“You’ve come a long way baby!” Or so I’ve been told. I have been feeling frantic lately with all the warm congratulations I’ve received for the amazing progress gays have recently been making. I am told the dark days of oppressive silence for my kind are in the past! Yeehaw!
I must have been in the Provigo in N.D.G. when the revolution arrived and not noticed it on my walk home.
Somewhere between all this news of change I was hearing about and the fact that I was not seeing it anywhere, the hamster in my brain started racing.
I had taken a long break from the exhausting position of gay man full of sorrow, some of it home-grown and some enforced by the full extent of prejudice.
The rambling theories of sexuality and on-edge distrust of the world casually returned after a long hiatus. I have some unsettled, some might say bitter, views about gays fostered over decades of violence, cruelty and vicious ignorance. Especially since I grew up in a small town whose residents sent death threats to the homo who dared tried to open a bar. The city has a more sophisticated take on prejudice.
I am whipping out quick generalizations begging to be challenged just as I did at a meeting with close, old friends earlier this week.
My quick rant opened for trashy stories over martinis and onion rings. A popular but always mysterious debate about the reality or delusion of bisexuality developed.
The positioning of the two camps, the one stating bisexuality is a cover-up and fraud for people on the run versus bisexuality is in all of us and over 400 non-human animals. The sliding scale theory of course was a major focal point.
I noticed this time the bisexuality debate, though always welcome, quickly became very passionate and full of convictions. Yet other than personal trial and error stuff, nobody really had any real insight to share to put our bisexuality curiosity into perspective.
Sure, some kissing here and there, a sleepover, alcohol, small town boredom, etc. I don’t trust anything that was rooted in any of that random desperation.
Listening to how my friends’ positions on the debate have changed over the years, I suddenly wanted more. I needed something meatier. A mission was born that night.
Would it be possible to gain a thoughtful, informed understanding of the countless variations beyond straight or gay? Why is bisexuality this mysterious taboo?
I headed straight to my trusted friend, faithful companion and very sensual lover, the world wide web.
The first thing I wanted to see, an unpopular pet-peeve of mine, was the existence of organizations, support groups, affiliations and the like.
Having had that experience upon my big city arrival when I was 19, not knowing anyone and being very turned off by some, the skeptic in me wanted to sift through the official existence of bisexuals.
As I suspected, they were lumped together with gays and transsexuals and anything that isn’t straight, which to me is a… well, I won’t throw out too many unkind words.
Ghetto-izing and marginalized groups gathering together can head in wrong directions. And there are a lot of people who feel differently as there are organizations, usually a rainbow or queer-something with a long list of unifying numbers meeting for many reasons.
Next I fired off an email to Sue Johanson’s Talk Sex show in Toronto. For those who can’t place her, she is the hysterical, matter-of-fact Canadian sex educator who has been popping in and out of schools and TV shows for over 30 years to discuss blue balls and how frustrated she gets with men who can’t find the clit.
Her frankness is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately she had to decline to speak to me this time as she is preparing an article for the Globe and Mail for Valentine’s Day.
This means I still don’t know much about the world of Bi. I tried the girl-thing once and she was nice but again I didn’t really learn anything from that.
While I travel about the city talking to people, my glow from Sue fades fast. I wrap my thoughts around the never-ending list on the Talk Sex website, which makes me wonder how a person can properly contemplate their orientation while figuring out HPV virus, obesity’s effect on performance, the new sex rules, sexsomnia, nicotine, cellphones and everything else that wants to kill my sperm.
The site had great information but bisexuality was hard to find information on.
It was tacked onto different mixes of groups and wedged in firmly between disease and suicide info sites.
So far, I hadn’t come up with more than Will and Grace’s offensive, clich
