While I cheerfully admit to having a bit of a thing for 'straight' men (the sort of straight men who feature in the song 'Six Beer Queer' by Brisbane's queer punk band Anal Traffic), I don't actually believe that they're straight at all. They can think of themselves as straight all they like, but if they're getting off with another bloke then in my book, they ain't completely heterosexual.
They probably don't even think of themselves as 'bi-curious', unless they inhabit some of the same gay chat rooms that I sometimes do. Having known more than a few bi-curious blokes in my time (not always in the biblical sense), while I think it's a rather feckless, artificial phrase on a par with 'straight-acting', it does definitely have its uses.
Anyway, the reason I'm posting this entry this morning is because I just read an article by UK queer writer Mark Simpson on his blog about bisexuality, bi-curiousness, and the commodification of male masculinity:
"Male bisexuality as a phenomenon is here already and is something that society is going to have to get used to, or at least stop pretending doesn’t exist – except when it wants to make money out of it in the form of advertising, fashion, pop-promos, movies and porn. A generation of young men have been programmed by our hypocritical culture to be bisexually-responsive – so long as it makes corporations rich, but they are told it’s wrong and ill and makes their pricks drop off if they take that as a cue to be anything other than passive, veal-pen consumers. If I was Herbert Marcuse I might argue that reaching for your buddy’s shorts instead of your wallet – choosing the Real Thing – over Diesel and Nike is still verboten because corporations are making so much money selling straight men ersatz homosexuality."
Although his style tends towards the florid and hyperbolic, it's a fascinating read all the same. Check it out.
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