To be sure, this has been a small group, one which seems to unnecessarily overlap with wife-swappers, and I never managed to date one. A friend of mine and I found a Bi group in the town we lived in at the time. We had looked around on the internet and read what we could find, which was precious little in Texas, and decided to go see what these self-identified bisexuals were like at their weekly get-togethers. We were members of the group for about a year. The large
majority of these bisexuals looked like assistant principals. Boring, and perhaps with secret interests in Star Trek, they thought of themselves as mystics of some sort. Perhaps anyone who lives with the contrast between an idea of themselves as modern day avatars of some commingled god-ness and with a reality of themselves as perverts or traitors floats away to the twenty-third century after awhile.

    All of this has left me as conflicted and confused as I was when I first stumbled upon the fact that I was bi, however that was. Without any smart or coherent talking points or believable characteristics, I’ve only been able to define myself to people by what I’m not (a traitor, indecisive, or making it up to seem cool) rather than by what I am. Complicating this is that I’m into monogamy, so there’s the question of whether I can even still qualify for inclusion in the club. My bi friend asked me that very thing when I told her I was writing this article. Since I’m married and monogamous, how can I be bisexual?

    The only conclusion I can come to on this is that we must have a fundamentally flawed way of self-definition. I think I would have to agree that some sort of definition is inevitable and good. Politically, one has to say that one is something, particularly if you’re being defined in that way by others in order for them to politically deny you something.

    But as I’ve lived as bisexual, I’ve come to think that a difference has to exist between a political Identity and who and what it is we really are and what we do. I have to think that you have to fight for rights and acceptance and to broaden the social landscape, but employing labels can only be a means to that end, and those definitions cannot turn around and define you by proscribing behavior or feelings.

    Most of us are aware of what it’s like to have accumulated assumptions ascribed to various identities weighing us down. It’s been surprising to me to find that a lack of those very assumptions can make interactions and relationships just as fraught. In the same way that an identity carries

with it all these stereotypes and assumptions, the lack of a coherent identity makes people nervous. It’s great that we have a society now where gayness exists in something more than a Three’s Company style joke, but we only seem to broaden out to accept an identity when it has some useful and easily categorized hook. Like gay meaning Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for example. Which is great, but ultimately it has little to do with what people actually do. Not that I think it is the job of entertainment to accurately reflect anything, but the reductive pattern at work, the patterns of political consciousness built on definition affects you. And brave is the soul who will wade out into their life with the knowledge of who they are but no societal vehicle for the expression thereof. But I think, as with all these things, it’s best to go down with the ship.

    What I’d like to happen would be for bisexual people to become the fulfillment of what I read John Waters wish for the gay community in a magazine, for bisexuals to become the dangerous element in society and make things interesting again. There’s something great in the mystery of sexuality, to having people try to figure things out. Creating a space for confusion and being able to relax and enjoy that confusion, to be able to be happy without having to understand a thing completely. Maybe bisexuality could make a place for “definitely maybe” and score a point for freedom over security and recognizable stereotypes. Unlike Myanmar, I don’t think bisexuality is something you can hold in your hand. Maybe that’s what can make things interesting and dangerous, having to accept something that it is by its very nature not a solid. Maybe it can make the confusion and unanswered questions that I still have not seem so crazy when there’s less emphasis on hard and fast identity.

    And maybe that’s the final proof that I’m bisexual, that I can believe a thing like that.
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