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Straight, Bisexual & Queer Identities with Dr. Jane Ward
3.4k Plays6 years ago
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Music by Ross Mintzer
Graphic Design by Kaitlin Weinman
Edited by Moxie Peng
Produced by Moxie Peng, Matt Loomis, Alex Boyd, and Rob Cohen
A transcript of this episode is available at www.TwoBiGuys.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Evolution of Podcast Recording
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Rob, and thanks for discovering Season 1 of Two Bye Guys. We hope you enjoy it. So in Season 1, we recorded everything in person. It was pre-pandemic, and we used professional sound booths. And as you'll hear, the audio quality is pretty great. But it was also very complicated and expensive. And when the pandemic hit, those booths became impossible.
00:00:23
Speaker
So in season two, we tried recording interviews locally while chatting on Zoom, which kind of worked. But the audio quality was spotty. Sometimes people made manual mistakes with the recording. It was a huge hassle for me to receive the files, convert the formats, compile the audio, edit by hand. I knew I needed a better solution if I was going to continue the podcast.
00:00:46
Speaker
And Zencaster was that solution. The thing that was most important to me, knowing how the process works, is that the audio gets recorded locally, not over the internet like Zoom does. When you get up to seasons three and four, you'll hear how good the audio quality is. It rivals what you're about to hear from season one, which was recorded in professional sound booths. And it's so much easier and cheaper. Everyone can record from home with whatever equipment they have, even just a laptop's built-in mic.
00:01:15
Speaker
And then there's the editing and post-production. I used to have to go through every track manually, reducing background noise, mixing volumes and levels, making sure my guest and I were synced. Now Zencaster post-production takes care of all of that and delivers ready to upload files. So if you're thinking about starting your own podcast, I highly recommend Zencaster. It's easy, it's affordable, and it's very reliable, and the sound quality is great.
00:01:40
Speaker
And now if you go to zencaster.com slash pricing and enter promo code 2BUYGUYS, you'll get 30% off your first three months. That's z-e-n-c-a-s-t-r dot com slash pricing promo code 2BUYGUYS for 30% off your first three months. It's time to share your story with Zencaster.
00:02:07
Speaker
Welcome to
Interview with Jane Ward - Part Two
00:02:08
Speaker
Two Bye Guys. I'm Alex. And I'm Rob. And we are super excited to bring part two of Jane Ward's interview to you today. And, you know, in part one, Jane talked a lot about kind of where straight men are able to find sex with other men. You know, military, prisons, you know, she talked about the elephant walk in fraternities and all of that.
00:02:28
Speaker
And we're gonna kind of bring all of that discussion and we're gonna focus on maybe some other things like Grindr and Craigslist and places in our lives where we've seen this in
Exploration of Sexuality and Anonymous Encounters
00:02:37
Speaker
person.
00:02:37
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I mentioned with Jane when I was in LA that I used to go on Craigslist and read through a lot of the ads that were designed to target straight guys. But I never actually met with anyone in Craigslist. But I have met with a lot of people off Grindr and other apps. That's sort of the new way, and that's taking over. So why don't we talk a little about that and our experiences with some straight identified guys, or for me as a straight identified guy. So Rob, what was it like for you to be a straight man looking for sex with other men?
00:03:08
Speaker
It was difficult because I didn't really know where or how to explore that stuff. And I was very, very homophobic at the time. I had a lot of internalized homophobia, so I wasn't ready to go out somewhere, go to a bar or anything like that, or even to really meet a guy in a public place. What I ended up doing was going on apps, because I felt I could be very anonymous and I could do it.
00:03:35
Speaker
From the comfort of my home And I think that's why grinder is so popular for straight identified guys who want to explore this I actually think a lot of people who aren't on grinder don't realize just how popular it is But since I've been on like
00:03:51
Speaker
Almost every time I open that app, I see guys identifying there as straight, straight but curious, mostly straight. I see that a lot. You see a lot of discreet, like guys who are discreet, whether they're gay, straight or whatever. Yeah. So as one of those people who doesn't use Grindr very much myself, you know, from your perspective, like, do you feel like that discreet nature of Grindr is why it's so popular there?
