The fact no one likes to admit: many gay men could just have easily been straight

Feb 15, 2019 by Jill

by Matthew Parris, Spectator:

[…] In the 1960s and 1970s, as I matured and experimented, what I’d been told did not tally with what I encountered. I was never very promiscuous (or I’d be dead) but over the decades built up a modest personal casebook. Some of the men I slept with have gone straight despite a strong cultural barrier to a gay man doing this. Some friends I thought — knew — to be straight have gone gay, or ‘bisexual’. All in all, I’ve probably slept with as many straight men as self–identifying gay or bisexual ones: I doubt most were lying, and in some cases have reason to know they weren’t. For every ‘bisexual’ man who’s actually gay but reluctant to say so, there’s a straight man who’s actually bisexual. And there are plenty of ‘gay’ men who know that, in a different life, they could reasonably contentedly be straight. Indeed, hordes are: happy in real marriages with wives and children. And I’ve noticed in myself and heard reported from others how the shapes of our desires can shift with the years.

In what passes for the gay ‘community’, there’s something of a taboo about admitting, even to ourselves, that quite a few of us (not me) could, with a little coaxing and self-discipline, be ‘straight’. Straight men are equally reluctant to admit the converse. There exist strong reasons for this taboo among gays: first, ‘we can’t help it’ was absolutely central to our early pitch for equality, and we needed to believe it. Secondly, if sexuality really is modifiable for some, how long before someone suggests cognitive behavioural therapy minus (or even plus) the Hallelujahs?

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