The Advocacy Council for Human Rights

By Gene Naden

I have routinely hidden my own bisexuality and fought against it for my entire life because it carries an even greater stigma than simple homosexuality. Consider this real bedroom conversation, a moment of post-coital spontaneity on the man’s part:

 Shelly says to her man (I know him very well), “So, tell me about the lovers you had out in California.”

 “Some of them were men,” the man replies.

 “Oh, uh, OK. Let’s get some breakfast.”

 In the ensuing days she no longer wants sex. She does not consider herself the man’s girlfriend anymore. When confronted, Shelly explains, “I can’t stop thinking about where your dick has been. You’ll f*ck anything that moves.” The clear implication is that for a man to have sex with both men and women is even worse than if he has sex with just men.

 At the time of this writing, the play “F*cking Men” is showing at the Baliwick theatre in Chicago. There is a scene where a naïve young man approaches a male sex worker for a blow job. “I’m really bisexual. I have a girlfriend,” the young man says. The audience laughs. The simplest explanation is that they think he really just likes men but doesn’t want to admit it. We thought we were superior to him.

 Does bisexuality truly exist? I asked this question in #gaypride, an IRC Internet social chat room for gay men. I got four responses. One woman, call her Gabriel, said that she herself was “bi.” Three gay men said that people who call themselves bisexual are really just queens in the closet. That was a kind of crude statement that nonetheless reflects the thinking of lots of folks. Some say we are losers and others say we don’t exist. Does this sound familiar? It is ironic that much of the anti-bi prejudice and verbal oppression comes from men who have sex with men.

 During a period of outed-ness in my youth a former professor of mine asked, “Well, Mr. Naden, are you (gay) or aren’t you?” When I answered that I was bi, he said “Aren’t we all, Mr. Naden, aren’t we all?” His dismissal made me regret my honest answer.

 I am a member of the New Town Alano Club, a social club in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, near Boystown. I have met a hundred men there who acknowledged an attraction to men but not one has mentioned a serious attraction to women. You hear some references to a man being particularly attractive but no such reference to a woman despite the fact that it is, to me at least, often obvious. Statistically, some of these men must have it but don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want the stigma.

 My bisexuality is not just about who I am attracted to and would have sex with; it is also about who I fantasize about, who I form emotional attachments to, the gender of the people I associate with, their sexual orientation and my political stance.

 We are not all bisexual. In the five years I have been associating with gay-identified men, several have told me that they simply cannot make love to a woman, or that they could do it but had to imagine themselves to be with a man, or that they felt violated. These men are not bi.

Yet many of us are, secretly, afraid to be accused of coupling with “anything that moves.”