Some Gays Can Go Straight, Study Says

[emjay]

[...]
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.

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I never said, and do not believe, that a person can change orientation at will. You can't just throw a switch. Nor would I ever suggest that Matthew Shepherd or anyone else ought to have changed, for his own good. 

I only said that people sometimes do change their behavior. How this comes about I don't know, but -- again -- I don't think it's something that a person can just will when it's convenient. If you start to want different things, then you find different ways to enjoy yourself. And I think that's fine.

As someone technically bi, I understand a lot of what you're saying. Though I identify primarily as gay (now, and for most of my life), rather than bi (or straight), there have been other times - though not many, granted - where I've identified more as straight and been more interested in women... so I have degrees of freedom here that my truly gay friends, who can't even conceive of being with a woman, don't. Ultimately I doubt there'll be a full 180 in my life like your examples, because overall I'm much more emotionally attracted to men than women, and that's more important to me than just physical attraction (which is the part that is the most 'interchangeable' for me), but it is nonetheless conceivable, in a different time, place, and mentality. Also, in the spirit of what I think you were saying, I don't think we/I really need a label; when I was young it was all about coming out and fitting in, and I was very 'in your face' and political about it, but nowadays I don't feel the need to be so vocal about it, only bringing it up if it's relevant to a topic at hand... ie it's not such a defining point of my identity any more... and as such I guess that means I get to 'embrace the bi' a lot more now, ie just embrace whatever is, without needing to give it a name.