00:04:18
Speaker
Well, I think that's why it's popular for straight guys. I mean, to be fair, not everyone on Grindr is discreet and not everyone is just looking for sex. There are people on these apps that want a relationship, but there are definitely a ton of straight guys seeking very specific types of sexual encounters. And I think that on Grindr, there's this culture that you've
00:04:39
Speaker
very explicitly can talk about what you want to do and what you don't want to do, like specific sex acts that you want to try, things you're not comfortable with. You know, it's like not an experience that I had talking to women on Tinder or Bumble or, you know, those other apps. Whereas on Grindr,
00:04:56
Speaker
You know, if you want a date, you can do a date. But if you're a straight guy, you don't want a date. And so the natural process there is just to kind of be very explicit and very upfront. So people would just ask me, like, you know, what do you want to do? Or they would just offer things to me. Thing that was very common at first was a lot of people just offered blowjobs, a no-recip blowjob, which means no reciprocation necessary. And for whatever reason,
00:05:22
Speaker
that was appealing to them too. Now I see that kind of stuff as a bit unequal and kind of problematic and I don't, you know, love to do things that way anymore, but at the time this was what was being offered to me very earnestly and it was what I wanted to explore and I really wasn't ready yet.
00:05:41
Speaker
To touch another guy or suck a dick or even kiss a guy like even at this time That was almost too intimate for me. No, even when getting my dick sucked by a guy Felt okay. Yeah, it's a weird how that kind of homophobia and into works. Yeah Kissing is definitely more gay than a blowjob. I get I mean that was in my head. Yeah it's interesting though because that just kind of revives the memory of my first experience with a guy actually and
00:06:09
Speaker
that was the opposite, where a straight guy had reached out to me and he wanted to give me a blowjob. Interesting. Like I wasn't knowledgeable enough to see that that was weird, but in retrospect it's kind of wild to me, but that obviously exists out there too. It's another example of us having such similar but almost opposite angle experiences. Yeah. Okay, so what was that like? Tell us more.
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, like I'm not going to go into a huge detail here. Why not? But, uh, but it was all the details, but well, but he like reached out very similarly. Actually, it wasn't through Grindr. It was through some other, you know, now outdated dating website or something.
00:06:49
Speaker
And he just was very explicit that he wanted to give a blowjob, did not want to receive, just wanted to like know what that was like. You know, he was like 23 or so, so like still a younger guy, but around the time that I tend to see a lot of straight men kind of exploring things. And that was pretty much all that happened too. Like I did give a blowjob to him in return and he was not into it, which was,
00:07:13
Speaker
strange. But also I think it was partially because he wasn't into me. Like he was into the idea of this thing happening and him defying the expectation and doing this thing that maybe he had never really thought about seriously or clearly had never done. Interesting. That was not the only time that we met up. I think we met up maybe like six or seven times over the course of like a year and a half maybe. I didn't ask outright but it seemed to me that he very much so identified as straight even like a year and a half later.
00:07:43
Speaker
And he still very much so kind of only wanted to give and never wanted to receive. You know, it was also a very clear step-by-step kind of basis, which, you know, you've talked a little bit about here that, like, there's one thing that you're comfortable with that you have to kind of get through to achieve, like, the next checkpoint, you know?
00:08:01
Speaker
Yes for me it was this very step-by-step thing and so like yes my first experience was this no-recip blowjob and I was like super super nervous about it and I kept sort of talking to people and putting it off but then finally like this one guy made me feel comfortable enough to actually do it and I think what made me feel comfortable enough was like
00:08:23
Speaker
I was being very open and honest with this person. I was telling him I was straight but curious and, you know, maybe exploring bisexuality and definitely interested in what we were going to do. And I wasn't at the time really open with anyone else in my life about this stuff. Like in a weird way, this anonymous sex app was the only place I could actually express myself in that way.
00:08:46
Speaker
So it was actually a very intimate experience. And then I remember after that, having this aha moment of like, oh, you know, I built it up in my head. And then I got there and did it. And it was good and fun and nice. But I was like, oh, that was a blowjob. Like, I've had that before. I know what that's like. And oh, this didn't change everything. Like, yes, it was exciting because there was this taboo aspect of it. And I was
00:09:13
Speaker
overcoming this repression, but felt so similar in the end. And it kind of helped me get to the next step and realize, okay, that step wasn't as big a deal as I thought it was, so maybe now I will take that next
Queer Identity and Safe Spaces
00:09:28
Speaker
step.
