Had this conversation with a guy just this week. He had maintained he was straight even while having sex with guys. I told him I was bi and he reluctantly said maaaaaybeeeeee he was bi too. I explained to him about some guys being bi but hetero-romantic and he lit up the room with his smile. "That's me!" Now that he knows where he fits, and that it's a thing, he's thrilled.

I think this is a great conversation - to really allow the range of sexuality to be acknowledged. Lopsided bisexuality certainly seems like it is out there- and many LB's just 'round down to straight' . As I read this though, I wish you or Blow might have commented more on the 'raped as a child' part.

It would be helpful if we could talk more about the enduring impact trauma can have on our sexuality-- our feelings and our choices-- in a long-term way. For some it can make something that would otherwise be erotic, frightening. For others it can make something associated with fear strongly erotic. It can make some people who were abused engage in repetitive re-enactment of those scenes, even if the gender of the person is not who they are typically attracted to. And the thing that seems to characterize these 'reenactment experiences' is that the person does not really enjoy them or find sexual freedom in them. Blow's own comments about having to get really drunk to have these encounters and then regretting them after certainly raises this question for me. And I think that it is helpful to separate 'orientation' from 'trauma reaction'. One is innate, the other is a reaction to a difficult event.
(By the way, in NO way am I suggesting that most bisexual people are reacting to trauma. ) If someone experiences sexual trauma and has a lot of sexually confusing impulses after that, there can be a connection.

This is why the Craigslist M4M "casual encounters" section is filled with hundreds upon hundreds of closet cases, cheating on their wives or girlfriends, demanding that they are "straight". What bullshit. What cowards - too scared to accept how they were born, too gutless to come out of the closet. If you are a woman reading this and you have a bf or a husband - there's a very good chance he's been cruising Craigslist M4M "casual encounters". It's amazing how many closet cases are out there cheating on their wives and girlfriends. When you meet a man who says they are married, just assume they are on CL, trolling for cock and claiming to be "straight". Cowards.

The "men seeking men" section has much fewer closet cases, as it takes more courage to admit you are actually seeking another man, so the "casual encounters" section is perfect for cowardly closet cases.

It is amazing to see how many men are out there looking for a same-sex hookup. Search CL for these keywords: MWM, straight, str8, "can't host", discreet, "not getting it at home", wife. - You will find tons of so-called "straight" guys out there who want their cake...and to eat it too. They get all of the benefits of a hetero life (acceptance, equal rights, etc.) and want cock as well, all the while us out gay men are here fighting for equality and justice. Any out gay man has 100 times more courage than those closet cases.

I'm sure there will a ton of disagreement with me on this (maybe not?) but these cheating, married/attached so-called "straight" guys are gutless and their wives and girlfriends deserve to know what kind of men they are attached to, and they need to know what kind of health risks they are being put under.

@3: With that kind of a welcome, what possible reason would a straight-identified bi man have for staying closeted?

Straight men think we're fags, gay men like you think we're cowards.

You aren't helping.

I believe (and I'm not making this up) that there is not one but many bisexualities. The Kinsey scale is onedimensional but human beings are multidimensional.

Dr. Rinna Riesenfeld proposes a crossed referenced set of scales that allows one to discover many different kinds of bisexualities that go beyond the standard not-so-flexible definition one can find in a dictionary. She proposes several forms, such as:

--Shop window bisexuality: can only fantasize about it;
--Fantasy bi: only uses it as a sexual mental device;
--Experimental bi: bi-curious, perhaps?
--Momentarily bi: during certain circumstances, such as during prison or seminary time;
--Specific bi: attraction only for a specific person of the same genre;
--Periodic bi
--Alternate bi
--Simultaneous

Then she refers to other possible qualifiers such as frequency, intensity, duration.

I'm sure from the time of publication until now her ideas might have progressed but this, to me, is a very positive, ample and generous way to look at it.

I'm short terms: there isn't one but many bisexualities.

I gotta say--and I'm not trying to bash bisexuals--but his description sounds like a bunch of crap. Sorry, Dan. I heard you talking about this guy on your podcast as well, and it just doesn't...sound at all convincing. I don't want to piss on the parade of Bisexual Awareness Week but this guy just comes across as gaaaaaaaaaay. With his loving descriptions of men's bodies, and his endless (but toally sincere!) pronunciations of his true love for women, but nevertheless he just can't get away from that persistent tug (even with alcohol!) of lust for those tempting, tempting men's muscular, broad-shouldered frames. Yeaah...

