I never really believed my friend — I'll call him Nelson — was anything but gay. I met him through gay friends, in a gay bar, and he had the usual downtown New York gay enthusiasms, like Six Feet Under and the modish, skinny-boy models in Arena Homme Plus. His favorite member of the Strokes was Fabrizio, and he often wondered if the band's tendency to make out with each other during interviews might . . . mean something. Yet Nelson would emphatically deny being "gay," and he would often drop wistful, ponderous lines into conversation, such as, "Why can't we all just be like Mick Jagger in the '70s?"
    Being bi always seems to have a certain, unconstrained rock-star glamour (even if, in reality, the bi-guy contingent at most gay-pride parades seems to trend more Trekkie than Bowie). Considering that we're in a very rock-star era and that macho panic has generally subsided, it seems that we ought to be in the middle of a bisexual moment.

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    But I just figured Nelson was being uncooperative with the identity border guards. I couldn't stop thinking about Michael Stipe's famous declaration in the early '90s: "I've always been sexually ambiguous in terms of my proclivities. I think labels are for food." That, of course, turned out to be a bit of a dodge. Stipe later came out as full-on gay, thus confirming one of the usual condescensions about bisexuals: that it's a transition phase, an easing-into-gaydom.
    Nonetheless, I was surprised when Nelson and I ran into a girl, a friend of his, one night while we were standing in line at a concert. The three of us chatted for a while. She looked me over coyly. After she left, Nelson took a deep breath and told me he had been leading a secret life — a life of sex with chicks.
    The assumption that my friend couldn’t really be running AC/DC wouldn't really surprise Skott Freedman. The twenty-four-year-old bisexual activist and lecturer has spent the last three years barnstorming the nation's college campuses, trying to convince students that bisexuality even exists. "Many people think bisexuals just can't make up their minds," he says. Or that they're holding out to keep their membership privileges in the parent-and-society-pleasing

It's still not easy to describe oneself as bisexual.

heterosexual world.
   "Biphobia is more subtle than you expect," says Freedman. It's always, "'Oh, is that guy gay?' 'He says that he's bi,' 'Then give him two months.' It's like Phoebe on Friends singing, 'Some men love men, some love women and some say they're bi, and some that they're kidding themselves.'"
   As people become more and more accepting of gays as inevitable members of sitcom casts, and therefore the cast in one’s own day to day life, it's still not easy to describe oneself as bisexual. "I do see a shift in open mindedness," says Skott. "A couple of years ago, people would say bisexuality didn't exist. Now people are saying that they just don't get it."


In 1953, Alfred Kinsey found that, on a scale of 0 (completely hetero) to 6 (supergay), 11.6 percent of American men considered themselves a "3," or equally attracted to men and women. In a 1977 Psychology Today study on masculinity, 29 percent of men surveyed claimed "some degree of bisexuality." Today, stats on male bisexuality are sketchy: sex studies are primarily conducted along strict gay/straight lines; depending on who's funding bi research, anywhere from 1 to 75 percent of American men are said to be having sex with other men.
    Yet every few years, the media fixates on the idea that going both ways is going mainstream. Newsweek, for example, plumbed the velvet goldmine for "Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes" in 1974, followed by a 1987 scare story titled "A Perilous Double Love Life," (which declared that "in the AIDS era, bisexuals are becoming the ultimate pariahs"), then rediscovered it in 1995, wondering "Can You Really Have It Both Ways?" That next year, Esquire announced the arrival of the "Post-Gay Man," in a piece wherein its writer, who was "mostly gay," admitted he occasionally desired women. Around the same time, new HIV treatments drastically reduced the sex-death stigma, and the Web replaced local moral standards with a national sexuality bazaar. Will & Grace, Queer as Folk and high school gay-straight alliances made being gay seem everyday, banal.

According to a study last March, bisexuals were perceived less favorably than every other group mentioned.

