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February 14, 2010
January 25, 2010
Married & Bisexual-Finding a Solution
Of all the bisexual husbands out there, a few join forces with their wives to find the solution. The following is from an online bi married male group. It reflects an element I think is important if you’re looking to get the most from a third party relationship; the connection. Not likely that it’s love, but it’s in that family of emotions.
Once the hard relationship crisis started to ease after my wife found a copy of something I had sent to an online contact, my wife’s bottom line issues turned out to be: a) she didn’t want to be abandoned and b) she wanted to be INcluded rather than EXcluded in my “whole” personality including the part that had been secretive and fearful. So, it appeared the ball was sorta back in MY court. I didn’t feel experienced in gay issues, but I had more contact and experience than SHE did so it felt to be my role to try to find ways to start bring my straight wife along. We tried to be open and creative…to find things to do that I might have done alone but now we would do them together. We both went to San Diego’s Pride activities, for example. We read a lot—on any related topic. We went to a bisexual support group here in San Diego. Another thing we did was do some online chatting with people together….men who represented they were married but had interests in men, bisexuals, etc.
We got connected with a married guy who said he lived in PHX. He said he had experienced some bisexual activity before he was married while in college and was interested in trying to do it again. He would start a scenario and then send it to us to pick up where he left off, develop the story a bit further and then send it back to him. Not long into the connection he said his job was bringing him to our area to attend a convention, trade show, or seminar. Plans were made to meet. The night before he was to arrive we got an email saying that somehow his wife got access to the email stream that had passed between he and us. Furthermore, his email address suddenly had been deleted. We were upset—not so much that we weren’t going to get to meet him after all—but more from the standpoint that if what he said was true he and his wife would be in a mortal struggle as we had been not so long before. We found out later, though, that what he had described he’d done while in college was kind of “boiler plate” erotic fantasy—that the “bones” of the story he told was familiar. What was new wasn’t the story…but my wife and I! We also came into some fairly reliable knowledge later that supported he had pretty much “chickened out” of the idea of meeting us. Such is life on the ‘net! What we realized, though, was that in passing the fantasy story-line back and forth, and our email exchanges with him had served to “bring us along” in certain ways—ways that we kinda needed at that moment.
January 13, 2010
Coming Out 2010 Style
MTV’s new season of Real World DC has cast a young man I think represents today’s refreshing attitude toward sexuality among his generation. Mike Manning, a twenty-two year old student from Thornton, Colorado is taking time off to be part of the show. He came out just before filming began. The following is an excerpt fr0m his interview with MetroWeekly.
Mike Manning (Photo by Todd Franson)
Interview by Will O’Bryan
MW: When you came out, that was as bisexual, right? You identify as bi, not gay?
MANNING: Yeah. I dated girls. I had my first serious girlfriend when I was 16 and lost my virginity to her. I dated girls all the way until my sophomore year of college. So I was straight.
MW: Were your parents okay with you liking guys too?
MANNING: In the beginning, they weren’t so much. They were nice, and they gave me the whole, “You’re our son and we love you anyway,” things like that.
The way I came out is I wrote my parents like a five-page letter. I tried to include everything. “I am telling you this because you are my parents. I love you.” We’ve always been very, very close. I’d played football with my dad, and we’d go fishing and shoot guns. I can stay in and watch TV with my mom and do whatever she does. My whole family, we’re very close. So I was like, “This isn’t a reflection on you. This is how I was born. I just want to include you in every aspect of my life. I don’t want to lie to you and tell you I’m going to the movies when I’m really going to a gay club.” I was just trying to be honest with them.
I sat them down, they read the letter, and then I was like, “Do you have any questions?” That was it. My dad was like, “Are you sure you’re gay or bi or whatever? Are you sure you like men?” Yes, Dad. “Are you sure it’s not a phase?” No, Dad.
I think the female body is very appealing. I enjoy seeing boobies and everything like that. [Laughs.] I feel the exact same way when I see a [male] Calvin Klein ad. I said, “This is how I was born and it’s taken me a long time to accept that. Believe me, Dad, I’ve thought about the whole ‘phase’ thing, and it’s definitely not a phase.”
My mom started crying. She said, “Does this mean I’m not going to have grandkids?”
October 14, 2009
A Marvelous Take on Male Bisexuality
In his witty writing style, Mark Simpson nails the male bisexuality dilemma.
Curiouser And Curiouser: The Strange ‘disappearance’ Of Male Bisexuality
The recent spate of media reports of the commonness of female bisexuality and the ‘non-existence’ of the male variety inclines Mark Simpson ‘father’ of the metrosexual to wonder why we seem to be kidding ourselves about the real, red-blooded nature of the ‘bi-curious’ times we’re living in.
