Questions about bisexuality

ElvenSword, chapter 9

In which Fluin starts his training as a wizard, but nevertheless worries about his future.

Read it here.

The Kinsey scale

Drawn by M diMotta  (click to enlarge)

The truth is that in a world where being gay wasn't considered wrong or "unChristian" far more people would be in the middle categories from 1 to 5.  Why wouldn't you make out with a man you're fond of?  Of course, you might just love him and not find him sexually attractive.  But equally, if same-sex love was as accepted as other-sex love, you might well enjoy a male sparring partner.  Most people would prolly remain "wired" as straight, but a significant minority would not.  Once you stop accepting the orthodoxy, once you step outside of conformity, anything is possible.  Which, naturally, is why conservatives hate it.

Footy, chapter 19

Chapter 19, here, in which Sean meets Will and fucks a man for the second time in his life ..... with momentous consequences.

Footy

Some time ago I started switching my website from http://www.nick-thiwerspoon.com/ to https://nickthiwerspoon.wordpress.com/

Lots of work, because each file has to be re-uploaded and each link redone.  And then I got depressed and unwell, so I didn't transfer the files at anything like the rate I'd meant to.  The good news is that I have started moving files across again.  I took the chance to re-edit the story and tighten it up, and I feel it's better for that.

Anyway, I've transferred 13 chapters out of 35, so there's still plenty more work,

You can read it here.

Ronny and i

I want to recommend this charming, subtle, heart-warming (and heart-breaking) film.  It's beautiful and quite perfect.  A minor masterpiece.

Ronny and i

Is 10% of the population gay?

Alfred Kinsey

David Spiegelhalter in a Guardian article analyses new statistics which suggest that that's not a bad guess.  But it's a question of definition.  Which is pretty much what I've been saying for a few years now.


For a single statistic to be the primary propaganda weapon for a radical political movement is unusual. Back in 1977, the US National Gay Task Force (NGTF) was invited into the White House to meet President Jimmy Carter’s representatives – a first for gay and lesbian groups. The NGTF’s most prominent campaigning slogan was “we are everywhere”, backed up by the memorable statistical claim that one in 10 of the US population was gay – this figure was deeply and passionately contested.

So where did Bruce Voeller, a scientist who was a founder and first director of the NGTF, get this nice round 10% from? To find out, we have to delve back into Alfred Kinsey’s surveys in 1940s America, which were groundbreaking at the time but are now seen as archaic in their methods: he sought out respondents in prisons and the gay underworld, made friends with them and, over a cigarette, noted down their behaviours using an obscure code. Kinsey did not believe that sexual identity was fixed and simply categorised, and perhaps his most lasting contribution was his scale, still used today, in which individuals are rated from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual on a scale of 0 to 6.

Kinsey’s headline finding was that “at least 37% of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age”, meaning physical contact to the point of orgasm. He claimed that 13% of males were predominately homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55 (scoring at least 4) and that 4% of males were exclusively homosexual all their lives (scoring 6). For 30-year-old US men, he estimated that 83% would score 0 (totally heterosexual), 8% would be 1 or 2 on the scale, and 9% would be at least a 3. He acknowledged that people could move on the scale during their lifetime, and indeed Kinsey himself is said to have moved from a 1 or 2 when younger to a 3 or 4 in middle age.

When he published his study on women in 1953, Kinsey estimated that 20% of women had had some same-sex experience and 13% to orgasm. In unmarried females between the ages of 20 and 35, he claimed there was at least some homosexual experience in 11%-20%, and 1%-3% were exclusively homosexual.
So, in 1973, when Voeller was putting together the NGTF campaign, he went back to Kinsey’s estimates for those with predominantly homosexual experience (4 to 6 on his scale) for at least three years. As this was around 7% for women and 13% for men he took an average to get the headline figure: 10% of the population was gay.

This 10% claim was controversial, to say the least, and reignited old arguments about Kinsey’s poor survey methods. But even cleaned-up data gave similar answers, and Voeller stuck to the 10%, stating in 1990 that “the concept that 10% of the population is gay has become a generally accepted ‘fact’… As with so many pieces of knowledge (and myths), repeated telling made it so.”

