These folks were rare enough – and different enough – that I would argue they were a different animal entirely… not a gay/straight mishmash, but someone who truly is differently oriented because they think differently.

Yes, i think that it may be an error to think of bi as being kinda gay and kinda straight. Bisexuals seem to testify otherwise. I still have learning to go on that.

But I resist efforts to base discussion on “I don’t use labels”. While there are some who do not clearly fall into any of the pigeon holes, the vast majority seem to. And refusing to use descriptive terms only serves to limit information, not increase it. So a young fellow saying “I have ambiguous sexual identity” may be taking a social position, if he glows if an attractive man enters the room but the first thing he notices about a hot girl is her handbag, it isn’t a very truthful or useful statement.

So while yes, we can easily make a distinction between Sexual Orientation and Gay identity, I seriously doubt most straight people can.

True. I do hope that eventually our language is more clear and exact but it will be a process getting there.

Human sexuality is ridulously complicated, in no small part because it’s bound up in self-image, sexual impulse, circumstances, societal influences, goals & desires, socio-economics, the list goes on and on.

So, “gay straight or bi” is reductive enough. But pigeon-holing people by arbitrarily defining the terms and to circumvent thinking can be just obnoxious.

I love that Blake is putting a lot of thought into it, and is resisting easy categories (very non-reductive).

I will say that I have had the following observations:

I, like many other guys I know spent a period of time “warming up” to my gay identity by defining myself as “bi”, even though I wasn’t having much luck with the ladies. That said, I found myself very emotionally attracted to women. This made a lot of gay guys, and several straight friends very angry. They perceived it as cowardice.

In college I met a few gay guys – guys who truly dated without consideration of gender. Sometimes it was a guy, sometimes it was a girl. These folks were rare enough – and different enough – that I would argue they were a different animal entirely… not a gay/straight mishmash, but someone who truly is differently oriented because they think differently.

None of this gets into the many people I know who are asexual or non-sexual.

Although functionally gay now and attached, I would have no objections to a future relationship (including sex) being with the right woman. I still identify as gay.

I hear about a lot of folks in the newest generations being a lot less prone to rigid definitions – notions of gay / straight / bi / whatever seem to be becoming more fluid for men – which is consistent with destigmatization of gay sex and masculinization of taking the power of openly owning one’s own sexuality (for guys at least). I find this development fascinating.

More of what I was reacting to was the personal pet-peeve of mine which SGM brought up and which I labeled as the one drop rule: the popular perception that sexual orientation is defined by one’s actions. The idea that there are three categories of social sexuality; that they are gay straight & bisexual and that if a man sleeps with a man then he is no longer straight & now some sort of bisexual absolutely pisses me off to no end. So if I got a little off point… While I’m constantly trying to fight my egotistical/self-righteous/arrogant/pompous nature my personality gets the better of me sometimes.

Regarding the bi stepping stone, I would say that its existence supports my understanding of the m curve. Small at 1 small at 10 and small at 5. But my curve is purely conjuncture based on personal observation, anecdotes & outdated science. In all honesty, I truly believe that men & women’s sexuality aren’t as different as society makes us believe & that whatever the women’s curve looks like will be what the men’s curve will look like once we’ve dropped all of our social pretensions. Or at least adopted a different set of ‘em. Social pretension also informs my use of Kinsey’s old statistics because I believe that, in the long run, Kinsey is going to be closer to the mark because he was studying men in a situation where the social pretensions are vastly different than they are in society at large (which is still true in prisons: for an interesting look at the mores of prison life I highly recommend Hard Time which comes on National Geographic Chanel). Also, as a counterpoint to the stepping stone, I’ve met a number of men who say they’re gay but are bi & aren’t openly bi because of the prejudice in the gay community against bi folks. I have also witnessed such prejudice first hand. Being a bartender really does teach one a lot about human nature.

One last train of thought that has been gestating over the past few days:

While sexual orientation as you define it above makes perfect since to a gay layman, I think there must be some sort of disconnect when coming at it from a straight perspective. We as openly gay people have plunged the depths of our sexual psyches. We’ve pushed the boundaries of our own sexual ordinations as far as they can go. For some that’s marriage & a family & coming out later in life. For others (myself included) its second base. Regardless, we’ve asked ourselves difficult questions about attraction and orientation which straight people may never have considered or may have never had to ask at all.

