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So Rod Dreher, who has apparently been going through some shit, divorced and leaving America for Central Europe, posted another lament for the queering of America, which is an issue not for making it a worse place to be straight, but for misleading our children from the vital and active process of becoming straight, and starts citing from his own youth, and everyone else is like
👀
among other things, I have never seen so literal an example of “then the demons be bisexuality”
so many things make so much more sense when you realize that the whole time a good proportion of men who practiced and identified with heterosexuality did in fact find men sexually attractive
a good proportion of men who practiced and identified with heterosexuality did in fact find men sexually attractive
I mean I kind of see myself that way. I used to see myself that way exclusively: the idea of ‘being bisexual’, calling myself that, still feels a bit off to me. I may well end up not sticking with the label; the old one feels better to me, even with how mockable it is. LGBT culture, to the extent that’s a coherent thing, is not something I usually fit in well with or particularly want to be a part of. And for someone like Rod Dreher I imagine all those pressures, real and imagined, are 10x worse.
So I think there’s a meaningful sense in which a putative straight man can be sexually attracted to men and still not “be bisexual”. And if that sounds ridiculous to people, a contradiction in terms, well, that’s my point: there’s more than one viable mental model here, and they weight internal experience vs. conscious self-ID vs. societal perception differently. The idea that Rod, or anyone, should “accept who they are” and “get over it” is contingent on one of those models being objectively true and applicable to everyone.
tbh this is mostly where I’m at – guys, and M4M stuff, are their own thing that I’m on the outside of. Maybe in a more closeted era there were better on-ramps for guys who were middle-aged when they were like “maybe gay sex?”. Honestly I’m mostly following a bi-women-in-the-90s path: if I’m a more appealing partner to opposite-sex mates because they can do the work of putting threesomes together perfect