"Hold on, let me ask you a question? If she came up and threw it at you, would you smash?" This is the question a dear friend of mine asked me when I had to pause a conversation to look at an old college friend's live Instagram stream. (I wonder how soon that reference will become dated.)
Like most gay men, I came out as bi for the first year or two of my self-realization. I had a good reason for doing this, opposed to just using it as a crutch to lean into my homosexuality. My Facebook status literally read "Charles Clark is BIG minus the G." for a month; I wasn't messing around.
As I've told many people, I was heavily influenced by Boy Meets World as a child. I can remember searching for a Topenga of my own as young as four years old. This quest would continue into my high school years, an all boys private preparatory. But alas, we had a sister institution: an all girls private school.
My junior year - the first year I questioned and experimented with my sexuality - I entertained a girl from my sister school during our joint production of Guys and Dolls. My friends, not knowing the thoughts running through my head, called her my Big Titty'd Fling. Sadly, it turned out to be just that as I stopped talking to her after the show's run concluded. I felt an odd sense of jealousy when a friend started dating her a month later, but somehow I knew she wasn't actually the girl for me.
A year and a girlfriend later, I entered college and allowed it to be the playground of sexuality it was meant to be. I talked to a religious girl I instantly connected with the first two months until I revealed I was bisexual and she couldn't accept it. I slept with other gay men on campus because primal urges were real. I dry humped an older female friend because, again, primal urges were real.
This woman had always intrigued me. Though she was known for getting around, I didn't care. Early on, I knew a person's body count didn't define them, especially if they were smart and safe about it. We connected on a personal level. We shared many inside jokes, a few secrets. It felt as though the myth about sniffing out a person with an opposite immune system from you to build stronger offspring was true. But the timing was never right. Either she had a boyfriend, or I had decided I was full gay and didn't want to turn back.
That's right. I made a conscious decision after my sophomore year to just be a gay man. If I remember correctly, Kinsey and his scale proclaimed that no one is wholly heterosexual or homosexual. With this in mind, I settled on calling myself a 5 on the 0-6 scale. Why then, if I recognized I had some sort of attraction to women, would I shut myself off from engaging in coitus with them completely?
This is the part where I can hear my mother say, "Well, if you could choose to be straight, then why don't you?"
There are many factors that went into this decision, the most obvious being peer pressure. Not that they might have been fully outright in saying it, but the gay men I interacted with my freshman year of college thought bisexuality to be a joke. To them, all dudes on the "down low" were actually just gay men trying to seem more masculine and fit into society. I never dealt well with being in opposition - even less so then - so I quietly let my bisexuality fall to the wayside. Honestly, having dealt with the religious woman who dumped me before we technically started dating, I believed I was saving myself from future headaches.
To be totally transparent, the female anatomy never did much for me. Sure, I love a good pair of breasts, but the more worldly I become, the more I find that most people regardless of gender, sex, and orientation love breast. Besides, the first time I was a vagina in person, I labeled it as meat curtains (trademark pending); granted this was at a strip club, but still. The handful of women I've actually been attracted to, it was because of their personalities. I loved their brain and not in the N.E.R.D. way.
For a while, I considered myself a panromantic - someone not limited by gender or sex in the romantic attraction I felt for them - but I got enough random boners and crushes on men walking down the hallway to know that was a lie.
Still, I can feel my mother nagging at me, "Well, that could still be enough to make dating a woman work."
Sometime last year I met a trans man and wondered if he was gay. There surprisingly wasn't a curiosity about the unknown, just a genuine physical attraction I felt towards another man. Something about that moment made me sure about who I was.
After pausing for a second, I finally answered my friend who asked about the woman on Instagram. "You know, I would try. Honestly, I would; I just don't think my other head would cooperate. I suppose I'm just an appreciator of seemingly effortless beauty and confidence. And damn, she's got it." No, really what I said was, "She's bad (in a good way), but naw. I just recognize her diva." And with that, I continued my residency at the token gay of that group.
Word.
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