Not to deny bisexual male existence, of course! I think you took some bait here Dan.

@4 - It wasn't a welcome...again you are confused. It was a warning to all women out there who assume that their husband is faithful to them. And yes, you are cowardly for not coming out - at the very least come out to yourself. Accept who you are, accept how you were born and start to realize you are not straight. You are bisexual, possibly gay. The more men who accept that they are part of a sexual minority, the more acceptance there will be in society. You are the B in LGBTQ!

@6: So the only bi men are the ones who aren't physically attracted to men?

@7 -- Mr Savage delivers the tough love/honesty message with compassion and decency.

Your message is one of denigration and anger.

I prefer Mr Savage, who can deliver the same idea without anger.

@8:

Two main reasons:

1) His attraction to men is not only not diminished by guzzling alcohol (gasp!), but actually--wait for it--increased! This is so creepily similar to "pray away the gay" backwards thinking that I wouldn't think it even merit discussion here

2) His descriptions of love for men are visceral and bodily graphic, while his proclaimed love for women is perfunctory and chaste--something he could just as well say about his sister, mother, grandmother, or aunt--i.e. people he dearly loves but doesn't want to fuck.

I really don't want to beat up on the guy, because he obviously has real hardships (being a black queer in America, being sexually assaulted as a child), but the dude's a blatant closet case, loud and clear, and should be nobody's poster boy for Bisexuality Awareness. I know it, you know it, and most of all, Dan knows it.

I think Dan wants to make a point, and it's a good one (bisexual males exist). But as so often happens when he doesn't really read the fine print, he's hitched himself to the wrong wagon yet again.

Blow has become such a favorite columnist of mine, and I'm very happy for him to reach the point where he can write something like this. Terrific.

I loved Charles Blow's article so much.

I had a similar identity struggle that came out the other way - bisexual but homo-amorous, I guess. I found it super confusing to reconcile because to Dan Savage's point here I didn't really know that was a thing.

I'm out as bi, and yes, bi folks, come out!

@10: "His proclaimed love for women is perfunctory and chaste."

Did you read the same article I did?

I missed the tug of the female form, the primary sensation and the peripheral ones. The look of soft features and the feel of soft skin. The graceful slopes of supple curves. The sweet smells. The giggles... My female attraction was fully formed—I could make love and fall in love.

Do you really think a man would speak lyrically about the soft skin and supple curves of his sister, mother, grandmother, or aunt?

Why is all of this about bi men only? I have long since come to terms that I am a woman with lopsided bisexuality. I am sometimes attracted to women, no question, and have enjoyed being with women in the past. However, I am more often and more strongly attracted to men, and I have never really fallen in love with a woman. I have also come to acknowledge that I prefer monogamy. I have been in open relationships before and they don't work for me emotionally. I am currently monogamously married to a man. So on the outside I'm sure I look like a straight woman, plain and simple. However, I would say I'm a lopsidedly bisexual woman. My bi side comes out in my porn and erotica consumption patterns, which my husband has no problem with.

A dear, long-time (female) friend used to say: "Men are for fun, women are for keeps."

@13:

Yep. I think that's *exactly* the way many gay men would describe a woman they physically admire, or the way Nile Crane would talk about Daphne. "Ooh, their soft skin and supple curves! ("supple", of course, being a word straight guys use on a regular basis). And that lovely hair and awesome heels--work it, girl!"

You can love and admire women--even physically--and still simply be gay. Ever heard of the fashion industry?

@2; Kathy23. Great that you brought this topic up here. I feel my erotic development was interfered with by outside energies; parents, teachers- projecting their own damage around their erotic lives.
I do have nice erotic fantasies that involve women, yet have never allowed myself to go there in real life. Too much negative association after being around Catholic Nuns. Contaminating , what I now realize, is just the physical expression of female to female love.

I read the excerpt, these comments, and then the whole article. At the risk of making myself a pariah here, Blow seems kinda straight. Once he gets down to it with a guy, he totally loses his boner and can't go through with it, or only can if he's shitfaced? At most he's @5's shop window bisexual. I am keeping an open mind though. Maybe I'll learn something during bisexual awareness week.

