Is It Weird?

Trying to get comfortable with being bisexual can be a bitch, even when you think you’ve got a good grip on yourself.  I was thinking back about, oh, twenty years or so ago and to a discussion I had with someone who had the audacity to tell me that if I didn’t engage in all the sexual things with another guy that’s possible, then I wasn’t bisexual.  When the guy said it, my jaw unhinged over his statement along with the fact that he was so straight he wouldn’t even touch his own dick, let alone another man’s so where the fuck did he get off trying to tell me what makes me bisexual and what won’t?

I jumped dead into his ass – figuratively, of course – and pointed out that since he had zero experience with men, he wasn’t qualified to make such a judgement… but his words did have me thinking – or, actually, rethinking – about the things I’d identified within myself that said, “Yep, I’m bisexual!”  I had gone back to the beginning and reviewed my sexual behavior and specifically with guys and, okay, I think the only thing I didn’t do with a guy in those early days was kissing even though I had tried it several times and only kinda liked it once (and that’s still true today, if you were wondering).

I was aware – and even if my “devil’s advocate” wasn’t – that I had changed my preferences and even my behavior over the years and that those refinements also included 86-ing anal sex as a matter of course.  In later years, I would come to understand that everyone who is bisexual is bisexual in their own unique way and that even in those later years, there are still people who believe that if you don’t do it all, then you’re not bisexual.  But, back then, it gave me reason to wonder if my refinements made me weird or, as the guy suggested, not so much bisexual as expected… even though I did wonder where such an expectation came from for a moment – then it occurred to me that this guy was basing his opinion on the stereotypes surrounding gay men.

It kinda pissed me off to have someone who had never been intimate with another man trying to tell me what the deal was and how I was supposed to behave.  Just like anything else that has to do with sex, we mostly learn by doing – it’s still the best way to determine your likes and dislikes and while it makes sense to learn from the experiences of others, you almost immediately understand that what doesn’t work for one guy is the cat’s pajamas for another guy or one man’s meat is another man’s poison.  You understand this, adjust your thinking/behavior accordingly, and go on about your bisexual business; it makes sense that if there are things you won’t do with a woman, there are also things that you’re not going to do with a man.  Using this logic, if you didn’t do all that can be done with a woman, it doesn’t mean you’re not straight, does it?  Yeah, I know – this sounds pretty silly and that’s because it is.

Several years later, I had someone suggest that if I wasn’t as romantic with men as I am with women, then I couldn’t be bisexual; I guess their thinking here is that bisexuals do things equally between men and women, that being bisexual is a 50-50 kind of thing… when it never was.  Again, if a guy finds himself unable to be romantic with every woman he may come across, does it mean he’s really not as straight as he believes himself to be?  Of course not!  Sure, I learned that when it comes to being romantic, it works better for me with women than it does with men; when I learned this, I have to admit that I felt kinda bad about it – should I be as romantic with men as I am with women?  Eventually, I decided the answer was no; it’s not that I couldn’t like a guy if, as a person, he appealed to my sense of aesthetics and I learned that I could fall in love with a guy… but, yeah, if he was willing to give me his dick to suck (and I felt it was safe all the way around), then there was no need to be romantic.  Now, at the time, I wasn’t quite sure if having a regular guy to fool around with counted as being romantic; even in that situation, we might profess that we really liked each other beyond the sex… but romance – and the prospect of having a relationship (in the conventional sense) was never in the offing.  Indeed, most guys I came across preferred to skip having a relationship and all the emotional stuff that goes along with it and get right to making each other bust a nut which was preferable and more so since I was in a relationship and, in some cases, so were the men I was getting jiggy with.

Hanging out on swinging site forums was always good for a laugh or two, having conversations with people about my sexuality when, in fact, they had zero bisexual experience; you just ain’t gonna tell me that I should always let men fuck me when you’ve never done it yourself and wouldn’t even consider taking a hard cock in your butt.  Likewise, you ain’t gonna tell me that I’m not bisexual just because I don’t care for kissing men and you’d rather eat shit and die before you kissed a man yourself.  By this time, any “weirdness” I may have felt because of my refined preferences had gone away; I learned to own the processes involved with my bisexuality so that I could make it my own thing to do… but it was still funny conversing with non-bisexuals and reading their opinions on what a bisexual should be like and, yes, their misinformation touched women as well, i.e., if a woman didn’t eat pussy but she’d suck a dick in a heartbeat, then she couldn’t be bisexual.

What a crock of shit, huh?  One of the things I learned that excised the weirdness out of me was that, sure, okay, you can read about bisexuality and even draw your own conclusions about what the word means and what actions might be doable; you can even know a bisexual or two and, if you do, you might even learn of their exploits – I ain’t saying this is a bad thing on the whole… but if you’re not bisexual, have never had an actual experience – and, yeah, any experimentation done in one’s youth does count as actual experience – then, fuck, no; you’re just not qualified to tell me how bisexual I am (or how I’m not so bisexual) just because you think I should be doing something that I’ve learned through many experiences I don’t like doing… or I don’t have to do if I don’t want to.

If I could go back in time and have that original conversation with that guy all over again, I wouldn’t debate the issue with him – but I would probably laugh in his face because today I better understand that he had no fucking idea what he was talking about.  But I’m glad that I had debated the issue back then; it gave me reason to really look at my sexuality and to not take it for granted; I learned to own it lock, stock, and barrel and in ways that provided a great deal of meaning and, uh-huh, personal satisfaction.