In my experience, such labels tend to exist solely for the use by people who don’t need to know. I think a lot of the talk about ‘gay-bi-straight’ has a lot of similarities to other conversations, like music genre.
As a musician, as a teenager my friends and I used to have long conversations trying to figure out what genre a band is. Is Alice in Chains “metal”, for example? Does grunge count as a sub-genre of metal or is it separate? Because Alice in Chains certainly flirts with metal a lot, but not all grunge bands do that… And then we get into all the subgenres with words like “core” and “post” tackled on seemingly at random. As I got older I listened to more music, read interviews with artists, and wrote more of my own music. I realized my best music was written without any thought given to genre at all as a writer, and usually blurred the lines between genres. I noticed how some bands change genre completely- either gradually over decades, or from album to album, song to song, or even within songs. The conversation about genre was really more relevant to the people trying to market and sell music than the actual artists.
The human brain is designed to find patterns and associations. To take the hundreds or thousands of independent variables it is exposed to and forget connections between them and sort results into broad, and often imperfect, categories.
I view sex as similar. Is pegging gay? Are femboys gay? Are muscle mommy’s gay? Is a MMF threesome gay? I think the real question is “why do you care?”. If you’re filling out a profile on a dating site, identifying as straight, gay, or bi will probably help you to get better results, especially if you happen to fall within those categories nearly. It helps to organize porn catalogues too. But for understanding yourself and your partners, I think it is important to look beyond those broad classifications to the multitude of little variables of what someone does or does not like. If you don’t intend to have sex with someone, your sexual preferences are none of their business.
And even those variables are not necessarily boolean ones. For example, I’ve been with women who love anal, women who like having their butthole played with a bit but not penetrated, and women who don’t want any stimulation anywhere near that.
Personally, I’ve always identified as straight. A few years ago I started to explore prostate stimulation with my wife- first fingering, then pegging, then massagers and eventually a fuck machine. My wife has always been bi and we had a 3some with her bi-curious female friend a while back. We also had a few other close encounters where we almost had 3somes with other women too.
About a year and a half ago we made friends with another couple- a fully bisexual man with a lot of experience with men, and a bi-curious non-binary vagina owner with almost no experience with women. A few months ago they asked if we wanted to swing. We had some preliminary conversations about it and discussed man-on-man activity, and I said “I’m not vegan and I would never seek out vegan food on my own, but if I’m hanging out with my vegan friends and there are vegan snacks I’ll eat them and try to enjoy them”.
So yeah I’ve been messing around with a guy a bit for the past few months. Making out, oral both ways, fingering both ways, using toys. We eventually plan on doing anal both ways but there’s a lot of logistics to that (he’s also been dealing with ED, and we all had the flu for a bit).
It’s all been… Fine. I think I can safely say I am far more attracted to feminine traits than masculine ones. It’s fun to have something to do while watching our spouses together. But I have not gotten close to cumming with him and occasionally have had difficulty staying hard… Until one of our spouses comes over and starts touching me. Sometimes we will also watch TV or a movie and the 3 of them will start talking about how hot a male actor is and I just can’t relate.
So weird though it may be, in spite of the fact that I’m regularly having sex with another man I still identify as straight.
In my experience, such labels tend to exist solely for the use by people who don’t need to know. I think a lot of the talk about ‘gay-bi-straight’ has a lot of similarities to other conversations, like music genre.
As a musician, as a teenager my friends and I used to have long conversations trying to figure out what genre a band is. Is Alice in Chains “metal”, for example? Does grunge count as a sub-genre of metal or is it separate? Because Alice in Chains certainly flirts with metal a lot, but not all grunge bands do that… And then we get into all the subgenres with words like “core” and “post” tackled on seemingly at random. As I got older I listened to more music, read interviews with artists, and wrote more of my own music. I realized my best music was written without any thought given to genre at all as a writer, and usually blurred the lines between genres. I noticed how some bands change genre completely- either gradually over decades, or from album to album, song to song, or even within songs. The conversation about genre was really more relevant to the people trying to market and sell music than the actual artists.
The human brain is designed to find patterns and associations. To take the hundreds or thousands of independent variables it is exposed to and forget connections between them and sort results into broad, and often imperfect, categories.
I view sex as similar. Is pegging gay? Are femboys gay? Are muscle mommy’s gay? Is a MMF threesome gay? I think the real question is “why do you care?”. If you’re filling out a profile on a dating site, identifying as straight, gay, or bi will probably help you to get better results, especially if you happen to fall within those categories nearly. It helps to organize porn catalogues too. But for understanding yourself and your partners, I think it is important to look beyond those broad classifications to the multitude of little variables of what someone does or does not like. If you don’t intend to have sex with someone, your sexual preferences are none of their business.
And even those variables are not necessarily boolean ones. For example, I’ve been with women who love anal, women who like having their butthole played with a bit but not penetrated, and women who don’t want any stimulation anywhere near that.
Personally, I’ve always identified as straight. A few years ago I started to explore prostate stimulation with my wife- first fingering, then pegging, then massagers and eventually a fuck machine. My wife has always been bi and we had a 3some with her bi-curious female friend a while back. We also had a few other close encounters where we almost had 3somes with other women too.
About a year and a half ago we made friends with another couple- a fully bisexual man with a lot of experience with men, and a bi-curious non-binary vagina owner with almost no experience with women. A few months ago they asked if we wanted to swing. We had some preliminary conversations about it and discussed man-on-man activity, and I said “I’m not vegan and I would never seek out vegan food on my own, but if I’m hanging out with my vegan friends and there are vegan snacks I’ll eat them and try to enjoy them”.
So yeah I’ve been messing around with a guy a bit for the past few months. Making out, oral both ways, fingering both ways, using toys. We eventually plan on doing anal both ways but there’s a lot of logistics to that (he’s also been dealing with ED, and we all had the flu for a bit).
It’s all been… Fine. I think I can safely say I am far more attracted to feminine traits than masculine ones. It’s fun to have something to do while watching our spouses together. But I have not gotten close to cumming with him and occasionally have had difficulty staying hard… Until one of our spouses comes over and starts touching me. Sometimes we will also watch TV or a movie and the 3 of them will start talking about how hot a male actor is and I just can’t relate.
So weird though it may be, in spite of the fact that I’m regularly having sex with another man I still identify as straight.