So, @16 says he must be gay (not really attracted to women) and @18 says he must be straight (not really attracted to men).

That settles it. He's asexual.

@14: Because the article that Charles Blow wrote was about his male bisexuality.

I'm sure he's working right now on a piece about his female bisexuality. I know I'm certainly looking forward to it.

@19:

Perhaps let's just agree to disagree. I actually think your point of view about Mr. Blow, and the one espoused @18 have merits as well. He could just be a straight-but-somewhat-gay guy going down his own winding path, and thus identifying as bi simply works the best for him.

Let's face it: I don't know him personally, you don't, and Dan doesn't. His story does send up some red flags for me, but hey, I could be wrong. At the very least, the dude is very conflicted, which was actually my original point: I wouldn't call him a well-actualized bisexual guy, if indeed he is really bisexual. He's a work in progress. I just think it's kind of strange that the NYT and Dan are latching on to him so strongly.

I used to know Robin Ochs from a common social setting. She kinda turned on what she may have thought was charm but ended up being kind of gross. All the time. And a couple friends felt the same way. We came up with a term for it: being Oched. I'm glad that she's actually been helpful to people.

Nothing Dan quotes from Blow's piece even implies that he's sexually attracted to men but romantically attracted to women. On the contrary, he says that while having sex with men, he missed the physical features of women's bodies.

I don't know why Dan chose to jam that experience into an ill-fitting framework of "fucks men, but falls in love with women".

If you haven't read it yet, please read the original writing by Charles Blow. What I got out of it, was that he was not going to limit himself with expectations of how he should be but continue to allow for changing feelings and attractions and expressions of attractions. I think even Dan's labeling of him as lop-sided is more fixed than what Charles Blow was expressing in his own column.

I think the bi but hetero-amorous crowd are probably just damaged by growing up in a society where they are expected to be straight, marry a member of the opposite sex, and have kids. They bought into the vision at an early age, and it affects who they want to date later in life.

But, that's ok. People are damaged by all sorts of stuff by the time they leave adolescence, whether they end up with a fondness for hats, blondes, Santa suits, or members of the opposite sex. You work with your limitations.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot fewer bi-but-hetero-amorous in the next generation, as same sex relationships are less stigmatized. Or perhaps I am full of shit. 25-30 years from now, we will know.

IndicaDogwalk @3, you sound so bitter and angry. How does "hundreds upon hundreds of closet cases, cheating on their wives or girlfriends" extrapolate to your warning that all heterosexual women with husbands or boyfriends are being cheated upon by their men? That math does not add up at all. I see where your anger comes from but you seem to have lost perspective.

@23: you can't read.

@24: Blow labeled his sexuality as "lopsided." His term. He also RT'd this piece out to his followers. I can't imagine he would've done that if it was wildly off the mark.

Agreed with @25 to some extent - for one thing, most people feel some kind of attraction (physical or otherwise) far more often than they get the chance to actually develop a relationship with a person, so the sample size is much smaller and noisier. More importantly, when you do feel attraction it's about 9x more likely to be reciprocated if it's a different-sex attraction; that's the main factor shaping the romantic experiences of bi people, and it's unlikely to change.

I love all the is he straight? is he gay? on this thread. I honestly think it's worth keeping in mind how culturally mediated bisexuality is - those of us who identify as bisexual are probably a minority of people who experience attraction to more than one gender. Some people use other terms. Willing to bet that by far the most common identifying term used by people attracted to more than just one gender is 'straight'.

@6, et al. You missed the entire point in the article, as well as the overall subject. Blow is sexually attracted to both genders, but only emotionally attracted to women. Saying he's gay because of his lustful description of the male form means.... he's sexually attracted to men. WHICH WE'VE ALREADY ESTABLISHED! And you casually dismiss Blow's attractions elsewhere.

I don't get it, you say you don't know this guy, why are you so set on him being labeled "gay"?

I didn't know about Bisexuality Celebration Day until today. I congratulated my girlfriend and she hadn't heard of it either.

This has been floated before, and better, but anything that gets a new category into general consciousness makes advances. Good on Mr Alan @1.

