Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: 11 January 23, 1726 hours

For some reason I don’t pretend to understand, I have a lot of African bisexuals following me on Twitter that I didn’t ask for and reading what they have to say and what they’re doing is interesting and more so when, as I’ve said a thousand times, there’s always been this perception that all Blacks are homophobic and one that remains “true” today despite the obvious evidence that contradicts this perception.

Someone had made a statement that homosexuality in Africans – and that includes African-Americans – doesn’t really exist and someone responded by telling them to read a paper written by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe entitled, “Boy-wives and Female Husbands – Studies in African Homosexualities.

I wanted to read this, and they sent me the link to where the paper is located: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Boy-Wives-and-Female-Husbands-Murray-Roscoe/7a41ad22483180a5367b239e825f14b3ff148fdd

So far, it’s making for some interesting reading and despite quite a few typos. A lot of what I’ve read so far wasn’t unknown to me because of the stuff I had been researching and from all the sources that were available – before the WWW and better search engines came to be. I had to wave my fingers over it to open the provided link in Safari (since I was doing all of this on my iPad) and once that was done, send it to the Apple Books app and, voila – I don’t have to read it from a web browser. The one thing that stood out right away was that this perception and assumption came about when very early Europeans “stumbled” upon the African continent and declared that homosexuality didn’t exist in Africa.

You’d have to read it to really get this gist of things. A lot of this early “research” seemed to have been done by anthropologists who, um, didn’t do a good job of reporting things, to put it like that. The only thing I thought that got them off the hook was a statement that said that anthropologists weren’t being sent there to dig into African sexual behaviors so in some cases, when they saw homosexuality at work and in some forms, they didn’t “write it down” or, if they did, they glossed over things and it is to note that many of them were tasked to find out specific things so a lot of them were seeing this but because it wasn’t what their employers asked for, nothing was said.

What I’m reading about how African across the continent were dealing with this is… fucking fascinating. In most of the situations I’ve read so far, while Europeans were losing their shit over the “barbaric and unnatural sexual behaviors” they were seeing between and involving men, quite a few tribes or areas didn’t see it as them doing anything wrong since they didn’t “subscribe” to Judeo-Christian beliefs… and some still don’t.

I’ve got a ways to go before I finish it but I had to get this out there before it fell through the cracks due to me doing other stuff. If you’re interested, read it and, if not, okay.

This has got to be one of the shortest TBTs that I’ve written in a while…

 

Today’s Bisexual Thoughts: Violence Against Gays

We’ve all now heard of the horror that took place in Orlando and many are stunned at this act of senseless violence and that yet another person decided that because they couldn’t accept something due to their beliefs, then killing the people who offended their sensibilities was the only answer… and then the coward killed himself.  Some writings are calling this an act of terrorism; folks on Facebook (and I guess other social media sites) are ranting and raving once again about the right to own weapons, raising hell against against Muslims, stuff like that.

It’s not like I’ve not seen violence against gays or have been the target of vigilantes running around and beating up anyone they think isn’t straight (didn’t go well for them when they did try to attack me) and long ago now, one senseless killing made the national spotlight when some self-righteous assholes tied a gay man to the back of a truck and dragged him to death – and too similar to how a Black man minding his own business got murdered.

The question that takes shape in my mind is that outside of the great loss of life in Orlando, what did this accomplish?  Did the perpetrator of this crime think that his actions were going on put an end to homosexuality? Or is this just more of the same dumb shit we see all over the country where someone gets offended by something and decide that murdering those who offended them is the only thing to do?  Even better, how is it that even these homegrown terrorists (or whatever you wanna call them) don’t know that instead of striking fear in us, such heinous shit makes us stronger and galvanizes us to resist thes idiotic attempts to change our way of life even more?

Someone on Facebook posted a video clip of some Islamic cleric in Orlando allegedly saying that all homosexuals must be killed – don’t know if it’s real or not (y’all know how Facebook is these days, don’t you?) but if one wanted to know why shit like this happens all over the world, it’s because (wait for it…) adherence to dogma keeps us from new realities. The shame of it all and something we fail to see is that Islam isn’t the only religion that preaches against not being straight and not the only religion that pretty much promises death as the ultimate punishment.

It makes me wonder what it’s going to take for all of us to finally see that this kind of mindset does not help us be better and all it it really does is keep us either defiant or at each other’s throats… and all because we believe – and for some, fanatically so – in something that since recorded time has never been true, that despite these teachings, men have sex with men and women have sex with women and the “threat” concerning the continuation of our species because of this sexual activity isn’t all that dire?  According to http://worldometer.com, there are 7.4 billion people (and counting) alive in the world so, um, despite homosexual sex, uh, babies are still being conceived either the good old fashioned way or via modern techniques.