(Originally appeared on marksimpson.com Feb 15, 2006)
Male bisexuality doesn’t exist. Or it’s very, very rare. Or it’s really just gay men in denial. Yeah, it’s official: bi guys are freaks and liars as well as non-existent.
Female bisexuality, on the other hand, is almost universal. It’s as natural and as true as it is wonderful and real and… hot!
Or so you would be forgiven for thinking if you had read the effusive reports in the papers about California State University’s recently published sex-research which claims that women are 27 times more likely to become attracted to their own sex than men.
I haven’t yet been able to study the research quoted, but any sex survey that claims to have interviewed 3,500 people and show that 0.3% of men are attracted to the same sex compared to 8% of women (as quoted in the Independent on Sunday 12/2/06) is difficult to take seriously – except as a measure of social attitudes rather than sexuality.
Maybe it’s because some of my best shags are bisexual men, but I’m beginning to get a bit teed off with this drive to make male bisexuality disappear, either into statistics smaller than a micro-penis or obscured behind a flurry of girl-on-girl action. A few months ago the New York Times published an article ‘Straight, gay or lying?’ which seemed to be a press release for the hilariously cranky research of Dr J. Michael Bailey at Northwestern University, which apparently involves wiring up people’s genitals and showing them dirty pictures and then claiming to have ‘proved’ that male bisexuality ‘doesn’t exist’ and that most women are bisexual. Which seems a much more tenuous conclusion to reach, rather than, for instance: most psychologists at Northwestern University are very strange indeed. (Amongst other extraordinary omissions, the article neglected to mention that Dr Bailey has more than one ‘previous’ in his area: he thinks transsexuals are also ‘really’ gay men and, in a coup-de-grace of his tidy-minded thinking, advocates eugenics to solve the problem of homosexuality).
I hate to break it to you guys, but most of the evidence, historical, anthropological and sexological, suggests that if anything, male ‘bisexuality’ – it’s a terrible word, almost as bad as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’, but it will have to do for now – is much more common than the female variety. After all, entire civilizations such as Ancient (and according to many accounts, Modern) Greece have been based on it. Not to mention public schools, the Royal Navy and Hollywood….
September 27, 2009
One Man’s Experience with Bisexuality
Come as you are
From www.nerve.com
A personal essayby Neal Medlyn
I think I first figured out that I might be bisexual when I was in college. It’s hard for me to say when or how, as various alternate tales compete in my mind as the “official” truth. The first time I saw gay porn? When I realized my masturbation fantasies involved me switching parts, being the woman, then being the man? My identification with the gay movement? All of them sound equally silly, embarrassing and worse, perhaps just a personality hiccup and not a real “truth” at all. None of them sound like anything that approaches a realization of Identity with a capital I. And that, more or less, is indicative of my entire life as a bisexual: dubious, occasionally embarrassing, obscured.
Being a bisexual guy, as the term exists at the moment, is an exercise in frustration and confusion, and while I stand by that confusion as truthful and great (get me drunk and I’ll say it’s everything from the basis for art that I like to what I’d like America to stand for) I think it’s a basically flawed identity in sore need of some fixing.
Oh, some details might be called for here. The pertinent facts of my life are these: I am twenty-nine years old and incredibly happily married to a woman. I’ve dated and slept with exactly the same number of boys as girls. My feelings about the two sexes break down somewhat like this: I more easily form emotional attachments with women but because of that have found men mysterious and intriguing the way I’m sure my more hetero counterparts must find women. If I were to put it in those terms, I’d say I’m 70% into girls and 30% into boys. There. Done.
Now, back to what I was saying. Bisexuality is a disappointing, suspect, utterly chaotic identity. It seems to exist in only the foggiest regions of people’s brains, like Pol Pot the geographic location of Myanmar. They’re not sure what it is, but they’re pretty sure it’s lame and/or bad.
Gay men that I’ve dated in the past, the most recent being five years ago, were terribly suspicious. Aside from a few unexpected trysts with fellows, the first guy I officially dated was the president of an LGBT campus organization I decided to join. I should have known at the stunned silence on the first day when, delusioned by the supposed redemptive power of coming out, I offered that I was bi. The president of the group still decided to go out with me, but the majority of our time together consisted of long, accusatory conversations on car hoods. I broke up with him a few weeks later and was tearfully informed that I wasn’t able to love, to let myself really commit to a relationship with him, which I accepted as code for my waffling, noncommittal nature as a bisexual.
