Orientation? What orientation?

With so much talk of gay rights these days, I’ve found myself doing a fair amount of thinking. My sexuality has always been, to the best of my awareness, a kind of ‘open secret’. The funny thing is, the assumptions are probably wrong.

Let me preface this with a puzzling admission: I don’t understand sexual orientation. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand sexual attraction. What I don’t understand is a certain preference of one object/type over another.

As a child, I wouldn’t hide an attraction to a person regardless of gender. My grandparents quickly ‘corrected’ this, but I never got a reasonable explanation for why liking one gender was okay but liking the other wasn’t. Like many other things in childhood, I learned to play the game only the adults knew the rules of. I didn’t come out wholly unscathed, but it could have been worse.

Cut to 2011; I’m a grown man now, and I still don’t get it. But unlike the self-titled moral majority, it’s not the attraction that puzzles me, but the exclusivity.

And don’t even get me started on the fallacy that bisexuality is a phase or a cop-out. Here is what bisexuality means to me: I find beauty in the male form as well as the female form. A penis can get me off as well as a vagina. Breasts are cool as long as they’re real (or at least of a realistic size). And all these body parts do not need to always be found on separate bodies. They are after all just body parts, bits and pieces of meat and bone and molecules of DNA.

That concept known to most as the soul is a combination of neural connections, hormonal secretions and environmental reactions. This differs from person to person and is not dictated by gender to an extent that would make a romantic connection impossible. I simply can’t fathom turning away somebody attractive simply on the basis of what their brain says their gender is.

I know now that I am a minority. I’ve always been one in one way or another. That doesn’t bother me as much as it did the child I once was. And I don’t seek to invalidate your own preferences. I just want people to understand that there is such a thing as true bisexuality, and that it isn’t a stepping stone to being gay. Nor is it an excuse for promiscuity or polyamoury (though I don’t rule out the latter simply because I’ve never tried it so I’d be talking out of my ass).

Yes, I could potentially date, have sex, fall in love with a man, or a woman, or an intersex or transgender person, but I probably wouldn’t do it all at the same time. In fact, I’m enjoying the single life too much right now. There’s a reason the word ‘crazy’ is used in a romantic context so often. I like my sanity right where it is.

It’s the principle of the thing.

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