WE NEED MORE BISEXUAL MEN

Me, Shakespeare, & Lord Byron walk into a bar...

I wake up every day — a different version of hungry.

— from Either/Or, Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel

I want more bisexual men!

More bisexual poets!

MORE BISEXUALS - FULL STOP!

More men who write poems with a man and a woman and both and neither and, oh, everything, in the same breath without ever stopping to explain themselves, who wear the hot pink cuban heeled boot, cheeky literary slogan crop top, who let the shaggy wolfcut grow longer in the party than the business, who have been happily singing along to every Shania Twain song since they were ten and have never once flinched. I want all of this, and if I’m being honest — which I am, cos when am I not? — I mostly want it for me! Not because I’m not at the party. I’m at the party. I’ve been at the party since I was fourteen and I’m not leaving. It’s just that there are so, so many beautiful people in here and too many decisions still to be made and an all-night party is never as long as you think it’s going to be. So I’m still here, near the door, drink in hand, mostly taking notes & stealing glances. Still working out what I actually want, which is fine, which is the whole point — so, try anything once, as they say, except incest and country dancing.

being close enough to feel that pulse in the roof of your mouth, from the cherry pit of their stomach — stretching. into a kindred kiss. — from I Eat The Body Electric

So, to celebrate my hinge-lingering limbo state, here’s a bisexual-coded poem inspired by a wonderful poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti called “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes” that I remember reading aged fourteen, which made me fall in love with poetry all over again.

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All The Beautiful People / Playthings for the Scavengers
After Lawrence Ferlinghetti

by the hinge of the kitchen-door,
dancing by the light of both rooms at 2AM 
a hot pink garbage fire in red 
pleather cowboy boots 

swinging by the back door,
hanging on & looking down 
into the open-top beer can 
masquerading as ashtray 

the woman
in a three-piece linen suit 
with bitchin’ wolfcut and sunglassed 
the young blond man casually coutured 
with short skirt and tinted lids
on the way to sodom hall 

and the scavenger up since 9am 
the leftover dash of grunge from the noughties, 
thinking of heading home untouched, 
streaks of silver betraying the posture 
hunching down over his notes on style 
the gargoyle fixed by the kitchen door 
with quasi-model strut

and the next body, 
also with sunglasses and long hair, 
ageless dance-thing, museless dollboys & toygirls, 
both scavenging gaze, down the middle distance 
a cool couple, watching from the perfume ad of life,
in which nothing is impossible 

and the red light for an instant, holding us all in 
fracturing duality, glancing off a stray disco ball, & shoes 
between them, bodies in addiction,
across a tiny chasm of gender, 
pirates in the high seas of question.

---

So, what’s with all this erasure??

Don’t we deserve a little respect??

Here is what bisexuality probably does to people that frightens them: it doesn’t sit between straight and gay. LOUDER FOR THE DOUBTERS IN THE CHEAP SEATS!! It isn’t a midpoint, a both-and, a foot in each camp. It’s neither. It refuses the camps entirely. It is, very much, a camp all of its own. Classic bisexual. It looks at the binary, that enormous, elaborately maintained fiction, and dissolves it. And if desire doesn’t have a fixed address, if gender is a performance rather than a fact, then an awful lot of what the world has organised itself around turns out to have been made up. And don’t we all feel rather silly?? Bisexual people are not a variation on existing options. We are, whether we asked for it or not, evidence that the whole taxonomy is wrong. Is that why people are so angry? Cos we really are undeniably hot. So that can’t be it!

