by Dan Savage
Fuck ’em.
1 I don’t disapprove of outing—but I wouldn’t out this guy if I knew who he was. I don’t believe in outing movie stars or harmless folks. I agree with what Frank Rich said in New York magazine (January 17, 2013): “My own feeling is that every person, regardless of sexuality, should make his or her own decisions about what to keep private and what to tell the world. That said, closeted gay hypocrites with political power—whether in elective office, corporate life, or the pulpit—who vilify or curb the rights of other gay people deserve everything that’s coming to them.”
11. Mistakes Were Made
There was a time in my life when I didn’t believe in the existence of bisexual men.
Bi women? Yeah, sure, of course. They’re everywhere. Truly bisexual women, girls gone momentarily wild, a small number of vocal LUGs.1
Bi men? Nope, no way, not feeling it.
I know better now, of course, but unfortunately I began writing a sex-advice column before I saw the light. So I infamously put “Bisexual men don’t exist” into print. Once or twice.
My bad.
But there were a lot of things I didn’t know about sex when I started writing a sex-advice column. For instance, I didn’t know where the clitoris was located. I mean, I had heard of clits; I knew they were down there somewhere; I just didn’t know where exactly. And that’s crazy, right? Who would give a sex-advice column to a gay guy who doesn’t know where the clit is?
A nice straight boy from the tiny town of Pickett, Wisconsin, that’s who.
Tim Keck is one of the cofounders of The Onion, which got its start in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1988. Fake news? Writing bullshit in AP style? Tim, along with The Onion’s other cofounder, Chris Johnson, invented that. I met Tim shortly after I moved to Madison with my boyfriend at the time. The boyfriend was getting his master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin while I bided my time working in a video store. Tim and Chris had just sold The Onion, and Tim told me he was moving to Seattle to start a weekly paper. I told Tim to put an advice column in his weekly paper because everybody reads advice columns. Tim told me that was good advice and asked me to write it.
The column was supposed to be a joke. For six months, maybe a year, a weekly paper in Seattle was going to let a gay guy give sex advice to straight people. The plan was for me to treat straight people and straight sex with the same contempt that straight advice columnists had always treated gay people and gay sex. The salutation that would run at the start of every letter: “Hey, Faggot.” It was going to be hilarious. And it was hilarious. But a strange thing happened after Savage Love started appearing in the back pages of The Stranger, Tim’s new paper: Letters began pouring in from straight people who liked being treated with contempt—it was a new and different experience for them—and I was suddenly writing a real sex-advice column for straight people.
That wasn’t the plan.
It took me a long time to realize that I couldn’t just wing it. I was going to have to look stuff up. This was twenty years ago, remember, so I’m talking about looking stuff up pre-Google, pre-Wiki, pre-Internet. I couldn’t just type “Where the fuck is the clit and what the fuck is it for?” into a search engine and paraphrase the results. I had to look stuff up in books that were kept on shelves in things called libraries.
As it turns out the clitoral glans—the bit commonly referred to as the clit—is in no way analogous to the bell at the top of the strong man game at a county fair (hit pad with mallet, puck zooms up, bell rings), as I may or may not have written in an early column. The clitoris isn’t a joy buzzer at the top of the vaginal canal, as I may or may not have written in an early column. Although female genitalia in toto do, in fact, look like a canned ham dropped from a great height, as I wrote in an early column. (The “canned ham” comment prompted some readers to label me sexist and one to call me, and I quote, “a gynophobic little faggot.” I strongly reject that characterization. First, I’m six feet one. Second, drop a canned ham from a great height—say, the top of a skyscraper—and what happens? One of the can’s seams splits as it hits the sidewalk; the force from the fall compresses the can; pink meat is forced out through the split seam, creating a roughly symmetrical pink meat flower. And while pussy is something I could never bring myself to eat, I can eat an entire ham in a sitting. It seems to me that a truly gynophobic person would’ve compared female genitalia to something revolting and inedible. Like raw liver or lavender crème brûlée.)
So here’s what I learned about the clitoris from books on shelves in libraries: The clitoral glans is the exposed part of a female sexual organ found in humans, a handful of other mammals, and ostriches. (Thank you, Wikipedia, for that last detail. But where were you in 1991 when I needed you?) In human females the clit is located above the urethral opening, which is itself located above the vaginal opening, which is itself located just around the bend from the anal opening. And there’s more: Seventy-five percent of women can’t come from vaginal intercourse alone because it doesn’t provide the direct, focused, clitoral glans stimulation that most women require in order to climax.
To help straight boys understand the importance of the clit—a large part of my job—I tell them the exact same clump of fetal cells and nerve endings that become the head of the penis in males become the clitoral glans in females. Ignore the head of a guy’s dick and he definitely won’t be able to come. Ignore a woman’s clit and she most likely won’t be able to come.
