[sebbie]

What do Dylan and Josh have to do with Cedric and Brian? It turns out, quite a lot. Writing about Cedric and Brian got me to thinking some more about what was going on in my own brain and body when I was that age. Male hormones are bombarding a guy’s brain relentlessly, and yet a guy does not fully understand how he is supposed to deal with this. At some level, a guy knows that all of this has something to do with forming a relationship with a partner, most commonly female, but even at 19, a lot of guys are not going to be prepared to deal with the consequences of penis-vagina sex. But the hormones relentlessly keep the guy feeling horny, more or less constantly, unless he can figure out a way to get some periodic relief from this situation.

What kind of relief? Well, you can guess. This need and urge to jerk off is all but universal among college-age males, never mind all of the elaborate schemes guys work out in order to attempt to do this on the sly, under the cover of darkness. Partner sex is fun, but jerking off on your own is terrific fun too. That is, if you can only figure out a way to do this secretly. Or, maybe not.

Now, the thing you need to know about Brian and Cedric was that they both fell into the category of pranksters. They loved to do things that, as Bruce, Brian’s brother, would call “grossing out” their friends just to see how they would react. In this case, masturbation with the other roommates watching was just another prank to them. And of course, just the idea of Brian jerking of Cedric and Cedric jerking off Brian brought the prank to a whole new level on the “gross out” scale. The two of them were having just as much fun seeing how Bruce and I would react to them jerking off themselves and each other as we watched them doing something “really gross” as they were jerking off.

One way of looking at this I suppose was that it was my first encounter with the idea of a gay sexual act. Brian and Cedric both knew that, and that did not stop them in the least. I admit that I was pretty naïve, sexually. I loved jerking off but my list of techniques for doing this was, well, candidly, rather limited. I was very curious as to whether the other guys my age had mastered skills in this department that I had not yet acquired, and what Brian and Cedric were each doing to themselves and each other certainly added to my information set in this regard. But was I observing first hand a couple guys who, if not gay, were at least bisexual? That was an interesting question. Neither of them was dating a woman so far as I knew, at least not steadily.

Well, what happened was that both of them graduated from college. I lost track of Cedric, but Brian married and raised a family. There has been quite a bit of research by sex researchers on the whole subject of male-male sexual conduct that might be seen as one form of gay sex and its link to ultimate sexual orientation. A quick summary of that research says that perhaps 40 % of males who eventually marry have, at some point in their lives, had a sexual encounter with another male that led to an orgasm for one or both. The sex researchers seem less concerned about the meaning of all of this in relation to whether or not an occasional male-male sexual encounters means the guy is gay or bisexual than the public at large. The public at large seems to think that if this has happened at all the guy therefore must be at minimum bisexual if not “entirely” gay.

This gets into some really tricky stuff and into things about human sexual behavior that are not at all fully understood. First, let me say that I am as open minded as all get out on the entire subject of sexual orientation, and a proponent of the “whatever floats your boat” school of thinking on this. But I find it endlessly fascinating to try and better understand how guys get to the point where they eventually end up in this regard.

I’ve read all the stuff related to the science that says sexual orientation is ultimately determined by one’s genes. This perspective is the one promoted by the gay community--that a guy has no choice at all in the matter of sexual orientation but is stuck with whatever his genes say he should be.

But then, I keep thinking that in real life, sexual orientation determination is not nearly so simple and clear cut as this. People fall all over the five point scale from straight to gay and basically everything in between. At some point a guy might form a partnership that involves sex with another person, and that person will be either male or female. So the decision at that point is more or less 0-1. But then you have true bisexuals who like having sex with partners of either sex, and they do not fall neatly into one category or another.

I further conclude that guys who might ultimately live out their lives in a straight relationship may also have enjoyed engaging in some sort of sexual activity with a male partner. At the end of the day, the preference is still for being with a female, but that doesn’t discount the possibility that the male encounter perhaps was really fun sexually too. Seeing either sex as being absolutely equal in this regard (as a “true“ bisexual) is likely rare but certainly possible. At some point, most guys are going to get to the point where they at least prefer having a physical partner of one sex over the other, and, based on this most guys seem to ultimately be able to determine if they are actually gay or straight. At least, I think that is what is going on.

There have been many movies where the plot line involves a married man who has a gay male encounter, and what that means for a marriage. Sometimes males divorce wives and take up with a gay male. Sometimes females divorce husbands and move into a lesbian relationship. I’ve seen all of this up close in real life too. My only observation is that in general for both males and females, they seem to me to mostly be happier after the heterosexual breakup than before. I don’t want to ever judge people male or female in this regard based on what they choose to do. I’m not walking in their shoes, except to say that sexual orientation might be a bit more fluid than some of the gay rights advocates might care to admit given the effort made to promote the idea that sexual orientation is written in the genes and unwavering otherwise. Is this all somehow written genetically, or could circumstances matter and feelings about sexual orientation in one direction or another evolve in one direction or the other over time?

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