“You can’t be gay.”
She was on top of me.
It wasn’t a command — it was a challenge. You so obviously cannot be gay, was her implication, because this is good sex.
It was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop its unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular understanding of orientation was that it was something you were born with, something you couldn’t change. If you happened to engage in activity that ran counter to your sexual identity, then you had two options: you were lying to yourself and everyone else, or you were just experimenting.
The sexual categories were rigid. Fixed. They weren’t subject to human imagination or experimentation – to the frustration of many sociologists, and kids, like myself, who found themselves inexplicably in bed with a player from the other team.
My sexual journey through college was anything but run-of-the-mill. I came out at a conservative Christian college in the US and was in a gay relationship for around two years with a basketball player who ended up marrying a woman. During that time, we both pal’d around with girls on the side. I even went so far as to fall in love with one. To this day, she and I joke about how she was the only girl I was ever in love with, and how I would’ve been quite happy marrying her.
As a writer, this kind of complicated story is incredibly interesting to me – mostly because it shows that my own personal history resists the kind of easy classifications that have come to dominate discussions of sexuality. Well, you must have been gay the whole time, some might think, and because of some religious shame, you decided to lie to yourself and experiment with a girl. But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. After all, most kids experiment with heterosexuality in college, don’t they?
If so, that ‘blip in the road’ has always been a thorn in my flesh. How do I explain that I was honestly in love with a woman? Some people might argue that I am innately bisexual, with the capacity to love both women and men. But that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of my sexual history, either.
I’m only speaking for myself here. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this way.
Many people may find their desires changing direction - and it can't just be explained as experimentation (Credit: Ignacio Lehmann)