However, later surveys gave much lower results, and of course the ChrisTaliban seized on them as proof that gays don't need rights (as if Jews, for example, who are much less numerous, shouldn't have rights either because there are so few of them)

The explanation lay in the terminology.  If you ask ppl whether they're "gay" or "lesbian" or "bi"  most say no.  Even if they have had same-sex experiences to orgasm.  

Same-sex sexual behaviour can come in all degrees of intensity. So Natsal carefully distinguishes a “same-sex experience”, which could be just a smooch in the dark, from a “same-sex partner”, who is someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm. Respondents are asked about activity at any age, so adolescent fumblings counted.

For women in the age range 16 to 44, the proportion who report having had some same-sex experience has shown a dramatic rise over the past 20 years: from 4% in 1990 to 10% in 2000, and to 16% in 2010 – a massive change in behaviour over such a short period. But this is not all just girls kissing girls in imitation of Madonna and Britney Spears; around half report genital contact, and around half of these in the past five years, so that overall nearly one in 20 women report a same-sex partner in the past five years.

But has there really been a change, or are women simply more willing to report what they get up to? Using some neat cross-checking, Natsal reckons that the change between 1990 and 2000 was partly due to more honest reporting, but the rise in 2000 and 2010 was all real.

And it is clear that there is a lot of experimental activity – roughly, for each woman who has had a recent same-sex partner there are two more of the same age who have had some same-sex contact in their lives, but no partner in the past five years.

Men show a different pattern. In 2010, about 8% of 16- to 44-year-old men reported having had a same-sex experience: this is higher than in 1990, possibly associated with both better reporting and the decline in fear of HIV, but there have been no substantial recent changes.

Overall the proportion of people with same-sex experience is far higher than the proportion who identify themselves as gay and bisexual. This must mean that many same-sex contacts are by people who do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. That’s just what we find in reputable surveys: in the last big US survey, 10% of women and 3% of men who identified themselves as “heterosexual” also reported a same‑sex contact.

Read more here.

Other pieces about this:

How many of us are there?

How many American Men are Gay?

What makes us gay?

The Cum-and-Go Culture

I kiss them because I love them

Labels

Transgender model

Very sexy bloke, the transgender model Aydian Dowling, on the left, Adam Levine on the right.

 [From PinkNews.]

Sharing a bed

Pic from this intriguing Queerty piece.  I discuss an earlier paper by the same author here.

Tom Daley

Inverted

Tom Daley, upside down

Boxes

For so long I've thought of myself as a gay man who happens to love a woman.  I thought, when I fell in love with my guy all those years ago, that, ergo, I was gay.  That's how it was: there were gays and there were straights and since I'd fallen in love with a man, and had sex with men, I had to go in the gay box.  But over the last few years I've realised that I am attracted to women as well as to men.  I'm not even sure any more whether I'm primarily attracted to men or to women.  I'm attracted to individuals.  To people.  And their gender isn't really relevant any more.

Of course society is still stuck with boxes: the gay box; the straight box; and even, dare we say it; the bisexual box.  But it's stupid.  These labels don't matter.

Ryan Kwanten Begged for 'True Blood' Gay Sex Scene

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.  Times change, and we in them change too.

Who would have thought that a straight actor would have asked for a "gay" sex scene?  My generation still bears the scars of the intense homo-hatred we grew up with.  But younger people shrug off these taboos, indeed, welcome a chance to do something different.  Which is as it should be.  Note though that there are still the hate-filled comments from the unhinged brain-dead in the comments sections below the articles.

Read more here and here.

Bisexuality is not a choice

Vicarage

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
 And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
 Deep meadows yet, for to forget
 The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
 Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
 And is there honey still for tea?

Rupert Brooke.  Bisexual.  Dead 3 years after he wrote this, killed by an infected mosquito bite.  For a time he was a member of the Bloomsbury group.

