Kissing Boys: Coming out as a Bisexual Man
D o you want to know the truth, because I’m not sure I want to tell it. When I think back I prefer to remember the fantasy instead, and sometimes I wonder if that’s how it should be. I’m lucky that we’ve culturally come around to find bisexual men hot, and I’m lucky that I have good friends around me who encourage exploration rather than require a permanent identity, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s life and not a porn movie. It doesn’t change the fact that in the middle of the licking, the sucking, the watching and the being watched, there are actual people involved.
They say that the two ways to take away someone’s humanity are to either dismiss them completely or put them on a pedestal. When it comes to sex, it’s often easy to let ourselves forget that there are minds connected to the other body parts we’re playing with. If we forget the messy parts of real lives, then we can just focus on the juicy bits.
I don’t remember questioning my sexuality when I was young. I do remember that I always liked girls. From my earliest memories, I loved women, wanted to be close to them, and wanted to touch them. I wanted naked bodies–which fascinated me always–and I wanted skin and hair and love. From my earliest memory, I wanted to be near girls because there was nothing that interested me half as much.
I had the obligatory male friends, and we did the obligatory explorations long before I remember doing a damn thing with a girl. I know there were times my parents caught me with another naked kid doing the normal things kids do, but that’s only because they’ve told me. As for memories, they’re as blurry as most of my childhood, and I couldn’t bring them back if I wanted to. But there, in the dark, with boys my own age, we looked at dirty magazines, compared our tiny cocks, and when we were the most daring, we reached out in those dimly lit closets and touched one another.
But childhood exploration for me never feels all that connected to anything other than interest. I don’t remember wanting to kiss or insert. I don’t remember the sex at all, in fact, all I really recall is the overwhelming curiosity of discovery. What does he look like? What does she feel like? And alongside it was the strong and compelling understanding that we were not supposed to be asking those questions. But maybe the interest is the important part because when I look back on my life, other than a few brief moments of extreme emotion, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to know.
So when was that first time? When was that moment when I realized not that I was different, but that I was interested? If it wasn’t comparing penis size in the dark, if it wasn’t getting hard next to my best friend as we watched the Playboy channel late at night, and if it wasn’t staring at bodies on the nude beach, then when was it?
I might say it was the time Tony taught us to jerk off, but I’m not positive that counts. He was older than me and my best friend by two years, and he came into our room one night in order to explain a thing he discovered that felt good. In fact, he said, “I just did this thing that feels great on my penis,” and we were all ears. But we lay alone, separated by our slick sleeping bags as he taught us to rub up against the silky fabric until we came in the dark. Our twelve-year-old bodies as confused by what we were doing as our minds, and yet just as avidly interested. But that night, as fateful as it might be, feels mostly unrelated. It’s something I might tell my therapist if I needed to delve into my sexual origins, and maybe she’d have something to say about it, but I doubt it. It was awkward, it was fascinating, and it was brief. And if I happen to remember it now, nearly thirty years later, maybe all it means is that it stood out from the rest just enough to make an impression.
But my first kiss, that first kiss with another boy was something else altogether. Even now, after writing about sex for longer than I can remember, it’s difficult to share. Maybe it’s the cultural baggage or maybe it’s all my own, but writing about men is challenging, and all I can do is start where I always do: with memory as best as I can recall it.
My first kiss with a boy was under a piano at a Unitarian Church sandwiched between a boy named Jake and a girl named Molly. We had just spent an hour and a half at a workshop on bisexuality, lead by an adult who found the time to sit down with thirty teenagers and talk to them about sex. Mostly I remember two pretty girls saying they wanted to have a threesome to which the moderator asked for volunteers. I knew we were liberal, but my god was that unexpected and how quickly I froze! But the workshop only primed the pump so to speak, and I didn’t talk to the pretty girls at all. But I did find two other curious youth who wanted to talk long after it ended, and so the three of us sat beneath the grand piano in the sanctuary of a church I hardly remember and took turns kissing each other’s ears at the same time.
