Based on brief anecdotes of a few guys who slept with and/or had relationships with other guys when they were younger and then at some point realized that they wanted to be with women, the article has pretty much no space for the concept that sexuality (to say nothing of gender!) is fluid and complex- that sometimes our desires shift throughout our lives, that simplistic categories like "gay" and "straight" just might be too reductive for many people's lived experiences.

A few days ago at Bi-Furious (my new favorite blog), Aviva wrote:

I wondered if I could be straight after all for about a week before I started dating my first girlfriend; I wondered if I was really a lesbian for about another week when I was ambivalent about the man I was seeing and the sex we were having. But those things happened right after each other, and I figured out that my basic sexuality doesn't change because I'm attracted to a particular person in a particular moment. Even being the kind of bisexual who goes through phases (which I am) doesn't mean I'm gay some days or months or years and straight others.

I totally relate. In my late teens and early twenties, I came out (first to my journal, then to my friends) as bi, then gay, then straight, then dyke, then suddenly heard myself using "bi" again in conversation with a guy I was startled to find myself very attracted to (and then there was "queer").

When Anna David (once) mentions bisexuality in "What If You Only Thought You Were Gay," it's only to clarify that the guys profiled here don't identify that way, plus (just for good measure?) a little reiteration of a classic biphobic stereotype- that bisexuals "rotate between male and female sex partners the way the rest of us alternate pairs of shoes." (Hi, Anna. I'm a queer-identified person attracted to people of multiple genders; I've been in a monogamous relationship for more than a decade, and I wear the same sneakers pretty much every day. None of which is to say there's anything wrong with frequent rotation of sex partners, of course, just that that isn't the definition of "bisexual.")

We exist, people whose desires extend to people of multiple genders. And because we live in a society that likes really neat identity categories, a lot of us do a lot of painful and conflicted identifying this way and then that and then this and then that until we figure out how to identify outside of any of those categories, how to identify as the fluid and flexible creatures we are.

Now, maybe all the guys Anna David interviewed for Details uncomplicatedly used to identify as gay, and now they identify as straight. I don't want to question or challenge how any of them self-identify. I simply want to question why Details wants to publish a piece, composed almost entirely of a few individuals' anecdotes ("there aren't statistics to show how many men go through a similar sexual shift," David writes), that reinforces the limited and limiting notion of two simple and mutually exclusive categories for sexual orientation? Just why? If you're going to speak somewhat positively about what's good about "sexual experimentation," why not offer your readers something that points to an expanded set of options (to paraphrase Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, a reigning queen of expanding options), rather than reinforcing traditional gender and sexuality norms? That wouldn't, at this point, be very radical stuff. But David's apparent lack of awareness that conversations around sexual desire have expanded way beyond "gay" and "straight," combined with a picture of gayness that is all about fashion and night clubs in the Castro, suggests Details isn't as hip to the queer scene as they might want to believe.