September 18, 2009
Bisexuality 101: How many bisexuals are out there?
I’ve asked this question a thousand times. This article from examiner.com gives you an idea of how difficult it is to arrive at a consensus. I personally believe, as far as men are concerned, if we could take the entire male population and strip away a lifetime of indoctrination, if men were allowed to perceive and react to what comes natural to them, the numbers would be astounding.
From examiner.com
By Mike Szymanski
No wonder we bisexuals feel so alone–we don’t even know how many of us exist. Estimates range from zero to tens of millions in the United States alone, depending on which study you believe.
It’s not easy to find hard numbers on this. To quote scholar and activist Loraine Hutchins:
Newer Kinsey Institute studies found both more evidence of bisexuality, and more denial. A late 80s study, for instance, showed 46 percent of (self-labeled) lesbians, not bisexuals, reporting having sex with men since in the ’80s”
Time Magazine said any statistic is unreliable because people who engage in such behavior don’t consider themselves bisexual.
Here are other reports:
* 0.3% of women and 0.7% of men engaged in sexual activity with both males and females within the previous year-”Sex in America,” University of Chicago, 1992
* 1.5% of women and 0% of men defined as bisexual based on sexual and romantic attraction-National Institutes of Health, 2002
* 5% of women and 10% of men fall solidly into a middle level of the Kinsey scale of sexual preferences. However, when accounting for people’s actions and attractions, as many as 25% of women and 46% of men could be labeled as bisexual.-Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, director of field research for The Institute for Sex Research
September 16, 2009
Cristy’s Concern About Her Bisexual Boyfriend
Many bisexual males ultimately opt for traditional marriage, which is usually to a straight bride. Many of them keep their sexuality secret, in some cases their entire lives. A growing number are telling their prospective wives about their bisexuality, which is often shrugged off by the woman, only to rear it’s psychologically intrusive head further down the road. This problem is related to society’s overall attitude toward sexual diversity.
The following is a typical scenario
BY Sasha, From Eye Weekly.com
I thought your take on why so many people believe bisexuals to be less monogamous was thoughtful and interesting. However, as someone who’s been in long-term, monogamous relationship with a bisexual man, I think you missed the real reason for these insecurities. I thought I was completely fine with my boyfriend’s bisexuality but what started to gnaw at me after a while was the fact that by committing to me he would never be able to enjoy that other side of himself. Sure, I could give him all the vag in the world but I could never satisfy his desire for cock. It creates an insecurity that really is twice as dramatic as a heterosexual couple. Where before I only had to worry about women hitting on my man, now I have to be worried about guys as well. Not to mention that the longer one goes without something, the stronger their desire for it becomes. I’m not saying these fears are rational, but it’s where the mind goes sometimes, especially when trust is not a strong part of the relationship.
He can’t just turn off his attraction to men – I mean, can he really ignore those feelings forever or as long as we’re together? I think it’s more about feeling you can never fully satisfy your partner and for many, cheating is the next logical step in that equation. Cristy
The Reply:
You bring up a salient point about how, when we pursue a traditional relationship model with an atypical partner, we behave as though we are entitled – obliged, in fact – to feel insecure. Andrea Zanin, who conducts workshops internationally about non-monogamy, speaks to this tendency eloquently: “Most of us are raised within and completely immersed in the institution of heterosexuality. By this I don’t mean the sexual orientation per se; I mean the paradigm that has us all believing a certain package deal of sexual and gender-related feelings, identities and behaviours is normal and right. Within that paradigm, the prescribed set of behaviours is more or less as follows: you are appropriately gendered for your sex, feel sexual attraction to people of only one sex/gender (the ‘opposite’ one), engage in monogamous or serial monogamous partnership with such people, marry, reproduce and so forth. Sometimes we encounter people or situations that fall outside that paradigm but as long as we can normalize them, we can sort of incorporate them into the paradigm so that they remain comfortable for us. So for example, if your guy likes other guys, that can be seen as something that makes him unique or unusual, but you can still be ‘fine’ with it as long as it doesn’t disturb the rest of the package deal. The problem is that sometimes those unique or unusual people or circumstances are just a bit too hard to normalize, for whatever reason, and that causes us a great deal of anxiety.”
September 6, 2009
Five Married Men
No one knows how many married men live their lives hiding a secret.
Men who have chosen a traditional life, who have concealed their sexuality, who have tried in vain to ignore the pulls and tugs inside them, who have never allowed themselves to explore their attraction to other men. Perhaps you married one of them. Perhaps he lives next door. Perhaps he’s your father, your brother, your cousin or your best friend. Perhaps you are him.
