I mean, keep it between us, but I fooled around with a girl at school. Maybe they were experiencing the same curiosities that I - and many of us – did in youth. It’s only now that I’m entering my thirties that it occurs to me that perhaps a lot of those men weren’t, and aren’t, in fact, gay at all. And naturally, I assumed each and every one of them - the ones with girlfriends or wives - were all so far in the closet they had the White Witch on speed dial. Sure, they all insisted they were straight, and some even threatened my life if I ever told another soul (is it wrong that this made it hotter?) but they did exist. There were straight men willing to experiment. As if dating isn’t challenging enough without restricting yourself to a group of suitors who, by their very definition, aren’t interested.Īnd yet, I was not without success. That is just what turned me on, I’d tell myself - and it was true, I suppose. “I only sleep with straight men,” I’d profess at uni, proudly, about my approach to dating, like it was some messed-up badge of honour. However, in my defence, there was much going on to encourage me: a lot had happened since Nick refused to kiss me, shaping these views that I’m now shamefully re-evaluating.Īs I got older, braces removed and acne cleared up, I could actually start being intimate with men who weren’t severely visually impaired, presenting me with new opportunities to be annoying. Yes, I’m afraid to say I might be an example of a gay man who has been unwittingly endorsing and carrying out a less-traditional, but still problematic, form of homophobia. “He knows the words to the new Taylor Swift song,” I’d remark, all-knowingly, smug that I was right about him all along. What if there really are a multitude of levels between gay and bisexual?Īnd, perhaps, one of the reasons so many men don’t feel comfortable experimenting, or admitting to their curiosities about man-on-man encounters, is because people like Yours Truly are standing across the room, eyes-narrowed, whispering cattily about them. It wasn’t until recently that I considered the fact that people like myself, while officially believing everyone needs to be true to themselves, might be part of the problem.
It’s amazing that the irony escaped me for so long that I - the guy who had spent high school silently dreading the moment anyone ever accused him of being gay - had over the years, inexplicably, morphed into the accuser. If I had a pound for every time I’d uttered those words… well, I wouldn’t still occasionally consider faking my own death to escape student loans.