I didn’t know any of that before I started writing Savage Love. As a gay man in my early twenties, I didn’t need to know any of that. I wasn’t having sex with women and I had no immediate plans to mate with an ostrich.2 But I know all about the clit now. Hell, I know more about female sexual organs than many women do. And while I’ve never gone down on a woman, I’m confident that I would know my way around a woman’s genitals if I had to. I’m like an agoraphobic autistic savant who’s never been to London, and has no plans to ever go to London, but who can quickly draw you a map of the entire London Underground on the back of a paper placemat and tell you which station is closest to Buckingham Palace. (Victoria Station is closest but the approach from Green Park is nicer.)
This book would run to several volumes if I were to clear up everything I’ve gotten wrong in the twenty years that I’ve been writing Savage Love. So I’m not going to do that. I don’t really need to do that. Ever since readers forced me to turn my fake sex-and-relationship advice column into a real sex-and-relationship advice column—which required me to drop the “Hey, Faggot” salutation after a few years—I’ve viewed Savage Love as a conversation I’m having about sex with friends in a bar after we’ve all had a drink. A few drinks. While I like to think I’m usually right about sex-and-relationship stuff, and while I’m a pretty informed guy (particularly now, after looking stuff up for twenty years), I do sometimes get things wrong. And when I do my drunken friends set me straight. They send me angry e-mails; they argue with me in comments threads; they furiously tweet at me. Pretty soon everything is cleared up, or at least everyone has had a chance to be heard, and we’re on to the next week’s column.
Bi men tried to set me straight back when I first put “bisexual men don’t exist” in print.
But “bisexual men don’t exist” was the received gay wisdom at the time and I regurgitated that bit of wisdom more than once—usually in jest (I knew some bisexual men)—because: (1) It jibed with my own experience, that is, most of the bi guys I dated turned out to be closeted gay men (which turned out to be a problem with my sample and not a problem with bisexuality; more on that in a few hundred words), and (2) it didn’t seem like that big a deal. I saw my disbelief as inconsequential. I wasn’t the audience of preschoolers at a production of Peter Pan, and bisexual men weren’t a crowd of Tinker Bells—their existence didn’t depend on the power of my belief. (“Clap louder, Dan, or Bisexer Bell won’t continue to be attracted to men and women!”) And I saw the back-and-forth with ticked-off bi guys in the colu
mn as just more of the playful assholery that made Savage Love great. I see now that my gay-received-wisdom shtick was hurtful to some.
But there were bisexuals out there who saw the humor. I was even invited to sit in a dunk tank at one bisexual organization’s annual Valentine’s Day bash. I accepted the invite, donned full drag, and got dunked, over and over again, in an unheated ballroom in Seattle in February, raising hundreds of dollars for the group. (This was after I had gotten into it in print with a bisexual reader who said that she didn’t fall in love with genitals. She fell in love with people. I took offense on behalf of all monosexuals, the term she used to describe non-bisexuals, because my husband isn’t a dick with legs. Well, he’s not all the time. Sometimes he’s an ass with arms.)
As a result of the jokes, the dunk tanks, and my pushing back against the “monosexual” label (bisexuals didn’t like being told they didn’t exist; I didn’t like being lumped into the same sexual category as Rush Limbaugh and Charlie Sheen), I was labeled bi-phobic (“An aversion toward bisexuality and bisexual people as a social group or as individuals”). The label has stuck. Google “bi-phobic” and I pop up on the first page of results.3
The chief reason it took me longer to come around on the existence of bisexual men than, say, the location of the clitoris was that science—science!—was getting it wrong too. It wasn’t as if I went and looked up clitoris but refused to do the same for bisexuality. I looked up bisexuality. And much of what I read reinforced my preconceptions and my prejudices.
The single most damaging thing I read—and, regrettably, blogged about—had to be the results of a 2005 study conducted by psychologists at Northwestern University and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. The researchers placed advertisements in gay and alternative newspapers, recruiting 101 young adult men for a study about identity and attraction. While a third of the guys recruited for the study identified as bisexual, and while these bisexually identified guys existed, the researchers at Northwestern and CAMH were unable to document bisexual “genital arousal patterns” in their bisexual male test subjects. Men who identified as bi claimed that they were aroused by pornography that featured either men or women, but their genitalia—the dicks of these men had been wired up to sensors—told a different story.
“A new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men,” The New York Times reported in the summer of 2005. “The study, by a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto, lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation. People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted…. In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.”
The New York Times noted in its report that the study—the largest at the time of the estimated 1.7 percent of men who identify as bisexual (yes, even with that tiny sample size of 101 subjects, this study was then the largest to date)—would need to be “repeated with larger numbers of bisexual men before clear conclusions could be drawn.” But the study was widely held up, in The New York Times no less, as coming close to proving something many gay men had long suspected and loudly asserted: While women could be gay, straight, or bi—researchers had no trouble documenting bisexual arousal patterns in women—men were “Straight, Gay, or Lying,” as the nation’s paper of record put it in the freakin’ headline.
Here’s the great thing about science: What science gets wrong, more science sets right. (What religion gets wrong, by way of contrast, more religion rarely sets right.) But before we get to how science finally got bisexual men right—before we get to how researchers were able to document the existence of bisexual arousal patterns in males and prove, once and for all, and to the satisfaction of jerks like me, that bisexual men really and truly do exist, prompting me to write a blog post titled “Case Closed: Bisexual Men Exist!”—allow me to unpack the reason some people still see me as bi-phobic and always will.4
I can sum it up in a sentence: I’m unwilling to pretend that something that is, isn’t.
