Frat Star Friday: The Bisexual Manifesto

I asked Frat Star to re-publish a post he had written for his previous blog. It's what  made me realize what a great writer he was and also, how amazing he was at explaining things..how we feel..how bi guys are.
Next week, he will continue with his post on 'Bro Dating'.

So, without further adue --

The Most Important Post You'll Read All Year

My name is X, and I am twenty-one years old. I have dirty blonde hair and green eyes. I’m 6’3 and weigh 197 pounds, but I’m trying to get in better shape… not that I’m fat or anything. I’m a junior in college. My major is philosophy. I think it’s cool.  Like most other college students, I drink alcohol and smoke marijuana socially. I’ve got a crew of a few good friends that I chill with at school. We typically shoot the shit about girls, sports and life in general but on Mondays we play backyard football in an intramural league. I like to think I’m pretty well liked. Overall, if you met me you’d think that I was the average college kid. As a matter of fact, if you saw me walking down fraternity row, you wouldn’t think twice about me. Maybe if you were a dude I’d met at a party you’d awkwardly tilt your head up in acknowledgement, or if you were a girl – hopefully a cute one – you might smile and say hello but otherwise I’m a small cog in the big social machine that is college.

I’ve given you a lot of background to describe who I am because it takes a lot to admit the skeletons in your closet, so here it goes: I’m bisexual. Oh, you’re surprised? Yeah, I’m sure you are. I’ve cultivated every single aspect of my personality to hide this one small fact from civilization, even my parents. If I came out publicly my old man would die of shame – his old army buddies wouldn’t approve – while my mom would encourage me to buy some queer condo in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood so I could live with my "life partner." Screw that. What happened to the good old college try? Isn’t college supposed to be the time where you make mistakes, where you experience new emotions and feelings, where you try on a bunch of new things to find out who you really are and then you make an educated decision as to who you really are? No, that is a lie, a goddamned lie. Maybe it’s true if you operate as one of the cogs in the big machine and change your major from Economics (I can still see my mom saying this: "Oh honey, it’ll be good for your career! Think of grad school!") to something obscure like Egyptology, Urban Planning or whatever major Brown University is offering to their students these days. Not that I go to Brown, but I don’t know of another school that offers stuff like Aramaic. But if you really want to break the mold, if you really want to challenge thousands of years of societal constructs, that’s all nonsense. Case in point: I know a kid who experimented with a total fag who ratted him out and now he’s a walking pariah. Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t been dragged out of my dorm into the Student Union and ritually stoned by my peers. One of my best friends is quasi-dating one of his teammates right now at a large Southern university. Shit, if those good old boys ever found out that two varsity players were fucking around I think they’d ritually burn them on the Quad.

 
Now that I’ve explained all of that to you, I’d imagine that you’d try and console me. After all, this is the twenty first century and homosexuals are accepted in society now. But I’m not gay as far as I know. Hell, I haven’t even confirmed that I have a solid identity. I like pussy. As a matter of fact, I like pussy a lot thank you very much. I just tried something – an impulse like an itch you want to scratch – and now I’m automatically relegated to being gay. Sometimes people try things, don’t like them at first, and then love them later. Sometimes people try things, like them at first, and then hate them up later. Let me give you an example. I remember waking up really early one day when I was just a pup, it was probably like six in the morning, and I was really bored. My old man was asleep, so I started looking around the house for my mom. I don’t really remember what the hell I was trying to accomplish, but I just wanted to see her I guess. The night before my folks had a Christmas party where my dad invited a bunch of managers from work – he used to run a fancy department in downtown Baltimore before it shut down – and my folks got into a fight and I suppose he just passed out after from all the liquor he put down. I guess they were having some problems at the time, like all couples have eventually, but she offered to give me a sip of what was champagne. I just thought it was so gross, but now if you give me a nice cold brew I’ll slam that shit down like the next guy. That was an eventual progression. Just because I tried something doesn’t mean I identify with it, or that it consumes my life. It also doesn’t mean that I can’t restrain myself – I’m not a fucking alcoholic because I have self-control. Too many people don’t have enough self-control or will power these days.

