Sometime in college, I discovered I had a penchant for bisexual boys.
At first I didn’t know what I was doing. My freshman year, I dated two men at once, two friends, Dan and Eric. It didn’t feel like cheating, though classically speaking it was. After I told Dan that I had slept with Eric, and he was generally cool with it, it felt like something else was possible. Like we could all be together, maybe.
I had no models for this. I just knew that it felt right and everyone seemed generally okay with the situation.
That relationship ended when Dan moved abruptly back to Los Angeles, and I was left confused, heartbroken, and eighteen. Without him, my relationship with Eric faded into a casual friendship.
But I was left with an understanding that what I wanted, however ill-defined, was possible.
It being college, there was no shortage of confused men running around. Most of the ones who liked me were on their way to gay but making one last play for pussy. Boys like that dug me because I didn’t shame them for wanting dick, or doing drag, or lacking girl-part experience. I liked them right there, on that cusp of figuring everything out. The moment before clarity is always my favorite.
I finally had the boy-boy-girl threesome I itched for on my nineteenth birthday. It imploded, uninterestingly, as such things often do, as soon as the genitals came out. The threesome had been preceded by a wild party that featured a drunk stripper who rubbed his sweaty sack all over my face in front of my friends. If my sexuality were constructed by a series of tick marks in columns marked “men,” “women,” and “other,” that moment would have placed at least three points in the “women” column.
Once I moved to Los Angeles, I started buying into the myth that there were no male bisexuals. Though I clearly knew and loved many of them, every man I met in Los Angeles (with the possible exception of a few actors on my TV show—fingers crossed) was firmly on one of the two “Pussy yay” or “Pussy nay” teams. None of the men I knew were even willing to entertain the possibility of flexibility, sensuality, or open-heartedness. They firmly policed their masculinities—gay or straight—often assisted by the women who knew them. It all helped further alienate in my own mercurial attractions.
Two years into my time in Los Angeles, I was playing exclusively on the “Pussy yay” team. My transition to full-time lesbo was completed by taking a job at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center in the Cultural Arts Department. I wasn’t just a lesbian, I was a professional lesbian.
One morning, a few weeks after the easiest breakup of my life, I got word from my boss that I’d need to babysit a bunch of obnoxious New Yorkers who were renting the Center for the weekend. I grabbed my laptop and sunglasses and prepared for a shitty Sunday.
In the courtyard of the building, I introduced myself to the people who mattered, then I camped out at a patio table to work on whatever play I was writing at the moment. When I went to get coffee, I was shortstopped by a big blond man in a pink shirt.
“Hi!” he said. “You work here?”
“Yes. Do you need anything?”
“Nope.” He shrugged. “Just wanted to thank you for helping out today. My name’s Reid.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want a cocktail?”
“It’s eleven a.m.”
“Brunch time! We have a mixer sponsor. Do you want tangerine or cranberry?”
I looked around the courtyard as though my boss would peer out from behind a tree, scolding. “Tangerine,” I mumbled.
“Do you want to sit with me? My boyfriend is on panels all day.”
I retrieved my laptop and joined Reid at the deserted info table. He asked about the work we did at the Center, and I launched into the boilerplate about our homeless youth program, AIDS services, senior program, and more.
“And the art?” he asked referencing the gallery behind us.
“I curate it.”
“Wow.”
He asked about our AIDS health services, which segued into how HIV impacted the arts in the 80s and 90s. He talked about the closet and bi-invisibility, especially for men, which segued into the New York sex party scene.
He asked me about my own sexual identity.
“Lesbian,” I said. “You?”
“Bi,” he said. “And poly.”
“What?”
“Non-monogamous. My boyfriend and I are in an open relationship. I love men, but I prefer dating women. Queer women if I had to put a fine point on it.”
There was a lull while I looked at him as though a tentacle emerged from his forehead and started conducting a symphony. “You date lesbians?”
“If they’ll date me.”
“How does that even work?”
He smiled and took a sip of his mimosa, pinky aloft. “Quite well, actually.”
I wanted to scold him, to reiterate the definition of “lesbian” for him as though he were another douchebag who didn’t understand what a no-man zone meant. But it didn’t sound as though he was coercing anyone. I realized after my initial shock that it wasn’t that I thought he was a creep. It was that I didn’t believe him. How could I? I had never met a man who preferred queer women—I mean real queer women. Plenty of straight guys joked that they were lesbians trapped in a man’s body, but it was always clear that these men got their cultural cues about lesbians exclusively from porn. They usually ate pussy like “lesbians” in porn, too.
But this was a guy who insisted he dug flannel-wearing, mullet-having, pussy-eating, diesel dykes.
“Really?”
“I like women who don’t need me. Who don’t need men at all. I guess it makes me feel special to be one of the only dudes a woman wants. But mostly I like women who are comfortable in their own skin. Who don’t need to wear high heels or makeup just to feel pretty. Women who like getting their hands dirty. Utilitarian. Sporty.”
“Lesbians,” I said.
“Lesbians,” he repeated.
I sat back in my chair and took another sip of my tangerine thingy.
“But doesn’t that screw up their identity? Sleeping with dudes?”
Reid reached forward to grasp my knee, but paused, his big hand hovering over my leg.
“I realize I want to touch you to emphasize what I’m about to say, but I don’t want to touch you without your permission.”
The moment held a gravity for me I couldn’t have anticipated. I believe it was the first time in my entire life anyone, especially a man, had asked before touching me. I would have laughed if the depth of that realization hadn’t horrified me.
