But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this way.Īs Jane Ward notes in Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, what’s interesting about many of these claims is how transparent their speakers are with their political motivations. But that doesn’t feel like an accurate description of my sexual history, either. 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. If so, that ‘blip in the road’ has always been a thorn in my flesh.
After all, most kids experiment with heterosexuality in college, don’t they? But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. 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. 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.Īs 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. I even went so far as to fall in love with one. During that time, we both pal’d around with girls on the side. 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. My sexual journey through college was anything but run-of-the-mill. 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. 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.
#Turned gay sex story full
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. You so obviously cannot be gay, was her implication, because this is good sex. It wasn’t a command - it was a challenge.