Silver Bullet

I'm reading Melissa Scott's and Jo Graham's third volume of "The Order of The Air".  I'm thoroughly enjoying it.  A great read.

There's this:

Stasi nodded slowly.  "And without skin sensation or the rest this can't be anything
but torment to him."

"I wouldn't say that," Alma said.  "Orgasm without ejaculation is entirely possible."
Her face felt like it was flaming, but she went on.  "And surface sensation is only one
way to skin the cat, as it were."

Stasi blinked. "It is?"

"My first husband…."  Oh, there was no good way to put this!  "Sometimes if you
have an engine maintenance problem and can't get in one way, you can use the other
hatch."

Now she looked entirely confused.  "What other hatch?  There's only one hatch."

Alma felt the flush reach her hairline.  "Well, yes.  One hatch on men.  But you can
go around from the back, as it were.  The nerves on the back of the prostate aren't
affected by damage in front."

Stasi wasn't blushing.  But she looked like she'd just swallowed a whole egg.

Forward.  There was only forward into the breach, having come this far.  "If you put
pressure in the right places…well, it's very sensitive.  And you don't actually need
any…er…fluid.  Or the manufacture thereof."

"You've actually done this?"  Stasi looked either intrigued or skeptical, depending on
how one wanted to read it.

Medical words.  Medical words.  "Caused a non-ejaculatory orgasm with prostate
massage?  Yes.  Lots of times."  The ghost of Gil would be laughing his head off at her.
He probably was.

"Huh."  Stasi sat down on the edge of the desk and took a draw off her cigarette.

"I don't know that it would work in this situation," Alma said.  "I really don't.  But
it's a possibility.  I told you, I haven't seen in years and Mitch and I don't exactly talk
about it."

[Bit of background:  Gil was Alma's bisexual husband who she shared with Jerry Ballard another of the charcaters in this trilogy]

And in my experience, you can also ejaculate from prostate massage. As the bottom in this GIF is doing.

Tom Daley and his bloke

Tom Daley with the guy he loves: Justin Lance Black, who is apparently a screen writer. I wish them well.

Tom Daley

In a Youtube video a week ago, Tom Daley announced that he was in a relationship with a guy.

I note that he didn't say he was gay.   He said: “In spring this year my life changed massively when I met someone, and they make me feel so happy, so safe and everything just feels great. That someone is a guy.”  He added: “Of course I still fancy girls but right now I’m dating a guy and I couldn’t be happier.”

And that's exactly how it should be.  It might seem a meaningless quibble.  And perhaps it is.  But he is saying something very liberated: I love another man.  That's the key, not how he labels himself.  Or how we label him.  It's so simple, and the troglodytes find it so hard to understand.  Forget the labels, the categorisation, the this box or that.  It's something old as mankind, maybe older.  Something profound and vital.  Love.  What matters is not the gender of your partner or how you make love or any of those things.  What matters is that it is love.

Good on you mate.  And thank you for telling us, because it will make it easier for others also to be open and free.

You know you're bisexual when ...

This morning I woke from a powerful erotic dream of ... my wife.  We were making love, doggie position, and it was, well, very satisfying.  It would not have been a good idea to wake her too, at 5 am, to finish off what my subconscious clearly wanted.  Not a good idea at all.  So I lay there staring at the ceiling and thinking about our life together, nursing a massive hard-on.

The day before, I was woken from another erotic dream, this time with a bloke.  We were in a hotel room, high up, with a view over some city.  He was very handsome, with dark curly hair, pretty much like the bloke in the pic.  Perhaps that was where the dream came from.   Anyway, I was impaled on him in an entirely pleasing, sexy and fulfilling way.  In this case, I also woke up before the climax.  (Is there some hidden pattern here?) Perhaps the nicest part of the whole dream was that I could feel his desire for me.  I could see it in his smile, in his face.  Definitely wish fulfillment, that!