We embody the saying that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it in that murdering those who aren’t like us or don’t believe in what we believe never solves any problems.  We call ourselves civilized yet in some things, we are still barbiarians; we consider ourselves to be enlightened but cannot accept the reality of things, in this case, not everyone is or wants to be heterosexual.  Them first and second amendments to our constitution are being used for foment senseless violence against each other and all because of a belief in something that is so badly outdated and nearly irrelevant as anything I know of; forever and ever, the reasons why homosexuality was seen as forbidden and prohibited do not exist in 2016.  The thing that scares me is that religious dogma continues to be a measure of control and one that blinds us to that which should be obvious:  You might murder a homosexual (or bisexual) today but it’s not going to put an end to something that humans have been doing all along.  Even scarier is the obvious fact that there are people who can’t see the futility is such a thing.

And then there’s the cowardice in the crime committed in Orlando; that person felt strongly enough to kill and/or injure so many people… but wasn’t man enough to live and face the consequences of his actions.  If there is a threat to our existence as a species, it sure as hell ain’t sexuality in any form; it’s our continued inability to not kill that which isn’t like us or that which we don’t understand.  We’ve failed to learn from history; we keep doing the same things over and over and expect a different result… and haven’t changed one damned thing.  Manynpeoplemwere killed or injured… and homosexuality still exists, doesn’t it?  Somewhere in the world, someone is being taught that not being straight is a sin and a crime against nature and that those who are not straight have to be put to death and as long as we keep believing this shit, people are going to keep dying over what is, essentially, a lie…

 

Zero Shades of Gray

About an hour ago, I read a blog with the Bisexuality tag where the author went on a rant, essentially saying that there’s no such thing as a bisexual and that people are only straight or homosexual… and I rolled my eyes mightily because, clearly, there are so many people out there in the world who continue to see things in the absolute black and white viewpoint.

It’s amazing how many people continue to hold onto a viewpoint like this when there’s plenty of evidence that contradicts their point of view.  I understand that we all believe in stuff and in whatever way we do… but there was a time when people thought the world was flat until they learned that it wasn’t.  There were people who believed the earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it until they learned that they weren’t even close to the truth.  And it was once believed that everyone was heterosexual until it was learned that, um, nope, that’s not even the truth.  It was once believed that humans only had sex for procreation until this, too, was proved to be inaccurate – we have sex simply because we can and it’s a whole lot of fun (most of the time).  At some point in our sexual history, two men figured out that, hey, we can get our rocks off with each other; likewise, two women discovered that they could do a better job of delivering sexual pleasure than men could.

Yet, despite the evidence that exists in the here and now, there are still people who refuse to believe that men can have relationships with each other just as much as women can with each other – and they say that we’re the ones who are confused, that we’re deceiving ourselves into believing that we aren’t what we’ve proven ourselves to be?

The author of the blog I mentioned says that guys who’d rather hang with the fellas than their women are exhibiting homosexual behavior, as if he never heard of the concept of male bonding.  Indeed, within his rant is evidence that he has a very narrow view of sexuality as well as sexual behaviors – he doesn’t seem to believe that a man or a woman could enjoy sex outside of heterosexuality… but they’re not homosexual by default.  Forget Kinsey’s famous scale, which reveals that there are gray areas in human sexuality – oh, like bisexuality, for instance.  Let’s not think about the fact that if heterosexuality is zero and homosexuality is six, there are a lot of other numbers in there that a lot of people just happen to fall into.  Why should we pay attention to the fact that there are people who are expanding Kinsey’s scale beyond mere homosexuality, creating a new upper limit and, thus, more shades of gray?

The world isn’t flat.  The universe doesn’t have the earth at its center.  Bisexuals are very real and none of them are confused about what they are.  Sure, we might question to what extent we are bisexual but there’s little doubt that we are; come one, it’s really not that hard to figure out, right?  Does it go against the status quo?  No, not really, since humans have been displaying these behaviors for a very long time; it just goes against what we’ve been conditioned to believe and the way the majority wants things to go – how’s that been working, by the way?  Not so good?

I get that there are people who firmly believe that bisexuals and homosexuals shouldn’t exist… which, of course, doesn’t change the fact that they do.  You can try to apply whatever methods you care to in order to disprove their existence and, ultimately, they will all fail and if there are people out there who are trying to prove this lack of existence, I say to them that you are the ones who are deceiving yourselves because one of the things we all learn at some point is that life doesn’t do things the way you’d like it to.

Is having a viewpoint of zero shades of gray a matter of belief… or is it ignorance and a form of denial that’s being foisted upon those of us who aren’t straight?  I’m not gonna say that having the belief that anyone that isn’t heterosexual is wrong is, in and of itself, a bad thing – if that’s what you believe, then it’s what you believe but just because you believe it’s wrong only means that you believe it’s wrong – doesn’t mean that bisexuals and homosexuals (and all the other queer folks) don’t exist.

The shades of gray in human sexuality do exist and we are learning that these gray areas are much larger than we previously thought they were.  Open your eyes and your mind and allow yourself to see them; you don’t have to accept them but you should acknowledge that these gray areas do exist and they’ve always existed…