Bisexuality : Can You Acquire It?

Joe Dallesandro: “I consider myself bisexual. It wasn’t that I was sexually attracted to men per se, but you know, if you do something for awhile you can acquire a taste for it.”

Sounds like spinach.

I’ve known many gay men who could sleep with a woman and achieve orgasm. That ability didn’t lead to a fondness for repeating it.

There are orgasms that merely release ejaculate and mild satiation. Others that jerk your body like a rebellious pony and - to be florid - jolt your nerve endings with molten bliss. The former ends with the biological act. The latter has you smiling in recollection for hours.

Sex like baseball is 90% mental.

Dallesandro’s remark reminds me of something I’ve often wondered about as I’ve considered my own erotic evolution.

How many people have latent sexualities they’ll never realize?

If you could remove all the negative social conditioning from people who are heterosexual-identified how many would find themselves capable of bisexuality? Secondarily how satisfying would their same-sex experiences be?

Men in prison take other men as lovers. Often brutal, macho, ignorant they’d rather have another guy than be satisfied with their hand.

The need for another, even when it doesn’t produce offspring, is probably an artifact of evolutionary biology. Otherwise our prehistoric ancestors would’ve masturbated and their race would’ve expired.

Latent bisexuality would have different shades and hues.

Like the gay boys I knew who sometimes accommodated women there might be merely a release that was a product of friction. Satisfying but in a limited way. Viewed as if bisexuality were the norm the opposite sex being necessary for full sexual gratification would be a sort of paraphilia.

Heterosexuality as a fetish. Monosexuality as an aberration. Maybe long after I’m dead.

Orgasms, friendship, romance, love, passion - there’s no arguing with what we find ourselves needing and wanting. And only a few of us will ever disentangle ourselves from the effects of childhood, associates and mass media.

Myself I know I could love a woman faithfully. But there’s a frisson that a femme gay guy inspires in me that no other erotic type ever will.