The realization that I had smoked pole led to more questions than answers. I realized that the crush I had developed on Starbucks Guy wasn’t the first I’d had on a dude. One of my friends in high school was also the object of some of my fantasies. I remembered times when I would sleep over at his house, and we would sometimes sleep in the same queen-sized bed. I remember thinking, if he wanted to fool around, I’d probably be okay with it. Strangely, that never made me feel gay at the time. I just kind of went along with my life. Why had it taken me so long to accept that I was bisexual? The whole concept opening up in the fashion it had completely blew my mind.
I thought long and hard about what it was I was feeling. Was I just a closeted homosexual? If I was in denial, where did that denial end? I thought about all the gay men I had known. It seemed that they had all known they were gay from a very early age, but many of them tried to be attracted to the opposite sex to fit in. I had not been pretending. I was sure if it. I thought about women almost constantly. Bisexuals seem to get beat up from both sides. Generally, both homosexuals and straight people think that bisexuals are just unwilling to admit that they are gay. I thought long and hard about it. I loved pussy, so much so that cunnilingus had become my favorite sexual act. I would rather eat pussy than do anything else. That was a fact (and still is). If I had been gay, I think I’d be the gayest dude out there. I'd fly the rainbow flag from the tip of my erect cock. I had no worries about what people would think of me. In fact, I very much enjoyed stirring motherfuckers up, and being gay would have given me plenty of additional ammo to upset the uptight people I sometimes found myself around. On top of that, women can be pretty nutty. Being gay could probably save me a lot of stress, but I just wasn’t. It seemed a lock, I was bisexual.
The first thing I felt I had to do was tell Janet and Chrissy. I sat them down and laid it out. I told them about the homosexual 69 with my friend in early high school, and about my crush on Starbucks Guy. I had already pointed him out to them, but not as a crush. They really didn’t seem caught off guard by any of it. It was an easy conversation. Janet asked what I was going to do next? If I was going to tell my friends back in Illinois? I thought about that for a night or so, and decided that I would call each of my best friends at the time and lay it out just like I had for my girlfriends.
One by one, I dialed them up. It was weird – the friend I thought would be the most shocked by it (as we had been in many threesomes and foursomes together previously) was completely nonchalant. The friend I expected to be the most at ease about it was completely blown away, and had a whole bunch of fun questions. One of which was, “So, now that I know you like guys, can I occasionally ask you if you’d want to suck that guys dick or fuck that guy up the ass – like we do about girls?” I thought that was an entertaining question, the answer being, of course, yes. None of my friends had anything negative to say, which wasn’t surprising, since I would never surround myself with the type of people who worried about or judged that kind of thing.
Next, I had to tell my mom, who is also one of my best friends. The next time we went out to dinner, at a Mexican restaurant in Costa Mesa called Mi Casa, I told her about Starbucks Guy. My mom is very liberal and seemed more entertained than anything else. One of the first questions she asked was, “So, do you want to cuddle up with him and snuggle, or just, like, tickle his balls?” She asked this in the waiting area of the restaurant, in ear shot of many other customers, while doing a tickling motion with her fingers. They seemed less amused than I was by the question. Basically, my coming out couldn’t have been easier. All the important people in my life knew my orientation and the admission was liberating for me. Bisexuality seemed a good fit.
By my nature, I tend to over analyze things. This character trait eventually led to the following thought: I believe it possible that everyone is bisexual. Obviously, this declaration might seem dismissive of some the other letters represented in the LGBTQIA acronym, but from my perspective, it's the most inclusive way to think about the issue of sexual orientation (and certainly not a comment on the specifics of gender). To me, it’s all about percentages. Someone who considers themselves “straight” is 99% sexually attracted to the opposite gender with that other 1% reserved for the rare circumstance, which may or may not ever manifest beyond a single fleeting thought. Someone who considers themselves “homosexual” is 99% sexually attracted to the same gender with a 1% chance of the opposite being true. I put myself around 75% into women, 25% into men at that moment, a ratio that hasn't varied much in the eighteen years since. This percentage based scale makes the need for sexual orientation somewhat obsolete. Someone who thinks of themselves as “straight” might have a hard time dealing with suddenly finding someone of the same gender sexually appealing. The incident might create the internal monologue: “Am I gay? Am I straight? What's wrong with me that I don't know the answer to that question?” If they thought in terms of percentages, there’d be quite a bit less confusion. They are bisexual and the ratio is all that need be adjusted.
Because of the current social climate in the world, women seem to be encouraged to explore their sexual boundaries (unfortunately, often only for the titillation of the men in the room) and thusly, may find themselves more able to explore their sexual curiosity than men. I feel that, if women were as openly turned on by the idea of man-on-man action as men are openly turned on by woman-on-woman action, men could become more comfortable about the idea. Because of social taboos, someone with a 90/10 lean toward the opposite sex ratio might be less likely to explore the feelings in that 10%. It seems to me that when someone “comes out of the closet,” this extreme measure is necessary because their ratio is so severely skewed towards the same sex that it is unbearable to deny it. When it comes down to it, the ratio is probably just an easier way to explain why I’m not straight or gay. The reality is, I see or meet someone and I’m either sexually attracted to them or I’m not. When I get to know someone, if I’m turned on by their mind, it doesn’t really matter what they look like, and I feel like most introspective people would admit the same. I take it a step further to say, if I’m turned on by their mind, it doesn’t matter what their gender is. Male, female, or Trans – it doesn't matter. I'm attracted to the person inside. That seems like the best way to look at it, for me anyway.
Many years later, I saw the film Kinsey, which led me to read some of his shit. Some of you have probably been screaming at your computer/tablet/phone screens: “You moron, Kinsey said it first!” Imagine my surprise when I read about the Kinsey Scale. Alfred Kinsey wrote:
“Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories…
The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history… An individual may be assigned a position on this scale, for each period in his life…. A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist.”
The Kinsey Scale replaces my percentages with a number of 0 – 6. I felt shades of when I realized I didn’t invent the 69, which is sort of comical. I'll surely spend a large portion of my life realizing someone smarter did it first.
On many occasions over the years I've wondered what happened to the friend I traded blow jobs with over two decades ago. I wonder if he hid that memory away, where it still remains. Did he accept it and move on? Did it effect his relationships with women in a negative way? Was he driven to drinking, self-hatred, or suicidal thoughts? Was he able to come to grips with it. The fact that we stopped being friends is sad. We changed and took different paths even with out the homosexual experience, but I wonder how different we’d be now if we had accepted what happened and just chalked it up to kids experimenting, instead of ending our friendship. Just one more thing to write a song about, I guess.
* Obviously, all names have been changed to protect the identity of participants. So there's no need to send me emails asking if I was in a polyamorous relationship with Janet and Chrissy from Three's Company. I was not.
