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This week, in honour of Pride month, I wanted to re-publish an updated piece that was originally written in 2020.
I’d love to keep talking to all of you. I hope you’re having a fantastic Pride month.
Are you bi? That’s okay. They exist now.
‘The Other Two’
It was my final year of high school, and I was bored shitless in my Religion and Ethics class. Everyone agreed it was a black hole of a subject, even the teachers. It didn’t count towards your final numbers for university applications. It was a lazy period where we did ‘quiet study’ and occasionally answered an ethical provocation that the teacher threw across the room.
How important is it to fit in?
Is downloading a song illegally really a victimless crime?
What are you saying to the world about yourself when you don’t tuck your shirt in?
You know, hardcore stuff.
We didn’t debate the stuff we all wanted to talk about. We didn’t have the actual, real ethical discussions that were just below the surface of the every day in 2004.
Will this school be underwater in ten years because of climate change?
Isn’t it pretty fucked up there are only white kids at this school?
Are gay people only broadly tolerable when they’re flamboyant fashion accessories in romantic comedies?
I was a presumed heterosexual. Everyone was. Anything else wasn’t discussed or acknowledged. We were a good school and we were lucky kids.
So we were all straight.
This particular afternoon, there were a group of kids having a discussion a few seats in front of me.
‘What do you reckon?’ one of the boys asked one of the girls. ‘Could you date a chick?’
She was folding a corner of her school diary over and over again. She was the only girl in the discussion. Around her, three boys sat on the edge of their seats, eager for her reply.
‘Ummmmm,’ she said, biting her lip and then smiling. ‘Yeah. Yeah sure. I think everyone’s bi, you know? When you get right down to it. We’re all human. Yeah?’
All of the boys smiled and nodded eagerly.
‘Yeah.’
I tried to imagine any of the leering boys being comfortable enough to kiss one another. After all, they were all bi. Why not grab your bro and give him a pash?
In the schoolyard, young female bisexuality was permitted. I figured it was because straight dudes were supposed to find lesbian sex hot.
But I was confused. Thoughts of lesbian sex did nothing for me. What did that mean? That I was an illegitimate heterosexual? But I liked girls. I wanted to marry a woman. And have a family. And boobs are fantastic.
I consulted my sex education manual for information: porn.
I felt bad about porn, but not bad enough to stop watching it. I told myself it was because I was genuinely curious about the mechanics of sex. I wanted to see two people doing it because I wanted to know how it all worked. Because of this, I watched straight people having sex.
In truth, I also wanted to look at those videos because the men were hot.
I wanted to bone men.
Female bisexuality was more than permitted at school, it was encouraged. Girls made out with each other at parties, their cheeks flushed from foul alco-pops, a crowd of boys cheering them on. I wouldn’t presume to know the actual sexual orientation of these young women, but their bisexuality was at the very least performed for straight dudes.
‘Whatever,’ they’d say, putting a lot of energy into making sure they were letting everyone know they were casual about it. ‘I don’t even care.’
When I was young, I equated this with a sexual freedom and playfulness that I envied. If only I had the social confidence to attend a party and just see what happened. In my fantasies, these events would become free-love orgies where clothes were redundant, and genitals were irrelevant.
But men couldn’t be bisexual. Through a combination of straight-boy-turned-gay porn, jokes on Will & Grace, and the absorption of general bullshit, I whole-heartedly believed that male bisexuality was code for closeted gay dude.
Ergo, I must be gay.
By the time I was at uni, I’d settled into chaste homosexuality with a sense of vigour. The title of ‘gay’ allowed me to explore parts of my masculinity that had previously felt inaccessible to me. Printed, colourful shirts. Expressing myself with my hands. Close, uncomplicated friendships with women. All of these felt unattainable to me if I was a straight guy.
Actual sexual contact with a guy remained an aloof trigger for anxiety and I knew I was sexually attracted to women as well. But if I wasn’t gay then I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
I’ve never been comfortable outside a binary. I’m either doing really well or really shit. I’m either a successful man or I’m not. I’m either straight or gay. In between doesn’t exist.
At 19, I thought I knew what being gay and straight meant. Being straight meant being into football and cars and going to the gym. I wasn’t that dude. I was gay. That meant I was into disco, non-monogamy and going to the gym.
I threw myself into that identity as if my life depended on it. For a while it did. I was desperately unhappy and trying to find myself. But I knew I also fancied women. This confession felt like I was betraying my fellow gay peers.
My attraction to men became more complex. Some guys were straight-up hot. But others I wanted to be friends with. Some I wanted to be mentored by. Others I wanted to become. How sex entered into all of this felt messy and uncomfortable.