So while yes, we can easily make a distinction between Sexual Orientation and Gay identity, I seriously doubt most straight people can. I feel like SGM was striking at the same point when she described the difference between man-on-the-street understating of human sexuality and gay understanding of human sexuality. I think its critically important that we bridge that understanding or at least acknowledge that while we’re all using the same terms, the other side means something different.

Anyway, sign & signifier, language is complex, and all that jazz…

It has been over a decade since I first was surprised by the results so I can’t put my finger on that exact report. But I’ve followed this subject pretty closely and the results of studies of men, whether based on identity, orientation (attraction), or behavior seems to follow a J curve. (women do not)

I understand the problems with self reporting. Add to that the issues relating to how one’s sense of identity impacts what one is open to considering. Even answering what one believes to be truthfully may not be answering accurately. (Again, lessons learned from Exodus).

But, be careful in using doubts about self-reporting to advance your bell curve views. I think that you are aware that a certain percentage of young men falsely identify as bisexual during their coming out process and this would work against your theories.

I agree with you that sexuality is extremely complex and that we don’t have the language to address it or understand it (which is, in part, why I’m a stickler about accurate use of “orientation” and see it as having a different meaning from “gay”).

I don’t disagree with some of your ideas, but I very much disagree with you applying the term “sexual orientation” to them. Orientation is a measure of the direction of attraction.

Consider, for example, discussing a location. It has coordinates, height, weather, and a whole host of other attributes. But we don’t say that compass coordinates differ based height above sea level.

Similarly orientation is not impacted by “who you want to build a life with”. It is a measure of sexual, emotional, and romantic response. It directs crushes, lust, warm fuzzy feelings, and the general instinct to like and want to be around attractive people of a certain sex.

As a very real example, Alan Chambers is married to his wife Leslie. He loves her. He loves his life. He experiences sexual attraction to her. He is perfectly content with his relationship.

But Alan’s sexual orientation – the direction in which his attractions point and in which his unconscious reactions respond – is homosexual. Alan does not disagree with this; he simply finds it an immaterial fact in his life. (Some who discuss this subject have come up with the slightly-tongue-in-cheek term spousosexual to describe homosexual men who are not attracted to women in general but are attracted to one, their spouse).

For a long time we have all of us used muddled terms without good definitions. And even this definition fails in part. (For some, sexual attraction is not matched to emotional response and crushes and lust go in different directions. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be very common.)

Gay (and straight) is a more identity based term and encompasses a sense of community and belonging as well as ideas on how ones orientation does or should impact their life. Often they are interchangeable for discussion of politics or personal life. But not always. For example, Alan is not gay.

I like where you are going in your thinking and in your efforts to break out of the box, but in the process let’s try to use language that is more exact. Ironically, it allows us to articulate ideas that are less exact by giving us a point of divergence rather than a nebulous cloud of uncertain meaning.

There is the scientific study, then there is the man on the street understanding. I would venture to say that the average Gold Star Straight person would NOT say that your Bartender’s friend is Straight. Only based on my new found knowledge during the past 2 years of study and research, could I say that “some” Gold Star Gays WOULD say Bartenders friend is straight.

What I think is, that people who are gay see more layers of gray in sexual orientation than Gold Star Straights do. Gold Star Straights, if they study it like psychologists do, can see those layers, or perhaps call them gradients, but unless you are studying this, Gold Star Straights are only going to ever see 3 classes of sexual orientation. Even though I have been studying it informally on my own I STILL have a hard time with it.

I know it to be true that people can be a 3 or a 4 but gol darn it, I simply can’t “visualize” it. In other words I can only understand it intellectually not emotionally. Even though I have never had a parent die I can emotionally under stand the deep sorrow of someone who has lost a parent. I know intellectually how it works, a straight man could have sex with men and still think of himself (and others could also think of him) as straight. But I still don’t get it emotionally, emotionally to me he is NOT straight.

In conversations I have to check that emotion and rely on the intellectual truths I have learned. You can see why it never occurred to me that gay men would hit on straight men. I never even knew that Rachel Maddow is a lesbian until a few months ago when I read an expose on her. I watched her but it never crossed my mind that she is a lesbian.

