No, I’m Not Sleeping with Your Bisexual Boyfriend

By Josh Inocéncio

We scooted our feet along the wood-planked balcony of the Hidden Door, an old-school gay bar in Corpus Christi. Only the mumbling crowd below and the swooshing waves from the bay intruded on our silence.

“I think I fell in love this year,” I said, timidly.

“Yeah?” he responded.

“With a guy.”

The last time Dan and I had spoken seriously was during our road trip out West where we spent three summer weeks crisscrossing national parks and mountain towns. The journey was our Americana rite of passage, as well as my graduation trip—Dan still had two years left to go, but I had finished undergrad just two months prior. Over a thousand miles away from home in Houston, we buried—or so we thought then—the rumors about each other’s sexuality, particularly mine. I had told him that, despite a messy, month-long stint dating another guy at school, I wasn’t gay.

But here we were, two summers later in the lazy little town where we had both gone to college, drinking cheap beer and using the thickly fenced Hidden Door as a confessional stall.

“I think…I might be bisexual,” Dan said, avoiding my eyes.

I knew Dan from high school where we were both theatre kids. And funnily enough, despite his (our) homophobic jokes, I always believed he’d probably be the most down to experiment with another guy. We never got that far—instead shuffling through both high school and college fearing the judgment of family, friends, and each other.

But here we were, two fresh queers making amends in a place where we had been roommates, where we had suppressed so much. I told him about the guy I was heartbroken over, and he told me how he was able to face his bisexuality after his girlfriend shared her own experiences with women.

Weeks later, he moved to San Marcos to be with his mom and I moved to San Antonio to collect oral histories from the Latino side of my family. With little more than an hour between us, I drove up to San Marcos to hang out with him and to meet his girlfriend. He didn’t have a car, so after a day at the park and a coffee shop, I took Dan back to San Antonio to spend the night—completely platonic, just like the “bro nights” from our high school days.

Then came the suspicious text messages from his girlfriend, wondering if Dan and I were hooking up at my apartment. Certainly, there was a bit of nostalgia in our mutual coming out as we remembered our teenaged years. But Dan and I had cultivated a brotherly dynamic; thus, his girlfriend’s hunch, to me, was absurd.

This isn’t the only time I’ve had to defend the platonic nature of my relationship with a bisexual man.

Last year, I befriended Caleb and Rachel who are in a unique situation—they are married and both bisexual, but only came out to each other within the last year. Caleb and I met in a professional context at first, but we bonded fairly fast. We shared similar religious upbringings in the South, and there was an ease with which we could discuss sex. Within two months of our friendship, he came out to me as bisexual and pondered how to tell his wife.

But as they reached a place where they were tepidly coming out to one another, I was a suspect in a non-existent affair with Caleb. Things culminated shortly after they both attended a performance of my solo play, Purple Eyes, last summer in Austin.

“Did you like Josh’s play?” Caleb asked after the performance.

“It was okay,” Rachel responded.

“What didn’t you like about it?” he pushed.

“I’ve just seen better solo plays!”

“You know he and I aren’t having an affair, right?”

I wasn’t present for this late-night conversation in their car, but from what they’ve both told me, the tempo shifted electrically with that tiny admission—and the iciness that had pervaded Rachel’s critique of my play and our general interactions thawed. Now, we have an endearing trifecta that warmly giggles off the past.

But that particular Purple Eyes performance transpired into a climax of my relationships with bisexual men. Not only did Caleb and Rachel wrestle out their own identities with each other, but Dan, still dating his girlfriend, appeared at the play with his own little drama. Another two years had passed between us, but during one raunchier part of the play where I perform a little spoken word ode to gay sex, I heard Dan’s old riotous laugh in the audience. Afterward, we hugged as brothers would do, then jaunted to a bar down the street from the theatre.

Over drinks, however, Dan’s girlfriend resurrected those familiar texts riddled with her suspicions. Apparently, she had dropped him off to see the play after he heard about it via Facebook posts. But instead of going straightaway to a concert with her friend (as she said), she hid under the risers of the theatre seats for at least 20 minutes. And as she heard Dan laugh at some of the more comical and homoerotic jokes in the play, she flooded his phone with questions like:

“Why are you laughing so much at that part?”

“Why is that so funny to you?”

“What are you and Josh doing after?”

Opinions on her theatrical hideout aside, the notion again surfaced that Dan (for finding my jokes funny?) and I might follow my performance and our reunion with a celebratory romp. Sure, he and I possess a kind of queer affection for each other—one in which we can look at our journeys and smile in delight—but that doesn’t involve sexual pursuit.

It’s easy for me to say that gay and bisexual men share this stereotype that we’ll jump on anything that moves—and sometimes we do! But in both scenarios, these guys’ partners assumed I was the instigator and the home-wrecker. That because I was the single gay man, I stimulated Dan and Caleb’s queer sexuality not just intellectually, but sexually, too. There was no consideration that, even though both are attractive men, maybe I wasn’t attracted to the either of them.

But this is a larger cultural problem, rooted in clichés about queer, male sexuality. Even within the LGBTQ community, the stigma persists that gay and bi men are hypersexual and that the bonds between them are inevitably on a path toward sex. (And I have never encountered similar accusations from the wives and girlfriends of my straight male friends.)

Thankfully, we’re in a cultural place where many of us can celebrate casual sex. But while men can healthily have sex with each other and maintain friendships, they can also be friends without sex.