A Journey to Bisexuality
“There was never a story so good that it couldn’t be improved by a bit of imagination!”
I, as a writer of Irish descent, can only agree with such a statement. My grandfather was born in Tipperary. My grandmother died a few years before I was born and my parents returned to my grandfather’s house to take care of the old man who would have been about seventy. I can call him an old man because it is my approximate age as I write these words.
My grandfather’s house was in Lincoln Park, Michigan just six blocks away from where my parents had been living with their newborn child, my older brother. Two of my father’s brothers were still living in the family home that he had built. Grandfather had been a carpenter and his eldest son and namesake, Dennis, had taken on the business by then. Dennis would become the “rich son” with a Wasp wife and only two children. (We became the typical Irish Catholic family with six children and multiple miscarriages. One of my younger sisters carried on the name of Dennis with one of her four boys.) I liked all of uncle Denny’s family and part of me aspired to become that successful and to have a brick house. Even if it was only so that I could have the great miniature train set they had in their basement. For me, these were the signs of wealth.
Although I was born in the hospital in a nearby town, I was raised in my Irish grandfather’s house. It is likely, that as an infant, I slept in my parent’s room in the small one story building that had my mother as the sole female. My early memories inform me that I slept in the lower bunk of a bunkbed in my grandfather’s room by the time I was a toddler. My older brother had the coveted upper bunk. There was always a Miracle Whip quart glass container with amber liquid next to my grandfather’s single bed in the corner. The lid was always tightly in place. I thought that it was liquid coming out, but maybe it was liquid going in. I never had the guts to smell or taste it since I assumed it was liquid coming out. There was only one bathroom in the house which was at the far end, a distance from the front bedroom where the three of us slept. As memory serves, we children all had baths one at a time in a big circular metal tub. If we said any bad words, the Lava soap went into our mouths. I got used to its taste.
In the morning, I loved having a soft boiled egg with my grandfather. The eggs rested in thick clear glass shot glasses and after you broke the top you inserted a pat of butter (We never had butter but we used that word to represent the margarine that we did have.) My mother used to tell of the Depression days when you had to mix in the yellow dye for the margarine to make it look like butter. And she spoke of how she longed in her childhood for store made bread instead of what was made at home. I was raised in those improved “packaged” modern times.
My grandfather taught me how to pee against the side of the rusted metal trash can when the trash was burning. We did that in the alley back in the 1950’s. The hissing sound of the pee as it hit the hot side of the barrel was very entertaining. “Never pee into the wind,” the crusty Irishman declared. “They’ll think you peed yourself and you’ll be in trouble.” I might have made up that memory but does that change the entertainment value of the tale?
I once heard my own son telling his boy, “You can’t believe everything that Grandpa Bill tells you.” No one who knows me would be surprised that I enjoyed the movie Big Fish with Albert Finney. My stories are recollections of an experience filtered through the person I am today.
I didn’t fully appreciate the depth of my Irish heritage until I was reading Angela’s Ashes in my thirties and had to stop reading because it struck too many painful chords of disrespect for human life as well as the inherent violence between men. I always finished books, but this one exposed a box that I was not ready to open at the time. Life is different now and all of them are open.
The stories I have written in this volume are based upon some reality that I have lived. Some are truer (a word I never thought I could use accurately.) to the experience than others. I have never let the truth get in the way of telling a good story. But above all others, the truth that took me a long time to discover about myself is that I am equally attracted to women and to men. I lived my early life as totally straight, monogamous and ignorant about sex like most Irish Catholic American men were prior to the Internet. I was neither suppressed nor informed, just left to fend for myself.
My first understanding about sex came from my mother who handed me a paper pamphlet about the human reproduction process when it became clear to her that I had no knowledge of my younger sister’s condition during menstruation periods. The pamphlet had some limited pencil drawings of anatomy but nothing that suggested sexuality or human contact, just body parts in simple line drawings. It was meaningless to me, but did help me understand why my sister couldn’t always go swimming in the lake with the boys.
While I can recall a few wet dreams in my teenage years, I never masturbated until I was in college in New York City. There I lost my virginity to a thirty five year old hot Puerto Rican woman who seduced me. Then I understood what pleasure a penis could provide. Thanks to that sexy woman, I became a sexual being. You might well understand then why I am still exploring, learning and discovering fifty years later and asking people, “How did YOU lose your virginity?” Almost everyone answers that question, even at a dinner party with strangers. It is in the end a simple question and one that everyone can readily answer, if willing to be open. It makes for great conversation!
As a happily married man for years I had no need for an emotional connection with someone else outside marriage. I had a good sex life, but there was a feeling that nagged at me to understand what it was like to be with a man. Any activity I had to explore this before my divorce, was purely physical and far from where I lived, so it would have no connection with my “real” domestic life. This is not an uncommon experience for married men who are not completely heterosexual.
My early stories tell of my encounters with people in the years following my divorce. I had begun limited early exploration with men in my forties, but it was not until I was single and in my fifties that the more complete search took place. I avoided looking for any relationship with either a man or a woman, because I needed much more so to find myself first and felt that it was only possible to do that honestly as a single person.
I avoided labels such as gay and bisexual because I felt that those might limit my self image as I explored. I only took on the label bisexual as it became clear to me that when I was having regular sex with men, I still thought a lot about women. When I had a regular female sex partner, I thought about men. A friend asked me, “So when you wake up in the morning, do you want to be with a man or a woman?” I didn’t like his binary choices, so I replied, “I’ll take one of each, thank you.” Being that way made any kind of attempt at relationship more complicated, so I simplified and just had lots of “friends.” Nevertheless, I did sometimes try relationships, as you shall learn. Come with me on my bisexual journey of exploration. But I must warn you that in the process of writing these stories, I have learned how to stretch truth into fiction. You decide which is which to you. For myself, I’m not sure anymore.