    Yet bisexuality remained a purely academic concern, with professors like Harvard's Margerie Garber extolling its theoretical virtues and a Tufts class on bisexuality marking its fourteenth year. (Per the syllabus, readings include Bi Any Other Name: Bisexuals Speak Out, and poetry by Kei Uwano, a "Bi-Lovable Japanese Feminist").
   Most of Nelson's gay friends were like me: they thought he was really a homo but didn't want to admit it. And the couple of straight guys I know who had strayed into gay sex had just as quickly returned to heterosexual couplehood; they really don't talk about their gay old times much. And the out gays I know who've dated women — even had lots of hot sex with women — have almost to the man sworn it off. Few guys are like Nelson, openly trying to keep their options open.
   Why? Because male bisexuality is complicated and unpopular. According to a nationwide University of California survey published last March, bisexuals were perceived less favorably than every other group mentioned: blacks, whites, Catholics, Jews and people with AIDS. The only group rated more negatively was people who inject illegal drugs.
    Of course, among liberal-arts grads and Howard Stern listeners, the concept of a bisexual woman hasn't been all that stressful for some time. In most reasonably bohemian circles, it's nearly embarrassing not to have a certain amount of Sapphic experience. Lesbianism just isn't considered much of a threat: it's often taken for granted that a woman can "come back" if she wants (a recent Northwestern University study undergirds this by showing that, in contrast to men, both straight and gay women were just as sexually aroused by watching girl-on-girl action as they were a man and a woman having sex: woman have a "bisexual arousal pattern"). In any case, girl-on-girl lust is a good way to get a free drink at a bar, fodder for jovially arousing comedy during a drunken office Christmas party.
   But nobody likes a bisexual man.
   Even in an unconcerned metropolis like New York, it's not easy being bi. Jonathan Becker, twenty-nine, moved to the city to "find a nice Jewish girl to marry" seven years ago, but also to be someplace where he could explore sex with men. "I'd have these incredibly unsuccessful relationships with girls and these really weird, close relationships with guys," he says. "There wasn't a question of an attraction to women, but it was hard to figure out what level of bisexuality is normal. And since men are so normally homophobic, it's hard to ask someone."
   After having his first relationship with a man shortly after he moved to the city, Becker found his way to a coming-out support group and was introduced to a number of young gay men who didn't like the bar scene.
   "I was the token bisexual," he says. "There was a certain amount of bi prejudice. If I liked a guy, someone would say, 'Watch out, he's bisexual!' It would almost always mean I wouldn't get a chance with that person. After a while, I'd do the quasi-in-the-closet thing, saying that my sexuality was nobody's business." But it caught up with him. "I'd go on dates with people, and somebody else would go over to them and say, 'How do you deal with his bisexuality? A lot of people can't, you know.' And that would just kill it."

He's noticed that "thirty to forty percent" of guys online are bisexual and cheating on their wives or girlfriends.

