by Dan Savage
So how’s this for irony? The authors of this study—a study that has been quite rightly embraced, celebrated, and promoted by bisexual individuals, organizations, activists, and bloggers—were only able to document bisexual arousal patterns in bisexually identified males by doing precisely what many of those same bisexual individuals, organizations, activists, and bloggers condemn as bi-phobic: They refused to accept the professed sexual identities of nearly half of their subjects.
They controlled for liars.
I have had the disorienting experience of being accused of being bi-phobic for hesitating to accept the bisexuality of high school sophomores and British pop stars by people who were literally—literally—waving the results of this study in my face.
And this is why I drink.
1 It turns out the LUG phenomenon, or Lesbian Until Graduation, was fueled more by male fantasy than reality—that and the ability of the small handful of actual LUGs out there to distort people’s impressions. A study of 13,500 women and men, ages twenty-five to forty-four, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only 10 percent of those who held a bachelor’s degree reported same-sex experience, compared to 15 percent who had only a high school diploma. University of Utah professor Lisa Diamond speculated that the results might be a reflection of the more common and accepted status of gay relationships in society in general, making it more acceptable for women to experiment with their sexuality outside of the college campus setting. Another interesting finding of the study related to sexual identity: While 13 percent of the female respondents claimed same-sex experiences, only 1 percent identified as lesbian to the 4 percent who identified as bisexual. And women were twice as likely to report same-sex behavior as men. Professor Diamond again: “A lot of data shows that women’s sexuality is more hetero-flexible, more influenced by what they see around them.” It also could mean that there is less of a social (and sexual) cost extracted for women experimenting with their sexuality than men. Men are still going to think a woman is hot (maybe even more so) if she’s gotten it on with another woman once or twice. The same is not as true for men.
With the LUG issue settled, here’s hoping the CDC turns its attentions to cholera or antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea or something more pressing.
2 And I still don’t, despite the fact that gay marriage is legal now where I live. So much for the slippery slope theory of human/ostrich mating.
3 Sometimes right-wingers stumble onto something about me on a bisexual website, or a cruising website, or a trans website, and are shocked to learn that there are queers out there who hate me as much as they do. Or more. I’ve managed, in my time, to piss off lesbians, bis, asexuals, trans people, poly people, kinky people, and even other gay men. Especially other gay men—there are gay men out there who hate what I have to say about bathhouse sex, park sex, and anonymous sex. (Suggesting to gay men that anal sex isn’t a first-date activity, as I have, is hugely controversial in some circles.) Sometimes I’m wrong, and that’s why my fellow queers are upset, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes they’re upset because I’m right. And some hate me because I am, and I quote, “a gay, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied gay man focused on gay-marriage priorities.” The person who said that? A queer activist who goes by Fister Limp Wrist. The anger of other queers makes life difficult for right-wingers who want to paint me as the leader of all bomb-throwing sex-radical queers. Sorry to disappoint, right-wingers, but the true sex radicals see me as hopelessly conservative and dangerously “heteronormative.”
4 Because I’ve been tagged as bi-phobic for so long—and because it helps bisexuals win the oppression Olympics to claim that they’re even persecuted by fags—pretty much anything I say about bisexuals is filtered through a bi-phobic lens. A lesbian called my podcast to complain that her bisexual girlfriend actually liked dick (gasp!) and wanted to have a threesome with a man. I’m in favor of people meeting their partner’s needs (see “The GGG Spot”); I’ve made it a policy in my own life to always err on the side of having the threesome; and I have a pronounced pro-dick bias. So I urged the caller to be open to the idea of the odd threesome with her girlfriend and a man. When I added that the caller shouldn’t date bisexual women if she didn’t want to be with someone who liked dick, bisexual activists interpreted that as my saying that lesbians shouldn’t date bisexual women.
