Being Gay or Doing Gay?
“Are you bi or gay?” That question comes up frequently in conversations between men who have sex with men. Although heard frequently in on-line chat rooms where mature men gather, some believe the “B” in LGBT is silent, and that if bisexuality exists at all, it is only a state of transition.
As I worked through my own coming out process, I asked myself that question. Married with children, but feeling a powerful attraction to men, I felt very confused about what I really was, and I know that many others experience the same feeling of being sexually adrift. Finally, I decided that the pull I was feeling toward same-sex relationships was over-powering, even though I felt my ship might crash on the rocks. The name of this site, MagneticFire, comes from that tension between being pulled toward something while at the same time feeling an urgent need to resist it. Admitting I was gay seemed terminal, the end of the line.
Perhaps I should have named this site Magnetic Cross Fire, because that state of confusion and uncertainty is abhorred by much of the rest of society. I was called a hypocrite and a man with no balls by a gay man because I was not being honest with myself. Those who were sympathetic toward my wife called me a liar and a cheat. Many of the “social values conservatives” said I had a choice and I had made the wrong one, and fundamentalist Christians thought of me as an abomination.
Is being gay or bisexual a life or a life style? Fundamentalists and conservatives insist that it is a life style, something which is chosen, and thus can be changed. They say that the magnetic pull toward anything other than a strict heterosexual life is the work of the devil. For me, that power was so strong that I believed that if I would remain married I would in “weaker” moments, seek out those sleazy, underground venues where married men meet to have sex.
A frequent comment from men in this state of ambiguity is, “I am not a part of ‘the gay scene.’” Although the “scene” is never really defined, it seems that the phrase is used mostly by men who describe themselves as “masculine” and able to “pass” in a heterosexual world. I think a brief definition of “the scene” would be, “I, unlike those others, don’t meet the stereotype of a weak, feminine and hedonistic man.” It seems to imply, “I am better than those gay men,” a reflection of some remaining internalized either naïve or prejudicial ideas of what it means to be gay.
Bisexual behavior and bisexual identity are not the same thing. For most gay men the difference is between human being and human doing.” Being gay is not the sum of all our parts, but it is a piece of all of each of our parts. It isn’t just something we do. When people who define themselves as bisexual talk about it, they don’t describe it as if they are on there way to something else.
Labels are too restrictive, often damaging when applied by one person to another and sometimes meaningless. One report absurdly described about twenty different subtypes of bisexuality: gay leaning, straight leaning, straight affectional but gay sexual, and on and on. Can’t we just accept that there are no universal definitions for our sexuality?
In discussions of homosexuality and bisexuality, the question often comes up about how fluid sexual orientation is. Kinsey’s idea that sexual orientation is a continuum between exclusive homosexuality and exclusive heterosexuality has some value, but how much movement is there along that continuum?
My experience would suggest that there may be a little movement, but not much, and that at least for men, it is more likely that the movement is in the direction of a more exclusively homosexual orientation. Certainly the efforts of ex-gay ministries and reparative therapies would suggest that movement toward heterosexuality hasn’t been particularly successful. The only exception in my experience would seem to be when men have been confined in an all male environment where they may choose same sex partners, but when removed from that environment, they return to a more heterosexual life.
My personal experience has been that the intensity of pleasure, both sexual and emotional, that I have experienced as a gay man is such that I cannot imagine giving that up and attempting to become more heterosexual again. But each of us must resolve for ourselves where the balance is, and trying to stuff ourselves into an arbitrary category is for the most part a pointless exercise.
I knew I was gay at 10 and never had a date with a woman (excepting one trap date that I did not know of before hand). I had the usual push to have grandchildren and all that but I was never going to allow pressure from anyone to make me live what I knew was a lie (for me).
I had sex at 16 – in which I was the aggressor – and never looked back. I had my first relationship at 40. My first love at 50 and when he passed from leukemia I had the outstanding luck to find Dave. His is a Brit and we have been together for 12 years. I can’t live in my own country.
I know many gay men who were married – not many of them describe themselves as Bi. I also know many gay men who have stayed married to a woman for a myriad of reason but most of them don’t describe themselves as Bi either. The lives they live are not easily put in a box. Some wives know, some don’t want to know, and some don’t know and the men either lie, don’t tell, or stay silent. I wish I had written down all the stories I have heard in my life – it would make a good book!
Most men who describe themselves as Bi are Hetro on the road to Homo. This does not apply to all people but I think most.
I read Loren’s post with interest. I can’t say I understand how a psychiatrist can live to the age of 40 and not know he is gay. His book seems mis-titled to me – He did not come out at 40. He acknowledged to himself that he was gay at 40. Most gay guys do this much earlier although they may hide it for a long time or even a life time.