@ 21 - "...if indeed he is really bisexual." "He could just be a straight-but-somewhat-gay guy..."

You're right. He's totally not bisexual. He's "straight-but-somewhat-gay" instead. But "straight-but-somewhat-gay" is a super clunky label. Who wants to identify as "straight-but-somewhat-gay"?

It's too bad that there is not a word in our language that dictionary.com defines as "a person sexually responsive to both sexes."

Dan @27, thanks for posting this. I actually read the article first via your Twitter on the weekend, and it literally stopped me in my tracks. Literally; I stood in the grocery store parking lot and read it start to finish.

Blow's experience isn't everyone's, but he truthfully captures the particular circumstances of many middle-aged straight-identified but not necessarily straight men. We grew up and formed sexual identities at a time when being gay was often seen as the worst thing a man could be. The social pressure to be straight was enormous. It was a pressure that forced many gay men into the closet and into relationships with women, in an attempt to alter or at least conceal their sexuality.

But for a bisexual man, the closet wasn't exactly a closet; it was more of a furnished apartment. A man who was attracted to women at the same time and as much as, or more than, to men, could find love and sexual fulfillment in an opposite-sex relationship. Perhaps not complete fulfillment - there were always urges and fantasies - but more than enough to keep that closet door firmly shut.

So we grew up and lived our lives as straight men. We didn't attend to the other side of our sexuality, leaving it stunted and adolescent. And when one day we looked around and realized that being gay, that being attracted to men, maybe wasn't the worst thing one could be, we had no idea how to act on it. We were fumbling 12-year-olds in 45-year-old bodies.

If Blow had been born twenty years later, if I had been born twenty years later, we probably would have matured easily into self-accepting, well-adjusted bisexual men. We weren't. We didn't. But we might.

I totally had a different read of Blow's article. My reaction is, why the fuck is it sooooo important that you let us know that you're mostly attracted to women? The whole thing gave off a stink of homophobia.

That's actually closer to what those studies showed anyway: Bisexuality is real but almost everyone is more attracted to one sex/gender than the other.

There's another facet: a lot more men want to suck cock than kiss a stubbly face. A lot more women want to play with someone else's boobs than want to go down on a woman. It's complicated. Queer would be a good term except that it's starting to seem like almost everyone is queer once you know them well enough.

(I don't have stats to back up my post @38; just going by what I see with the people I know well.)

You hang with the right crowd, then, EricaP!

I think Blow is more a victim of his own dramatic, sophomoric prose style than he is ambiguous or coy. When you can write sentences like "made in the image of God, nurtured by the bosom of nature, and forged in the fire of life" with a straight face, people are more likely to figure you for a closeted gay or a self-deceiving basket case. Unfortunately, he often comes across like a mentally challenged child of Anne Rice and Ernest Hemingway, and that doesn't inspire confidence in his sincerity.

@29

Because @6 clearly is projecting his own shit onto the guy. I'm right there with @13. I don't know what the fuck article that guy read, but he's clearly got some shit to work out.

And from what Blow describes of his past, I don't think he was "born that way." I think those homo inklings have a direct link to his sexual abuse. Had that never happened, I bet he'd be a straight-as-an-arrow straight dude today. I'm just curious as to what percent of same-sex attraction results from abuse and what percent comes from birth.

@42 Given your bullshit second paragraph, you aren't "right there" with me on anything. Please don't ever agree with me.

@35 -- thanks for your comments, perfect description of my experience. Especially the "fumbling 12 year old" line. . . .

@43

Issues, much? Haha, very glad I'm not you - have a nice life!

@42 - I think your second paragraph undermines the first (the closest thing to intellectually defensible writing you've yet produced), but I think the casual reader will be better served if its addressed, rather than dismissed. So ...

I think it's possible, even probable, that any and all of our proclivities are influenced by events and environment. Which doesn't mean that we aren't "born that way," or at least "born" ... different. Hell, I'd guess my interests in dub and Japanese theater and cinema have a biological basis; I'd also have to concede that they have an environmental or cultural one.