   Becker chalks this up to "the heterophobia of gay guys. It's always assumed that, if you're bi, you'll end up with a girl."
    "I came out as being gay when I was nineteen," says bi poster boy Skott, who at the time was an undergraduate at Ithaca College. "I knew that I liked guys, and I knew that meant I wasn't straight." He defined himself as gay for a year and a half, before he found the courage to come out again as bi.
   "What caused me to come out was the feeling that I was hiding something," he says. "I was watching who I was looking at, cutting out the girls. I'd literally gone from one closet to another with my gay male friends."
   That's why, when Skott gives a lecture, sometimes closeted bi's will "come up to me afterward and whisper that they're bi too. People are like ashamed or something . . . they're closeted in this pride group."
   The logic is easy enough to understand: it's difficult enough to be gay, and people want to keep the numbers up. If bi's can melt back into the general heterosexual population seemingly at will, then it makes them not quite trustworthy.
   E, a twenty-nine-year-old Los Angeleno whom I met on bicupid.com, a bisexual personals site, has been out for ten years. But as gay, not bi: he's just on the site "for titillation. I think it's cool when men are willing and comfortable with crossing the gay line. Not for relationships though, because he would eventually have to choose a sex. Dunno if I could trust him to stick to one team."
    "The guys I would date would usually try and convince me to drop girls completely," says Daniel, a nineteen-year-old bi guy from Houston. "It's like dating crazy goth people — they try and draw you into their world of any other outcasty-type person."
   Daniel dated his first guy right after his first girlfriend, between ninth and tenth grade. (“I was like, fuck it," he recalls.) Today, he's with a girl; she knows he's bi and is cool with it. Not that Houston is exactly a hotbed of bisexuality, but Daniel knows a couple of others. "People seem kinda surprised, I think, because they don't know from the start, this guy is gay," he says. "When he's someone you hung around with, when you've met his girlfriend, yet you find out he's kissed more guys than she has, it tends to throw you for a loop.
   Simple as it may seem, Daniel's teen chutzpah is probably the future of being bi: you just force people to accept it.
   Though it's far from the model of the closeted straight guy, cheating on his wife Far From Heaven-style, a bi guy in a straight relationship raises an element of instability in a woman's mind: What if I can't satisfy him? E., who eschews gay bars for internet hook-ups, says that he's noticed that "thirty to forty percent" of guys online are bisexual and cheating on their wives or girlfriends. "Quite a few tend to have girlfriends or wives already, so they're meeting on the sly," he says. "Very interesting phenomenon."
   This is exactly what terrifies most women about bisexuality. It's also what powered the idea that bi guys were the secret vectors bringing HIV to the straights. That was the point of the 1987 Newsweek piece, and it's why, in 1989, Cosmopolitan published a primer on how to tell if your guy was "really" gay ("If a man's eyes follow other men, be very cautious.")

Jonathan has resolved to limit his female dating to just bi girls, which has led him down another bisexual rabbit hole.

    Which brings us to another problem of bi guy-girl relations: shared scooping of hot guys. It's one thing to gush over Jake Gyllenhaal with your gay best friend, but it's a bigger conceptual leap for most women to accept that Jake might be skulking around in your boyfriend's head while he's sexing her up. Even as more girls are actively getting off on gay porn ("there's just more cock to watch!" enthuses my friend Alice, thirty-three, who borrowed Sauna Paridiso from a gay friend and never returned it), it's a deal breaker for most women, at least relationship-wise.
   "It's fairly irrational," says Jonathan. "It's a big problem for women that I can appreciate what a good-looking guy is. Women couldn't really grasp that I could do that." Or that, in the end, their guy will want something they can't (at least anatomically) provide. It's the flip side of the reason that gays have so little patience with bisexuals, that in the end they'll go with the "heterosexual privilege" that a woman can provide. One of the ways that homosexuality has been sold, and accepted, is the idea that gays are, in some ways, essentially different — but that they want to be in committed long-term relationships like heterosexuals do. It's safe that way. But if both the man and the woman are interested in being bi, then it cranks the number of variables way up. It leaves open the possibility of polyamory, of endless variations of partners. The assumption: bisexuality is inherently unstable.
   There's also an implied sexual skittishness, a feeling that a bi guy just can't quite be counted on. "You might leave me for someone else," is how Skott describes the fear. "Well, hello, that could happen in any relationship." And a bi guy still has parents holding out hope that he'll eventually settle down — with a girl — and give them grandkids. Daniel thinks he'll probably end up that way. Skott's keeping his options open as he travels around talking up bisexuality. Meanwhile, Jonathan has resolved to limit his female dating to just bi girls, which has led him down another bisexual rabbit hole — trying to navigate a polyamorous relationship in which you have multiple partners of different sexes. Not long ago, Jonathan was involved in a tricky "triad," which "in the bi community and the polyamorous community is a big goal," he says. He tried it with his last bi girlfriend, but it didn't work out.
   Bisexuality has long been, at least in theory, a kind of ideal: as my friend Nelson pines for a possibly imaginary "Europeanness," wherein being gay isn't an irreparable erotic rift with the rest of society, and you can do whom you want.
    Well, the boundaries are breaking down a bit, at least outside of relationships. Anecdotal evidence from certain private colleges and liberal urban high schools hint that there's a fever dream of male bisexuality out there, enough to thrill the most sublimated Bret Easton Ellis character. Younger guys are experimenting more. With our culture awash in images of nubile men, it's no surprise that homoeroticism is no longer as alarming as it used to be. Maybe it's even a bit inviting — under controlled circumstances (there's little indication that many men are actually living as bi). In the mid-1990s, Harvard professor Marjorie Garber wrote Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, a book in which she argued for the existence of "virtual bisexuality," in which everyone has the capacity to be turned on by hot images, whether they're male or female. And more and more, this is beginning to be the case.