00:09:28
Speaker
And then I also started to find on Grindr, I would get connected to other curious guys or bi-identified guys who would want to do stuff like jerking off together or mutual masturbation and stuff. And so over time, I just kind of experienced all these new things on Grindr and was able to talk about it with these people very honestly and explicitly. It's very upfront, actually. Yeah. So I'm curious, how did it expand like beyond Grindr?
00:09:55
Speaker
I think it in a way was limited to these apps until I started coming out. But then pretty much as soon as I came out, you know, I came out to a very close friend who was like, Oh my God, this is so cool. We need to go out to some bars together. And so we went out and like, and then I had that same experience of going to gay bars and being really nervous and getting there and going,
00:10:17
Speaker
Oh, this is like a bar with fun people at it. And I can flirt with guys too. It was like, you know, oh, why did I build this up in my head so much? This is just a fun place to be. And it's it's like other places I've been out except for this big difference where I can be open and free to explore this stuff. And so, you know, it happened from there. And then I started meeting people out. And then I started
00:10:41
Speaker
Meeting friends of friends who might connect me because I was out and they knew I might be interested and yeah Just kind of happened step by step. Yeah, it's interesting because I asked that and it's funny how you
00:10:53
Speaker
kind of experienced exactly what I was gonna talk a little bit about seeing on my end, that having worked at a gay bar for a year and a half or so, you know, I saw a lot of straight men or straight identifying men coming in and like exploring things in various ways, you know, some were literally just looking for that dark room, that place where they can just like
00:11:13
Speaker
fuck someone in the corner, but didn't want to identify with it beyond that. But the most common experience, and as the bartender I got to be a first-hand witness of it all, would be a middle-aged straight guy that was married maybe, or a younger straight guy who has a girlfriend a lot of the time. They would come in and they would kind of explore on a quiet night. They would come on a Monday night, five people at the bar,
00:11:39
Speaker
and they would just want to find some chemistry with folks, would just try to talk to everybody in the bar. And I always saw that as a next step sort of situation. Those folks probably did do something ungrinder or in a more discreet way first. A lot of these folks were also traveling, which makes a lot of sense. Traveling to a place a thousand miles away from their home, less consequences.
00:12:03
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, actually, that sort of reminds me of like, I did explore this stuff a little bit more when I was away from New York at first. Like if I was out of town, it felt like, okay, nobody knows me here. So it's safer to explore this stuff either in person or even on an app. No, I think that's a common experience. Yeah.
00:12:23
Speaker
Another common experience I think that some of the guys that I came across had was, I might sound a little like a douchebag saying this, but it was my job as a bartender was to express interest in everybody and kind of lead people on, right?
00:12:39
Speaker
and these straight identifying men almost every time would be so excited to get that attention. Like in a way that you didn't get from other people because it was so unfamiliar and they were also, they were looking for it to be easy probably, right?
00:12:54
Speaker
You know, it just reminds me of some of my experiences. It was a really new and nice experience to feel wanted and desired by these guys on these apps. You know, at first I didn't put up a photo, but then I did put up a photo and I cut my face off so that nobody would see my face in case there was somebody I knew on there, which is very common on Grindr. There's so many headless torsos, but I did that
00:13:20
Speaker
and got all these responses of like people complimenting my photo and that was a really nice feeling and I liked that and it turned me on and for whatever reason that isn't a common experience I've had on apps with women.
00:13:37
Speaker
There is sort of a cultural tendency to talk about other things and then just sort of set up a date and it's less accepted to just be upfront about finding someone sexy. At least I don't get that much on the straight apps.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah. But at this time in my life, that directness was very appealing to me. I've been in some complicated relationships, and I really wanted at that time some no strings attached sex. And that not only seemed possible with men on these apps, it was readily available. Well, and you identified as straight through a lot of this process, right? Mm hmm. And I think that's a really common experience because we've talked about this. It's the idea of a straight man being able to like hold on to that identity.
