Question… aren’t we all a little gay?
I ask that after recent events – and countless female celebrities and socialites who left their husbands for a woman – have led me to believe the answer is 90% yes.
I was with some friends for an after work drink, and it was happy hour, so you know the conversation was going well. (Side note: When did a $12 cocktail become a bargain?). We thought about shows like Euphoria and Sex Education with openly gay and bisexual storylines and said it was a shame we didn’t have shows like that when we were teenagers.
We started to wonder if our own dating life would have been a little more colorful if it wasn’t so taboo growing up. Oh how free we would have felt to step outside of our normal sexual preferences and experiment a bit.
Chat with any teen these days and they don’t care if someone is gay, straight or somewhere in between.
Jana Hocking has been in love with women three times in her life and has slept with one woman
And I think we adults are slowly figuring this out. It wasn’t until I was thirty that I was brave enough to experiment.
You know, in my 39 years of life, I’ve been in love with guys about a hundred million times… and three times with women.
The first surprised me a few years ago, because I experienced flutters somewhere where I never normally experience flutters in a woman. (We’re talking about people “downstairs”).
I was sunbathing in a resort pool with friends when a very attractive Brazilian couple jumped in the pool in front of us. We all said they looked good, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl.
She had a confidence and curves that made you feel a little va va voom inside. I’m not gay, but at that time I wasn’t completely straight.
When I was in the middle of the lockdown I found myself in another predicament. I had just broken up with a man I had been in a horrible situation with for far too long and needed a distraction. Fast.
It was during that mid-lockdown break where we were all allowed to go outside again (jeez that didn’t last long). I was in a bar with a friend who is a very loud and proud bisexual. She said a friend she sometimes hooks up with would join us. Her friend came in and she had those Marilyn Monroe vibes. We ended up drinking way too much champagne and getting back to the friends house very, very drunk.
Before I knew it, the boyfriend was making moves on me and I didn’t dislike it. Maybe it was the distraction I needed. It was so out of my usual ‘type’ that I decided to just get on with it.
Skip forward to the next morning and I woke up with a very sore head and someone sleeping next to me. At first I panicked, but once I let what had happened I was actually quietly glad I had tried.
Honestly, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did with a guy, but maybe that was the first time? I remember I had absolutely no idea what to do.
The third time I fell in love with a woman was a few months ago. I met her through a friend and there was just a spark. Not like my normal girlfriends with whom I only feel a nice, friendly atmosphere. This was something more. She laughed at a crazy night out she had recently and ended up kissing a girl and I remember thinking, if the chance came I’d go there.
Now I’m not going to get into this because honestly I just like to have some sexual tension in the air. I almost don’t want to do anything about it because from experience, as soon as I realize I can do it, I kind of lose interest. And deep down I know I’ll end up with a man. Annoyingly, men just make me swoon even more.
It all sounds complicated… right!
I decided to ask my friends if they had ever been in love with women before and five out of six said yes. And yet we would all confidently say that we are straight.
On Louis Theroux’s podcast Grounded, he was chatting with gay actor Miriam Margolyes.
Louis is straight, but casually mentioned that as a teen he was “a little confused” if he was attracted to older guys at school.
He said, “I think like many if not most straight men I have not always been immune to a certain physical attraction to men. The idea that sexuality is on a spectrum makes sense to me, and as a young teen I remember falling in love with older guys once or twice and feeling a bit confused by it.”
What appealed to me was the idea that sexuality is on a spectrum. You are not by definition hetero and not by definition gay. Although you might not identify yourself as bisexual or pansexual. Attraction can be somewhere in between.
She doesn’t think she’ll sleep with a woman again, but doesn’t rule that out
Fortunately, a savvy sexologist, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, developed something called the “Kinsey Scale” in response to the overwhelming amount of people who can’t really identify themselves as gay, straight, or otherwise.
The Kinsey Scale is used to measure a person’s overall balance between heterosexuality and homosexuality and takes into account both sexual experiences and psychosexual responses. The scale ranges from 0 to 6, where 0 is completely heterosexual and 6 is completely homosexual. And guess what… we’re all on it in different places.
If I were looking at my gay best friend, I’d say he’s at a very solid 6 on the scale. The idea of a naked woman literally makes him gag. I have another friend who says she enjoys watching lesbian porn but is not at all interested in trying it out physically herself. So she’s placed herself around 2-3 on the scale. I think I’m a bit further along because I’ve tried the physical aspect. Although I’m not 100 percent sure I’d go there again. Maybe.
So we should be okay with not defining who we are when it comes to sexuality. Good lord, it’s all the rage among Generation Z. Maybe us millennials just needed a little extra time to figure it out. If you’re straight but get a surprising wave of “va va voom” for someone with the same knick-knacks as you, take a deep breath, kick back and relax. We all do.