So why make a judgment call about me if I myself am not sure who I am or, to relate back to the story, what I like. Can’t I like both? Is there something inherently wrong, or immoral about that? Even the Catechism (mom sent me off to college with it) says that having homosexual feelings are not a crime, but that the act is reprehensible. Isn’t any premarital sex reprehensible though? I’ve bagged a few girls in my time, so haven’t I already had my fair share of mortal sins? Why is this mortal sin worse than the others? It’s not, and it shouldn’t be. I’ve taken myself out of communion with God while having sex in a relationship as well as in a number of one night stands, so what makes this one act worse than any other? If I lust after the image of a lingerie model on a billboard, why does society seek to judge me if I were to do the same to a man? These are the frustrating questions that I ask myself to no avail.

You can’t explain a homosexual encounter between bisexual kids to someone who is heterosexual. Likewise, you can’t explain it to a confirmed homosexual because more often than not he was destined to be gay. Most guys who are openly gay in college fall into your typical swishy stereotype. It’s actually kind of funny in a way, because in high schools across the nation there are flaming gay kids in every drama class from California to New York who haven’t publically announced their sexuality – however obvious it may be – and these are the kids who you know are gay in college. They can’t hide behind a persona, because they can’t help themselves. It’s in their nature to act in a certain way, just like birds fly or wolves hunt. But if you take a look at a freak sexual encounter amongst two curious parties, it’s very different. Actually, it’s completely different because you aren’t going for the guy like you are for the girl; with that dude it’s all about bonding. Nowadays in television, you’ll see a whole genre of "bromance" films about how guys form a tight bond where they proclaim their love for each other. But what happens when these bonds are so strong that you can do anything together? That’s when society runs out of answers, because authentic real men aren’t supposed to make any sort of advance because that would throw off the whole heterosexual male bonding process. Men can get close to a certain level, but then the majority of the time they’ll back off because they wouldn’t have any interest in men; those guys want to solely function as your closest crew in good times and bad. But maybe you’ll bond with someone over the years, grow up with them, fight "enemy" football teams on gridirons and sweat and bleed with them. What do you do when you develop that certain level of intimacy, one that’s inherently different from that of a girl?

 
Short answer: you panic. You feel guilty as fuck and want to rip your guts out for being different. You look at your folks, who aren’t perfect, but see that they’re pretty happy with what they’ve got in life. You want that. You look at your girlfriend and see how dedicated she is to you. You want to give her that back. You look at your boys and see them running up and down the crease with you. You want to "defend this house" with them. For an athletic, masculine bisexual kid life is not easy especially when you’re young. Your first taste of masculinity is like opening Pandora’s Box, letting in a tide of emotions. I know exactly how to describe it too, I think. You ever taken a flight on an airplane? I took a really bad one once when the weather was shitty outside and you could barely stand up in the wind outside the terminal. You’re in this steel thing that by all common logic shouldn’t be able to move an inch let alone get up in the air, and its bouncing around like crazy while you hold onto the armrests in your seat. You pray for the flight to just end or for the plane to land, but you realize with terror that you’re just going to have to stick it out through every air pocket and every lump. You look around you and there’s a pretty mixed reaction with your fellow passengers. That businessman in the suit is just reading his copy of the Wall Street Journal minding his own business. He’s been through this before. The lady next to you, she looks very nice, is freaking out nearly as much as you are. Things are falling apart, yet very controlled. That’s what it feels like to be bisexual: organized chaos. And as every sportsman knows, from chaos comes victory. But your victories, however sweet, will always be short. Look at the Olympics: athletes train for years in order to get 30 seconds on international television and a little piece of metal on some fucked silk string.  

I remember the first time I really fucked around with a dude. In lower school, I had compared with a guy but that’s like saying I held some chick’s hand. Later I jerked off once or twice with some buddies while watching softcore porn but we had the lights dimmed and mountains of pillows in between us because somehow that was "less gay." Those times were nothing in comparison to my first real experience. His name was Jack. He was two grades older, and therefore much cooler than me. We were at a house party and we both had shot-gunned a ton of brews. We hit on every piece of pussy in the room but no girl was feeling either of us that night. "Fucking sluts," we kept saying in a slurred unison, a thought that was ironic at the time given that most of the girls we knew hadn’t even given their long-term boyfriends a blowie yet.