I didn’t choose this / bisexuality chose me. — from Either/Or

Erasure is the mechanism. It comes from outside, from the straight world that finds us suspicious, from parts of the queer community that occasionally find us insufficiently “committed”, from both directions simultaneously, which is its own particular kind of exhausting. But it doesn’t stay outside. It gets into the body. It becomes part of the posture. A particular held breath. The version of yourself you assemble before walking into a room. Bisexuality feels like being slightly mistranslated, & the version of you that exists in other people’s understanding is always a few degrees off from the one you actually inhabit. It moves like water finding its level, slowly and quietly, into every available space, until one day you realise you’ve been accommodating it so long you’ve forgotten what the original shape was. And now there are ducks swimming in it. And we can’t stop thinking about the whole corkscrew penis thing. Sorry-not-sorry to place that image in your mind.

love? recklessly / a match itching for its own strike. — from to live / becoming

There is something that sits heavily on bisexual men specifically. (Bisexuality in women has been fetishised into something palatable, decorative, safely titillating, albeit still very much a fetishisation which needs sorting out.) Bisexuality in men is still widely read as either a confession or a weakness, an incomplete failure of masculinity, a passivity, a no, not-quite. There is a long and grinding tradition of rewarding men for their masculin-idealised passability, for moving through the world as though nothing complicated lives inside them. And so a lot of men choose the “safe” route. Tuck it away. Miss out on the peach margaritas and all our very good puns. I came out at fourteen. Didn’t tell my family until I was twenty-seven, in the middle of a mental health crisis, not wanting to go out on a lie. I have bounced back from that. But the gap is not an accident. It’s the calculation, the body learning what the room will allow before the mind catches up. And I’m still playing catch-up at times.

Sometimes it feels like freedom, / sometimes it feels like a well-decorated trap. — from Either/Or

But, and here is where I need you to stay with me, because I have some overtly queer, queer-adjacent, or queer-coded men to tell you about, and I am doing this with all the grace & composure currently available to me, which fluctuates wildly—the world is not without evidence that another way is possible.

to live (openly) is to bleed-out the sky of its clouds — from to live / becoming

Stephen Colbert, in his final week of shows, has kissed basically everyone who came near him and seemed entirely at peace with this decision. I don’t know why yet, but fuck, I love to see it! Jacob Elordi (another cursory mention yet again, I know, I know, I have no self-control!) carries designer handbags, reads books (i know it feels like i’m setting the bar a little low, but hey, it’s sexy, more bisexuals, more reading, more more more, it’s not a short list), & he was called baby girl on live television by Renée Rapp and accepted it with the serenity of a man who has genuinely arrived somewhere peaceful within himself. It’s very enchanting to see. Moving on! Oscar Isaac does everything with his whole body, and his entire presence in Ex Machina was a public health emergency I am technically still inside. I can’t get sucked into another Frankenstein mention. Ah fuck! Pedro Pascal wears thigh-high boots, posts about his feelings, does not explain himself to anyone:

I see you, not across a crowded room, but— in the way I chew my lip when I leave the house / in the moment I almost cry at the scent of library books, the soundtrack swells in the heat of a too-soft jumper I bought to be held in — Untitled (After Pedro Pascal)

Connor Storrie & Hudson Williams walked the Met Gala the other week like they owned every step of it (and by now they surely do!) — Storrie in Saint Laurent, sleeveless, shirt in glorious polka-dot silk; Williams in Balenciaga with Black Swan eye makeup and a cape behind him. Men, see? You needn’t play it “safe” ever again. We are standing on the shoulders of so, so, so many giants at this point. Now go play with the accessories. Andrew Scott plays desire and restraint like a man who has sat with every inch of it and come out the other side, actually knowing something. He’s enigmatic & charming, and as Moriarty, more than a little unhinged. See? Sexy. Cos we queers do be making good villains. HIM, The Grinch, Loki, Scar, Jafar, Ursula, Hades, Mystique, Team Rocket, Shego, Jareth, Maleficent, Captain Hook, Xena, Mad Madam Mim, Frank-N-Furter, Lord Farquad, The Joker, Poison Ivy. The list goes on and on and on and…

show me a way two bodies can align so well on a single axis of yes — from Juxt-A-Position

Honorary mentions: Anthony Bourdain. Jack Black. Robin Williams. Andrew Garfield. Yungblud. And of course, the absolute king himself, The Daddy Returns, yep, it’s Brendan Fraser. No, I will not be calm! How dare you.

None of this requires a label.

Not even a fixed declaration.

I’m not asking for your sexuality.

I’m asking for your clavicle.

Stop being silly now, babygirls.