00:14:22
Speaker
to kind of do whatever and not even think about their label. Well and you know I eventually did drop that label and don't identify as straight anymore and identify as queer or bi but the only reason I was willing to do this stuff in the first place and explore it a little was because I felt I could keep that straight label. Like if I had to give that up at the beginning I think I had too much internalized homophobia to do that and I
00:14:48
Speaker
would have kept repressing it. And so that was the only way that I felt I could navigate it at the time due to my own homophobia. And I think we've seen it firsthand. So many guys are doing this. And for some people like me, it eventually affects their identity and they ultimately adopt a queer label. But others want to remain straight and they may want to claim that straight label for the rest of their life, but they also want this freedom of some amount of sexual
00:15:18
Speaker
fluidity and that's a lot of what you know we talked about with Dr. Ward and what you'll hear in the second half of this interview. And I think the second half is really interesting as she starts talking about like a game that she plays with some of her classes and kind of moves beyond the straight men having sex with men conversation into some other queer topics that are really interesting to me. Enjoy part two.
00:15:47
Speaker
Can you talk a little bit about the gay or straight game that you play with your gender studies classes? Oh, yeah. You know, it's funny because I used to do that a lot and I do it less so now. And it's really good news. Why? Which is that my students are much more savvy about this now than they used to be. But. Well, tell us about that evolution. Yeah. Because I do think things are changing very quickly since even you wrote this book four years ago.
00:16:13
Speaker
Right. So I teach this very, very large course. Sometimes it's an intro to gender studies and sometimes there are three, 400 students in it. And so I'm up on a stage with a mic and I say, okay, I'm going to describe a situation and you yell out, is this a gay or straight person? And so I would say something like,
00:16:34
Speaker
to men who live together and sleep in the same bed, to women who live together and sleep in the same bed and just say that they're just friends. And what was interesting is that often they would respond differently for the examples with girls or women than they would for the examples with boys and men.
00:16:52
Speaker
being a lot quicker to identify boys and men as gay. So I'd also do like, you know, a young woman gets drunk at a party and makes out with another woman. They'd all say, you know, straight or they might say bye. A young guy gets drunk at a party and makes out with another guy. They'd all say gay. So they would start to notice the pattern in their responses that they imagined men's sexuality to be far more rigid than women's sexuality.
00:17:22
Speaker
It actually reminds me of a scene from this movie Beatracks. The thing is how in two guys make out? No, it's not hot, it's just gay. What do you mean? Two girls can make out when it's hot, but in two guys make out it's gay.
00:17:37
Speaker
Let's talk about race and whiteness a little more and like you mentioned the DL and how that's racialized and that it's higher stakes for non-white people that any of this activity will push them very quickly into being seen as
Race and Sexual Fluidity
00:17:54
Speaker
gay.
00:17:54
Speaker
How is it different for white men and non-white men, and what are the privileges that white men draw upon to maintain their heterosexuality? Right. Well, we have a long history of constructing black men in this country as dangerous, and especially as having a dangerous sexuality, and then constructing white men as harmless, regular guys, you know, the average guy, and straight white men's sexuality as normal.
00:18:24
Speaker
So you can see that in the way that sexual fluidity is differently understood when it comes to black men and white men. So the discourse around the DL in the mainstream media highlighted what was dangerous about men being on the down low.
00:18:42
Speaker
There was a lot of concern about STIs, about black men on the down low having sex with men and then passing on HIV to unsuspecting wives or girlfriends. There was a lot of focus on deceit and lying. And so all of the language was, ultimately it painted a picture of this sort of deviant underground world of men who were lying to themselves and their friends and families.
00:19:12
Speaker
And you take all that together, and that's sort of what we call a moral panic, that there was this fear that was produced. White men, on the other hand, when we find out that they're slapping each other's naked butts in the locker room, that they're engaging in these hazing activities in the military, in fraternities,
00:19:32
Speaker
Because white men are already constructed as the kind of average guys who have an utterly normal subjectivity, the tendency is then to just brush off any kind of aberration as
00:19:53
Speaker
insignificant, inconsequential. So people would say, well, yeah, those guys are like wrestling naked in the fraternity, but boys will be boys, you know? It's very similar to what happens when a young white man picks up an automatic weapon and kills a lot of people. People will say, this is a really tragic case of a mental health problem that was untreated.
00:20:20
Speaker
But certainly if it is a Muslim person, a person with any associations whatsoever with, you know, the Middle East, people will say this is a terrorist, right? So we see similarly a very strong tendency to dismiss white men's sexual fluidity as just kind of a blip on the radar. Whereas for men of color, it's like the story.
