Letters to the Editor
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Married and bi
No need for nasty attacks. I know what I have read and learned over the years. My approach to treatment is to provide a safe place for my patients to discover who they are. None, of the hundreds I have seen, has discovered himself to be a male bisexual.
Your earlier letter was revealing. Your second one sounds very much like the married gay men I have treated who love their wives and are afraid to admit who they are.
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APA: Male Bisexuality is Real!
According to the American Psychological Association, the work of psychologist Ronald Fox (author of "Current Research on Bisexuality" and "Affirmative Psychotherapy with Bisexual Women and Bisexual Men") "has helped to generate a paradigm shift in our thinking about human sexuality. Specifically, his pioneering theory building about bisexuality helped to shift the field from relying on a dichotomous, unidimensional model to a continuous, multidimensional one. In fact, he is considered as having the most impact on helping to ensure bisexuality becomes a legitimized sexual orientation (as opposed to a transitory state unworthy of attention)."
Apparently St Cheryl missed the memo.
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I know, I'm there
I'm seventy-five and the juices till flow. I went to many psychiatrists to get rid of my gay impulses, all to no avail.
I'm the father of three, have been married twice, to my current wife for over thirty years. Once we were in a place where a young nude couple walked by and I told her I was more attracted to him than to her. Her response: I think that's to be celebrated. It took me a year to ask what she meant. "It just speaks of the mysteries and vagaries of human sexuality." I like woman and i like being married. I could never live with or marry another man. I wish my wires weren't rossed the way they are, but I wouldn't change. I like who I am tremendously and fear that if that part of me could be rubbed out I'd be someone else.
My childern are adults and I've told them. I want them to know who I am.
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I may have overestimated your commitment
Reading other letter writers, I realize I may have over-estimated your commitment to being faithful.
It comes down to this: Do you think you are so gay (or "queer," as you put it) that you HAVE to have sex with other men, or be in sexually intimate relationships with other men, in order to be happy?
You have to decide this. Because, unless your wife decides to be incredibly accepting and defines a way that you can go ahead and do that and still be married to her, then your marriage will have to end.
I think it's theoretically possible to "have your cake and eat it too." I know of some men who have that arrangement, but I've never met them or their wives, so I don't know how healthy it really is for them.
I strongly suggest going to therapy, because the issues here may be far more complex than simply whether or not you're "really" gay. I wish I could advise you on whom to see, because you need someone who helps you to explore this issue on a very deep level. You have to ask yourself -- if I truly love my wife, if she is my soul mate and I enjoy making love to her, why would I want to throw that away just so I can have sex with men? What's so important about the sex act anyway? Or is there more to it than that?
Whatever you do, don't sneak around and then justify it. (I applaud you for your clear desire not to do that.) And please, if you absolutely decide that you really must leave your marriage to be sexually active with men, then at the very least be as understanding of the pain you're causing your wife and kids as you possibly can be.
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I'm Confused, Too
I'm confused -- is the letter writer bi or queer? Or does "queer" encompass bi? If LW is attracted to his wife and wants to stay committed to her, what is the problem, really? I think the problem may be that the letter writer is not bi, but fully gay. Hey, straight people also face temptations within a marriage. But LW seems tempted by men only. How about other women? LW is on-line trolling for men, or at least has done that on one occasion. I think if LW is truly bi, there is not so much of a problem, as he wants to stay with his wife. I think if the LW is a homosexual, not bisexual, this self-hatred for his sexuality is a bigger deal, and eventually he will leave his wife or at least be unable to repress his sexuality forever, without succumbing to his depression. He will end up like that senator having stranger sex in bathroom stalls and still feeling he is not gay. That is sad. I feel for the LW for being unable to accommodate his sexuality within the parameters of the religion he adheres to, but I think his real depression may come for knowing he is queer, really queer, not bi, and is trapped in a life that is for him a "straight" jacket. I wish the LW best of luck sorting through all this with his loving wife.
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The choices we make.
I am sorry,I don't mean to sound harsh. But how much of this problem is your OWN making? You have always had these feelings towards men and yet you happily get married, father children and now lo-and-behold, come to find out you are NOT really happy? I can't feel sorry for you, I just can't. I feel sorry for your wife who deserved better then this, who should have been told what was really in your heart regarding this issue years ago and before you got married. I don't see anyway out of this mess that YOU have created without much blood, sweat, and tears!
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StCheryl...
I hope that your "safe place for [your] patients to discover who they are" doesn't include the kind of response you've given to the LW. Seriously. Your first response to him was judgmental and unhelpful - I certainly hope you don't finish the first session with your bi-curious patients using the same zinger as in your response to the LW - "Bisexuality is a pit stop on the road to Gayville." It's really not helpful.
Perhaps the reason you have no bi patients is that you don't really let them be bi, you force them to choose, and so they do that or they find a better shrink. Kind of like your attitude towards Married and Bi - you've put him in your married-but-gay box and thus written off what he actually *says* his sexuality is, even though to me it sounds like he has a deep and well-explored understanding of his sexuality.
And don't forget there is a huge sample selection bias here - bi dudes happy and secure in their sexuality aren't particularly likely to seek out psychiatric help to fix their sexuality "problems." Deeply tormented married gay guys? Much more probable.
People can always be sorted into boxes of arbitrary categories (hence the proliferation of "there are three types of people"... jokes), but that doesn't make those boxes full descriptions of their fundamental nature. People classed as bi might really prefer one sex over the other 60% of the time, or maybe they feel fundamentally different towards different genders, or whatever. So you put them in the gay box, denying them a part of themselves. Sexuality is complicated. It's okay, really.
More practically, to the people who say they've never met bi men and so they must not really exist - well, the lovely thing is that my job is a lot easier than yours. You have to go around proving that every single bi dude is a fake, all I have to do is prove one isn't :-). Alas, it's the internet, so this will never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction. One thing that might be the culprit, though, is that you seem to be older than me - I'm 23 - and I think perhaps in your generation the bisexual label has been so overused by closeted gay men that it's possible to come to these conclusions. But the vast majority of my peers are very out, happy, and self-accepting in whatever their orientations, and I have bi friends of both genders. By your simplistic sexual arousal test perhaps we could be classed as gay or straight only, but I assure you that our existence as self-actualized and happy and complete human beings involves a desire to screw both genders, and that's just how it is. Sorry.