Originally Posted by
hisdogspot:
“I'm more confused than ever now
There seems to be an overwhelming consensus here that Biggins was wrong when he said, more or less, that men who call themselves bi-sexual are actually gay men 'in denial'
So, assuming he is wrong, does that mean that a man is only gay if he exclusively has sex with other men ? .... and if a man has sex with other men, but also has sex with women, then he is not gay ?
”
Its not as complicated as you make it out to be.
In essence it is not about who you have sex with. Its about who you WANT to have sex with.
A gay man could have heterosexual sex but not truly want to. He could even have sexual fulfillment with a woman, but judge it to be a transitory thing that doesn't matter in any real way, because he believes the fulfillment would be even greater with a man.
A bisexual person--a true one--wouldn't distinguish. They'd be the case of someone who either truly had no preference, or who at the very least judges themselves to be inherently unbiased in either direction.
The tricky line is that there are indeed people who declare themselves bisexual who do also state it in such a way that they prefer one gender but accept sex with either. If Biggins hadn't been making a sweeping statement that talked about "bisexuals" as all one thing, and qualified what he said properly, he might have a point about THIS specific group. People who basically experiment with same-sex intercourse but are dabblers. That said, there's really nothing WRONG with that, and at the very least Biggins statement was judgey about this in a way that's kind of bull******. Its no skin off Biggins pale white arse if people dabble. It doesn't injure him.
They used to convey this on a spectrum rather than as distinct choices. One one end the people who are hardcore attracted to the same gender. On the other end the people who are hardcore attracted to the opposite gender. And a whole variety of states in the middle between them. But even that idea is somewhat outdated, because it doesn't present bisexuality as a possible endpoint instead of as a mid-point. Probably its better to represent this as a triangle, or possibly a kind of Venn Diagram, where you can be one thing or another, or both, without it being displayed as some kind of compromise.