The Fascist Religious Right is wrong – dead wrong. I am gay. (PERIOD) It was not a choice although if I had a choice and know what I know at age 65 I would choose gay. I don’t think anyone gets that choice. As the song in La Cage aux Folles: “I am what I am.” I am aware that Popeye in his first cartoon said: “I am what Yam”.(Hollywood has always had to express gay sentiment in code until recently).
The Gay Lifestyle is like Gays themselves. We are all different and don’t be confused by what the media presents as gay life. When we asked our gay pub 12 years ago if they were showing the World Cup are man with a high voice said: “We don’t do sports in here, were gay” Well, guess what? Many, many gays are sports fans. In the states gay sports bars are everywhere. Our pub in London had the last world cup and the will have this one as well.
We are as varied as are all the people of the world. Gay to me means you sleep with men ( or want to). All else is up to whatever me and my partner want.
I struggle with men who describe themselves as “not part of the gay scene” That means they are at leasts 99.9 % in the closet. I have two answers to that: 1) one rude – you can’t describe yourself as non scene with a —— in your mouth! 2) more thoughtful – A closet is just a bedroom with no self Esteem. It does seem strange that most guys who describe themselves as non scene don’t have sex in a bedroom. They usually have sneaky sex – often in semi public places.
I can’t imagine living with, or loving (sexual) with a woman. In many ways I feel like many of my hetro friends. We are, what we are. I struggle to find many couples who are as much in love as Dave and I.
I know I tend to go on but one last thing. Loving a man and receiving love in return is the greatest feeling in the world. I have been extremely fortunate in having found two such loves. I describe my life before I found love as a long time ago on a planet very far away.
William,
Congratulations to you and Dave, and thanks so much for sharing this story with us.
I hope you will continue to follow the blog and give us more of thoughts.
Loren Olson
Hey, Loren,
You wrote:
“Bisexual behavior and bisexual identity are not the same thing.”
I like that. Identity and self-identification are important pieces to our gender and sexuality, and behavior doesn’t necessarily always correspond to that.
I’ve read on Twitter, and you mention it here as well, the issue of labels. I understand that labels can be too confining, too broad, too something…OTH, I find that these can, at least for a time (for the person, for a community, for society) increase understanding about human variation. But, these have their limitations, too as seen amongst younger folks who seem to wrestle with jettisoning them completely to atomizing them into finer and finer distinctions.
Recently I find that I like the term “same-gender loving” (I think first coined in the African-American lgbt community). Simple and yet broad.
Anyway, I’m glad I found your site as I continue to meet more men in your situation. In fact just a few weeks ago I went on a friendly date with a man who is the father of two kids, has a great relationship with his ex-wife, and didn’t come out until he was 50. So there you go.
Perhaps I can get my kids or my ex-wife to write something. Dating someone with kids, especially if you’ve never had them yourself, can present some special challenges.
Speaking of bisexuality, a couple of years ago, I read about a study that found that homosexuals are even lower in percentage than previous low estimates. The reason? Most gays are actually bisexual! By the criteria of the study, I am bisexual (and so are you). This despite the fact that I am 100% gay.
So why on Earth are we bisexual? We had sexual relations with someone of the opposite sex after age SEVENTEEN! Yep. Anyone who has not engaged in exclusively homosexual behavior from age 18 onward, is *not* gay.
I didn’t come out until I was 28 and didn’t have sex with another male ’til I was 30. I did have relations with a woman in my mid-20s but often had to pretend I was doing something else, if I wanted to complete the transaction. I find girl parts either unappealing (breasts, hips) or absolutely disgusting (the scary thing down below). I feel no romantic or sexual attraction towards females at all. Yet, despite all that, I am bisexual by the standards of the above study.
What a load of baloney.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in their “Media Reference Guide” defines bisexuality as, “An individual who is physically, romantically, emotionally and/or spiritually attracted to men and women. Bisexuals need not have had equal sexual experience with both men and women; in fact, they need not have had any sexual experience at all to identify as bisexual.” That seems pretty broad to me, too. You could have a spiritual connection to a woman and yet, as you say, find her body parts abhorant and still be bisexual. That would seem to ignore the “sexual” part of “bisexual,” and you’re right, that would make both of us bisexual rather than gay. That’s a frightening thought, isn’t it.
It would seem to me that for some, perhaps most, “bisexual” is a default position when someone, for whatever reason, is unable to take the leap to being gay.
I still have some spiritual connection to my ex-wife, and in fact, so does my husband. Oh my god, we’re both bisexual. It is a lot of baloney, isn’t it?
