Contemplating Bisexuality

By Mister Curie

With it being roughly a year since I began to blog, I have been reviewing some of my early posts and the progress I have made exploring my thoughts and feelings on this blog.  In my first post coming out, I wrote, "I am questioning now, but I think that I am bisexual".  I then wrote a post about bisexuality, noting a study that brought into question the existence of bisexuality as well as the common notion that bisexuality is a transition period as one accepts their homosexuality.  Then I wrote a long series of posts where I explored the past and acknowledged my attraction to men throughout my life.  In the final post of that series, I ranked myself on the Klein grid, determining I was probably about a 5 on the Kinsey scale and wrote, " I definitely can't claim to be equally attracted to men and women, even with the abundance of attraction I feel for my wife, so I don't think bisexual is the correct label for me. I guess I'll embrace the homosexual label."

I then went through a challenging and enriching period of time, struggling to understand what being gay meant and striving to overcome my own internalized homophobia.  Over the summer I came out as gay to my parents and siblings.

And now I am back to contemplating bisexuality.  I have been reading some books on bisexuality, including "Bi America" and "Dual Attraction".  I think my initial dismissal of bisexuality may have been too quick and uninformed.  So, time permitting, I intend to explore some of my thoughts from reading these books and where I identify with these books.  Some of the struggles are different, but many of the struggles of the bisexual person are similar to the struggles of a homosexual person.  Both are attracted to persons of the same gender and both need to decide what to do about those attractions.  As I wrote in my first post, "I think being in the church is probably easier for the bisexual than for the homosexual. . . . Bisexuality [allowed] me to focus on my heterosexual feelings within my LDS belief system and ignore my homosexual feelings. . . . I had heterosexual feelings I could explore. Any homosexual feelings that I chose not to pursue were easily ignored due to my LDS church belief system, as well as the cultural mindset I was raised with."

As I have learned since becoming disaffected from the church, the world is not composed solely of black and white, good and evil, gay or straight in easily and rigidly defined dichotomies, rather there is a rainbow of variation that is good and wonderful in the world.  It was easy to quickly dismiss bisexuality when I was first acknowledging my attractions to men because I was still used to operating in a black/white world view (in fact I still have some difficulties escaping the black/white world view at times, much to my wife's dismay).  So this is going to be a concentrated effort at avoiding black/white dichotomies and instead explore the richness and depth that comes from contemplating the vast middle ground.