But more than that, it’s based on attraction. Partly it’s cultural, a shared identity of being gay. Being partnered with a woman, getting married, having kids, doesn’t make a gay man straight or bisexual. We define it based on what we’ve done.īut what if we defined sexual identity based on who we’re attracted to? Gay men mostly do that. Any man who has ever had sex with men gets tagged as gay or bi. We have a cultural “one drop” rule for this behavior. That time we didn’t try to convince each other that I was attracted to him, and it was really good.ĭepending on how the question is asked, as many as 16% of men have had some kind of sex with a man at least once in their lives. It was 25 years before I had sex with a man again. That hurt too - we were really fast together. We never got over that, and broke the team up soon after. I wasn’t attracted to him, while we were having sex.
He’d figured it out by then, I didn’t have to say it. It was just… vaguely unwanted, and boring. My toes stopped curling, my heartbeat slowed. But then - he tasted wrong, like a man, slightly brassy and invasive. The perversity of it kept me aroused enough to get started, and we enjoyed the first 15 minutes or so.
We were happy, full of ourselves, feeling particularly proud of each other, and connected in what we were doing. I’d said no, and we got on with learning to make the boat go fast.īut on this day we’d practiced against a former world champion, and found out that we were as fast as they were. He was gay, not all that out about it, but he’d asked a couple times. We were both 22, we’d been sailing together for several months, vaguely thinking of putting together a serious campaign for the national championships, and trying to figure out if we were good enough to try. He was graceful, fit, blond, witty in the kind of sly way that often takes several seconds to land before it bursts into open laughter.