Darkside Rainbow

Oh, man, I haven’t done one of these in a while, have I? I’ve had a bunch of letters sitting on the back burner and they kept getting pushed aside for various current events. Well, it’s a bit of a slow news day (or it’s the Friday of a long week and I’m feeling too lazy and burnt-out to trawl the headlines or create my own), so let’s root around in the mailbag and see who today’s victim topic is.

Adrian,

I’m not sure, but I think I might be gay or bi. I’ve dated girls all my life, but keep looking at men. It’s not that girls turn me off, but men turn me on more sometimes. But sometimes they don’t. I get confused there. The men I’m attracted to are feminine and very pretty. Maybe I’m straight and attracted to feminine things. But I like dick too. I’ve experimented a little and girly guys get me off but I like butch girls. I don’t like butch guys. I’m really confused and don’t know if I’m gay. How did you know you were gay?

-Mix in NY

Weeeeeell, that’s kind of a funny story that I’ll try to keep brief so we can focus on you instead, mmkay, Mixy m’boy?

My best friend told me.

I sh*t you not.

I was thirteen years old and my best friend was this girl named Trish. Pretty, popular, annoyingly perky as all hell with a tongue that could cut like razors. Me? I was working my way towards being a teenygoth, bad poetry and all, although I never went for the makeup and the spikes (that phase came later). Just the dark clothing, long hair, sullen looks, and the floridly awful “my soul is dark” writing. She belonged out in the light. I belonged pressed up against the wall glaring at everyone who tried to talk to me because I was utterly socially maladjusted and far too shy for social interaction, so I hid it behind defensive anger. We’d never have been friends if she hadn’t decided, one day in P.E. class, that we would be. Just like that, she sat down next to me and said that she liked my attitude, and we were going to be friends.

Trish…was not someone that you said no to. And I tried. Oh, gods, did I try. The girl practically stalked me until I gave in, and you know, we turned out to get along really damned well once I stopped being a surly arse and she stopped nattering at me all the time. And that was when she told me “hey, you. I think you’re cute, so we’re going on a date.”

Again, Trish was not someone that you said no to. And so despite my absolute flabbergasted confusion and reluctance, we went on a date. We went to a movie, we held hands, she dropped a million hints at me to kiss her in the movie theatre and I missed every last one of them until she smacked me upside the head with a cluebat and kissed me.

And I felt nothing. Except a little panic, maybe, but my toes didn’t curl, my little budding teenage hormones didn’t bubble and froth, my little…well, you get the idea. I tried to kiss her back, but she might as well have been kissed by a cardboard cutout. I just wasn’t into it. It had been something I’d run up against rather often when other boys were talking about girls as they started growing out of their “girls are icky” phase. I didn’t think girls were icky, but I wasn’t that interested in the blossoming contents of their training bras, either. I wasn’t quite sure what I was into, and although I’d glanced at a few boys before, I was too sheltered to know that it was even possible to be attracted to other boys. I thought I was just looking at them because they might be nice to draw, sometimes. I had sketchbooks full of profiles.

Well, Trish shattered that illusion. She kissed me once, she kissed me twice, then she gave up in frustration and said, “I knew it. You’re gay. Damn it, I had to try anyway.”

“I’m…what?”

That’s right, kids, I had no idea what homosexuality was. At thirteen years old, in the early nineties. I told you I was sheltered. Trish had to explain it to me, while I squirmed and blushed and tried to deny it even as I thought back to the number of other boys I’d quietly studied and conceded that she was probably right.

I didn’t accept her verdict blindly; I spent a long time thinking it over, and for years after tried to remain flexible about the idea until my hormones stabilized and I knew what it was that I was really attracted to. It took a little experimentation on the side, too. Kiss a few more girls, kiss a few boys, see which one set off the butterflies in the stomach. But Trish was the one who opened me up to the idea, and made me stop and take a good look at myself to realize.

So there you go. There’s your answer as to how I knew; now let’s talk about you.

Yours sounds like a very iffy situation in which I don’t want to concretely tell you that I think you swing one way or the other. Most solid and safe thing to go with is bisexual - in other words, stop worrying about if you’re gay or straight and just do what you want with the people you’re attracted to regardless of gender. We place too much importance on sticking ourselves in one box or the other. Forget the bloody effin’ label, man, seriously. You like what you like. Stop worrying.

I mean, c’mon. I say I’m gay, because mostly I’m into men. But every once in a while a girl can turn my head, and it doesn’t rock my world because the adhesive on my label may be peeling just a little bit. If you need the label of bisexual to help stabilize your world so you can come to grips with the fact that you’re not 100% hetero, that’s fine. It helps some people to have a specific way to identify themselves until they get comfortable with their own identity and can stop focusing on it as a world-turning issue. But don’t cling to that label so hard that any tiny shift of it causes your world to go completely off-kilter.

Date your girly boys. Date your butch girls. Enjoy whatever it is that draws you to either of them. If you’re worried about one day settling down with one gender but being worried that you’ll still have a desire for the other, thus making your long-term relationship inadequate…9/10, you won’t face that problem. If you’re comfortable enough with someone that you settle with them for the long term, then they’re most likely fulfilling your needs adequately enough that unless something in your relationship dynamic changes drastically, you won’t need to seek fulfillment elsewhere.

And you know, maybe you are gay and you’re just starting to find your way towards that, leaning away from women and taking slow, progressive steps towards men, and the fact that you’re attracted to more feminine men is confusing you there. If that’s the case, that’s fine, too. Just keep in mind that you don’t have to jump in with both feet and you can keep playing both fields until you’re 100% sure exactly what it is you want. No one’s judging you but you, so it’s okay to be a bit lenient on yourself, be a bit confused, experiment a bit, and change your mind if you feel like it…but do have a bit of consideration for those that you experiment with as you try to find yourself. Don’t break too many hearts on your way to learning your sexual orientation.

The basic gist of all of those is to just let things happen naturally. Destress, Mix. Don’t worry about issues of attraction until you’re faced with someone you’re attracted to, and then take it on a case-by-case basis. Deciding something arbitrarily is just going to confuse you even more, anyway, because no matter what your head says your body’s going to make up its mind without consulting your primary thought processes - and then you’ll be stuck in a war between the two, trying to force your cock to adhere to what your brain has decided when it really doesn’t want to.

Most women will probably kill me for telling you this, but y’know…sometimes it’s okay to let the little head lead. It knows what it wants even when you can’t consciously figure it out.

Still confused? Yeah. So am I. It’s a brain-burning issue, trying to sort out what goes where and with whom, and it’s different for everyone. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter at what moment you know that you are or aren’t gay, because you and your life are changing every second and something might just come along to rock that later.

So don’t worry about that defining moment. Worry about this moment, right here, right now…and just live in it.

Have a good weekend, because I am out.

~Adri