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.

Devious morality

You know, I try hard to be a good person.  I try to be kind, to be generous, to be a giver not a taker, not to lie, not to be cruel, not to stab ppl in the back, not to be spiteful or horrible.  To think of others, to try and make the world a better place, even if just a little.  I don't always succeed.  I get grumpy, lose my temper, whinge far too much, resent others.

But the one thing which I have consistently been condemned for is my sexuality.  My behaviour.  Oh, the condemnation hasn't always been overt.  But it's there.  Silent disdain and disapproval. Or more open disgust  and anger.   Of me.  For what I am.  Not for being immoral.  Not because I am dishonest or a thief or unkind or vicious.  But because I am gay.  I am looked down on, despised, rejected.   So-called friends have unceremoniously dumped me when I came out to them.   Because of something innate in me.  Because of what I am.  To these ppl (and there are so many of them), my morals don't matter.  All that matters is that I am gay.  That I am not like other men.  That I am queeny.  All the good I try to do, all the aspects of my character and personality which may be funny or useful or valuable or interesting, all are set at nothing when it comes to my sexuality and my behaviour.

All my life.  All my fucking life.  Oh, they'll tell you things are getting better.  And they are.  But I don't mix with 18 year olds.  The ppl who are not supposed to care any more.  Those I meet and talk to are a decade or two either side of my age.  And they might in public say all the right things.  But I can see what they're thinking.  And they do not approve.  Especially men.  The worst in a way are those gay or bi men who should know better, but still can't set aside their conditioning, their thoughtless and unthinking taboos.  The pretend-straights.

And so I grow ever more dyspeptic, ever more angry at the judgmental, irrational prejudices against ppl like me, ever more withdrawn from the world.  And that is such an irony.  Because I actually like ppl.

Oh well.  I was going to put this on my diary, my secret place where I can rant at the world.  But WTF.

Enjoy.  :-)

And now I'm going and do something mindless and soporific, like watch Miss Marple.

Being an arsehole

A real man

You know, my whole life has been defined by being gay-shaded, by the judgements and hatred of others. As a small boy, a young teen, a young man, a middle-aged man, and now, I have called been "queer", "a homo", " a moffie", "camp", "queeny", "effeminate", "girly", "perverted", "unnatural".  I have been despised and beaten up.  I have been ignored and excluded.  When I came out to straight friends, I suddenly and mysteriously got the cold shoulder.  How bizarre!  All the other things they liked about me weren't enough to tip the scales when they discovered I was gay.  I became persona non grata.  An untermensch.  A nothing.

I have never been good enough for the straights,  Judged always.  Never mind about the rest of me: whether I was kind or not; generous or not; honest; decent; loving; intelligent or stupid; well-read or ignorant.  None of those things mattered.  Only my gayness mattered.  Only that I wasn't "a real man", I wasn't "manly".  Let's judge people by just one of their characteristics, shall we?  Because all the other things don't count, right?  I am what I am.  I was fucking born this way, OK?

I have come to realise that my allergies, my joint aches and pains, my overeating and overdrinking, my depressions, even how much money I have now -- these have all been heavily influenced and driven by others' rancid and judgemental perceptions of me.  I am so fucking BORED with it.  Jesus tap-dancing Christ, why can't I just be me, without all this fucking baggage? My illness, my body, my mind, my soul. Driven to the state I am now in, with dodgy health, depression, poor finances.  By these pieces of dogshit.  By judgemental, obscurantist, narrow-minded, hate-filled bigots.  "Hate the sin not the sinner."  Yeah, right.  "Judge not lest ye be judged."  Oh, but we do it with love.  So that's all right, then.

And their fellow travellers.  As in a racially stratified society, where the less black consider themselves better than the ebony, and the whites look down on all, so bisexual men and straight-acting men, and the macho pretend-straights and those able to "pass" look down on people like me.  They're not "swish".  They're real men. Isn't that nice?  And when they despise us, it's only natural and to be expected.   Of course it is.  Because the "natural order" is that real men and real women are the only worthwhile humans beings around, and even though they take it up the bum, they act straight.  So it's OK.  They're not really gay, are they?  

I know I'm angry.  And bitter.  And resentful.  Tough.  The only healthy way to react to subtle and overt negative cues and discrimination from society and their unquestioned values which make me worthless and a nothing, is to fight back; to expose the ChrisTaliban and their loathsome lies; to call out gay friends who are uncomfortable with queeny men and manly women; to remind people that it's the whole person which matters.  And to tell myself every day:  I'm worthwhile; I'm lovable; I'm good; I'm a real person.  Even if I shall never be a real man.