The flux of it all is frankly gorgeous, and the door is swinging open in EVERY direction. Gird your catflaps!!

Also, if you wanna read an interesting bit of research on bisexual code-switching, have a look at this article from Queer Majority. Apparently, people have better gaydar than bi-fi. That’s how deep the coding as passibility structure goes.

we eat the phrase / & we eat the phase / wash it clean-down with something ridiculous & expensive — from I Eat The Body Electric

Bisexuals In Poetry… yeah, (probably) everywhere.

Shakespeare wrote 126 sonnets to a man. Mad, bad, & dangerous Byron was “both, and either” per his biographers and kept getting exiled, which is extremely on brand. Even Coleridge (loosely speaking) coined the word bisexual in an essay, admittedly meaning biological dualism rather than the night I ended up on a bathroom floor in Rotherham with Armitage Shanks imprinted backwards on my forehead & sore hips, but still: a poet, getting there first. We love to see it!

Three bisexual poets walk into a bar. Byron gets exiled immediately, again, you’d think he’d have a system by now, it’s been 200 years Gordon! The landlord takes one look at Shakespeare and shouts get out, you bard. I offer to get the drinks in and end up stood at the bar alone. Three cocktails for me then.

Three bisexuals walk into the room above a queer bookshop. One is the author. One works in a nearby bar. The other is me. A bi+ book launch event small enough to hold the entire thing in the back of a taxi. And yes, this actually happened.

The keepers of our chaotic traditions are currently hiring for successors. And I am asking you, nicely, directly, and with entirely transparent self-interest, to come and help fill the gaps.

to be misunderstood in stages / appear as many things / be mistaken for weed / then wish / then weather — from Blooming Brilliant

Which brings me, by way of South Yorkshire, to a story.

The wandering hands that stalk the night about my knees

Are you sitting comfortably on, near, around or adjacent to a chair in a way that is entirely unique to you? Marvellous. One night, late, at night, night had fallen over the screaming hellscape of Rotherham, I stir gently from my place on the sofa, my tea has gone cold, I’m wondering why, no, wait, before I stirred, I was deep in slumber, having a nightmare, I seem to recall driving with one hand, trying to change lanes last minute on a busy Doncaster roundabout, and with the other hand I was frantically making pancakes. 
(That's right! A tossing and turning joke in a story about an early bisexual experience.)  

Before I fall asleep, I hear the television erupt in uncanned laughter, I find myself flanked either side by two complete acquaintances, like a big pink wafer under one warm marshmallow blanket. The television flickers, drawing me further into a routine about unexpected sexual advances. A voice in the dark recess of my mind calls out They’re here! Suddenly, all of a sudden, a sudden hand gently clasps my knee on my left leg. I look down to see a maniacal grin peering back up at me from the man apparently no longer sleeping peacefully to my left, his face eerily underlit by an unusually difficult segue into the unspoken etiquette of an open bag of crisps on a pub table. The hand has since departed from my knee, making a move further north. Having since consulted a map, his hand would at this stage have been somewhere between Rotherham and Wombwell. Maybe Greasbrough, Nether Haugh, or Rawmarsh, which all sound like queer northern euphemisms anyway. Out of the manifold darknesses, a second fresh demon began to stir and swell. To my right, the wandering hand anew met with my brazen knee, unkissed by the night, clasped beneath this draperie fair. It dawned upon me that a terrible, terrible choice was now afoot. And once it was made, I would become entirely undone. 

A choice that seemed to fade into my distant past as I clambered up the stairs in terror, my legs shaking, knees knocking, ankles locking, toes curling, and all other bodily nouns now verbing. I awoke in a pile upon the bathroom floor, dishevelled, unkempt, my back adorned with deep & loving scratches, burnt by the heat of the moment, I licked my wounds, a salty taste lingered about my lips, the words Armitage Shanks imprinted backwards upon my forehead. I slowly and unsteadily unfurl myself from the bathroom lino, stumble in a haze beyond the threshold and find a door half-ajar, my eyes fall upon a body, splayed out, like a lazily spatchcocked chicken, half contorted human and half Jackson Pollock life drawing. A victim of our violent excesses. Hung like a renaissance sculpture and snoring like someone clumsily throwing particularly asthmatic sea lions into a wood chipper. I hastily search for most of my clothes, hurriedly assemble an impression of a passably dressed man, and make my exit back into the early morning & the winding lanes of Rotherham’s back streets. The ground as yet kissed by the morning dew, looking up at me with knowing, I feel all of my shame, and still proceed.

