Several books have been published in the past couple of years about straight-identified men, mostly young, who have occasional sex with other men, but don't consider themselves gay or bisexual. This morning I looked at the Amazon page for one of them, Mostly Straight: Sexual Fluidity Among Men, by Ritch C. Savin-Williams, published by Harvard University Press in 2017.
Here's the blurb for Mostly Straight:
Most of us assume that sexuality is fixed: either you’re straight, gay, or bisexual. Yet an increasing number of young men today say that those categories are too rigid. They are, they insist, “mostly straight.” They’re straight, but they feel a slight but enduring romantic or sexual desire for men. To the uninitiated, this may not make sense. How can a man be “mostly” straight? Ritch Savin-Williams introduces us to this new world by bringing us the stories of young men who consider themselves to be mostly straight or sexually fluid. By hearing about their lives, we discover a radically new way of understanding sexual and romantic development that upends what we thought we knew about men.This is wrong on just about every point. Do "most of us assume that sexuality is fixed"? Maybe, but it also looks to me like most of us assume that "everybody's a little bit gay," that "sexuality is a continuum," that "Kinsey proved most people are bisexual with just a few exclusively gay or straight at either extreme." "Sexual fluidity" is a very common buzzword. At the same time, I concede, many or most people believe that sexual orientation is genetically determined and immutable, and many people refuse to admit even the reality of bisexuality, denouncing bisexuals as closet cases who need to get off the fence and choose a side. (This last generally comes from people who throw tantrums if they think someone has said that being gay is a choice.) The human capacity for doublethink is impressive.
Today there are more mostly straight young men than there are gay and bisexual young men combined. Based on cutting-edge research, Savin-Williams explores the personal stories of forty young men to help us understand the biological and psychological factors that led them to become mostly straight and the cultural forces that are loosening the sexual bind that many boys and young men experience. These young men tell us how their lives have been influenced by their “drop of gayness,” from their earliest sexual memories and crushes to their sexual behavior as teenagers and their relationships as young adults. Mostly Straight shows us how these young men are forging a new personal identity that confounds both traditional ideas and conventional scientific opinion.
Further, the idea of sexual orientation as a spectrum is not new; it's over seventy years old, maybe older, and it's associated with Alfred Kinsey's work on human sexuality. Certainly it's the conceptual environment in which Savin-Williams and almost everyone studying human sexuality these days grew up. "How can a man be 'mostly straight'?" the blurb asks rhetorically. That's easy to answer: a mostly-straight person would map anywhere from 1 to not-quite 3 on Kinsey's continuum, a zero being exclusively heterosexual and three being equally heterosexual and homosexual. I've noticed that many professionals get the Kinsey scale wrong, which baffles me: it ain't rocket science.
Even before Kinsey came along, sex researchers were aware of the phenomenon Savin-Williams and others are writing about. When the inversion model reigned supreme, it meant that inverts had to seek partners from the "normal" population. Many of these partners were younger men, and their sexual orientations had to be "fluid" enough that they could play the insertive role with other males. It was, I believe, less often noticed that many older men did the same thing, and trade who took the receptive role were an anomaly that had to be ignored. All this was something of a stumbling block for conventional ideas of sex and gender, but with enough doublethink all things are possible. Kinsey provided an alternative conceptual model which most researchers adopted officially without really believing it. In any case Savin-Williams isn't describing a "cutting-edge" "new world" at all.
"Today there are more mostly straight young men than there are gay and bisexual young men combined." That's interesting, because it would require a vast research program on the scale of Kinsey's to support this claim, and no such work has been done. But Kinsey found more "mostly straight" men than gay or bisexual men (depending on how you define "bisexual"), and given how widespread the queer/trade model was before Kinsey, it's likely that it was always so. So, again, there's nothing new here.
The difference between a "mostly straight" man and a "bisexual" man depends on who's doing the labeling. The amount or ratio of same-sex to other-sex experience could be the same. As I said before, much depends on how you define "bisexual." Many people claim it means a precise 50/50 divide between one's same-sex and other-sex partners, which is probably pretty rare. One Amazon reviewer said that one experience with a man doesn't make a man bisexual, which is true except in a narrow technical sense. But Savin-Williams is writing about young men who have sex with other men on an ongoing basis. If they reject "bisexual" as a label, it isn't necessarily because it's inaccurate. At most, "mostly straight" is a subset of "bisexual," not a distinct phenomenon.
Savin-Williams specializes in the sexual lives of young men. Fair enough, but I can testify that sexual fluidity isn't limited to men under 30. (Thank goodness.) What might be new is that such men are more willing to talk about their homosexual experience than they used to be. When I ran the local LGB speakers bureau, we had plenty of bisexual women volunteers, but very few bisexual men. It certainly wasn't because there weren't men on campus or in town who were having sex with men and women; I suspect the stigma of homosex was still more than most bisexual men could handle.
Reality -- that "buzzing, blooming confusion" William James ascribed to babies' perception, not quite accurately -- doesn't map as neatly as scientists and others want it to. That's not news, so I'm baffled by their refusal to take it as given. "Fluidity" isn't a much better concept. I've sometimes thought that "plasticity" would be better, but probably not. The real problem isn't the word used but people's attempt to cling to it monogamously, to insist that reality conform to their definition. It might be that concepts and terms are like walls and fences: they must be checked regularly to make sure they haven't fallen down -- the more people use a word, the more its meaning will drift -- but also that the plants and livestock they contain haven't jumped over to or from the other side. Nature doesn't respect barriers, physical or conceptual.
I'd be very happy if the stigma attached to homosex were to disappear, so that people wouldn't feel compelled to take a pledge of allegiance to either homo- or heterosexuality because of whom they're dating or having sex with this week. If it happened, defensive quasi-identities like "mostly straight" or "bicurious" (gag me) would also go by the wayside. Human beings are language-using animals, though, and I expect that we'd just come up with new ways to describe ourselves badly.