00:20:45
Speaker
I do think, I mean, unfortunately, that was stuff was in my head too subconsciously when I was first exploring this. And like, my first few experiences were with other white men. And I think I didn't realize it at the time, but that felt safer to me. And I was also still trying in my head to deny that this was meaningful and to deny that this affected my straightness. And for some reason, and the reasons you're saying make sense,
00:21:15
Speaker
that was easier to do in my head with other white men. And then only after I had done that enough to start to question my straightness was I then comfortable meeting or hooking up with people of color. And I'm embarrassed by that, like it's racist and not cool.
00:21:35
Speaker
It points to the way that cross-racial sex is often queered in and of itself. It adds another layer of difference that I think for somebody who's really wanting to feel normal about what they're doing.
00:21:53
Speaker
they're just not going to go there. There's a chapter in the book that looks at personal ads on Craigslist that are placed by straight white men looking very specifically for other straight white men. You know, this was before Grindr really, so now the whole terrain is different, but at that time
00:22:11
Speaker
you could just find hundreds of these ads in the casual encounters section of Craigslist. And what you see in those ads is, I'm just a regular white guy, straight guy looking for another really regular white straight guy. But they would also use codes for that. Like, you should be a jock or a surfer.
00:22:33
Speaker
You should be wearing flip-flops and a t-shirt. You know, just like let's really script this out as white as possible. Yeah, bro. We're bros. Yeah, super bro-y. So, and sometimes they would talk too in the ads about like nothing faggy here. This is not gay at all. I don't want to, you know, you cannot be gay.
00:22:55
Speaker
Because we're just going to get together like dudes do and bond by jacking off together, or we're going to give each other a hand job, or I'll suck your dick, but it's not good. Yeah, so I think that when we're feeling either internalized shame around our sexual desires or we're actually experiencing some kind of public scrutiny, or both,
00:23:17
Speaker
We're looking for every way possible to understand ourselves as normal. And so for white people, one thing that you can do is call on the resources of whiteness, of white normativity to help set the scene. Yeah, before Craigslist.
00:23:32
Speaker
casual encounters went down, I used to go on there and I used to look at these listings because I was fascinated to read these things and see how common it was. And you're right. Like I live in New York and if you searched the men for men encounters and you typed the word straight, you would get hundreds of listings a day. And I
00:23:54
Speaker
looked at it because i wondered what does that mean and why are there so many of these and like how do you know when you were researching that like can you tell if they're really straight guys or not yeah i mean you don't ever really know i would have had to meet up with them and even then you don't really know right but but it i mean what i ended up concluding when i wrote the book i think is maybe a little different than what i would conclude now at the time
00:24:23
Speaker
I pointed out that there is a language that's used in gay culture to describe a fetish for a straight acting gay man. And that's just, people would say, straight acting. That usually means, I'm not into femmes. I want you to look like a straight man, talk like a straight man. Mask for mask. Mask for mask, exactly.
00:24:46
Speaker
So I was so tuned into that, so when I'd seen an ad like that, that was very familiar to me. But these ads had a totally different flavor. They weren't using any of that language that's familiar in gay personal ads, but more than that, they were homophobic. So they would often say, like I said, no facts, absolutely not. I hate facts, shit, things like this.
00:25:11
Speaker
Now, could those have been gay men who were so into their straight fetish that they were willing to write a homophobic ad? It's possible. But to go that far, I think you would only do that if you just felt so certain that straight men never do this kind of thing. And we have so much other evidence indicating that, in fact, straight men do do this kind of thing, that I don't think there's any reason to discount their own accounting of who they are.
00:25:40
Speaker
Is it Occam's razor? Is it like the simplest explanation is often the correct one? In this case, I think that what these guys are writing, that's probably it. And I have met with people who are straight, not from Craigslist, but from Grindr, who identify on there as straight or curious and they want to try this or that.
00:26:01
Speaker
I don't know, like even after meeting those people, there's no way to know for sure. Maybe this was like a roleplay thing, but I've never met with anyone who I'm like convinced was lying.
