My Fruity Pebbles went flaccid and my coffee tepid as my roommate recounted his previous evening’s threesome. A threesome with a couple that just recently got engaged; a self-identifying heterosexual couple and a self-identifying bisexual male.
“I didn’t even really touch her. I mean, we made out and I massaged her breasts, but the whole time we were both focused on him.”
“Wait, go back. How do you know these people?”
“I don’t, that’s the crazy thing. He was cruising me at Pride. I thought she was just his fag-hag.”
For its blinding misogyny, not homophobic nature, I shuddered at this terminology: “fag-hag.” I rattled off the checklist: alcohol, psychotropic substances and fatigue were all absent from this experience; so he recalled. The better part of my judgement says that if a twenty-something self-identifying heterosexual male has sexual relations with another twenty-something anatomical male then all claims to heterosexuality must be relinquished (especially when external forces can’t be blamed later on for the sexual rendezvous). Staring down at my gummy soup I smiled: the dawn of the bisexual is upon us.
As a confused adolescent I secretly self identified as a bisexual male for the better part of a year, long before I came out at 16. In my transition period between blithely accepting what society told me to be (heterosexual) and then finding my own voice, I waded/waited in the bisexual swamps. At 13, I was going steady with a wonderful self-identifying heterosexual female while simultaneously held captive by the sights, sounds, smells and touch in the locker-room. Discovering my sexuality wasn’t abrasive and short lived, there was a fluidity and incubation period: one day I’d fantasize about men, the next women. As male arousal increased in frequency and female fantasies slowly subsided, my self identification as a bisexual dissipated and morphed into homosexual.
Society asserts this internment of sexual exploration as “curiosity” and “confusion” yet fails to define the experience as something qualifiable to produce a long lasting identity. As if to say, bisexuality is a phase or transition period between the constructed sexual binary: hetero versus homo. Quite possibly bisexuality is a transition period, but for how long? Months? Years? Decades? A life time? Our culture puts limits on this evolution, deciding that who this once self-identified bisexual dates/marries/engages will solidify their sexuality. Instead of allowing sexuality to be fluid and gray, the dominant groups our of society project this confusion onto the individual; disowning any sense of other. In reality, the dominant groups are confused because they can’t define, categorize or pigeonhole those that they desire to control and marginalize.
Last night I felt a calling to re-watch Craig Lucas’ “The Dying Gaul.” The climatic confrontation between the married male film producer and male screenwriter he was having an affair with still echos this afternoon:
I’m sorry I don’t live up to your standards, trouble is I’m bisexual; I like both. You want the truth, but-You’re lucky to be all one thing. I’m not. I’m not hiding in my marriage, I need my marriage...and not just for business reasons, Jesus Christ, half of Hollywood is out of the fucking closet, they’re all on the cover of magazines, proclaiming their pride, it’s not the old days...
- “The Dying Gaul” by Craig Lucas
Both the homosexual male and the heterosexual female have isolated the producer’s sexuality to a state of confusion and mistrust; granted he was cheating on his wife...
So, here is an engaged male and female seeking the sexual experiences of a third party; my male roommate. There is immense beauty in their acceptance of exploration and fluidity of sex and sexuality:
“It was just so chill. Even this morning we had coffee in bed and all agreed we should do it again sometime.”
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