I read in the NY Times magazine section today about how increasingly middle-school students as young as 11 and 12 are declaring their sexual-affectional identities to friends, family, and teachers. This is a welcome evolution of gay liberation that has resulted from decades of gay activism and the gradual inclusion of more accurate images of LGBT people in media. It is significant that young people with no sexual experience recognize their sexual-affectional identities at such young ages because being gay is more about whom and how we love and how this colors our experience of the world than about sex only. The article points out that parents never question their children when they admit to opposite-sex attractions at a young age, but they nearly always do with same-sex attractions. The common question, ”How can you know for sure at your age?“ is just another form of denial of their gay child’s reality that they would never think to impose on non-gay children. The article goes on to describe some support programs for gay youth, but it also reports what we all assume, that anti-gay bullying and harassment is still pervasive in schools and almost never challenged by teachers or administrators even in relatively liberal school districts.

Recently new hunky Hollywood it-man Gerard Butler was quoted as saying that he had dated men, as well as women, in the past, supposedly from a 1994 interview with Movieline magazine.  It turned out the quote was bogus, and while there is something interesting in the fact that it happened to come out RIGHT while he was promoting his new romantic comedy, what really interested me was the reactions on gay blogs when the news broke.  Peppered within typical variations of “I’d hit that” and musing about the “300” hottie’s body was something I hadn’t really thought existed… true bisexual bigotry.
What started as a standard dialogue regarding the questionable heterosexuality of Hollywood’s leading men (a common gay man’s pastime) quickly turned into a pretty heated, and nasty, debate on the truth of bisexuality in general.  From the old thought that bisexuality is just a layover on the way to gay-town, to rage-full rants on the convenience of the life of the bisexual.  That they get all the dick they want on the side, but when it comes to public fronts, they get to play straight and be part of “regular” society.  And then a very emotional response, which really got the words flying, from a bisexual man who rarely “outs” himself as bisexual as he had been completely abandoned by all of his gay friends when he started dating a woman after a years-long relationship with a man ended.  All of this got me thinking… do I really believe in bisexuality?