Ten Thousand Ways of Going Both Ways

To speak of the relationship between masculinity and bisexuality is to entwine minor infinities: each of these terms is bottomless, and takes on ever new forms in the variegated flow of life. I’ve written before about what the bicurious man represents in the symbolic system of my sexuality, specifically from the vantage point of my own projective fantasies, namely: the promise of exploratory fun with no threat of commitment; the pedagogical thrill of inducting someone into a new experience of themselves. 

In this essay, four men speak from their own sensual, sociological histories. Only by considering a spectrum of men’s bisexual experiences can we even begin to portray the range of complexities and contradictions inherent in this identity.

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Phases and stages

G, effectively straight until his twenties, tells me that homosexuality came to him in increments. Here are some highlights of his passage through the phases and stages:

It was the first time I’d done Adderall, and I went back home from the gay bar, where I had accompanied my gay friend. I was flipping through a book of South American and Central American art. I started getting restless and horny and imagining something with a guy, and suddenly it all felt… plausible and appealing.

Later that year, the first thing I ever actually did was get head in the dark. I started by getting serviced, you know, an entry-level act.

Then a twink on Ossington invited me over to his place. He was playing D’Angelo’s Voodoo, which is an album you play for 10-year anniversary sex—a terrible choice for a hookup album. I tried to penetrate him but my hard-on just kind of whimpered away.

Then there was a guy with a massage table, and I gave him a “finger” job. There was no heart in the act; I was just dipping a toe into reciprocating. [Here I remark on his rapid-fire mixed metaphors: finger, heart, toe; a Frankensteinian patchwork of figurative body parts dissociated from each other.]

Now I’ve graduated to bottoming, like being spit-roasted by two much older men. I feel far less confused by that homo side of my sexuality. But still all the men I sleep with are strangers, and there’s never anything romantic there. Whereas there’s always romance and intimacy with women in my life, and I never meet them on apps. Lastly…I’m also so glad to have a man eat my ass out, but I would never let a woman do it.

G’s stories are replete with details of sex-app encounters with men he would never countenance in daylight life. Delving deeper into sex acts—and into his own comfort with the whole spectrum of unfolding possibilities—produces bizarre aesthetic experiences of inappropriate R&B and abhorrent interior decor choices that make up the details of stories he retells with relish. The two sides of G’s bi divide are assigned to essentially different worlds: gay sex and straight romance, with anal play and Family Guy posters belonging to the former and the possibility of love and life partnership in the latter.

G’s backstory of his upbringing sheds light on how his sexuality is rooted in the homosocial, shadowed by the simultaneity of the macho and the erotic:

In small-town Ontario, there’s a phenomenon where if you just make eye contact with a man, whether it's from your car or on foot, and you both lock gazes. It’s a town where people fight, people chirp and they fight and every man you see on the street might throw you a “hey bud” but it’s not necessarily in a nice way.

So sometimes if I feel like I'm being checked out by a guy, I can feel anger rising in me and I wonder if that’s from what the male gaze meant to me, growing up in small-town Ontario.

G’s early life informs his emerging homo side. The gaze that circulates between men ambiguously mixes fight-fuck-flee energies. I speculate that this origin story led him to reclaim the male gaze, once exclusively a competitive sizing-up, into his erotic repertoire. G tells me that he actively resisted the toxic masc milieu he grew up in; he would kiss his friends when bullies would call him faggot. Ultimately he believed his reactive response to the macho attitude around him was to flip the script, but his revolt was no less obnoxious; he was essentially a young edgelord running against the grain. For all his youthful jesting, for all the defense mechanisms he raised against those small-town gender roles, it took until his twenties for the sex of his bisexuality to flower, for the strong separation between the homo and the hetero to fully take root.

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Pages and sheets

I was shut in during the pandemic. I had to live vicariously through books.

H’s bisexuality bloomed just before lockdown. He recounts to me how a collection of contemporary queer lit & theory—Justin Torres, Ocean Vuong, Garth Greenwell—was his community, and prepared the ground for real-life explorations. A lover of research, H’s awakening was driven by these literary representations of queer yearning that ran parallel to his own forays into bisexuality. In contrast to G, who maintains the boundaries of a split bisexuality, H’s bisexuality is all of one territory, though these days he swings gay:

 A big head trip was going from being a straight guy on apps who did okay; you know, you have five or ten likes, but then I turned it to all genders and it went up to a hundred likes in the next hour.

Suddenly the numbers made me feel like, yeah, I don't know how to handle this. I don't know how to filter the attention I’m getting. Then you're confronted with your own tastes and you have to choose from the pool.