00:26:12
Speaker
This is what I meant that I probably would have even more questions or want to put even more complexity to this issue or treat it with more nuances now is that how would you know authentic straightness if you saw it? I mean, let's say, yeah, let's say this guy, you find out he's married to a woman and he has kids.
Authentic Heterosexuality Debate
00:26:32
Speaker
Does that mean he's quote unquote really straight? Is he still really straight if he has sex with men every weekend without his wife knowing? Is he only straight if you're the first man he's ever had sex with? There are just so many questions about what your litmus test is for authentic heterosexuality.
00:26:49
Speaker
You could grill me right now on whether I'm an authentic lesbian. Maybe you'd ask me, have you ever been attracted to a man? And I would say, of course, there are hot men out there. Have I had sex with a man? Yes. Before I came out, I did. And I had a stretch of time that I had sex with men. And I don't look back on that and think, oh, I was like a sad, repressed lesbian. No, at that time, that was really working for me.
00:27:16
Speaker
Now, and for the last 25 years, being a dyke really feels like my authentic sexuality, and I have a lot of street cred for it. But you could certainly make a different case, because there's always going to be some conflicting data.
00:27:36
Speaker
Well, I think that's a good segue because I want to talk about your personal conception of like your queerness and what it means to you. And in the book, like you talk about your sexuality is not necessarily about the bodies that you're attracted to or the specific people or gender.
00:27:53
Speaker
but more of the circumstances surrounding it and the types of things you're attracted to or situations and about how you want to identify sort of politically. Can you explain that?
00:28:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I write about how when I first went to a queer bar, like not a gay bar, but like a seedy queer bar, there were trans women there, there were gay men there, there were folks who were into leather there, there were just people of all kinds of genders. And I walked in and I was like,
00:28:29
Speaker
Oh my God, this is it. This is what turns me on. Like just the profound juiciness of not really knowing what all these people were into or what kind of bodies were under their clothes or just the sexual and gender creativity was dazzling to me. And that's when I knew like this is not about how I
00:28:56
Speaker
was born with the desire for vaginas. This is about that I am deeply excited by queer spaces, queer life, the unpredictable, the unexpected, people with really smart analyses of sex, people with radical politics is hot, that all that context matters more to me than bodies.
00:29:19
Speaker
What got me into this was a specific desire for certain types of sexual contact with other men. But then once I opened up to this stuff and started going to queer spaces and meeting queer people, I quickly realized that that was how I viewed my queerness too, that what I was attracted to was
00:29:39
Speaker
something different and something that's not normative and that like breaking the rules was like who I am and who I want to be in the world and it's about so much more than wanting sex with other men.
00:29:51
Speaker
Right. And I think sometimes people think like they want to reduce that to like, oh, you just have a thing for naughtiness or the or taboo. And I'm not saying there's not an element of that. But to me, it's far more about creativity, you know, that in the same way that our taste for art or for music, you know, once you really commit to those things,
00:30:13
Speaker
You're attuned to difference. What's new? You know, what's cutting edge? Where's the innovation? And it makes a lot of sense to me. We'd especially feel that way about gender and sexuality because what we've been given is so, so narrow. So narrow.
00:30:36
Speaker
I read your book about three or four years ago and then I was rereading it the past week or two in preparation for this and I got to the last chapter which is about queerness and sort of your personal perspective and I realized I had never read it because I think three or four years ago I was not ready for that or I thought it didn't apply to me.
00:30:55
Speaker
So I just read it this week and it is exactly the same conception of queerness that I've come to. And I just want to read one of the last lines that you wrote, which is that it is precisely because queerness refuses normalization that it is meaningful to me and to other queers. The subversion is where the romance lies. I just thought that is so beautiful and it makes so much sense to me now that I
00:31:22
Speaker
want to question the rules and question authority and challenge these systems and structures. I love that we're having this conversation on a podcast about bisexuality because I did get some critical feedback from bi readers or from the bi community more broadly. I think many people didn't actually read the book, but they were worried
00:31:43
Speaker
that this book was an example of bi erasure, that basically I was saying, you know, if you are straight identified and having sex with men, we should trust your own account of yourself and allow you to be straight identified. And that felt, I think, threatening to many bisexual people. In some of those conversations, I was very interested in knowing more about why that was threatening and what became clear to me
00:32:12
Speaker
with some of the bi-identified folks I talked to is that their theory of sexuality was that if you even have the capacity to be attracted to or have sex with both men and women, then you are bi. You're fundamentally bi. And in some cases, I think they felt you're born bisexual with a bisexual constitution. You're biologically bisexual.
