Questioning Sexuality

Hi All,

I started reading these forums yesterday, and it seems like people with similar questions to mine get some good advice here. I figured I'd share my thoughts on questioning my sexuality and see what people have to say. I think it will also be helpful to finally put my thoughts in writing. Thank you in advance for any advice that you share.

I'm a 33 year-old male, and I've always identified as straight. I have, however, had many fantasies in the past about being with another guy. Although I was solely interested in girls as a teenager, I was slow to develop sexually. As a teenager, I was sexually excited around girls and by watching straight pornography. I could not, however, successfully masturbate until I was 22 years-old. I had wet dreams about women, but I could not bring myself to climax consciously. When I did start to masturbate, sometimes it was to fantasies about women and other times about men.

As I progressed through my 20s, I developed sexually as many of my peers did before me. I started to really enjoy sex from the age of 24 and had a girlfriend for about 1.5 years that I really enjoyed being with sexually. For the time I was with her, I rarely, if at all, fantasized about other men.

At the age of 30, I quit work and returned to graduate school. I started to have fantasies about men again and began, for the first time, to enjoy gay porn. At the age of 33, I still have fantasies about men, but they are less frequent than fantasies about women. I never watched a lot of porn in general, but I would say it's mixed gay/straight when I do watch.

Like many other people, I have my fetishes. My favorite sexual experiences and straight fantasies have been with large-breasted women. I also fantasize a lot about being with older women. I've had periods during which I've fantasized about big women, and I've also had sex with a handful of women bigger than me. That fetish, though, seems to be flagging. When I fantasize about guys or watch gay porn, it's almost exclusively related to twinks and especially Asian twinks.

I've actualized and enjoyed my fetishes about women. My fetishes about men have yet to cross over into reality. I can identify if a guy is handsome, but only once have I ever felt sexually attracted to a guy. And in that case, I had fantasies about him later. I was not attracted to him when I met him.

In the past 18 months, I've had sex with four women. With three of those women, I reached climax after I began to fantasize about being with a young Asian guy. We weren't having great sex, so I changed my thoughts to something that excited me. I was really turned on by the fourth woman, so I didn't need to fantasize about someone else.

The Kinsey theory that people fit somewhere along a sexual continuum - rather than exist as completely straight or completely gay - makes sense to me. If I had to place myself on that continuum, I would say that I'm more straight than gay but not really far to the straight side.

I guess my issue with women is that I struggle to find someone both physically attractive and emotionally compatible. I'm tired of being with women who are physically attractive to me, but incompatible personality-wise. I've been trying to meet women who are compatible personality-wise, but I haven't been enjoying sex with them.

When I think about the fantasies I most commonly masturbate to (curvy black women, bigger women, older women, sometimes taller women, Asian twinks), the common thread seems to be the element of taboo. Society is, of course, much more accepting of all kinds of relationships than it used to be. I grew up, however, in a place where the men and women who got together were not only white but also conformed to norms regarding the physical appearance of couples. The heterogeneity of my youth was always boring, so I'm not surprised that taboos turn me on.

My sexual preferences regarding women are a great deal wider than they are regarding men. I guess my main question is: Am I not attracted to a broader range of men because I'm not as open to the idea of being gay or bisexual? I'll admit that the thought of being gay is a bit scary to me. It's very confusing to have gay fantasies mixed in with my straight ones. It would be a lot easier if my fantasies were exclusively straight or exclusively gay.

This has been a long post, so thank you for reading it and responding if you so choose. There are probably more questions that need to surface, so I appreciate any help in bringing those to light.