Our culture doesn't know how to see bisexuality," says Ochs. "We identify people by what they're doing."

    As Robyn Ochs, the author of the Bisexual Resource Guide and the teacher of the Tufts course on bisexuality, says, "My original definition of bisexuality was the potential to be attracted to people regardless of gender. That has changed tremendously. My current definition is that I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge in myself the potential of to be attracted to people of more than one sex, not necessarily at the same time, or in the same way or the same degree."
   Back to Kinsey: his famous '50s-era scale only ran from 0 to 6. But the most advanced bisexual theory claims that your score depends on a number of other variables, including duration and intensity of feeling, what you want, what you do and when you do it. And it acknowledges that these criteria can change over time.
   "Our culture doesn't know how to see bisexuality," says Ochs, whose classes tend to be eighty percent female. "We identify people by what they're doing. A man walking down the street holding hands with a man is gay. If he's holding hands with a woman, he's straight."
   That's what needs to change: bisexuality needs to somehow just be taken down a peg. It simply isn't that big a deal. So why can't we, as Nelson wanted to know, be more like the Europeans? (Or at least Nelson's romantic, possibly false idea of Europeans.)
   Darren Mitchell, twenty-four, went to England to figure it out. He'd dated girls at the small, Jesuit school he attended as an undergrad, but it wasn't until he'd studied abroad in London that he decided to try dating boys. When he returned to the U.K. for grad school last year, he started hanging out in the bohemian precincts of East London, where, more or less, anything goes. Gays and straights mingle with a bit of cross-over.
   "A lot of my guy friends here hook up with girls and guys as well," he says. "Here in London, there are more bi guys. In America, girls can exhaust their curiosity" about same-sex sex, partly because it's porno-sanctioned. "Guys want to see two girls to go at it." But in Darren's case, people tell him he's old enough to have figured out which he prefers by now. Even if he doesn't think so. "It's so easy to pull girls," he says. "It makes me wonder if I'm more gay than straight. To me, its just easier. Maybe I'll settle for any girl. But I can be choosier about guys. I see a pretty girl and I don't scan her for the five-point test."
   Yet even in Europe, boyfriends get antsy when you look at girls, and you don't necessarily even tell a girl about your boyfriend. "It doesn't come up," Darren sighs. "I have a few girls say, 'Are you gay?' I'm like, why would you ask that? She says, 'You're skin's really soft and you're sensitive.' I don't deny it. That was this past Friday. I told her I use Oil of Olay a lot. She didn't find that funny."
   The fundamental fact is, though, that for all the societal scolding, the category-bashing and rock-star cachet-ing, bisexuality is basically about having relationships with other people. For all of its outdated swingerish implications, in the end, it's just dating. Relationships are, after all, about choosing an individual — at least for a while — regardless of social category or gender preference.
   In Darren's case, his longest relationship with a guy lasted eight months. Ultimately, he found it unexpectedly similar to going out with a girl. "You have the same problems and arguments and issues," he says. "I expected it to be . . . I don't know. The first time I had sex with a guy, I expected butterflies to come out. But they didn't. It's the exact same thing."  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Carl Swanson is a freelance writer who is frantic enough about his romantic life without attempting to be bisexual, too. He writes for New York magazine and The New York Times, mostly, and lives in New York City.