"...A person's sexual orientation is a little more fixed than their taste in end-of-the-day pick-me-ups.
Frankly, I don't trust a man who says he swings both ways, unless he is a spotty teenager who hasn't sorted himself out yet. Oaten is 41 and Hughes is 54. If they think they are old enough to run the country then surely they are old enough to work out which gender they fancy?"
This is how I ended previously and the jumping off point for this. As far as I am concerned, sexuality is not fixed, and should not be considered as such. This is not a new idea -- the famous psychologist Alfred Kinsey was discussing this back in the 1930s, and yet many people seem ignorant of the Kinsey Scale, which plots sexuality on a scale of 1 - 6. You are not either straight or gay, as Ms Turner suggested in her article. The fact that you don't often hear of gay men having mistresses on the side is neither here nor there when it comes to sexuality. But not only are there not only two options, but where one appears on the scale is fluid. It can and does change -- how much it does, how much we are aware of it, and sometimes how much we perhaps want to admit it are all open to debate and most likely dependant wholly on the individual.
The label bisexual has always bothered me, and has been a source of argument between me and other people. For a start, traditionally it suggests that one is equally attracted to men and women -- this is not the case for me, only that I am potentially attracted to either. Where I appear on the scale on Monday might differ to Friday, and I like to believe attraction is based entirely on individual merit rather than gender. I don't feel comfortable discussing these things in great detail here, but this article looks at another scale and discusses the complications of the issue intelligently and in more depth.
The prejudice of Ms Turner in her article is not new to me -- the idea that bisexuality doesn't exist, or that after one's experimental teenage years, one should grow up and "pick a side". It's not limited to her, when I was in my final year at university I started spending time with the "Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual" group -- except that I was the only one who identified as being bisexual, and was told on more than one occasion that I was secretly Gay but hadn't met the right man yet. If I had dared suggest to any of the girls there that they just needed the right man I probably wouldn't have got out alive. I've also had straight friends claim that I am just trying to be "fashionable", or that I am just pretending.
I don't talk about this to my closest friends. Many of my friends have no idea I am anything but straight, because however much I might like them I don't trust them not to treat me differently. I wouldn't be one of the boys any more. I feel like there would be concerns about if we went swimming together if I might be "looking" at them in a certain way. Or when someone starts getting anonymous and pornographic text messages -- as has happened before -- I would be considered a suspect.
The fact is that a person's sexual orientation is not fixed. It might be fixed where it is today, it might be fixed where it is for 20 years, but it can just as easily change. It is never set in stone.
To my mind we are all just people, and distinctions between straight and gay and bi and whatever are mostly fictional and entirely unhelpful.
I'm reminded of this song -- funnily enough, it raises some points not unlike the academic article linked to above.
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