July 05, 2021
The gift of Gab...
Holiday weekends don't feel much different than any other weekend, at least not for me. I did get to do some excessive vegging, and that's not something I ordinarily do, so maybe that's what makes a holiday weekend different, but other than the fact that I spent my Sunday doing close to absolutely nothing, it felt like any other weekend.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon down by Federal Hall, watching street theater and realizing why I don't want to live on the isle of Manhattan right now. Downtown, the streets are so narrow, and the buildings so tall, it's like there's a permanent shade structure in place. It feels so sad and gloomy and dark, even with the small pockets of light that can come from that place. Anyway, it made me really happy to be in Brooklyn.
It was my boyfriend's (aah..should I be writing that word?!) "official" last performance with his group and he was by far the cutest patriot (okay, yes I am biased) and I was so sad because my best friend L. and I almost missed the whole thing. It started at 3PM and at 2:42P we got on the subway at Canal St. hoping to take it downtown to the area around where the towers once stood by the official start time. Only without thinking - something I am told I should do more often, but realizing now that when I don't think bad things happen - we got on a train that was express to Brooklyn. And not just like over the bridge to Brooklyn, this train didn't stop for at least four stops. The event was supposed to take place in 15 minutes and we were on the neverending subway ride. I almost cried. Seriously. I really wanted to be there for him on his last day and here I was trapped on the N train going in the wrong direction. But something or someone was on my side, and as L. was trying to convince me that we could take a cab (Time 2:54) I was pretty sure that finding a cab in this part of Brooklyn wasn't going to be all that easy or fun. So we ran up the stairs and over to the other side of the tracks, where the trains were heading back into Manhattan and where the right train was waiting with it's doors wide open, inviting us in. We made it back to Manhattan about 10 minutes later, and we were only 5 minutes late for the event (Time 3:05) and then, to my surprise and delight, the event actually started late!!! So, even after all the drama, it worked out. And I handled myself like a big girl.
But big girls still get pissy, and this morning I became irritable when I noticed this headline in the NY Times..."Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited." The article wasn't as bad as it could have been. In fact it didn't make me angry, just curious.
Bisexuality is something I've taken to learning a lot about. For personal and professional reasons I find that bisexuality is an intriguing and challenging concept for lots of people. I wrote my first paper for my Masters in Sex Education about "The Bisexual Option" and how many heterosexuals think a bisexual person is simply "curious," while people who identify as homosexual think a bisexual person is "copping out" of being gay. This article talked about bisexual men, saying that it's less likely that a man is truly bisexual.
Acording to the hands on research done at both Northwestern University and at some center in Toronto, where they placed some sort of device to measure men's levels of arousal, men were either aroused and therefore attracted to either men or women, but not both. While I think this is one of the more interesting and thorough studies to date about bisexuality and men (The same type of study was done on women, and more often bisexual women were attracted to other women as well as men) I also think that arousal can't necessarily be measured by a hard dick or a flutter in the heart. While men might be more visually turned on by one sex over the other, perhaps these bisexual men base their attraction to women on a more emotional feeling, and not a physical one. Call me crazy, but if that's the case, then watching a bit of sex on TV isn't going to necessarily float a bisexual man's boat. I don't know. Perhaps these men just don't want to be gay, and therefore continue to have sex with women to prove that they're not, and perhaps they truly enjoy women...either way it doesn't matter. As long as the sex is safe and consensual, who's business is it to decide how any one person wants to identify? Plus they got their test subjects out of a gay magazine, and truthfully, bisexual men who date more women might not be buying these mags to keep around the house. Maybe if they looked for subjects in Glamour or Elle, magazines that men in relationships with women are more likely to see, the results would be different and the pool of applicants would be more men who tended to date women. I guess none of this matters, but science is so subjective, no matter how unbiased it tries to be.
When are we going to stop caring and just let people be whatever it is they want to be?
That's my point. Really.