Letter from Thomas

I got this letter from a reader, and (with his permission) I'd like to share it with you:

I just wanted to write to let you know that I have found your blog to be very insightful. And, indeed, helpful.

I am a happily married bi guy as well, though I have in the last year or so struggled to work out exactly what I am. I was so impressed to read your postings about distaste of labels. It brought it home for me that I was really just struggling to define "what" I am, and that in fact it is pretty much irrelevant. I love my wife. I like guys. And that is that.

It also gave me some comfort to know that there are other bi married guys out there who have a lasting and strong relationship with their wife and their kids, and still can appreciate what is good and beautiful in life - be it male or female.  Though I am out to my wife, I am not yet to the broader community.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. There is some fine perceptive writing on your blog and I greatly appreciate your point of view.

Thomas

Firstly, thanks for writing.  I'm never sure whether my own eccentric view of the world resonates out there.  I know that I am odd, very odd.  So to hear from someone who likes my writing, or my rants, or just my style, is great.

Second, I think there are so many guys like you, Thomas.  Maybe as many as one in five guys is bisexual and remain so most of their lives.  It's hard, because the Cartesian dualism in our culture inclines all of us to the view that you're either one, or the other.  But it's more complicated and more subtle than that.  For humans, sex was never just about reproduction.  It was always about bonding, too, because when our ancestors moved around the Serengeti plains, they needed social glue to bind the tribe together.  I suspect we formed extended and overlapping "families" of males and females who had sex with each other, as I discuss in Our Cheatin' Hearts.  

One of the reasons I write my fiction and this blog is that I think it vital that we fight for the right to be gay or bisexual: 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.  That's clear enough, isn't it?  Shakespeare was bisexual, without much doubt.  He loved women: look at the characters he created, full of life and vigor, sexy, feisty, thrilling.  And he loved at least one man:

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
     But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
     Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

 As usual, I digress.

Thanks for writing, and remember, in the end, it's love which matters: omnia vincit amor.  Love conquers all.  And if you and your wife love each other, you will make it work.  The world is full of sorrow and grief and loss and loneliness.  To reject someone for such a paltry reason as their sexual inclination is plain stupid.  My lady loves me for me, for what I am, and a key part of that is my gayness.  I'm sure your lady loves you too, and when you truly love someone, you know that they come as a package, good and bad combined.

Go well.