Another year, another New Year’s Day hangover. At 5 o’clock in the morning, not yet having gone to bed, or to be more accurate, not yet having gone to sleep, I was jolted from my post-party, post-Conor delirium by a phone call from an ex-boyfriend, Chris, who told me his new year’s resolution was to have sex with a man.

Now, most resolutions are well meaning but fairly boring – quit smoking, get a promotion, join a gym, or be a better friend and lover. So Chris’ rather intrigued me. I had made the same resolution myself many years ago, although I’ll grant that the circumstances were somewhat different.
On the surface, Chris would appear to be your average male of the beer-guzzling, footie-watching, skirt-chasing variety. But as we all know, appearances can be deceptive. Having wrestled with his feelings for a couple of months, he decided he needed a sympathetic ear, so he called me. I was surprised, not that he could be attracted to men, but that it had taken him so long to admit it to himself. Being the filthy-minded girl that I am, I’d always had a sneaking suspicion.
Teenagers have it lucky. They can be moody, rude and self-absorbed – but still get a cooked meal every evening. But more importantly, they are allowed to be sexually confused. Almost every book on teenage sexuality will tell them that it’s not unusual to be attracted to members of the same sex while growing up and that this does not necessarily mean that they are gay. This is true. However, these tomes of wisdom also state that they will grow out of it. This is often not the case.
Oddly enough, being straight is not entirely a straightforward business. Neither for that matter is being gay. Many of us are ambivalent about our sexual orientation, but it’s not something we like to admit. Not publicly to begin with, and often not to ourselves either. When you have spent many years flirting and fornicating with members of one sex, it can be very unsettling to find yourself more than a little attracted to a member of the other. It has the potential to throw your whole self-image out of whack.
The traditional terms we have to define sexuality are rather limited and limiting. They tend to divide the world into polar opposites – male or female, hetero- or homosexual. In this neat little scheme, there is no place for bisexuality and that’s why many people dismiss bisexuals as simply fence sitters, unwilling or unable to decide either way.
Even if we are indeed more enlightened than this, we still like to be able to slot people into categories, so these days we have a whole new set of words to try and make sense of the confusion – bi-curious, transsexual, metrosexual and pomosexual. Lucky us!
On the one hand, I’m glad we have more definitions to describe sexuality, but on the other, I don’t think they tell the whole story. None of them, for example, would be an accurate description of me. My friend Henri used to say he was ‘straight, but not straight like a pencil’. That definition is the probably most truthful I could apply to myself.
For the most part, I think of myself as straight. But I have had relationships and sex with women. Does this mean I’m bisexual? I don’t think so, because I am definitely more attracted to men. So perhaps I am merely bi-curious? I decided that was a suitable definition until a friend pointed out that a great number of my ex-boyfriends looked like women. Perhaps I am gay, but sublimating it? That might be it, except that most of my ex-girlfriends are pretty androgynous looking too.
So what’s the term for a woman who is attracted to androgynous members of either sex? Even if there were one, it still wouldn’t be completely correct. While my lovely Conor may not be the last word in masculinity, he’s definitely not androgynous. So if asked, I would still say I was straight. Any other explanation would be too complicated.
For those who don’t know, a pomosexual is someone who refuses to be defined in terms of his or her sexual identity. I quite like that because it’s open-ended. But its still another category, and no matter how many categories we create, no matter how hard we try to pin a person’s sexuality to a neat little definition, we are never going to be able to fix it in stone. Our sexuality is fluid. It changes as we get older, as we have different experiences and meet different people.
If we really need to define sexuality, it would be easier to do so in terms of percentages. These could change depending on the people you were with, what you were doing, your mood, even the weather. On Mondays, you could be 88% straight and 12% exhausted. On Fridays, confronted by an attractive member of the same sex, you could decide you were 50% straight, 30% bisexual, 20% confused but nevertheless, 100% horny.
Some people are decidedly straight or gay, but many of us fall somewhere in between. The question is, does it really matter? Do we need a word, a term, a definition? In many ways, I think we’d be better off without them. My ex-boyfriend was struggling to come to terms with his attraction to men. He had never thought of himself as bisexual and was finding it difficult to apply this definition to himself. Is he bisexual? Maybe, but probably not.
What I said to him is something I want to share with all of you – people are sexual, the prefix is immaterial. Experiment, explore, enjoy – and have a happy, fornicating new year.