I can’t know what your friend was thinking when he asked why you were wearing that shirt. I wouldn’t have had a problem with it, and I wouldn’t have necessarily thought that you were wearing it to express your own sexual orientation.
I don’t agree with any impulse toward exclusion, but I might be able to explain a little bit of the difficulties that go through people’s heads when they think about things like that, at least from a gay male perspective.
Lots of gay men like me don’t have the slightest attraction to women. While I tend to find women beautiful, I don’t find them sexy. Breasts and female genitalia sexually repulse me rather than sexually attract me. So, I can’t imagine what it feels like to be bisexual or straight.
Now wrap that up with growing up ridiculed by adults and peers for displaying the least bit of behavior that might be read as gay or effeminate. I grew up, like many gay men do, with a sense of hiding a shameful secret. And I despaired of finding a path to a happy, fulfilled life.
Obviously, I’m in a healthier place now, but the memory of struggle and despair is never far from the surface.
Being gay for men is struggling to accommodate oneself to something that is deeply uncool among other men. Sure, there are tons of awesome straight men allies out there. But are they the rule?
I used to belong to a health club attached to a Detroit hospital. It wasn’t an exclusive club, but it wasn’t cheap either, so membership reflected the highly educated medical staff at the hospital and a sampling of the fairly liberal and progressive people who lived in the neighborhood.
Want to know the fastest way to shut down conversation in that locker room? Talk about being gay where other guys can hear you. Watch conversation shut down. Watch nervous eyes flick about. Watch some of the guys who had been been relaxing and joking around hurry up and get dressed and scurry out.
That’s the reality of what it can be like to be a gay man in the United States. It’s that sense of always feeling on the outside looking in — unless surrounded by other queer people.
That makes it tough for some of us to understand the bisexual experience. Especially when someone like you is sort of tangentially bisexual, if that’s the right way of putting it, we can think to ourselves, well she doesn’t have to worry about the things we worry about. She doesn’t have to worry about being shamed and shunned by her neighbors, of being fundamentally cut off from fellowship. She is not, some will say to themselves, in our boat.
She has choices we never had.
People who say that aren’t wrong, but the big problem comes in when resentment takes over from observation. It’s an attitude thing, isn’t it?
The end game of LGBTQ equality is a dissolution of the binary, is an overall acceptance of the spectrum of gender and sexual experiences, is a diminished importance of the whole subject.
It’s clear to me that we aren’t going to get there without people like you, who probably represent a majority of the human experience. Most people are not sexually polarized like me and other purely gay people. I think data and history show that most people are bisexual like you.
I don’t know how that feels personally, but I recognize that full acceptance of gender and sexual diversity must not just include bisexual people, but will probably never fully happen without the power of bisexual people.
I’m talking about power in numbers, but I’m also talking about the power of empathy. You have the power to know or at least begin to know what a gay person feels like, because you feel that way sometimes too.
On a personal note, I would suggest that your friend’s friend, as insensitive as he was, probably deserves some empathy too. It’s not okay for him to try to exclude you, but it’s probably worth thinking about the pain that had to underlie what he said.
