Good Bi (Yellow Brick Road)

Don’t know if you’ve heard about this or not, but just yesterday, the New York Times broke a groundbreaking story about bisexual men. They exist. And also unicorns.

Okay, I’m joking about the unicorns, but apparently bisexual men are real. Which will come as a shock to a lot of my friends – and when I say “a lot of my friends,” I pretty much mean the gay guys.

For some reason, gay men don’t want to believe in bi guys. We all seem to understand that female sexuality can be fluid, but the idea of a dude who gets turned on by chicks and dudes is anathema to us. I can understand this, to a degree. For many of us, the journey to GayVille included a pit stop in BiTown. Of course, the gentlemen who briefly disembarked from the Rainbow Train and donned a bisexual identity weren’t really bi – they just weren’t ready to make the whole trip in one fell swoop. And because of this, many of us are doubtful when a man takes the trip to BiTown and stays there.

The usual criticism of bi guys – beyond the fact that they’re fooling themselves and attempting to fool everyone else – is that they’re cowards. If so-called bisexual men were only brave enough to stand up to the scorn that heterosexuals dish out to the full-on gays, a certain segment of gay guys proclaim, they wouldn’t have to pretend that they get excited at the thought of a naked woman. And the proclamation usually ends there, because these are the gay guys who get nauseous whenever the notion of a naked woman enters their brains.

When the vapors recede, another criticism of bisexual men emerges: they’re just greedy. In fact, this kind of insatiable lust, one that includes both kitties and roosters, is so out of control, so ravenous, that it’s really more of a fetish than an actual sexual orientation. Of course, this is just a slight variation on the things that Tony Perkins and Pat Robertson say about us, but that’s completely and utterly beside the point … right?

The truth that is revealed by these blatantly false stereotypes is that many gay men (and by “many gay men,” I mean a completely unscientific sampling of my own friends) don’t really know any bisexual men. Or at least they don’t knowingly know them. And let’s face it – why would a bisexual man want to come out as such to a community of Kinsey Sixes? We haven’t exactly been all that welcoming.

The truth is that bisexuality is a sexual orientation, just like homosexuality and heterosexuality. Bisexual men (and women) did not choose to be bi. Like the rest of us, they were born that way. The truth is that bisexual men (and women) don’t lust after every person on the planet, in the same way that straight guys don’t find every woman attractive, and gay men can be very particular about the men that fall into the narrow category that is their “type.” The truth is that many bisexual men (and women) find a partner and settle down in monogamous or “monogam-ish” relationships. And the fact that this makes it harder for you to tell who’s bi and who’s not is your problem, not theirs. The truth is that it takes a lot of courage, not cowardice, to openly identify as a bisexual man these days.

And that, as they say ... is that.