I’m Still Uncovering My Repressed Bisexuality
I had no idea I could be romantically interested in other men.
When I first began to accept my bisexuality, at age 40, I thought I had only kept physical experiences and desires repressed. Through thoughtful conversations, my wife helped me feel safe to think about if I had ever had any other (non-physical) feelings for guys.
My earliest memory of these confusing feelings was from high school. Despite me being a 4-sport athlete, I was not a jock and I did not fit in or have any close friends. I was eager to move on from high school but with my lackluster GPA and typical poor testing, in some part due to my diagnosed ADHD, I knew I would only be accepted to a university with an ACT score that even my guidance counselor thought was beyond me.
My mother and I were living in poverty but I used Christmas gift money to purchase an ACT test prep course along with additional tutoring and worked harder than I had ever. I earned the score I needed to be automatically accepted to a state university without GPA consideration and was the most confident in myself that I had ever been.
I then found out that a football teammate did not get the test score he needed. Even though I was never “one of the guys,” this teammate had been nice to me. He was nice to everyone. He was one of the most talented athletes on our team, too. It was easy to root for the guy and with newfound confidence from earning the ACT score I needed, I wanted to help.
I gave him all my test prep materials. These materials represented two weeks of skimpy dinners in the past and hope for the future that college could bring me out of poverty. Looking back it was a significant moment to hand these over to him and to hand them over without expecting anything in return. And it didn’t end there. I wanted to personally help him. This was not characteristic of me as I was/am introverted most of the time and I was/am not an academically gifted type of person. We spent study hall time talking about testing tips that worked for me. Every time I passed him in the halls I gave him a few words of encouragement and he would shoot back a quick cool nod up and genuine smile…and oh my gosh that smile.
He was captain of the football team, homecoming king and he was physically stacked. Who wouldn’t want to be this guy? And at the time I thought this was why I could not stop wanting to be around him, giving him tips for his ACT retest all while I stared way too long at his chiseled jawline and his enchanting smile. Did I mention his smile already?
But those few hours hanging out closely with all those new confusing feelings is where it ended. At that point in my life, I was preoccupied looking for girls to make out with. After witnessing an assault at school the previous year, I had completely repressed my physical urges and desires for guys and I had no idea what was going on with these new feelings. We graduated and I didn’t think about it again for more than 20 years.
The other significant memory that resurfaced was from two years after what I now think of as my first guy crush. I was in college, not yet 21, and a fellow student council member had a band playing an 18+ show at a local bar where most live concerts were 21+, so I was in.
I didn’t care who was playing, any chance for me to see live music had me interested. His band didn’t go up until the end. So wait, this guy I know is the lead singer for the headlining band??? I was impressed. After the second band finished playing I noticed many people leaving. By the time student council guy’s band went up, there were just a handful of people and definitely no one from our larger student council group left in the audience.
His band started playing their set. He looked like a 20 year old (healthy/sober) Mick Jagger…or at least that is what he looks like in my memory of him. The band played all original songs and a few were actually really good. I remember telling a friend afterward I thought they were radio worthy. The show ended with the intro to The Doors’ “Touch Me” (instrumental intro, then “come on, come on, come on, come on, now touch me, babe” before the lights went black and sound cut out). The lights came back up and the crowd was confused as he told us, “That’s it.” Everyone was super unimpressed and walked away without much, if any, applause. I stood there thinking that these people were nuts and it was a fun way to end the show that was mostly made up of unknown original songs.
I waited around to say hey. It wasn’t long before he left the backstage area but it was definitely an awkward amount of time for me (a guy known to have had a few girlfriends within that same student council group) to be waiting for another guy who was just slightly more than an acquaintance.
Again, same as the captain of my high school football team, this guy was nice to everyone. But, instead of being a jock, he had this essence of queerness about him. I only understood gay or straight at the time, so I wondered if he was gay (I now know how limiting that assumption was but looking back, I think my curiosity about him being gay is significant in how I behaved and what I felt that night).
He saw me waiting for him. I remember a surprised look on his face. I wonder if that look was because he didn’t see me in the audience or if he was just surprised that I was still there.
As we were talking, there was this moment of he and I standing there face-to-face where everything else faded completely away from existence. It was just us, staring at each other. It seemed to last an eternity and a fraction of a second both at the same time. I didn’t know why I was acting this way. No. Feeling this way. What am I feeling? Why am I nervous? Why do I have butterflies in my stomach? All I knew was there was nowhere else I wanted to be at that moment. Both smiling at each other, swaying uneasily, a glance down and a “so…ya.”
The moment passed and we said our “later”s with a nod and parted ways. I apparently suppressed my butterflies quickly, I don’t remember dwelling on our face-to-face interaction at all. After this there was no weirdness between the two of us, everything was normal.
Thinking about these interactions 20 years later but now with a bisexual self-awareness, there was the realization that I was really into these guys in a way that went way beyond physical attraction. I wanted to just be in their presence. Especially the lead singer, I realized that standing in front of him I really wanted to…kiss him? Yes, but not only that, I just wanted to be with him. Physically, sure, but there was something else in that eternal split second. Not only was I open to romance with this guy but desired it.
Being several months into my bi-awakening, I thought I had already uncovered all my repressed bisexuality but I had been viewing my non-hetero desires and experiences as purely physical. I thought I had never wanted to be with a man emotionally or romantically, only physically. The safe space my wife created as she prompted me to explore the confusing feelings of my past helped me uncover a biromantic aspect to my bisexuality that, frankly, blew my mind. Processing these repressed romantic feelings towards guys totally changed my perception of myself as a bisexual man. It seems I still have more work to do in unearthing the real me buried down deep beneath everything. I will gladly keep digging because with each new self-discovery, I feel like a happier, more complete version of myself.
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