Reid held still. I smiled. “Go ahead.”
He squeezed my knee in a casual, friendly gesture. “Anyone I date, or sleep with, or love. Their identities are their own, influenced by far more important things than my dick. I mean, my dick is important,” he laughed. “But not enough to take away anyone’s identity or community. You are who you say you are. Other people’s opinions are irrelevant.”
I took a heavy breath as his point lingered in my head. He removed his hand.
Another hour of animated conversation passed. Reid’s boyfriend, an equally linebacker-sized black man with a big voice and animated presence, joined us briefly, then returned to the theater.
“So,” Reid said, after a small lull in the eager stream of talk. “I have a question for you. But I don’t want to freak you out.”
“Okay,” I said warily.
“Do you want to go make out?”
The word “No” was cued up in my brain, as it always was when I talked to men about pretty much anything. A lifetime of experience taught me that it was better to have that word prepared than risk needing it and not having it at the ready.
But I didn’t say “No.”
I didn’t say anything. I thought about my ex, and how our sex life had been fine, but meager. I thought back to the last time I had sex before her, and how long it had been. I thought about how many years had passed since I had kissed a man, and how I had actually liked it when I did. I looked at Reid. He grinned sweetly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
The Center had a hallway that employees affectionately referred to as “Hookup Alley.” It’s like Diagon Alley but with different kinds of wands. Hookup Alley was a fire exit with doors that didn’t lock. There were no cameras, and it was rarely used except by men after their AA meetings who wanted to engage in a little sober entertainment.
I had forgotten the keys to my office, so I took Reid there. What ensued was likely the only hetero-paired make out session ever seen in Hookup Alley. And also the hottest. The hottest and the only.
Yes, it was strange. And yes, I was still a lesbian as far as I was concerned. But it was hot and hit the spot, and I was happy that I said yes.
We reassembled ourselves and went back to the courtyard to wrap up the event. Reid invited me over to his boyfriend’s place in Mid-City for lunch the next day.
His boyfriend wasn’t thrilled to see me at his condo, but Reid was delighted. He made tuna salad and offered me a back rub.
We cuddled in a sunbeam like two puppies, and he invited me to stay on after his boyfriend left so we could have sex. Between the vibe from the cranky boyfriend and my still solid lesbian identity, I declined.
Since I had come out for the third time as a lesbian, my experience in the community had thrived. I had found lovers and friends, and I felt an ease in my own body I’d never experienced before. Even casual sex had become something more honest and sweet. I wasn’t ready to give it up because of a hot make out session with a dude. Though I had certainly liked, lusted after, and loved men in my past, I wasn’t ready to turn my back on an identity that had given me so much.
Instead of fucking the dude, I went on a bike ride.
I was training for the AIDS LifeCycle, a 565 mile bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which to me meant smoking a joint in Playa Del Rey and biking up the boardwalk to grab a burger. The burger joint was empty but for a group of three men.
I ordered a beer and a burger and cracked open Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, which I had picked up at the Henry Miller Library on my last trip down the PCH from San Francisco.
It was hard to focus on the book. One of the three men was bragging, drunkenly and loudly, about getting his “cunt of a boss” fired. The story was a string of misogynistic invective, goaded by his cronies. Every detail was colored by his hatred of working for a woman, occasionally spiced up with anti-Chicana racism. I couldn’t focus on anything but the bullshit these men spewed.
Praying for them not to notice me, I drank quickly and read and reread the lines on the page. Every bit of my righteous feminist and lesbian rage bubbled at the top of my consciousness. The part of me that wasn’t praying for invisibility was begging for the chance to skewer them.
Eventually the ringleader did notice me. On his way back from the bar with a fresh round for his meatheads, he asked me what I was reading. “Henry Miller” I muttered, giving him the sharpest eye-daggers I could muster.
He proved my hypothesis. He was such a moron he didn’t even realize what kind of conversational opening I gave him by invoking the name Henry Miller.
He said something too dumb to remember and returned to being a hero to his repugnant friends.
I watched them pal around, laughing at those who they thought were inferior to their masculinity, their whiteness, their entitlement. And I realized, book in lap and beer in belly, that I was putting Reid in the same group as them. I was telling myself I couldn’t let myself like him, because he was a man, and men were like these guys: oafish, bigoted, small-minded.
But Reid wasn’t any of those things. He was bright and compassionate and big-hearted. I had been tamping down my budding feelings for him because his Y-chromosome represented all of the things I was trying to escape in this world, all of the horrible things represented by masculinity. It was as though by divesting myself from men, I could render myself immune to, or at least apart from, the patriarchy. In doing so, I was ignoring the beauty and nuance that masculinity could hold. It was fair to neither Reid nor me to lump him into this douchebag triumvirate.
On the slightly stoned, slightly drunk bike ride home, I realized that there was more to him, to me, to all of it, than I had given myself permission to explore. And that to turn down the possibility of love, or at least connection, because it came in a package I didn’t think I was supposed to like, was myopic and ungrateful. Instead, I chose gratitude and an open mind. It paid off in ways I wasn’t anticipating. And it gave me a new appreciation for the possibilities and permutations of my own relationship with the world.
Two years later when I left my job at the Center, I walked past where Reid and I had leaned against the wall in Hookup Alley, and I saw a hand print, faint as anything, but clearly there. A perfect print of Reid’s hand, just above where my head had been, bracing himself as we started something brand new.