What's your sex?

Some months ago I wrote a bit about my sexual outlook and my ambivalence towards pornography. Looking back, I feel a little bit of a hypocrite: for one thing, I'm still a regular and unapologetic porn consumer, even if 9 out of every 10 clips I view (I won't lie to you or myself by calling them 'movies') are erotically bankrupt dreck. I said before I don't actually hate porn, but I should have specified that actually I love it- one the rare occasion it's any good.

Anyway... Jadis, endless source of inspiration that she is, recently posted a blog on the various concepts of sexual identity, and invited her friends to contribute their thoughts. My 'comment' turned out to be more of a mini essay, which I reproduce here. This is the first time I've written about my own sexual identity in such detail.
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One bisexual male's P.O.V: As a teenager, I found the same private, hormone-fired fascination with other males as did a lot of lads my age (although I never knew this then). It was puberty, plain and simple; wanting to know just how far the storm of new sensory experiences could take me. I wondered about sex with other males, sure- I wondered about sex! I certainly wasn’t having any. It was, truly, a whole new level of perception: I knew very little about it, I couldn’t really imagine how it’d feel, but it had become the most important thing in the universe. I quickly got used to adults telling me it was all just a phase, that I’d calm right down as I got older. That seemed a bizarre suggestion then, it seems bloody ridiculous to me now.

Yes, my interest in other boys was fleeting. Girls were softer, easier on the eyes and a thousand times more complex. In fact, it was my first introduction to women, and I’ve been hopelessly in love ever since.
Flashforward to my late teens and I’m thinking about other males again. I’m still a virgin, still painfully gauche, but I’m familiar enough with at least the mechanics of sex to realise it’s not so narrow and limited as to be closed of to those of us without girlfriends.
Since that time, I’ve been with men and I’ve been with women. I’ve sat and looked at myself and thought how my feelings make no sense. I’ve thought, when enjoying the company of a man, that I could live the rest of my life without women and be perfectly happy. At other times, I’ve been with a woman and seriously wondered what on earth ever drew me to other men in the first place. The problem was, I kept expecting my inner self to figure out what shaped peg it was and drop into the appropriate hole (so to speak).

We live in a world that demands we categorise and label ourselves on every level: we like what we can recognise and identify. We often feel at our safest knowing we are one of many. It’s an instinctive anxiety, but it doesn’t make much sense. Life itself thrives on diversity, and those that don’t devise new levels of being, be they individuals or species, are doomed to stagnate and die.

Are you straight or gay? If you’re bisexual, which gender do you like better? I was forever asking these questions of myself. But honestly, sexual and romantic passion for the opposite gender and the same passion for your own are entirely different. What I desire and enjoy in men is nothing like what I desire and enjoy with women- it seems so obvious now!

It’s been suggested that bisexuals are simply sexual omnivores, addicts who’ll say yes to everything, with bisexual men in particular having just watched too much porn. Some say that porn conditions straight men to associate the naked male bodies they see with the pleasure they derive from watching women, and thus they start to think of themselves of bi. I have a little sympathy for these theories, certainly there will always be some men with the ‘any hole’s a goal’ attitude, and God knows any man who turns to fellow males seeking simply a substitute woman is doomed to end up more frustrated and depressed than ever. In the end, regardless of stated orientation, if you can’t love men for being male, or women for being female, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

The very definition of sexuality is the most nebulous, most hard to quantify in the whole sphere of human experience. There are those who see it purely as a question of which gender you prefer, while others see ‘sexuality’ as beginning and ending simply with whatever gets you off- fantasies, fetishes, etc. Neither definition is adequate. Sex is a vast, fluid continuum of perception, experience, intensity. The variables are infinite. One’s sexuality is as complex and individual as one’s fingerprints.

I call myself bisexual for the sake of conversational clairty, but the older I get, the more I think of these labels as essentially meaningless.

I am a sexual being. I am me.


One final thing: Cardiff's LGBT Mardi Gras is this weekend. I'll be going along this year, for the first time ever. Hope it's nice!