I’m not gay if he goes down on me.
“Remember, you’re only gay if you’re a bottom.” Jon Stewart
That reminds me of the conversations I have with female friends who ask how many people I’ve had sex with and we end up having to qualify what constitutes “real” sex. In a woman’s world, apparently, if the penis doesn’t go inside the vagina to orgasm then no sex has occured, it’s just heavy petting (and thus makes understandable a lot of otherwise fairly illogical and bizarre justification of extra-marital behaviour from some women I know).
So in the straight world I’m still a virgin.
Oh fine. The opacity of my metaphors goes unappreciated once again.
The two couples seem to have found a “work around” for living in their Christian society and being gay. I was strongly implying (or were you strongly inferring) that the two husbands were lovers and that the two wives were as well. But they were each “married” to person of the opposite sex, so they could keep up a front.
If you saw these two couples you wouldn’t wonder why I think that. It may be that they never have done anything, and that they spend all of their time in unrequited longing for each other. I prefer to think that one Fourth of July, after one too many beers and helpings of ribs… Well, we needn’t go any further. You know digital cable ought to have a gay Cinemax for these types of stories.
Sometimes I wonder if I should start an Ask the Queer who Tried to Cure Himself with Religion and Failed thread.
To whoever said ‘You’re not really gay if you marry opposite sex, you’re bi’, for one thing, who’s really anything, but if we’re talking in those terms…it’s very easy for men or women to have lots of sex they don’t actually enjoy.
In kindergarten I kept instinctively going to the girls’ side whenever the kids were divided by gender, until they forcibly reminded me several times over to stay on the boys’ side. There are always kids who exhibit cross-gender behavior at that age. Most of them grow up to be gay, only a few grow up to be trans. Maybe he was playing with dolls then and connects it with being gay later on.
You think the jeep’s name was a dead giveaway? How about his name???
Um, no. While it’s entirely possible that the Rev. is actually bi, it’s much more likely that his attraction is largely or even exclusively towards men. If he were bi, it would be much less likely that he’d risk his reputation (and violate his own morals) by sleeping with men. Not when he was capable of having a perfectly satisfying sex life with women. I can’t speak for all bisexual everywhere: the more you study sexuality, the more you realize that there are as many sexual orientations as there are people on the planet. But generally speaking, people are bisexual because gender is not a major component of attraction for them. I’m bi (Also, gay. The two terms are not mutually exclusive.) and I don’t have a seperate “need” to sleep with people of each gender. If I have a satisfying sex life with a man, I don’t have any need or particular desire to have sex with a woman. One person, of either gender, is enough to satisfy my emotional and sexual needs. I don’t need one of each.
Now, it’s possible that the Rev. is different. It could be that he really does need to have partners of both genders to be emotionally satisfied. It could be that he has some sort of neurotic compulsion to fuck anything that moves, entirely regardless of gender. But those are both pretty rare. Far more common, is to find a person who is simply gay, but who has internalized so much social homophobia that they’re deeply in denial about their nature and hope that entering into a conventional marriage with someone of the opposite gender will “cure” them, that if they have straight sex often enough, they can train themselves to be straight themselves. Compared to genuine poly bisexuals and hopeless sex addicts, closeted homosexuals in sham marriages are pretty commonplace.
Going strictly by the percentages, we cannot say that “at most” he’s bisexual. There’s an outside chance that he’s bisexual, but odds are strongly in favor of him being homosexual and in denial.
From animal testing it would appear that one’s sexuality is determined by bursts of hormones in the womb at critical developmental times. After birth one’s sexuality is irreversible unless we find some amazing technology to rebuild or rearrange one’s brain somehow.
Sorry for being obtuse saoirse, and thanks for explaining this - it makes sense now (initially I couldn’t understand why gay marriage made you think of technical cabling which was throwing me off).
Great post Miller, a very succinct busting of some commonly held misconceptions about sexuality.
“Repent bixsexuals of the world, you have nothing to lose but your massive potential for sexual and emotional fulfillment through being able to target the entire population and… um, actually, why are we doing this again?” 
An odd thing to me is this: I’m an openly gay man, a few extra pounds but at the same time some muscle tone and certainly no worse looking than most of the gay men I know who are in relationships or otherwise scoring, and yet I very very rarely hook up. When it comes to sex and relationships I’m a camel: the occasional oasis with lots of barren spaces in between and ultimately identifiable by a hump here and there. I’m really not complaining as while I have a normal sex drive I’m really not going nuts for lack of companionship and my non-circulating status is largely self-imposed; there are worse things than celibacy and a bad relationship is high on the list.
However, almost invariably these closet cases- again, men who I know I look as good as or better than- have really active sex lives. They may be married with children and all that but they have sex with other men far more often than I do. Is it a deathwish of sorts- on some subconscious level they want to be exposed- or do they get off on the danger or do they just have abnormally high libidos or… what?
And why do the “reparative” therapy places (all of them church affiliated) continue to get people seeking to change when they’ve been exposed and re-exposed countless times as ‘iffy’ at best and downright dangerous outfits run by hypocrites and charlatans and know-nothings? Paulk, one of the founders and several original members of Exodus, Mel White and numerous other former “you can changers” have either proven to be frauds or voluntary left to pursue life on openly gay side, meanwhile none of the organizations will submit their results data for clinical calculation (some will not even submit their criteria for success), the APA recognizes homosexuality as a minority but normal sexual orientation that is neither harmless or a barrier to happiness in and of itself, and studies indicate that openly gay men are much happier than closeted gay men, yet Exodus and its brethren organizations continue to get recruits.
And the Paul Cameron nonsense (a man far more dastardly and dangerous than Fred Phelps could be in his wildest dreams, a man whose methodology has been denounced by no less conservative men than William Bennett, Billy Graham and even to some extent James Dobson, whose lack of ethics cost him his APA membership and have been exposed in major reliable popular and scholarly publications across the western world, continues to be distributed and read as if he was gospel in Fundamentalist quarters (and even by the occasional court of law). This nonsense will go down as our era’s Jim Crow calibre “what the hell were we thinking?” pseudoscience.
Sampiro - re: your point about closeted gay men having avery active sex lives. It’s not difficult as a gay man to get access to sex, however as the quality of the sex goes up, so does the availability of it go down (no pun intended). If all you want is an anonymous penis to suck on in a public toilet cubicle it’s pretty easy to get 24/7. If you want long, hot, steamy, passionate and wonderful sex with an attractive man who cares about you (without paying for it) the you can join the queue behind the rest of us.
I’m guessing your camel love life is a little similar to mine - I’d rather happily masturbate to good porn by myself than have crap sex with another person just because, hence my own sexual encounters at the moment (other than my monthly trip to a very good fetish club) are pretty much non-existant. But, as I’ve outlined, this is entirely my choice.