That was, in all honestly, something I recommended much earlier in my advice-slinging career (see below). But I wasn’t advising this particular lesbian to dump her girlfriend and date only lesbians. I was telling her to accommodate her partner’s needs, which is my standard advice for all people, regardless of sexual orientation, and in her case her partner needed dick now and then.
As noted above: I did once suggest that maybe—maybe—bisexuals should date each other. If gays and lesbians are so awful to bisexual people, and if straight people are awful to bisexual people, why not date each other? I’m not suggesting—not anymore—that monosexuals shouldn’t date bisexuals. We can and we should and, if I were single, I certainly would. (I’d like to dedicate that last sentence to Eric, my insanely sexy bisexual friend, and someone I could definitely see myself dating if I were single.) I get letters every day from bisexual men and women who complain about how unfairly they’re treated by both bi-phobic gays and straights. When I say, “Why not date other bisexuals?” thereby avoiding both bi-phobic gays and straights, bisexual activists spin in circles, claiming that I want to see bisexuals herded into the dating equivalent of internment camps.
5 From a recent letter from a bi man seeking advice: “I’m bisexual, married, and in my mid-30s. I made it clear to my wife very soon after we met that I was attracted to both men and women, and she was fine with that. My interest in guys has always been limited to the physical.” This guy gets credit for being out, and I gave him the best advice I could. But it has to be said: A bi guy like this has one wife but he may approach hundreds of gay men for sex—and only for sex—during the life of his one marriage. A gay man looking for a romantic partner who winds up in bed with one or two bisexual guys like this—a gay guy who has been misled, perhaps, or who fell in love despite the bisexual guy’s stated limitations—may conclude that being with bisexual guys isn’t worth the risk of another heartbreak. It’s like test-driving a car you’ll never own. It’s another thing that is.
6 There are worse examples I could have chosen—letters from bi guys cheating on their wives are common. But so are letters from straight guys cheating on their wives, gay guys cheating on their husbands, and lesbians cheating on their wives. People who aren’t screwing up, or being screwed over, don’t write to sex-advice columnists for advice. Pretty much all of my samples are hopelessly skewed.
12. On Being Different
Terry found a vacation rental for us in Hawaii.
The house was just steps from the beach—a very important detail for my husband—and it had six bedrooms. That’s not the kind of vacation home we can typically afford, but there had been a last-minute cancellation, some other family had forfeited a large deposit, and my husband, ever the bargain hunter, snagged us a deal.
Six bedrooms! We invited two other couples, both gay, to join us. They were thrilled. Our then thirteen-year-old son invited two of his friends, both straight, to join his boring gay dads and their boring gay friends at the beach for two weeks. Their parents were thrilled.
It was on that beach in the summer of 2011 that I read Merle Miller’s essay “What It Means to Be a Homosexual” exactly forty years after it first appeared in The New York Times Magazine. Miller was a famous public intellectual; he was a war correspondent during the Second World War, a novelist and a historian after. He went on to be an editor at Harper’s and Time magazine. Miller came out in “What It Means to Be a Homosexual,” which was published later that year in book form as On Being Different.
As my son and his friends roughhoused in the surf with Terry and the spryer halves of the two couples who joined us, I
was sitting on the beach reading this passage:
The fear of it simply will not go away, though. A man who was once a friend, maybe my best friend, the survivor of five marriages, the father of nine, not too long ago told me that his eldest son was coming to my house on Saturday: “Now, please try not to make a pass at him.”
He laughed. I guess he meant it as a joke; I didn’t ask.
And a man I’ve known, been acquainted with, let’s say, for twenty-five years, called from the city on a Friday afternoon before getting on the train to come up to my place for the weekend. He said, “I’ve always leveled with you, Merle, and I’m going to now. I’ve changed my mind about bringing ________ [his sixteen-year-old son]. I’m sure you understand.”
I said that, no, I didn’t understand. Perhaps he could explain it to me.