Self-reporting makes for all sorts of problems in studying sexuality. With all the social baggage & politics which surrounds sexuality it is going to be impossible to get a good picture of it as long as people are reporting their own activity. For example, I’m in an HIV vaccination program. As a part of the program they ask all sorts of questions about my sex life. My sex life is pretty boring, but if it wasn’t I might would lie to make it seem more boring in order to fight the perception that ‘gay men are sluts.’ In fact I already have lied when answering some other questions because I’m a recovering alcoholic & I didn’t want to admit when I failed. This is the reality of human nature.

We’re never really going to understand sexuality unless people consent to be monitored without their knowledge.
Some sort of surveillance of extremely private moments under some sort of pretense & without their knowledge of when & how they’re being recorded & where they don’t think their sex lives are the subject of the study (or that the camera is in the bedroom at all). Actually, in this day & age that might not be too hard to pull off…

Anyway, regarding the note about attraction. I was attempting to contrast the idea that someone who has gay sex is automatically gay or at least bisexual with the realities of sexual identity. I did not mean to imply (as I did) that any one element of identity was more important than another. Just that sexuality is complex & not as well understood as we all like to tell ourselves & that our language often fails us when we consider the intricacies. This understanding I drew from the Klein Grid.

To re-sum my previous:
Sexual Orientation is defined by a blend of:
1. Who you have sex with
2. Who you you want to have sex with
3. Who you fantasize/dream about having sex with
4. Who you want to build a life with
5. How you identify.
6. How you live.
7. From whose perspective you’re looking at it from.

Just as we can’t define Cynthia Nixon’s gayness for her we can’t define Alan Chambers’ straightness for him. But we can all certainly try. Regardless, the fact that different people looking at the same facts can come to different conclusions about a person’s sexuality is clearly symptomatic of trying to force everyone into 3 categories (or 5 or 10).

Take this example: A friend of mine used to run in hipster circles. I was at a party with him & I met a young man. When he heard we were openly gay he came & talked to us. His story was (at least this is what he told us) that he’d only ever had sex once. It was with a man, but he’s primarily sexually attracted to and wants to have a long-term relationship with women. He identified as Bi. By my understanding of sexuality I would say he’s straight. By the Religious Right’s definition he was gay while he was having sex with a man, but now he’s straight (or ex-gay). I imagine others would also say he’s at least Bi but probably “a big ‘ole closet case”.

Now, of course, my focus here is on the intersection of language & identity as well as the meaning of words. None of this should suggest that sexual orientation is mailable or easily changed. Just that our language fails us when describing sexuality & therefore people who a majority of others would agree are straight may sometimes have sex with men & gay men might hit on straight men because some understand that straight is not necessarily a non-starter sex wise. But I’m certainly not encouraging people to hit on straight men. As others pointed out, in the wrong situation, it can be very dangerous.

The weirdest example of a straight-gay relationship I can think of is one between a bartender I used to work with and his concubine (for lack of a better word). The concubine straight identified, had a wife, self-reported that he was only marginally interested in men sexually, yet went to my former co-worker for gratification so often that he would come into work and do chores on his behalf. Of course when people connected the dots he got a lot of eye rolling & “sure he’s straight”. But still, by my understanding, I agreed with his perception of his own sexuality: straight. Why? He never once hit on another man in there. He never even commented on other men’s appearances. He sometimes pointed out sexy women (but not so much that one felt like he was compensating) & he never talked about it directly. At one point, though, I was hanging out with them both & they were quite candid about their relationship away from work. I guess this is because they could better control the reactions & felt offended by the eye-rolling. Not what is the concubine? I said he’s straight. The RR would say he’s being corrupted by a gay man into the gay lifestyle. He says he’s straight. His sex partner says he’s straight. A bunch of patrons would assume he’s a closet-case. Who is correct?

Straight ain’t always so straight & narrow.

I love to see people really thinking about sexuality. And your ideas are interesting.

However, I see two flaws.

1. If orientation is defined by sexual attraction, then “who one wants to have a relationship with” is not really a factor. For decades Exodus and other ex-gay groups presented as “former homosexuals” men who very much wanted to be in a relationship with a woman. It didn’t make them straight.

2. While your bell curve might seem likely (and theorists like Kinsey assumed it was true) research found the opposite. Attraction in men is more like a J curve. Most are either strongly same-sex or opposite-sex attracted and become moreso over time. There are more gold stars than your theory allows for.