It was rather clinical in some ways. Each of us wanted to know what it was like to be kissed by two people at the same time, and so we simply did it. I suspect that she mostly wanted him, I wanted her, and he wanted me, but that’s neither here nor there. Even if it became a pattern that followed me for years to come, it doesn’t matter. Because for a moment, I sat there on the floor while two beautiful people leaned in, kissed me gently on the neck, and then pressed their lips against my ears until I felt like the world might explode. In the middle of it, I turned and kissed Molly, her lips soft and gentle, the lips of a bird or a mother. It was nearly chaste compared to what came next, and my memory isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be. Because when Jake kissed me it was not the same. When his full lips connected to mine the world changed, and I knew it in an instant. He was not gentle, he was not neat, and he was not my mother. He devoured my lips and mouth with his own, and his hand pulled me closer as Molly sat back and watched, her mouth hanging open in awe as she took in the scene in front of her.
And then, short minutes later, she was off, dancing back into the throng of other youth as Jake and I sat breathing harder than I thought possible as we wondered what the hell had just happened. But he and I didn’t continue and maybe there’s a reason and maybe not. We both drifted back to the party, and it would be more than ten years later before I bumped into him again, this time both of us adults, and this time both of us with more time to see what we might do.
And maybe it’s telling that that time and the next both involved a girl. Maybe it’s telling that they both involved Molly, because the truth is, when it comes to men there’s almost always a girl there. A year later, the story went nearly the same way, but this time in a house with only six friends, and when Molly went home I was left with a boy I hardly knew and didn’t especially like. But we crawled into bed because there were things I needed to know and things I needed to like, and it was normal and awkward; when I was done I felt a sense of accomplishment more than anything else.
“Let’s try sucking each other’s cocks,” he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And what did I know? Maybe it’s just how guys like to talk to each other and what did I have to lose? What did it matter if I would have preferred Molly’s lips a hundred times over and what did it matter that I really didn’t want his hand let alone his mouth on me? But we did it all the same, him first for no more than a few minutes, and then it was my turn to crawl beneath the sheets, take him into my mouth, and see if I knew what to do with someone else’s cock.
And after that? After those early teenage memories there were more kisses, more cocks to suck, and more awkward nights when I didn’t know what I wanted any more than I had back then. A year after that, the boy from the party cornered me and told me we had something and all I could do was run. All I could do was try to pretend I had enjoyed our first encounter but wasn’t interested in another, because the truth was the girls occupied more of my mind than I could admit to. Oh, I wanted to be different, and I even wanted to be bisexual. It was a tag that made me stood out, and it was an odd moment in history, where in northern New Jersey there was something daring, something exciting, and maybe, if I was lucky, something cool about coming out. But wanting something and being something are never the same thing. Especially when it comes to sex.
And then I was off to college and everything grew more complicated as it always does. There were older men who took me to parties, and friends who fell in love with me. There were late nights of kissing on beds and groping with hands and mouths alike, but they were spread far between, and what did it matter? I was neither straight (look what I had done!) nor queer because, let’s face it, I lacked the fucking street cred for that. And in college that street cred meant all the difference. I went to the meetings, hell I helped organize one of the largest queer college conferences in the country, and yet still I doubted everything. Maybe I liked girls too much to fit in, and maybe I didn’t like boys exactly the same way.
One afternoon, the best friend of the guy I was spending time with (there’s no simpler way to describe that relationship) told me I needed to fall exactly in the middle to call myself bi. Tammy told me I hadn’t suffered enough to claim my own gayness, and she told me that until I had dated exactly as many men as women and loved them in exactly the same way that I was just a straight boy who was fucking with the good gay men and I should cut it out. And I’d like to say that didn’t stay with me, but the truth is I believed her one-hundred-percent. The truth is, she hit a nerve I already secretly believed, and it’s taken me far longer than I’d like to admit to get past it.
The language of identity politics mixed with the language of privilege and power make sorting out your own shit a challenging task, because while the personal may be political, it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way when you’re sitting in bed at night with tears in your eyes wondering why the hell you can’t just be one thing or another.