Thanks for you comment
Hi Loren. Some very insightful comments here to which I can add little except to agree that there is a distinction between being and doing gay. I’ve also felt for many years that Kinsey’s continuum is very real indeed. There is no doubt in my mind that sexuality is fluid with varying degrees of preference. Ah, there’s that P word the Religious Right likes to use against us, but it works in the context of Kinsey’s continuum theory. Gays have, unfortunately, reacted badly to the RR’s use of “preference” and understandably, preferring to replace it with “orientation”. Both are valid and it’s time to get over it. I DO indeed PREFER sex with a man as opposed to a woman and I’ve been married so I do know the very real and powerful difference, but it is BECAUSE of my sexual orientation. The same is true of men who PREFER women. It’s time we owned the word “preference” and stop letting them own it.
I read the topic and a lot of very strong views have been posted. In my life my sexuality-has been over shadowed by other emotional problems that consume me. As for being gay, I have always been attracted to men and they have always been older.
I have at times found myself attracted women but rarely, and interestingly, again over the age of 40. This happened as I got older.
For the first time i cried at therapy last week. It happened, when i had to imagine my dad who said nothing as he never spoke to me. He made me feel like I was bothering him. Then I had to imagine he put his arms out to hold me and that was when I broke.
I’m not sure if I would still be gay if I was closer to my father. I think I would. I often think that every guy who likes older men has a history of emotional abuse from their parents. The lack of awareness of my family of what I was going through and the lasting effects just left me more isolated and confused. Nobody was looking.
Dave, I think all of us who are gay have looked for an explanation for it, but so far, no one has a definitive answer.
Obviously the relationship with your father was painful, and I congratulate you on seeing someone to work through the difficulty.
Some men find it difficult to be a nurturing parent; they probably have their own reasons for that, but I don’t mean to excuse abusive parents. What I have seen, particularly in the men who are of you father’s generation, is that they become much more relaxed and caring when they become grandparents.
Unfortunately, there are some who are exploiting this by promising male re-nurturing that will change people from homosexual to heterosexual. This therapy has no basis in science, is considered unethical and can be quite harmful. You are lucky to have a good therapist to help you.
My personal feeling is that your experience did not make you gay, but that it may influence the kind of partner you choose to be with, but I have no science to back that up.
Thanks for your contribution.
Loren
Loren,
I think this idea of ‘magnetic fire’ is quite interesting. I am a younger guy and in the process of coming to terms with my sexuality and this idea has been in my head but I haven’t had a word to describe it. What I mean is this pull between what you feel you should be doing and these other feeling that I have that seem to be contradictory to the first feeling.
I think a major source of this is the fact that we live in a predominantly heterosexual society that expects others to be heterosexual. When growing up we receive all these slight pressures to assume that heterosexuality is right or ‘normal’. This isn’t necessarily a consciously malicious act by people in our lives. However, we create this idea of ‘normal’ including everything from race, to sexuality, to intelligence. Anything that doesn’t fit in that category receives la abel to show how it is different from ‘normal’.
Growing up I was always conscious that i was different and not “normal.” However, I have for so long identified as “normal.” Realizing that it can be very difficult to put yourself out there and tell others that you are different by being gay, I chose to bide my time ‘playing strait’. By doing this you dont get the constant pressure to legitimize yourself as an important part of society that can come with identifying as gay. However, I am slowly realizing that i can no longer keep up this charade. It is a lie. But at the same time I feel this pull to remain ‘normal’ in the eyes of others. Right now its a dance between these two feelings of being true to myself and being seen as ‘normal’ by others.
I think this idea applies even to those in the gay community. You speak of people saying they ‘arent into the scene’ or that they are not feminine men. That is part of this dance I spoke of. We want to retain aspects of “normal” life in gay life. In academic jargon you could call this the hegemonic forces that make us feel a need to be normal and part of normal society. in this case normal meaning our ideas of what normal heterosexual orientations look like.
To speak on what Dave talks about, attractions to older men is another movement away from both heterosexual and homosexual ideas of normal sexual preferences. I am also attracted to older men. this makes that dance a bit harder, I think. Not only do I have to get others to understand that i am gay, but also that i like older men. These are two things that contradict what heterosexuals consider normal sexual preference (usually young and women).
I think its important to realize that we hold this idea of normal sex even in the gay community. There are so many variations in sexual preferences that is seems ridiculous to even think that there is one normal way to have sexual preferences. If we do, we are only further creating more restrictions in peoples minds of what is wrong and right and perpetuating this magnetic fire that Im sure every gay, bisexual, or trans-gender has felt.
Well, young man, you have captured in great clarity the conflict which each of us has experienced. When I was first coming out, I joined a gay fathers’ group, and that experience was the most tranformational experience in my growing as a gay man, because I began to realize that I was different from the majority but not so different from a lot of others. In addition, I began to experience the great diversity within the gay community.