That’s an statement to make when you’re going one way, but really such statements are like the gay equivalent to the antiquated ‘one-drop-rule’ regarding blackness. Gay sex acts don’t necessarily make one gay (or bi). This is THE major difference in understanding sexuality between many on our side and many anti-gays.

Think about it from the flip-side. Do you consider men who have had long marriages with women but who come out later in life as bi too? What about gay men who have had sex with women at one point or another in their lives?

My husband, for example, slept with women before he came out. But he is not bi.

Sexuality is not black & white & bi. While ‘gold-star-gays’ and ‘gold-star-straights’ (my friend’s term for people who are wholly in one camp and the other side disgusts them) do exist but most people fall somewhere between. I think it helps to think of sexuality not as three categories but as 10 (or 5 if we’re talking in person b/c the hand makes a handy tool to illustrate). On the 10 point scale 1 represents someone who is 100% gay, 5 the 100% bisexual & 10 the 100% straight. While there is a small population of ones, fives & tens, most people fall somewhere in the 2-4 or 6-9 range. Also the numbers represent more than just who you have sex with. A person (say a male prostitute) can have had a majority of his sexual experiences with men, but could still be straight oriented. That is to say his primary desires are toward women and he seeks to build romantic relationships with women.

Male Prostitutes aren’t really good examples, though, because of money. People do lots of stupid things for money (like having sex with someone they’re not sexually attracted to). So consider a straight man (as I define straight: a man who seeks women to build relationships with) who also seeks sexual outlets with men. His excuse is ‘there is less drama with men’s reactions to sex’. Let’s say he understands my scale, buys my argument, & honestly places himself as an a 8. Low enough to acknowledge that he finds men sexy in certain situations, but high enough to reflect the fact that, comparatively, he always finds women more attractive then men. All else being equal, he would pick women over men every time. Is he bi? I’d say no. Some’d say yes. I’ll come back to this.

For the time being, if you accept my understanding, as illustrated above, a straight man can have sex with a man and still be straight. A straight man can even find a man sexually attractive & still be straight. One way to think of it is as man’s equivalent to LUGs (lesbians until graduation = some women in college will experiment with lesbian relationships before embracing their straight sexuality). While women do it openly, most men do it underground.

Back to bi. Regarding our 8, above, is he bi? Well I’m sure the O would say yes, but consider the following. What is she basing such a statement on? In order for him to be bi (by the definition I laid out)he would have to have an equal desire to build a relationship with men as with women. But he doesn’t. He wants to be with women over men, but he finds men more convenient. Not for relationships, but for sex. So what is he? I still say straight.

In my opinion, gold-star-bi people are as rare as gold-star-gay or gold-star-straight people. Go back to the 10 point scale. Only fives are gold-star-bi. Most bi people (as defined by the O and even some self-identified bi people (hipsters come to mind)) are actually somewhere in the same range as most other people. The difference being that they’re a little more self-aware or open about their preferences. Insisting that our 8 is bi because he has sex with men while not considering who he actually wants to build relationships with, who he fantasizes about having sex with (women), or how he identifies himself (straight) is doing him a disservice.

There’s more to it than who you have sex with. Another example: I would consider someone who is primarily attracted to men, fantasizes about having sex with men, but who, for whatever reason, only has sex with women as gay. Not bi. But he probably identifies himself as straight or maybe bi. So perspective matters too.

The point is, the three categories of sexuality that we use are inadequate. This inadequacy is why I dislike the idea of men on the ‘down-low’. By forcing people to fit into the three labels we are ignoring the complexities inherent in the cross-section between sexuality & identity and are going straight for a simplified identification. “OH he has sex with men, he must be gay or at least bi.” To make such a statement only reinforces the notion that sexuality is easy to understand and that these labels work. And when we insist that only these labels are valid we force people (evangelical Christians, for example)to ruin their lives trying to live up to a label which is, in many ways, arbitrary.

Anyway, I’d be happy to continue this conversation in a different forum and to point you to some links and websites from where I learned this information. I’m not sure how this sort of thing works (I’m truly an internet dunce) but perhaps the moderators can facilitate some sort of exchange of e-mail addresses? Alternately, I could set up a junk e-mail address & then post it here? SGM,let me know if you’re interested.

BTW, SGM, I see you all over the place. Thank you so much for the work you do.