Five Married Men is a story about men who have found themselves in this situation, their lives and their emotions; five happily married men who finally decide to act on their urges. The reader sees inside their minds, sees how this dilemma affects their lives and the women they are married to.
An Excerpt from chapter 11:
In a room high above the city, a small island of space and time, five men plan to give themselves over to the mysteries ingrained in them before leaving the womb. In their hearts they had become brothers-within the privacy of four walls they were five nervous men on the threshold of an age-old fantasy. Together in secrecy they would explore the compatibility of their minds and bodies, knowing very little of each other, yet more than the rest of the world would ever know.
The first to arrive, Tim rented the room. One by one they dialed his cell phone from the lobby, and he let them in when they knocked on the door. The last to arrive, James took a chair near the window that overlooked the downtown skyline. They sat around the room in skittish knots, the world that would condemn them locked beyond a bolted door. They were a collection of sweaty palms and bodies comprised of identical poetry, of minds filled with doubt and adventure; five men standing shoulder- to-shoulder, trying to cast off their guilt on a road with no clear horizon.
Can Bisexual People be Monogamous?
From Bi Social News
So here’s the proverbial $64,000 question: What does it mean to be bisexual and in a monogamous relationship?
How do we even approach the question to begin with? It seems rather daunting; after all, I’m not the first one to pose the question. On a random sampling of the web, I found a few people who have been trying to grapple with the question. There was one young woman who attempted to answer the question in a college term paper, to no avail. Then there’s a fellow who said he loved his girlfriend but was chaffing at monogamy. I found yet another posting of by a young man who extolled his girlfriend yet seemed unnerved by his sexual fantasies that included other men. As you follow the links, you’ll notice the postings span seven years. I’m sure I could have found more, especially if I had done some scholarly research.
Before we continue with the question itself, let’s also consider that resources dealing with bisexuality seem always seem to field a question regarding whether bisexuals can be monogamous. Both the Bi Writer’s Association, which I have referenced here before, and The Alliance at Michigan State University discuss the issue.
So what’s going on? What is inherent in the question? What makes people ask it? I propose the following: The mention of bisexuality leads people to assume sexual voraciousness, dissatisfaction and instability. After all, we live in a society – though it is by no means the only one – in which sexuality is still tightly controlled. Monogamy is the norm; celibacy is tolerated; polyamory is beyond the pale. Sexuality and reproduction are seen as synonymous to the point that if scientists could figure out a way to have us reproduce sans the pleasure of sexual intercourse, they’d be given the Congressional Gold Medal. There’s no need to wonder why the pornography industry is so lucrative!
Thus even in a hetero-normal society, the labels ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ can be seen to represent a restriction of choice and some sort of control. There is also an element of concreteness in the designations ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ’straight’. After all, if monogamy is the norm, we are restricted to going out with a member of one sex or the other. Desire, fantasy and expression can all exist in a nice neat package, along a nice straight line. What you see is what you get.
September 3, 2009
Would You Want to be 100% Straight?
So you’ve recognized the fact you’re attracted to men. Is that something you regret? If you walked into a French Quarter voodoo shop in New Orleans and found, among the spider eggs, fly wings, and toad stools, a magic potion that would make you 100% straight, would you grab it up and drink it as fast as you could?
How many gay or bisexual men have asked themselves this question? I bet 99% of them. What if a pill would do it, would you swallow two or three and then stare at yourself in the mirror, waiting for the change, wondering what you will look like straight? Or perhaps you find out about a tribal dance practiced by young warriors in Kenya that makes real men out of boys; would you put on a loincloth, take up a spear and give it hell around a backyard bonfire come the next full moon? Given the circumstances gay and bisexual men face in our misguided society, it’s little wonder if some of them would.
But when you get under the surface, below the lifetime of negative self-images and male identity questions, all that history that has glommed together to comprise your uniqueness, would you really want to give up one of the most vivid colors in your rainbow? You’ve finally gotten past all those gender-identity issues and have learned how to let your thoughts blossom without self-imposed limits–would you really want to force all that vital roundness back into such a small square hole?
Your liberated sexuality defines far more than the shape of the human body that attracts you, it’s interrelated with other facets of your persona. It’s likely to make people perceive you as interesting, whether they know about your sexuality or not. It plays a role in the books you chose to read, the movies you choose to see, the places you choose to travel to, the friends you choose. Without it, you may not even be interested in books, or you may find yourself lined up with the masses at the next college coed exploitation movie. You might even identify with those guys in TV beer commercials, heaven forbid.
