Heterosexuality Is Bullshit
To some degree
Don’t get too excited about me saying heterosexuality is bullshit. The same can and has been said about homosexuality. What you need to understand is that neither orientation is more valid than the other. Let’s get a couple things out of the way.
- Yes, I am insane. That’s not relevant to this article.
- No, I’m not writing a clickbait story. Nor am I getting payback at the religious right for trying to invalidate my identity by doing the same thing back to them.
Human sexuality is complicated.
Malvina Reynolds’ 1962 song Little Boxes is the perfect theme for this article.
It’s about how mid-twentieth century Americans were building monuments to conformity; aka, the suburbs. Every house that came off the factory floor conformed to fit post-war Americana. As humans, you tribalistic apes reading this right now have a LOVE for categorizing things and making them fit in boxes.
But I have an interesting theory. Those boxes are bullshit.
If you’ll kindly follow me down this rabbit hole, I’ll explain to you why I strongly believe that 70% of humanity is on the Bisexual/Pansexual/Heteroflexible spectrum — why heterosexuality and homosexuality are almost as much drag performances as Ozzie and Harriet or Tricky Dick Dodger and Hedda Lettuce.
Now, I’m not a sexologist or anything, but I am an old pro. I used to be a call boy. Two decades ago, I worked as an escort, charging money for time spent rather than by the sex act. My clients were often “heterosexual” men. Not closet cases. Self-identified “straight” guys like the ones described in this article in Phys.org.
The vast majority of them just wanted to fuck because for one reason or another, they weren’t getting a particular sex act at home, or they weren’t getting sex from their wives at all. Having sex with another woman, in their minds, was cheating. Having sex with another guy wasn’t.
Many of my clients had a no-kissing rule to reinforce their internal straightness. Their risk of getting caught was lower. There was no way in hell I was going to get pregnant. And they didn’t have to worry about smelling like another woman’s perfume or having to explain makeup smears. They could be seen with me in their “straighter than 6 o’clock” drag, and nobody would suspect anything. So, I did A LOT of outcalls.
This is when I first started to realize human sexuality isn’t as neat and tidy as I had thought it was.
I bet you thought that I’d go right to situational homosexuality like prison sex, but “heteroflexibility” isn’t limited to that. “Straight” people have “gay” sex in more settings than just prison, the military, or college.
I could’ve also mentioned some of the “straight” guys I knew who were also gay escorts because it pays more. I could also talk about the “straight” guys that do gay porn for the same reason. What I want to focus on is the people who call themselves “heterosexual” but seem to like gay sex more often than they like to admit. Because sex and relationships are a lot more complicated than we think, and labels like “straight” or “gay” and to a degree, LGBT+, don’t work for a majority of humanity.
One thing we must understand is that these labels are kinda new. In the 350,000 years of human existence, these labels have only cropped up in the last few centuries. I could go into detail about how common homosexual behavior was in ancient Greece and Rome. How everyone from warriors to heads of state had some same-sex strange every now and then. The ancient world had a lot in common with Game of Thrones’ omnisexual Oberyn Martell and the Dornish.
Even in high society during medieval times, they only cared that you gave them an heir and a spare. After that, so long as you were discrete, they had more in common with Game of Throne’s Highgarden.
So, what changed? Humanity got cursed with the Abrahamic religions.
A bunch of old men who wanted power and money got the idea of using a book full of bronze age fairy tales to control everything about you. From what you eat, right down to who you fuck. Our ancestors got beaten over the head with begats and everyone got it drummed in their minds that they couldn’t be devout unless they were pumping them out.
No more Roman orgies or gay warriors. Much of what we would call LGBT history was either erased or buried and we all started wearing our cultural drag outfits. What once was normal became a perversion. It didn’t help matters much that as a species, we got a bit of an incentive to do this in the form of arranged marriages for property and dowries. This became the beginning of hetero-supremacy (homophobia) and what would later become biphobia from both “straight” people and “gay” people.
The damage done from all this hetero-supremacy may have been great, but it’s slowly but surely getting better as more of the youngest generation identifies as LGBTQ. But with all this in mind, we shouldn’t be teaching that “heterosexuality” is the human default. Because it’s not. Not even most animals are exclusively “heterosexual.”
Conservatives like to argue that humanity wouldn’t exist without heterosexuality. It’s not like I don’t know I wouldn’t be here if my mom didn’t put her legs up in the back seat of a Mazda 626 just because she thought my dad looked cute in a uniform (This was THE most awkward conversation I EVER had with my dad). But sexual fluidity exists for a reason. Because of our opposable thumbs, the ability to walk upright and our intelligence, humans are an apex predator. Which means that we’re at the top of the food chain unless you’re having a bad day and run into a bear.
Mother nature's intelligent design saw to it that there was at least a possibility that we might pair off in a way that would keep the human population down. This also has the added bonus of us being able to take care of kids that for one reason or another, don’t have parents. This allowed for there to be a balance so that we didn’t hunt too many species to extinction or over farm the land. Nature also didn’t dictate for only a small segment of people to have the possibility of being attracted to someone of the same sex. This applies to THE VAST MAJORITY of humanity. This is why there is no such thing as a “gay gene”. Which is good because if you can identify a gene you can erase it.
Humanity, despite our flaws and our vestigial trappings of being tribalistic apes, is intelligent. An intelligent species cares more about what’s between the ears and less about what’s below them. As an intelligent person, if I find someone to be sweet, kind and good-looking. I’m not going to say that human is off-limits because he has a dick. If I think someone’s hard-working, fun and I can’t imagine not being around them, I’m not going to write them off because they have a clam.
But humanity has locked itself into paradigms just to fit in. We’re social animals that crave acceptance because it’s a key element of survival and as humans, we take the path of least resistance. The little boxes we put ourselves and each other in are prisons. They keep us from exploring who we may want to be with and enslave us to who we think we should be with. These trappings need to be tossed away. In 1948, we were given the Kinsey Scale. Maybe it’s time for not only a new scale, but whole new words. I give you the McGuinness scale:
- Andro-attracted: exclusively interested in male and male presenting.
- Andro-inclined: mostly interested in male and male presenting.
- Duo-attracted: interested in male and female and male and female presenting.
- Estro-inclined: mostly interested in female and female presenting.
- Estro-Attracted: exclusively interested in female and female presenting.
It’s a rough idea, but at least these are a bit more gender-neutral. Maybe in ditching the old labels, we can also ditch the stereotypes and dogma that goes along with those archetypes. One thing I definitely know for sure. Laws like the don’t say gay laws, they don’t just harm a community of around 10% of all people. It affects ALL of humanity. The idea of orientation as we know it is the end result of holier-than-thou types on a power trip. The same way peacocks call attention to their plumage, so do the VAST majority of heterosexuals.
They do it publicly with every bit of their culture (think Mardi Gras and 50 shades of Grey) as LGBT people do it with ours (think pride parades and RuPauls Drag Race). We all want to fit in. And we’ll go through any lengths to do it. Including pretending to be the embodiment of that tribe when all reality, at any given time. We privately have a foot in multiple worlds. Or in different boxes. This also explains why a lot of conservatives think of gay sex as a kink and not an orientation. Because for them, that’s their best rationalization for their own feelings.
In the meantime, I’m working on a three-part series. If the begats insist on us living by the dictates of a three-thousand-year-old book. I’m going to need them to prove that sky-daddy exists.
Collin is a natural born atheist who doesn’t believe in dogma, religious or political. He grew up in NYC, but his heart belongs in the midwest where he’s moving. Bi-ish, but mostly gay. Nerd! Dogs are the very best kind of people.