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I feel all of my shame, and still proceed.

That’s it! That’s what bisexuality often feels like from the inside, not the politics, not the theory, not the unlimited discourse. The 6am walk home through Rotherham, assembling yourself into a passably dressed man, the ground knowing, and going anyway.

language stutters where motion completes. — from Juxt-A-Position

In my PhD research, I’ve been using the word desirance for the erotic charge that lives in language, in the body, in the space between what’s said and what’s meant. Poetry has always known about this on the sly. The best poems are hungry. They move towards something on the page even when the poet can’t move towards it in the room. Write from your body, not about it. Use both, any, and all pronouns. Let the desire be illegible by the world’s standards and luminous by your own. The call is almost always coming from inside the house.

The Greeks are said to have invented sex, while the Romans were the ones who decided to also do it with women. I’m being flippant, of course. Two thousand years of the binary insisting it invented something it merely narrowed. We are not the aberration. We are the original text in glorious verse, not yet mistranslated!

Sometimes I feel like a badly organised buffet with too many sauces and not enough cutlery. — from Either/Or

My Moodmilk co-conspirator pixiewithpens called my recent poetry collection Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel “probably the most bisexual poetry collection ever written” (which contains several of the poems featured in this post!) and I have chosen to receive this now as established fact. That statement has very much set the bar, and I only intend to write more increasingly bisexual books until the entire canon is actually just a set of instructions for building a giant glitter cannon in thinly veiled disguise loaded with pink, blue, and purple glitter only — and you know it gets everywhere I want to go.

am I gay if I only like some people sometimes am I gay if I like girls who look like boys who look like girls who look like gods “An evolving line of enquiry, sir.” “One recommends discretion and good humour.” — from Search History of a Queer Body

Give yourself permission. That’s the whole ask. Not to be bisexual, that’s far too large and way too complicated and frankly too interesting to get into here. The ask is simpler, sneakier, and I’ll be honest again, written partly out of potential future self-interest: be one percent more bisexual-coded every day. Just one percent. Wear the thing. Say the thing. Be a little louder. Take up space. Blur some lines. Correct a straight man in public. Put the man and the woman in the same poem. Sing the words to Santa Baby without changing the pronouns. Let the want be transmittable for once, on entirely your own terms. One percent. That’s nothing! That’s everything. That’s how the glitter cannon gets loaded. Come be a sparkly confetto! Just one confetto….

Come to the party. You’ll find me by the kitchen door, taking notes, drink in hand, thinking about heading home and not quite doing it.

mouths belong / where they make people tremble — from I Eat The Body Electric

One final thing, plainly, because all I write definitely has a distinctly bisexual bent and has never benefited from anything even closely resembling coyness:

It wouldn’t hurt a few more men to know what it feels like to have another man inside them. Some doors only open from a very specific angle.

If you are a newly bisexual man experimenting with anal sex for the first time, know this:

having another man inside you

might not make your day.

But it just might make your hole weak.

You’re welcome. I’ll see you at the party.

— Ryan x

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I’m Ryan Stephen Thornton, hi! — I’m a bisexual poet, full-time maximalist, PhD researcher in queer archival poetics, and roughly one third of the entire bisexual male British poetry canon (I’m only over exaggerating if I’m wrong, and when I say roughly, I mean…) My latest collection Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel is out now. It’s extremely horny. Pixie called it “probably the most bisexual poetry collection ever written” and Pixie is never wrong. Find me at “@poetchaotique” on Instagram. DMs always open. The glitter cannon is loaded. Come and get some, babygirl.

Oh, and who ever said there was anything wrong with being greedy?! 😜

Also…………. 👀😈🍑😛🥵 you coming???