You also nailed it when you talked about how difficult it can be within the gay community because there is an expectation that everyone’s life should follow the same course. I have heard other young men feel that they had to try to explain themselves to other gay men because they were attracted to older men. They say they are often accused of seeking a “sugar daddy,” and their attraction is treated suspiciously by older men. They say younger gay men just don’t understand it and demand some justification. It seems we all expect everyone else to experience attraction to men just like we are attracted to.
I have a good friend who is in his mid-30′s who has been with his 85 year old partner for 10 years. Another older man had a very loving relationship to his wife 53 years and came out as gay in his 80′s; he now has a partner and says he can’t believe he didn’t see the clues that he was gay which he now sees very clearly. I am working on a piece about intergenerational gay men’s relationships. There is a lot of resistance within the gay community to exposing this aspect of our community.
It is my belief that there is no one way to go through this process, but each of us follows an individual trajectory. The critical element is exactly what you have identified: Recognizing that your own happiness will never come through letting others — including parents, heterosexual society, of the LGBT community — decide what is right or wrong for your life.
Thanks for your comment which I know will be appreciated by a lot of young men.
Loren Olson
I’d like to echo Adam’s reasoning about Loren’s term “Magnetic Fire.” Then, I would like to add my own rambling logic about bisexuality.
First, I can relate to this idea described in the blogs here of Magnetic Fire, although I don’t consider myself to be bisexual at all. My own “learned” behaviors all supported sexuality in a loving committed relationship, rather than condemning the opposite. I suppose that’s why I’ve not been stricken with the strong internal conflict against homosexuality in a less domestic situation. It’s not that the thought of a woman has never given me sexual arousal. My memories of such arousals are dim and distant. I’ve never been with a woman. I’ve had opportunity, but never at the same time as the impulse.
When it comes down to it, the most basic instinct we men have, other than survival, drives us to implant our seeds in whatever “soil” is there, fertile or not. This is more basic even than the form our desires take.
I personally believe in the theory that a person’s sexual identity is established, or “hard-wired” before the age of 5. The drive between following your “wire’s desires” and behaving in ways that are more acceptable to outside influences creates an internal dialogue constantly in conflict. This conflict I see in the “layers of programming,” if you will allow a modern day analogy.
In other words, even if your more instinctual behaviors are opposite of society approved behaviors, both layers of programing get so ingrained in your decision making processes that both may seem “normal to you,” even if they cannot be mutually satisfying.
I’ve found from listening to people’s stories that they point to the place in their lives they label as “coming out” as the time in their life where they finally realize what this internal conflict is. Once they can separate what their actual natural attraction is from what is externally acceptable, then at least the perspective of the war changes, if not the conflict itself.
This is perhaps not universal, but I have found it to be a deeply recurring theme, which is one reason gay people like to share their coming out stories so much. This is also, I believe, the reason why so many gay men find it incredible to think there could actually be bisexual people. It’s easy to assume that your own experiences, and those of others who are similar, mean that attraction on the learned level, rather than the instinctive level, is false and therefore they are not bi, nor is anyone else.
This is the point where I step out of my own experiences, and use reason to suppose there are some of us for whom the attraction to another human being is primary, and the gender of that other human being might be secondary. I do know more than one man who would be quite happy to experience a physical thrill in whatever way he can. To borrow from the song: “If you can’t be with the sex you love, love the sex you’re with!”
Is the ability to live in the moment, and capturing excitement in the circumstances a pre-requisite for being a true bisexual?
With the majority of coming out stories I’ve heard, there is conflict when a more primal, or “wired” behavior impulse is contradicted by a higher or “learned” pattern. Is a true bisexual’s ability to seek sexual and/or emotional gratification either way imbedded on one of the lower instinctive levels? Is it possible for a person to be “wired” with less specific sexual impulses? Or, could there be examples where the higher behavioral patterns ingrained don’t impose as much sexual restraint or conflict? Reason would suggest a combination of both is valid. Why can’t there be more than one factor to make a person comfortable with sexuality in more than one form?
Is the desire to find the answers to these questions valid? To those who would shun “labeling,” the answer would be resoundingly NO. But to those of us who are seeking ways of countering our sworn enemies, the fundamentalists, then the answers become vital. Perhaps we cannot change the hardcore fundies, but as long as they are set to oppose our rights we need to be able to reach as many “swing voters” (if you will forgive the obvious bad analogy link and unintended pun) with sound reasoning and logic as we can.
Craig.
I was scanning something else about this on another blog. Interesting. Your position on it is diametrically opposed to what I read earlier. I am still contemplating over the opposite points of view, but I’m leaning to a great extent toward yours. And irrespective, that’s what is so good about modern democracy and the marketplace of ideas online.
I’d be interested in reading and posting the alternative position. Can I have a link?
Loren Olson