And here’s a thing that is: Many gay men briefly identify as bisexual during their coming-out processes.
I did.
Telling my friends that I was bi was easier than telling them I was gay. Being bi meant I hadn’t gone over to the dark side entirely; I was different, sure, but I wasn’t that different. I liked boys, and that was news, but I still liked girls. So, hey, no need to panic: I could wind up with a girl in the end and not a boy in my end. (Sorry about that.) The news that I was bisexual wasn’t a comfort to everyone. “So friction is friction?” my girlfriend at the time asked with barely concealed contempt when the news reached her. (I didn’t have the courage or the decency to tell her myself.)
I knew I was gay when I came out to my friends as bi. I had never really been attracted to girls. When I messed around with my girlfriend, and when I’d messed around with the girls I’d been with before her, I would close my eyes and pretend that I was with a boy. Because guess what? Friction isn’t friction. (Yes, I had sex with girls—several girls—without discovering where the clitoris was. I never laid eyes on it, much less finger or tongue. I was a lousy straight lay.) But I told my friends I was bi because I was afraid. I didn’t think they could handle the truth, and I knew that friendlessness was something I couldn’t handle. So I lied.
Most of the guys I dated in high school and during my freshman year of college had told the same lie. This is the problem with my sample that I mentioned earlier. Around the same time I was lying to people about being bi, the gay boys I was dating were lying about being bi. Eventually everyone I knew who identified as bisexual—everyone I knew personally, everyone I knew biblically—came out as gay. They were all close to my age, they were all “young adult men,” and they were all lying about being bi for the same reason I did: They were afraid.
This was why it was so easy for me, as a young adult, to accept the gay received wisdom. In my personal and biblical experience, bi guys were gay guys who hadn’t come all the way out yet. When I first started writing Savage Love, I didn’t know a single bi-identified guy who hadn’t subsequently come out as gay.
Identifying as bi during the coming-out process wasn’t unique to the gay experience in the early 1980s. I met a high school student at a conference in 2011 who was in the midst of what he described as his “second coming out.” Bryce Coder is a gay kid from a small town in Ohio. He told his family and friends that he was bi when he was a freshman in high school, but, as a sophomore, he had to come out to everyone in his life all over again. Why did he lie about being bi? He was afraid.
“I came out as bi because I didn’t feel like my family would love me if there was no possibility of me being with a woman,” Bryce told me in an e-mail recently. “I worried my parents would reject me if I couldn’t give them a grandchild or get married one day. It was purely out of fear of rejection.”
The British pop star Mika cultivated an air of sexual ambiguity—something very few straight men do (David Bowie and Ira Glass are the only other examples I can think of)—before telling an interviewer in 2009 that he was bisexual and could “fall in love with anybody—literally—any type, any body.” Three years later Mika told another interviewer that he had “found the strength to come to terms with [his] sexuality.”
“Yeah,” Mika told Instinct Magazine in 2012, “I’m gay.”
Here’s why some people insist that I’m bi-phobic: I admit that when I meet a teenage boy who identifies as bisexual, a little voice in my head says, “I was too at your age.” Or when I meet a British pop star who has been out for less than a year and who identifies as bisexual, that same voice says, “Yeah, I was too at this stage of the coming-out process.” I do
n’t say anything out loud, of course, and the fact that I lied about being bisexual when I was a teenager doesn’t mean the person I’ve just met is lying about being bisexual. But my experience—and mine is common among gay men—does leave me doubting the professed bisexuality of high school sophomores and British pop stars alike.
While almost all LGBT people seem to enjoy speculating about the “real” sexualities of various celebrities, some LGBT activists view doubting a person’s professed sexual identity—even if those doubts remain unexpressed—as a sort of low-level hate crime. It angers bisexuals in particular, as their sexual identities are questioned more than most. “If we respect a person’s identity, we empower them,” reads an epic bisexual manifesto that a reader directed me to. “We need to respect whatever [someone says], whether or not it jibes with our assumptions about them.” This requires us to accept that the Reverend Ted Haggard is, as the Reverend Ted Haggard has claimed to be, “completely heterosexual.” Seems like a stretch.
I’ve never berated a bi-identified teenage boy or a British pop star. I don’t tell the ones I meet that they aren’t or might not be bisexual. But I know that a bi-identified thirty-six-year-old man who has been out as bi for a decade is much likelier to actually be bisexual than a bi-identified sixteen-year-old boy. Bisexuality is not a phase for bisexuals, but for many gay men identifying as bisexual it is. If I have to pretend not to know that in order to avoid being labeled “bi-phobic,” well, I guess I’ll just have to live with that label.
I can see now why this is all so enormously frustrating for bisexual men. Many gay men think all bisexual guys are lying because a lot of men who claim to be bisexual are lying. But it’s not bisexual guys who lie about being bisexual. It’s gay men like me and Bryce and Mika who lie about being bi. And what do we do after we stop lying about being bi? We insist that all bisexual guys are liars because we were liars.