00:32:37
Speaker
And that was clarifying for me because I realized, okay, we're coming from two very different viewpoints because I believe that everybody has the capacity for that. So the capacity to desire both men and women is not a very helpful measure because I think that's sort of built into the human experience.
00:33:00
Speaker
Each one of these sexual identities isn't just an identity in a vacuum, it's a whole cultural experience. And that's part of why people fear it, because they, you know, maybe they like that they're attracted to, like in your case, you know, you felt an attraction to men, but you weren't ready to be queer.
00:33:23
Speaker
And that's because once you identify, then a whole landslide of cultural meanings get assigned to you, right? So for me, I think it's much more interesting, like, how do individual people understand their sexual desires? Do they think that it has some bearing on their identity?
00:33:44
Speaker
Where is their cultural home? Where do they feel the most fit? Is it within queer culture? Is it within straight culture? I know a lot of straight identified women who like to hook up with women, but they have no interest whatsoever in identifying as bi. They love heteronormativity. They love the way straightness feels in their lives and on themselves. They love being perceived as straight.
00:34:12
Speaker
And that would be a prison for me. I mean, if I had to identify as straight, it would feel so like such a profound misrecognition of who I am, but that's not true for them. So for me to be like, oh, no, no, you've had sex with women and enjoyed it, so you've got to identify as bi, at least, really feels like missing the most important point.
00:34:36
Speaker
That's something Alex, my co-host, and I have talked a lot about, and it's very complicated to get at this point without sort of coming off as biphobic or telling people how they should identify. But I identify as bi, but I also do identify as queer often, and I think that that is more unifying in terms of like
00:34:58
Speaker
connecting me to these concepts in this community because it's not just about who I'm attracted to or who I've had sex with or what kinds of relationships I've had with certain people. It's how I want to present myself to the world in a political way, right? And what we want to try to do with this podcast and I think what you're trying to do is break through that discussion of labels and talk about the actual behavior.
00:35:32
Speaker
How do you respond to some of the criticism that's, I think, mostly based on the title, which is not gay sex between straight white men. I've heard pushback when I tell people that title, but then I'm like, no, no, no, you should read it. How do you respond to criticism that that is by erasure?
00:35:50
Speaker
Mostly I say it's precisely because I take the bi community and bi identity and bi politics so seriously that I don't want to say that every guy who's ever touched a dick during fraternity hazing is bi.
00:36:10
Speaker
because I think of bisexuality as a political orientation and as a thoughtful sexual orientation that is, at least in my social circle, claimed by people who've really thought through the complexity of their sexual identity.
00:36:31
Speaker
So, to say that anybody who has ever engaged in a single homosexual sex act is bi, to me just cast so wide a net as to become meaningless. And so, for me it's really about spotlighting bisexuality, preserving bisexuality, recognizing
00:36:53
Speaker
the legitimacy of bisexuality. These are the reasons that I am not interested in calling straight, identified men who touch other men by unless they do themselves. Yeah, I think I totally agree that everyone is born with the capacity for queerness.
Queerness as a Political Identity
00:37:12
Speaker
but that doesn't mean that everyone is bi. Even though technically, the way a lot of people define bisexuality is if you have the capacity to be attracted to more than one gender. But if everyone has that, then it's not really useful to say that everyone is bi. Because you're not getting at what does that really mean. You're suddenly then having a semantic discussion about what is bisexuality. But we also really need to have this discussion about
00:37:41
Speaker
the capacity for queerness and that it's universal. Right. And I like that you're saying the capacity for queerness rather than the capacity for bisexuality. I think this is also complicated by the way that young people are redefining bisexuality. I mean, most of my students, very few of them, identify as bisexual compared with in the past. Instead, I sense that many of them who would be identifying as bi now identify as pan.
00:38:11
Speaker
And part of that is because they feel that bisexuality is a binary construct and it doesn't allow for them to demonstrate that they're attracted to non-binary and trans people. Some of them have told me that they do identify as bi, but the way that they understand bisexuality is that you're attracted to people who have a similar gender to your own and people who have a different gender from your own, which gets away from the male-female binary. So even what is bisexuality really up in the air right now?