I was still operating under a porn-educated assumption that desire was a straight line. If you want to fuck men, you want to fuck men. If you want to fuck women, you want to fuck women.
Well. Duh. I’m bi. But I write that now at the age of 35, and I’ve only become really comfortable in owning that label in my thirties. I married a wonderful woman. I’m a father to two beautiful daughters with that woman. And yes, I’m still bi. My bisexuality is invisible, because I present as straight (sometimes…straight-ish). My sexuality doesn’t really affect my life day to day. But, by all technical definitions, I’m bisexual.
I resisted the label until my thirties because of a misogynistic homophobia that I thought I was intellectually vaccinated against. I wasn’t. I carried around a whole lot of myths that were bullshit.
One was the presumption that a bi dude is just a scared gay dude. My experience and being in a loving, long-term relationship helped me to see the flaws in that idea.
Bi guys in a heterosexual relationship can be monogamous. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. One penis between my partner and I is enough to do everything we want to do. That’s me. I don’t expect it to be the same for everyone else.
Bi guys aren’t liars by nature. They’re not secretive or deceptive. They’re not bad people. In the past, our culture has forced them into becoming that. We’re not trying to trick anyone.
A healthy sex drive is a healthy sex drive. Lusting after both sexes doesn’t make anyone disordered or in need of a dampening down. I’m less horny than I was a teenager (thank fuck), but I’ve stopped apologising for having a sexual appetite. I certainly don’t force that appetite upon anyone else, but I had to forgive myself for having sexual desire. It’s okay to want to have sex.
I bump up against bi-phobia frequently, and I don’t know how to wrestle with it.
I wrote extensively about my adolescent sexual journey in my first book, How to Be Happy. I don’t go back to look at the reviews anymore, but when I felt like punishing myself, I would spend time scrolling through different readers’ remarks. A frequent complaint was my resistance to labelling my sexuality, even at the end of the book. I thought my bisexuality was implicit – I fancied guys and girls, and I just happened to end up with a girl. But because there was no clear sentence where I spelled this out, some readers – frequently teenagers – were upset because they felt I’d left something unresolved. But of course, it was unresolved, because that part of me can’t be resolved. It doesn’t need to be. Being attracted to a woman doesn’t erode my previous attraction to men. Or vice versa.
The problem is more complicated in fiction. On two separate occasions, I’ve attempted to write male bisexual characters into play scripts. These works have been produced for major theatre companies that advocate for positions of diversity. But still, male bisexuals are implicitly read as deceptive. If a bi-male character travels from a relationship with a woman to a relationship with a man – then we read him as ‘gay’ the entire time. If a bi-male character travels the other way, from gay to straight, then we run the risk of somehow ‘erasing’ his homosexuality, or ‘correcting’ it. Neither is true: the damn character is just bi.
Oh please, it’s 2020. Aren’t we all bi now?
‘The Good Place’
I’ve struggled with placing myself on the LGBT+ spectrum because I don’t feel I’m oppressed enough to be on there. People have fought so hard for their rights, and I’ve been told – point blank by LGBT+ friends that I love – that I am privileged because of my bi-invisibility, my race and my cis maleness. And I feel that if I speak up too publicly as part of the LGBT+ spectrum, then I overshadow other voices who don’t have the same privileges that I do.
Of course, I’m privileged. I won’t argue with that. I don’t write this to challenge that notion, nor to take anyone else’s voice away – only to say that…here I am. This is my experience.
Now I can go even further than simply tolerating my bisexuality, I’m thankful for it. My queerness is a gift. It’s the exit hatch from the claustrophobia of masculinity. It allows me an outside view. It gives me a sense of humour.
Here, queerness is more than simply a sexual orientation. Queerness is simply being ‘other’ in the eyes of gender norms. Through queerness, I can forgive myself for having an interest in needlepoint as a teenager. Or having feelings towards my child that may be called ‘maternal’. It gives me room to forgive myself for not being interested in football or cheap beer. It means I can start to take an interest in fashion and cologne.
Queerness is a vehicle for spiritual transcendence. It gets us out of our bodies, burdened by millennia of prescribed meaning and political manipulation, and onto a higher plane. Nor is it a cognitive process, although certainly embracing our queer selves can change the way we think. For me, reading queer theory, celebrating queer culture, and coming to peace with my own queerness, has been a spiritual journey. Gender binaries are repugnant. It’s 2023, and in the young people I frequently teach, the performative bisexuality I spied in my youth seems to be dissolving into actual, authentic indifference towards bisexuality.
It makes me grateful and excited for the future.