He said, “________ is only an impressionable kid, and while I’ve known you and know you wouldn’t, but suppose you had some friends in, and…”
D.J. came out to his boring gay dads as straight when he was eleven; both of the teenage boys he invited to Hawaii with us were straight. And the parents of D.J.’s friends? They were straight.
And they understood.
Which is why they didn’t hesitate to say yes. The parents of D.J.’s friends knew they could trust us and our friends—two gay men they knew, four other gay men they’d never met—alone with their sons. (They also knew that their sons would be eating decent meals, brushing their teeth twice a day, and getting to bed at a reasonable hour—Terry and I have a reputation among D.J.’s friends and their parents for being joy-killing, rule-enforcing hard-asses.)
What worried Miller’s friends—the “it” that his friends and acquaintances feared—was seduction. Gay men, given access to young boys, would “seduce” them into the gay lifestyle. My parents used to believe that. Among the questions I got when I came out to my family was whether an older gay man had ever seduced me.
I have known quite a few homosexuals, and I have listened to a great many accounts of how they got that way or think they got that way. I have never heard anybody say that he (or she) got to be a homosexual because of seduction.
I have known quite a few heterosexual parents since Terry and I adopted D.J. nearly a decade and a half ago. Despite the fact that more same-sex couples are adopting today than ever before, Parentlandia remains overwhelmingly straight. And not once in all the time since we became parents has a straight parent expressed the slightest anxiety about his or her son or daughter spending time with D.J., or with us, or with our gay and lesbian friends, despite the best efforts of anti-gay “Christian” conservatives to prop up the old bigotries and fears.
Have I mentioned that one of D.J.’s dads is a notorious sex-advice columnist, a recovering drag queen, and a political bomb thrower?
It has gotten better. Not perfect.
Better.
Billy Lucas was a fifteen-year-old kid growing up in Greensburg, Indiana. Lucas wasn’t openly gay—he may not have been gay at all—but he was perceived to be gay by his peers and relentlessly bullied. Classmates told him to kill himself; they told him he didn’t deserve to live; they told him that God hated him. School administrators, according to a lawsuit filed by Lucas’s family, witnessed the abuse and did nothing to stop it. Some may have participated in the bullying of Lucas.
On Thursday, September 9, 2010, Lucas hanged himself in his grandmother’s barn. His mother found his body.
Lucas’s death moved Terry and me to start the It Gets Better Project. The idea was simple: There were LGBT kids out there who couldn’t picture futures with enough joy in them to compensate for the pain they were in now. We wanted to reach those bullied and isolated lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. We wanted to talk to them about the future, about their futures, and offer them encouragement. We were particularly interested in reaching LGBT kids growing up in places like Greensburg, Indiana, and other parts of the country where there aren’t support groups for queer kids or Gay-Straight Alliances in the schools. We particularly wanted to reach gay, lesbian, bi, and trans kids with parents that would never allow their kids to attend an LGBT youth support group.
“You got to give ’em hope,” Harvey Milk said. By sharing our stories, and encouraging other LGBT adults to do the same, we wanted to give LGBT kids hope.
Four weeks after we posted the first video to YouTube, the president of the United States uploaded his own It Gets Better video. (It took Ronald Reagan seven years to even say the word AIDS—it has gotten better.) More than fifty thousand videos have been posted as of this writing, they have been viewed more than fifty million times, and we have heard from thousands of LGBT kids who have been helped by the project.
The It Gets Better Project has generated a lot of goodwill and raised awareness about the challenges faced by LGBT youth. But the project was motivated by anger. Kids were being brutalized and bullied—sometimes bullied to death—for being queer. And not just by their peers: The LGBT kids who most needed to hear from us were the ones whose own parents were least likely to approve. LGBT kids are four times likelier to attempt suicide; LGBT kids whose families are hostile—LGBT kids who are being bullied by their own parents—are at eight times greater risk for suicide.