00:38:40
Speaker
Well because I mean I am in that last group I identify as bi but to me it means that I can be attracted to people regardless of gender like it doesn't to me just mean male or female and so right it is like I also identify as pan like that feels like it fits me
00:38:57
Speaker
But then when you go into those things, you then have to explain what it means. And I think that's why I like identifying as queer in the right context because it basically just means non-normative, non-heteronormative, which is probably the most important thing that I want to convey to the world at this point where I am now.
00:39:19
Speaker
It's sort of like the sorting hat in Harry Potter. I remember being straight identified and seeing that, and it was like the sorting hat knows these things about Harry, but Harry says not Slytherin. I don't want to be Slytherin. The sorting hat goes, okay, you can be Gryffindor.
00:39:37
Speaker
Okay, there's all these things inside of everyone, but at the end of the day, you do get to choose how you want to identify on which group you want to be part of for political purposes. You need to trademark that analogy. It's so good. It's so good. Yeah, so if you're sitting there with the sorting hat on and the hat knows that you have queer desires, but you're like, please straight, please straight, please straight, then okay, fine. Right. Yeah.
00:40:05
Speaker
Mmm, difficult, but where to put you? Not Slytherin. Not Slytherin. Not Slytherin, eh? Well, if you're sure, better be Gryffindor!
00:40:22
Speaker
Let me ask one last question. Um, like, so we're, we're doing this podcast to buy guys. We want to try to normalize sexual fluidity among men because as you read, like things are very rigid for guys and for everyone, but especially how should we be talking about this kind of fluidity in order to normalize it and encourage more visibility and representation?
00:40:46
Speaker
Well, it's been very, very helpful for me to understand queerness not as a sexual orientation, but as a political orientation that is about a commitment to sexual and gender non-normativity, a delight in sexual and gender non-normativity, and a commitment to honoring it, protecting it, being in solidarity with other people who
00:41:13
Speaker
violate gender and sexual norms. And so when I talk with students about that, many of them will say,
00:41:22
Speaker
Oh my god, well I'm queer. I had no idea, but I'm queer. And I had the student once at UC Riverside. It was such a moving moment. He was a very prominent Chicano activist on campus who was very visible in the Chicano student organization and he was very masculine and he was dating a woman.
00:41:44
Speaker
He basically took the class and had that experience. He came to my office hours and said, you know, I am down with all the things you said, so that means I am queer. And I said, great, let's. And he wanted to talk about that, you know.
00:41:59
Speaker
And he had so many innocent and sweet questions like, who do I need to tell? What does this mean that I'm queer? And so we started to have an ongoing conversation about it. And the next time he came to my office hours, he said, well, Professor Ward, I called my mom and told her I'm queer. And I don't know. She's not so happy about it. And this is how seriously he took that invitation to claim queerness.
00:42:27
Speaker
and the bravery that he had, which was to come out to his mom. And he knew, you know, I didn't need to tell him like, hey, you don't have to do this because you have a girlfriend. You've got, you know, you could just be making your life a lot easier for yourself. He knew that he had chosen a harder path, but he also chose a very expansive and liberated path, which is
00:42:51
Speaker
to take on an identity that allowed for any kind of desire or attraction or political commitment around gender and sexuality that might emerge for him. And I thought it was amazing.
00:43:06
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. It's going to make me cry because it's because it is so much how I feel that like as I learned more and started realizing my capacity for queerness, I realized I had a responsibility or I felt I had a responsibility to be more public about this and that it really is a political identity for me.
00:43:28
Speaker
I think that's beautiful. I wish I had taken your class in college, but I'm glad I read the book eventually, and so thank you. I'm just an email away. Awesome. I will probably stay in touch. Thank you so much for being here. This has been awesome. I really appreciate it, and it was great to meet you and talk about this stuff. It was really fun. Thank you. Thanks, Jane.
00:43:55
Speaker
Our music is by Ross Mincer, graphic design by Caitlin Weinman. This podcast is edited by Moxie Pung and is also produced by Moxie Pung, Matt Loomis, Rob Cohen, and me, Alex Boyd. Thanks for listening to Two Bye Guys.