The economy of desire opened to exponential availability for H, to such a torrential degree that he had to learn to take agency over his own tastes. Simultaneously he began to learn more about his preferences in the bedroom:

In my straight life I definitely fell more into dominant roles sexually. But I began to not enjoy that as much, that default dom position that was expected of me. Now that I’m mostly having gay experiences I’ve begun to learn that I enjoy the submissive position, it’s what I prefer and it’s what I’m exploring.

In this way, H removes himself from a classic line in the hetero playbook: dom/sub dynamics and their respective gender delineations. It’s not that these roles can’t be reversed or complicated in a girl/boy situation, but between boys there’s a cleaner slate from which to have a freer play of desire.

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One with the boys

X grew up bi but now considers himself, at the end of the day, gay. He’s afflicted by a familiar drive: magnetized to his straight friends, he finds himself in the turmoil of lopsided intimacy:

It’s not even that I’m looking for a daddy, because I just feel like as a kid, I didn't have any male friends. I hung out with a lot of girls, I played with Barbies, I had a lot of the “tells” as a kid, and eventually I felt I just wanted more men in my life and more masculine approval.

This past summer I had a friend where we would hang out for whole days like three days a week. We were spending so much time together, and if I was a girl then we’d already be dating.

At a recent party, X’s feelings—in a haze of drugs and drink—became more apparent to his crush, which caused an awkward rift between them. I pause the interview to coach X through this particular tragedy of desire. I tell him to hold close the love that already exists in their friendship, that it doesn’t need to be seen as a desperately hopeful facsimile of whatever “dating” is. Cold comfort reassurance: nothing solves the wound of asymmetrical desire quite like time and the eventual rerouting of the libido into (more) reciprocal formations.

At the end of the interview, X reveals a limit factor to his bisexuality, tilted as it’s become toward the homo:

I feel like seeing my mother as a more angelic force stops me from wanting to sexually pursue women to the same extent.

We pursue the psychoanalytic line with our next subject, whose mother’s unconscious was, as C says, the seed of desire that was planted all over his body.

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Under mama’s gun

Pussy in the face, cock in the ass.

C gifts this image to me sardonically as the portrait of perfect bisexuality; I tell him this will become a nasty little pull quote for the beginning of his interview. He oscillates between self-reflective gravity and a winking dismissal of the terms of sexuality:

When I was a child, the fear I had was that my primary caregiver would perish in some way. So,  big pressure, I have to do everything I can to keep myself alive, to keep her alive. So my speech, my very modes of relating to her, were dedicated to sustaining her. And so I became whatever I imagined she needed…She’d say a version of, “If you fuck up, I'll cry for you, but you're the one who’s going to have to live with it.”

I respond: So you formed a defensive mechanism that was the “all pleasing boy.” Disappear. Disappear into a function for her.

Yeah. And that shadowed my relationship to women, echoing through the rest of my life.

Before C was barely sentient he was at the beck and call of his mother, who—escaping the loneliness of her relationship with an abusive man—imprinted on C, her son, the role of surrogate lover. C struggled to make out the shape of his desire in the face of his mother’s needs that oscillated between giving care and demanding care; and he replicated this dynamic in his romantic relations. C tells me that, although his raw sexuality is pointed toward women, his gay relationships have been a reprieve from the emotional entanglement that’s tailed him from childhood.

C ended our interview on a political note that serves to usefully complicate the whole project of speaking of “masculinity” and “bisexuality.” 

I was enucleated to my nuclear family through my mother’s dependency on me and my father’s totally antisocial repulsiveness. It’s a restrictive structure that creates “outing” situations where the possibility of blackmail and abandonment is premised on your having some essential identity, e.g. as a faggot, as a weirdo. So I found reprieve in Queer, indigenous, Black structures of togetherness—these family structures that have this expansiveness beyond heteronormative intimacy.

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Coda

My own bi-curiosity—that is to say, curiosity around bi identity—is endless. The more I speak to bi-identified men, the more I’m certain it’s impossible to say anything definitive, or to make any solid generalizations about bisexuality. Ultimately I want to clear the way for my interviewees’ narratives of sexual awakening, of their own coming into consciousness of their changeable orientations. Sexuality is hardly static, and so delightfully expands far beyond identitarian logic, where popular categories like “masculinity” and “bisexuality” could name any truth.

From a sociological angle, homo desire interacts with the dominant scripts of heterosexuality that haunt all relations, that radiate normativity into straight and queer psyches alike. Homo desire might represent playtime, freedom, a natural extension of homosocial activity, where the bridge between basketball and blowjob could be forged with no anxiety to block it. At the psychological level, all kinds of complex transferences appear in the carousel of family relations, in the hallowed hallways of classrooms, or the subtle brutality of street encounters. Sexuality is a map of nature and nurture, indistinguishably blended, an accrued history of experiences and reactions calcified over time. And always the jostling of transformation, of agency amidst the pressures of outside forces.

What can I say by way of a conclusion? Bisexuality is a many-splendored thing.