“How do you know? Have you ever even tried sleeping with a woman?”
This is a question asked of many gay men when they ‘come out’ by curious and perhaps well-intentioned straight people in a bid to understand a sexuality they see as incongruous with their own. It is brought up from a sense of confusion—like when pizza puritans ask how I can like pineapple in my pizza. It goes outside the bounds of their minds and cultural context to consider the possibility that something they don’t find attractive can be attractive to someone else—who they feel should have all sense to not have the attractions they do.
What confuses me and many gay men is why sex is made into a philosophical inflection point. It is as if straight people are saying, “If you have ever had sex with a woman and enjoyed it, you definitely can’t be gay.”
Perhaps people use sex alone as a measurement for orientation because sex is supposed to be one of the greatest feelings a human can experience.
It’s the reason people use sex as a comparison to gauge and measure the quality of experience of many things—from gym rats describing the feeling of ‘the pump’, to the long-time family man juggling the stress of work and children describing the feeling of having a day to himself, to an extreme sports athlete describing the rush of falling from high altitudes.
Intensifying thrill, rising joy, building tension, exploding pressure, sudden peace—these are the things great sex is associated with. So, obviously, it can be the greatest feeling. But the question remains: If that great feeling was felt while interacting with a woman, how then can a person say they are not straight?
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While I was busy coming to terms with my own sexuality, there was a period where I had a difficult time trying to figure out what it was about guys that I liked so much more than women. I racked my mind trying to find out the exact thing that proved the single pivot point for my fancies being directed at men rather than women.
I gave up that search, as it wasn’t the correct way to go about coming to terms with my orientation. But I did find out something valuable in my futile search. It wasn’t the physical interaction or fascination that was the crux of my pull towards men. Rather, it was my orientation that makes the physical interaction or fascination with men exciting.
Physical interaction, or even the imagining of a physical interaction, can certainly be an exciting feeling. But it is not the ‘single thing’ that lures me. I am sure it is the same for straight men.
We fancy interaction with those we are attracted to. We don’t necessarily become attracted to someone just because we may have had an interaction with them.
An experience of sex can never alone be evidence of orientation.
Sex isn’t a good measurement to base anything off of, least of all orientation. So what if a guy didn’t enjoy the experience they had with a woman? There are many accounts from straight men who tell of their ‘first time’ as something they felt had an element of awkwardness and perhaps was a little terrifying. Does that mean that these men were gay?
I know of some gay men who have, during their time trying to play it straight, had sexual encounters with women that they enjoyed. The undeniable pleasure they got from having sex with women delayed their ‘coming out.’ For some of them, the experience blurred their sense of identity because of the idea of sexual orientation as something based on physical sensation.
One guy, who I know to be straight, confided in me that he had had experiences with men before that he really enjoyed. He wasn’t gay or bisexual because of it. He was, as I understood, straight but was not denying that physical sensations can be given and received and if a person can relent for a moment about the body they are interacting with, they are likely to derive physical pleasure from whoever the person is—physical pleasure being the operative phrase. He enjoyed the physical pleasure but that was it.
The rest of the things that sexuality is generally considered to consist of, emotional stimulation and concern for mutual benefit interaction, were just … missing. The nuance about sex and sexuality is largely missing from the discussion on the nature of orientation.
TLC had a special about men who were married to women but were attracted to men. They identified as completely gay but had only ever had sexual encounters with women to the point of having children and, by their telling, had a fully functional and healthy sex life. I know many people do not appreciate the paths they have set out for themselves. Still, whatever we think about them, it is clear that their lives and the relationships they have with their wives don’t, and haven’t, changed their orientation. In their religious interpretation, they have settled with living in contradiction with their orientation. No matter how much sex they have with their wives and no matter how much they may enjoy it if they do, their orientation will remain undented.
The tendency to define sexuality based on sexual encounters or sexual history is misguided. What I have found out in my attempt to scientifically explain my own attraction is this:
What makes a person attracted to men or women is subtler than one night stands.
It possibly lies just outside of our perception, and our perception even in modern culture is blurred considerably when it comes to sex and sexuality.
Perhaps if we had an approach to sex and sexuality that didn’t revolve around the idea of sex as a simple, nuts and bolts interaction of parts—and rather a view in which sexuality is a deep and intimate interaction between people, and in which sex is an act of giving or receiving physical pleasure—we wouldn’t need the ‘straight’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ labels anymore.
There would simply be people who have sex however they want that is best for them and their sexual satisfaction.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
The fact is that many men and women are bisexual.