When we uploaded that first video, it was with a sense of defiance. We were going to talk to these LGBT kids whether their parents wanted us to or not. We were going to talk to them whether their preachers wanted us to or not. We were going to talk to them whether their teachers wanted us to or not. These kids were being told that LGBT people were sick, sinful, and unhappy, and we were going to expose the lies and call out the liars—even if the liars were their own parents.
Anger motivated us to start the It Gets Better Project, just as anger motivated Miller to write his groundbreaking essay. Gay people were coming out and demanding their rights in the wake of the Stonewall Riots, which prompted an explosion of commentary, much of it as bigoted, misinformed, and vile as the insults that Billy Lucas had to face every day. Miller, in an explosive coming-out scene, announced to two colleagues that he was “sick and tired of hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.”
That exchange—that anger—led Miller to write “What It Means to Be a Homosexual” and to come out in the most public possible way. The social change we’ve witnessed over the last forty years was never a given. Change began when people like Merle Miller decided that they had finally had enough. Change began when LGBT people began to stand up for themselves and their friends.
I am sick and tired of hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends.
In that single sentence Miller captured the anger that has motivated LGBT activists from the Mattachine Society to the Stonewall Riots to ACT UP to the It Gets Better Project. Every LGBT rights activist I’ve ever met is someone who grew sick and tired of hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about themselves and their friends and decided to speak up and fight back.
That’s what the LGBT movement is at its core: people standing up for themselves and their friends and their lovers and people with HIV and bullied LGBT kids. The LGBT movement is still facing down the liars and pushing back against the degrading bullshit. Gay people of Miller’s generation knew that gay life, as described by the shrinks and the religious bigots, looked nothing like gay life as they lived it. Miller, in anger, came to the defense of himself and his friends and helped to change the world. Today, in anger, we come to the defense of LGBT kids, gay kids growing up in parts of the country where goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit is being screamed in their faces.
And we are sick and tired of it.
I’m often asked if I wish there had been an It Gets Better Project when I was a gay kid growing up on the north side of Chicago.
There was.
It wasn’t on YouTube, which didn’t exist when I was a kid, or on television, which didn’t acknowledge the existence of gay people when I was a kid, and the presid
ent of the United States certainly wasn’t a part of it.
Here’s what the It Gets Better Project looked like in 1976: I was with my mom and dad and brothers and sister at Water Tower Place, a shopping mall near downtown Chicago. We were going to the movies—Logan’s Run—and in front of us in line were two young gay men. They were holding hands. I was eleven years old. I was old enough to be aware, painfully so, of being different than other boys. My mother glared at the gay men in line, shook her head, and said, “They’re weird,” to my father, and put a protective hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer to her. She didn’t reach for my brothers or my sister. Just me.
While my parents could only see dangerous perverts—it was the only thing their upbringing allowed them to see—I saw a future. I’d always known that I was different and now I knew how. I was different like them; they were different like me; I was going to be like them when I grew up. And they didn’t look unhappy. They looked happy and free. They looked like they were in love.
Just by being out, just by being themselves, by taking each other’s hands in public, those guys in that line at Water Tower Place gave me hope.
“Somewheres in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person who all of a sudden realizes that she or he is gay,” Harvey Milk said in 1978 in his famous “hope” speech. “And that child has several options: staying in the closet; suicide. And then one day that child might open a paper that says ‘Homosexual elected in San Francisco’ and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight.”
I was one of those kids that Harvey Milk was talking about when he gave that speech. I was thirteen years old in 1977, when Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors after three previous runs for office, and I only knew a few things about being gay at that time: My parents thought gay people were sick, my peers thought gay people were disgusting, and that woman who sold orange juice on the television thought gay people were pedophiles. I briefly contemplated suicide as a teenager, not because I was particularly depressed or unhappy, but because I wanted to protect my parents. I was a good kid, a well-behaved mama’s boy, and I had concluded that my mother and father would rather have a dead kid than a gay one.