Soon it was time to break the seal. Now if you’re a guy, regardless of your sexual orientation, you’ll know how satisfying a group piss can be. Drunk group pissing ranks up there with good shits, late-night 3-o-clock "chill seshes" and that feeling that you’re the man because that cute girl with light eyes laughs at your shitty jokes. During that bro piss I caught a glimpse of the head of his dick. It looked soft, like girl skin, and I stiffened a little bit. My pulse quickened. Sometime during that moment we crossed a boundary that society tells us we shouldn’t and we got hard. Hooking up with Jack was instinctive, like drinking, eating or sleeping. This isn’t an erotic story so I’m going to save you the details – sorry – but we did shit together. It was fun. That’s all you need to know and that’s a part of the problem: bisexual guys are quiet about their activities. 

There are a lot of reasons for discretion when you’re male and bi. Part of it is that people will look at you differently. Sure, there are kids who are bi and make it work, but they tend to be cut from a different cloth than a lot of other bi kids. The discreet and quiet bisexual guys are one of the most underrepresented groups in America today. We’re the silent majority, yet no two of us are exactly alike. It’s sort of like snow: each snowflake is different but it’s still fucking snow. We view our sexuality from a "straight" standpoint – there is nothing different in between us bisexuals and our friends except that we sometimes fuck around with people of the same sex. Big damn deal. I like it that way. It’s simple. I don’t want to be "different" I just want to be true to who I am. As bisexuals, we want to keep dating girls, but we also want to get around with guys. It’s the most complicated form of sexuality because there aren’t any firm rules about sex in our own minds. We aren’t completely straight nor are we gay. Instead bi kids fall somewhere in an uncomfortable middle and that is where the criticism begins.

People are afraid of what they don’t know. Like a little kid wondering through the steep staircase of a dark house at night, bisexuality is scary for people to comprehend because there is no firm definition. Even worse, society makes broad assumptions based on individual groups. The problem is that we aren’t a sub-set; we’re an individual brand. Being bisexual is not like a menstruation cycle, as some people would suggest, where I’m a "normal" kid for 29 days and then on the 30^th I turn into a "faggot." This is not a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation. Nor is it because I have a hyperactive sex drive and my promiscuity just overflows from girls into dudes. The problem with bisexual kids is that they value the person and they derive their sexual attraction from their individual connection with a person. Instead of lumping our emotional and sexual attractions together, they are entirely separate. Our penis may lead one way and our heart may lead the other. Society hates this. They want to tell us that we’re wrong because they don’t understand how we work. This is the worst thing possible for young male bisexuals, because they can’t fight back against an ingrained system. No wonder identifying as bisexual is a terrifying prospect for most young men.

The straight community operates in large generalizations. The general public expects young men to chase after young women with vigor while acknowledging the mere existence of the homosexual community. Straight people are unable to fully understand the homosexual community for a variety of reasons that range from cultural differences to sexual preference but they realize that they exist by a simple generalization: gay people like men. There is no black and white. Like the "one-drop" race rule of the Old South, any person who commits a homosexual act is automatically linked as gay in the mind of most heterosexual people. The homosexual community is even less accepting of bisexuality than the straight community and many falsely view bisexuals as being in the closet. Bisexuals who want to come out therefore can’t escape a torrent of criticism from both sides of the sexual spectrum and therefore stay deep in the closet, where it is safe emotionally, mentally and physically.

There is no easy way for any bisexual to come out of the closet. Like any minority – and let me take a moment to make this crystal clear, we are an oppressed minority – there must be a first generation to break boundaries. We undoubtedly owe a large debt to our homosexual cousins who first shattered the sexuality barrier in 1969 during the Stonewall Riots. Unlike homosexuals, however, I feel that the bisexual community has made relatively little progress. Rather than being seen as equals, we are instead categorized in various ways: cowards, frauds, homophobes and perverts are all words used to describe bisexuals. In 2005, the New York Times published an article claiming that bisexuals were all simply homosexuals in denial. There has still been no rebuttal. No wonder so many of us are still so reticent to discuss our sexuality let alone publicly disclose it. Yet one day I hope to come out of the closet. And sometime afterwards - perhaps years or perhaps decades - I hope to hear someone say:

A: "That's X. He's bisexual."

B: "Who the fuck cares."

My name is X. And I am a bisexual alpha male.