Your subconscious doesn't lie.  When you dream of a man or a woman sexually, or of both, it's reflecting a profound reality, a truth, from deep inside.  There was a time when I thought bisexuality was a con: a transition phase to gayness.  And for some people it is.  Many straights I've mentioned this topic to are inclined to believe that if you desire or love another man, you are by definition gay, even if you also love and desire a woman.  If you have one drop of gayness in you then you are ipso facto gay, just as it used to be considered in regard to black blood.  Which is rubbish.

Our culture likes nice convenient labels and divisions.  Somehow, if we can just say 'it is thus', we can come to grips with complex phenomena, we can make the world less scary because we have labelled it.   We confuse the label with reality.  But reality is much more diverse and complex than these simple categories.  I am what I am.  I respond emotionally and sometimes sexually to men.  But I also respond emotionally and sexually to woman.  Some people would call me 'gay', others 'self-deluding', or 'in a phase'.  Some 'hypocritical' or 'dishonest'.  Actually I have news for all of you.  I am me.   Put me in a box at your peril.

Meanwhile, later today, after my lady gets home from work ....

I have written about this a lot.  Here are some more blog posts:

Labels

Queer but not gay

Saturday Night Thoughts

Special

Thought Experiment

Gay Sex by Any Name

Letter from Thomas

What Makes Us Gay

Saturday night thoughts

For thirty years after I married my lady, I considered myself a gay married bloke who loved just one woman, his wife.  It never seemed plausible to me that I might be bisexual.  I believed (foolishly) that bisexuals were dishonest, pretending to be half-straight when they were really gay.  And after all, I wasn't attracted to other women.  My emotional and sexual attraction was exclusively to men.  I was faithful to my wife (as I still am!) and didn't pick up men.  To most people I would have appeared completely straight.

Seven years ago I started writing gay-shaded fiction. My motives were several.  I had been through hell when I realised I was gay, and I wanted to write about gay and bisexual characters in a way that celebrated their gayness, not denigrated it.  I hoped that that would help young blokes who were struggling to accept their sexuality to be happier, and to believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay.  To be honest, I also hoped to make some money.  At the time my children were at pricey private schools and uni, and I wasn't earning much.  Untold wealth hasn't happened, sadly!  So far, I've made a princely $80, for my story Redhead. 

I had lived a life quite outside the gay networks which exist.  I knew no gay or bi men -- that I knew of; as with me, perhaps there were many that I didn't know of because they were closeted or "straight-acting".  But the essence of a network is that it is known, if not necessarily obviously visible.  What gay fiction I read didn't resonate with me.   I travelled along, occasionally attracted to a man, always, so far as I could tell straight, never talking about what I thought I was or what I felt, and never acting on my attractions.

And then I started writing, and started posting my stories in online groups.  And I started talking via email with other blokes out there, many of whom were bisexual, had been or were still married, who thought it quite ordinary that a man might be attracted to both genders even if he preferred one or the other.  And I found that my own definitions shifted as I learned more.  Remember, I'd been very ignorant.  I'd had sex with a few men, fallen in love with one, and then met my wife and married her.  But it became perfectly clear to me that I too was bisexual.  Oh, I was for the most part emotionally and sexually attracted to men, but once I allowed myself to feel it, I was often attracted to women too.  The labels and the boxes were too rigid and confining.

These days I have come to believe that whether you are gay or straight is absolutely unimportant.  Of course, I'm not saying gay rights don't have to be fought for.  Gays in many countries are still persecuted and murdered, and vile laws which discriminate still exist.  And that should stop.  But in most Western countries, gays if not yet equal, are certainly accepted in ways I never thought of 30 years ago.  I'm not talking about the law and custom, though, I'm talking about my perceptions.  I have gone through a transformation, where my intellectual acceptance of gayness has translated into a spiritual and emotional acceptance of my straight-shadedness, if I can call it that.  A bizarre journey,  but when you come to think about it, perfectly logical.  Acceptance does that.  It's liberating.

I feel tremendously free, free to think and feel what I want, untrammelled by convention or custom.  I hope one day the whole world will regard it as irrelevant and insignificant as I now do, and accept that people will run the gamut from gay through all different bisexualities to straight and it won't matter to anybody.  We shall overcome.  And it will be wonderful.