Some Gays Can Go Straight, Study Says

[Belacqua]

I am certain that someone who is homosexual can indeed 'act' straight.  Live a straight lifestyle, as it were.  That doesn't mean anything other than behavior has changed.

Come on outta that closet Winter.

Does this mean that someone who is really straight can "act" gay or believe they are gay for years only to realize that they have really been straight their whole life?

I've known a number of people who seemed to be fully one way and then, at some point, started swinging the other way. 

(I knew a guy who was stationed in the Philippines and spent every spare minute either playing with the bar girls who serviced the military base or recovering from the infections they gave him. And then he got home and discovered Grindr and took up a new life meeting guys at his local truck stop. Or a good friend of mine who spent his teens and early twenties as a gay star-fucker, managing to get into bed with just about every gay poet or novelist who ever published a book. But he got too old to have that kind of gay-nymphet sex appeal so he settled down with a nice woman and lived happily ever after. And several other examples.)

I guess I question the concept that people are "really" one way even though they are voluntarily and happily living another way. If they're having to force themselves to be straight because they think it's bad to be gay, then, yeah, they aren't "really" straight. But if they truly want to do one thing in their twenties, and then change things up when they're middle-aged, then I don't think there's been any self-deception going on. 

Maybe if we HAD TO label them we'd say they were bi. Or "serially bi," in the way some people are "serially monogamous." But I think we might be getting to the point where insisting on a predefined category for each and every person's sexuality may be too limiting. 

So I do think it's possible for one's orientation to change. Though this has to come from within, and it's still a very bad thing to try to force someone to change who doesn't want to.