Reflections of a Male Kinsey 1-2

In 1948, Kinsey said the following: "Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats…The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects."

In the abstract, this does not seem to be a remarkable proposition. Once you cross the threshold and acknowledge that sexual orientation is not a choice but is somehow hardwired, then simply consider that the hardwired setting maybe be somewhere on a continuum.

But surely Kinsey was referring to an ideal world and not our living world when he said it was a continuum in every aspect, because surely our world does not reflect, in a self-acknowledged way, a spectrum of sexual orientation in men. Thus the astonishing paucity of any visible presence (for sure, they exist, but do not reveal themselves to others except in their incredibly circumspect and limited parallel universe that they might construct) of men who would acknowledge if asked, much less embrace the fact that while they are predominantly wired "straight," they must acknowledge that there is a part of them that is not, and admit that there's no "good" or "correct" score on the Kinsey scale, just an honest score.

A not so well-kept secret: there's a lot of latent and even overt homophobia in the straight world, and the latent stuff abounds even in otherwise good-meaning people. And that atmosphere can be rather pronounced in the formative years. So very early on, when you are most fragile and vulnerable and perhaps susceptible to the hostile judgment of peers, you hide some small part of what you know is part of your sexual being because you think about or perhaps even act on it, but you hide that from others. Because we don't challenge the prejudices of others, you somehow become complicit through silence. Because it is far easier to swim silently in the straight world.

I think for other men who are elsewhere in the spectrum, they are more wired and attracted to men rather than women and perhaps they simply eventually self-identify as gay. But there don't seem to be many people who are planting their flag somewhere in between. Clive Davis, and....?

Anna Paquin is a wonderful role model, being out about her bisexuality while being in a committed monogamous heterosexual relationship. She had to school Larry King in a recent interview, who was so daft, but consider: there simply must be, another corresponding mirror image relationship, where it is the man who if equally honest and transparent would be acknowledging and claiming his bisexuality, if only for the sake of authenticity. Yet we don't see that, at least not in my world moving about in a big east coast city.

I think we all collectively have more work to do, to try to break out of conventional thinking about sexuality in simply a binary way. Bisexuality is for many, both straight and gay, the (sorry, pun ahead) butt of a joke, like the line from a recent Broadway musical If/Then, which got one of the loudest audition guffaws of the night, something to the effect that bisexuals should just "pick a team."

That indeed can be the unspoken basic expectation of many people in life, and since you feel compromised by your silence and your acquiescence, you feel somehow bound not to challenge, at least not in a way that would betray your real orientation, the prejudices of others. Thus you end up judging yourself and your thoughts, desires, actions harshly, when you should simply be acknowledging them, and simply owning them as part of the human experience.

I think it was Kierkegaard who said, life is lived forward but understood backwards.

Maybe more men will acknowledge themselves to be bisexual and create some sort of space in the public forum that does not seem to exist in significant visible numbers now. Ah yes, the invisiBIlity phenomenon.... Until then, if we are concerned about whether it was the chicken or the egg, we can only try to be more aware that since there must surely be, as Kinsey said, a spectrum, we should all be trying to work a little on changing whatever unconscious things we are doing, to make it appear, from the perspective of the typical man who happens to realize, at some point, that he is perhaps predominantly, but certainly not exclusively heterosexual, to remain invisible, rather than visible about that, to the rest of the world, both gay and straight.