It didn’t help that the men in my life were as aggressive as I was. I can see some of the ironies there, although, like everything else, it’s not simple. It started when I was young, though, and I suspect that’s usually the case. Queer kids get attention from adults for a million reasons, but one of them is that we welcome any sort of guidance at all because otherwise the world is a terrifying place. But my barber rubbing his hard-on against me as he trimmed my ten-year-old-self’s hair was not the attention I wanted. My babysitter climbing into bed with me and telling me how handsome I was was not the attention I wanted, and even the lawyer who took me into the city at nineteen so he could watch me shove dollar bills into the guy’s g-strings at Splash was not the attention I wanted.
And through it all, there were some women who loved me for it and some who feared it. Sara cried one night telling me she now had to worry about losing me to men and women, but Katherine watched in awe as I took Robert’s cock between my lips before begging us to fuck her. She watched and she moaned, and she told us there was nothing prettier in the world than two men who wanted each other. And that made it easier, because I understood women, or thought I did. It made it easier because I wasn’t alone and it made it easier because at the end of the day there are a million things I like, and watching is one of them. And, of course, it made it easier because women didn’t scare me, and there’s nothing like not being terrified to help me get turned on.
I spent a summer up in Provincetown, and I’d like to think that helped and maybe it did, but normalizing queerness to the extent that it was assumed you were gay unless otherwise noted wasn’t a magic spell that made it all easier. It simply made it harder to get a date with women, and more complicated when it came to men. But I worked seven days a week, I partied until two each morning, and I sailed out to the lighthouse in my few hours off. I learned how to walk the street holding a man’s hand without fearing for my safety. I learned how to talk honestly about what I wanted, and I learned how to touch and kiss without shaking myself awake. Most of all, I learned that I was allowed to continue figuring my shit out without any deadline at all.
Being a bisexual man meant that when it came to queer spaces I was never quite gay enough. That was a challenge and it was awkward and frustrating at times. But I should not equate it with the flip side of the equation. While I never doubted how much I liked women, being even slightly gay in straight spaces meant someone might try to kill me. From the first time in fourth grade when I kissed a boy in class and was teased for it over the next ten years, I knew it was dangerous. And when I finally went off to college with hair down to my shoulders, I discovered just how true that was.
Mostly it was catcalls while out for a run or snarky comments from someone I didn’t know. Once while back campus a group of teenage boys ran past before stopping and turning to face me.
“Hey faggot, where you going?” they asked. I just kept walking, because even though I was a few years older than them, I was alone in the woods and there were four of them. I tried not to stop and they kept yelling. My heart beat faster as I imagined everything that might happen over and over again until it nearly burst.
“We’re gonna kill you!” they screamed, before they ran off laughing, and it was hard to go out by myself for a long time after that. Those stupid fucking high school kids from Indiana started working on a scar that would take longer to heal than I knew, but even then I wanted to yell back with my safety net. Even then I thought I should be able to pass far better than that. Even then I knew that if I was in a group of gay men I’d get questioned just as much and I’d be found wanting.
“I’m not even all that gay!” I wanted to shout back.
A few months later, standing out front of the one gay bar in Richmond Indiana smoking a cigarette with the acapella band we had brought in for the conference, I heard a thud next to me. The bar didn’t use the front entrance (what gay bar did?) and it sat on a mostly abandoned promenade that had maybe seen better days and maybe was always as depressing as it was. Another thud sent us clutching at our faces as we dropped our cigarettes and headed for the door. When the third potato, raw and as hard a rock, bounced off the wall just inches from my head we made a run for it, ducking back into the dark bar with some hope that there might be safety in numbers.
“I’m sorry that happened,” one of the older men said to me. They had come all the way from Provincetown, a town where everyone knows you’re gay and they’re always glad you came, and suddenly they were stuck in Richmond Indiana trying to make me feel better about it all. God, did I feel even more like a fraud when that man hugged me and told me he hoped my generation wouldn’t have to deal with this shit. My god did I feel like a liar and a thief when he cried and told me it would get better, and all I had to do was hold on. It would be okay, he told me. Everything would be okay, and we were the ones making it happen.
But, of course, I knew I wasn’t doing a damn thing. Because Tammy was right: I had no fucking business calling myself a real queer until I had suffered a whole lot more.