Given that, I doubt that Blow would be "straight-as-an-arrow" minus the abuse. I also wonder if what he almost certainly was born with mightn't have manifested in a different way given different circumstances, just as my particular weirdness mightn't have led me to Jah Wobble or Kabuki if I hadn't been exposed to such things (or less traceable social influences) at crucial junctures, or if my own bisexuality mightn't have manifested as such if I hadn't majored in theater. :)

That said, these questions are only interesting to me from a narrative standpoint, since we're not really talking about properties that require explanation to begin with. I think the biggest problem with any question of nurture or nature, when it comes to the properties of character, involve an assumption on both sides that there's something for which to account, if not apologize.

Also, @43 - everything you need to know about the poster in question is summed up here:

Confluence's activity is hidden.

Never trust anyone unwilling to own his or her own words.

I'm a lopsided bisexual in the other direction -- I'm a woman who can be both romantically and sexually attracted to nearly any member of the same sex, but it's a rare male body that does much for me. Yet I'm completely capable of falling for a man romantically, then remembering a bit too late that flat, hairy chests do nothing for me. But men are so much easier to FIND than women, and I often do like them as people so very much... I'd just go ahead and call myself a lesbian, except there are a handful of men in my past to whom I was sexually attracted. Argh. It's complicated.

@49 - You sound like you're tailor-made for a romantic relationship with an understanding man who will let you go off and have some fun with women occasionally, or maybe even join in, if you're both into it. You make him happy, he lets you be happy, everybody wins! Or at least in theory.

@47: I agree, thanks. In particular, my read is to the extent that Blow's sexuality was influenced by the fact that he was a victim of abuse, it is that there was a conflict between his natural attraction to men and his trauma from being victimized by a man.

While the basic property of being attracted to men, women, both, or neither, needs no explanation or apology, I am interested in how - or whether - that attraction expresses itself. This is where experience and socialization play a huge part.

As to your comment @48, also agreed. I've read enough of @43's posts to know that a claim that rape turns boys gay is pretty much par for the course for that one.

@50: Actually, she sounds tailor-made for having a girlfriend who lets her fuck a guy once in a while. People expect to regularly have sex with their romantic partners, so it's really not a good idea to have a relationship with a person of the less-attractive gender.

@49: I think that so much of the bisexual experience can be summed up by what you say here: "But men are so much easier to FIND than women". As in, yeah, some bisexuals legitimately have lopsided sexualities, but the reason why most bisexuals' experience is lopsided is because straight people so vastly outnumber queers. Though you're lopsided toward women, the fact that there are so many more straight men than queer women even appeals to you. It's no wonder that those of us who have equal attractions still end up in hetero relationships more often than homo ones.

@15 " men are for fun, women are for keeps." Is that why same-sex female couples have the highest divorce rate???

Posted this on Dan's post about bisexuality, will post it here too as this thread is still active.

I nominate FLEX for the full permutations of bi-romantic bi-physical-sex bi-relationships bi-whatever.

Flex was suggested on the SLOG comments last year by someone, don't remember who but sounds great to me!

The end of the world must be just around the corner. Dan Savage has written about male bisexuality, and I'm neither enraged or offended. Even better, he actually said something that made sense. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.

I think that gay marriage is partly responsible for bi erasure. Gay marriage is still a political issue, federal benefits are only available if the state recognizes the marriage as far as I'm aware. So the term gay marriage, and the implied opposite straight or traditional or old fashioned marriage are going to stay popular for awhile. Monosexuals are in the news more, so there is less public interest in bisexuality.

Then again, threesomes are so trendy that bisexuality gets a lot of private attention from straights. Which would seem to make it easier to come out with the label of bi. As a straight woman I find bisexuality on a guy almost completely positive, except I feel a little inadequate but that's my own insecurity. And straight men seem to see bisexuality as mostly positive on women as well, although I've heard insecurity about it from them too.

@57: I think marriage equality is way too new an arrival to be responsible. The two main causes of bi erasure, in my opinion, are homophobia and straight marriage.

Homophobia makes bi persons reluctant to reveal their same-sex attraction.

Straight marriage means they don't have to.

Oddly enough, hardly anyone speaks about what many heterosexual men are. They "love" women and want to have sex with women while utterly disregarding women as thinking human beings. The only meaningful intellectual relationships are with other men and their deep feelings of loyalty and bro-hood often surpass those they feel for women, and this often includes their own wives. Surely there ought to be a term for that. Besides douchebag, I mean.