When ‘Brokeback’ leads to heartbreak

“BROKEBACK Mountain” isn’t just a movie. It’s not just a short story, either. With all due sympathy to Jack and Ennis, it’s a woman’s worst nightmare.

I understand that it might be terribly difficult for a man to admit to himself, and his family and the community, that he is gay. But it is a woman’s private horror to find out that the man she is in a relationship with has his own private, uh, Wyoming.

So many embarrassing, shameful questions arise. Is he gay or bi, and does bisexuality really exist, or are bi men just on the slow boat to Gayville? Is he just “experimenting”? Can she make him go 100% straight? If not, is she somehow inadequate? Not pretty or sexy enough?

Worst of all, these doubts are frequently triggered by men who seem to be either in denial about their sexuality or too timid to come out. So they carry on a game of relationship charades, often at the expense of another.

I have an unfortunate propensity for either picking or attracting gay men. It’s like my gaydar is backward. My friend Eve always runs a quiz by me:

Eve: “Are you attracted to him?”

Me: “Yes.”

Eve: “Then he’s gay.”

Or:

Eve: “Are you attracted to him?”

Me: “No.”

Eve: “Good! Go talk to him, he’s straight.”

What’s my excuse? I like good-looking men who dress well and are entertaining conversationalists.

What’s theirs? I asked my gay pal Buzzer why I tend to get involved with bi men (for the record, one admitted -- tossed into a conversation like a grenade -- and two suspected). He explained: “You look like the type of woman straight men are supposed to want. Tall, blond, all-American. It makes you a repressed-gay magnet.”

One close gay friend of mine didn’t come out until his 30s. Until then, he dated women. He hooked up with men only when he was drunk -- drunk at a gay bar, conveniently. For years he told himself that it was just an “alcohol thing.” But he rarely felt like having sex with the women he dated.

My friend Carolyn has a friend who says he’s straight. Yet he sleeps with men. And he has unprotected sex, because see, it’s unplanned. It just happens, because he’s not gay. Last year he found out that he’s HIV-positive. He still insists he’s straight. None of the women he dates knows about his “lifestyle.”

A recent study by a team of psychologists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto took 33 professed bisexual men and hooked them to monitors that measured sexual arousal. Then they showed them gay porn and straight porn. Not one of the purportedly bi men was turned on by both straight and gay porn -- for each man, it was one or the other. And for three-fourths of the men, it was the gay erotica that was appealing.

In a piece called “Gay, Straight or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited,” Benedict Carey wrote in the New York Times last July that the study “is the largest of several small reports suggesting that the estimated 1.7% of men who identify themselves as bisexual show physical attraction patterns that differ substantially from their professed desires.”

Carey went on to write: “Studies of gay and bisexual men in the 1990s showed that the two groups reported similar numbers of male sexual partners and risky sexual encounters. And a 1994 survey by the Advocate, the gay-oriented newsmagazine, found that, before identifying themselves as gay, 40% of gay men had described themselves as bisexual.”

The odds clearly seem stacked against the woman who is determined to win the heart -- or, more accurately, the lust -- of the bisexual man.

But if a guy is so charming and sexy that she must give it a go, here are potential red flags that Mr. Gaydar-Breaker probably is longing for Brokeback:

He seems to have no discrimination when it comes to women. Pretty, ugly, tall, short, fat, thin, old, young -- he’ll date any of them, because, “Look, world, I’m dating women!” He has no preference because he has no real attraction to women.

His apartment is neater than yours and he is way more familiar with the use of an iron.

He uses cuticle cream and line smoother.

He shaves religiously. And not just his face.

He is fit and never passes a mirror without stealing a glance.

He knows about color; for example what color dress would contrast nicely with your eyes. And he is actually able to buy you clothes in your correct size.

He packs hair product in his overnight bag.

He packs an overnight bag.

One might argue these signs merely point to the metrosexual. Agreed. But if you add metrosexual to, “Oh, once when I was drunk I hooked up with a guy,” then you come up with gay. Gay.

Another tipoff is the ruse of the long-distance (a.k.a. the long-suffering) girlfriend. “Having a girlfriend in another state is perfect,” for bisexual men in transition, my gay friend Don told me, “because you only have to see her a few times a year yet it provides a perfect explanation for why you aren’t dating other women. Meanwhile, you’re able to hook up with men.”

Adding to women’s confusion is that, as we learned from “Brokeback Mountain,” many bisexual men do not fit gay stereotypes. They can seem as straight as the next guy, even macho and athletic.

It is unfair and selfish for a person with a sexual identity crisis to create emotional and, very possibly, health crises for unsuspecting women. Dating is fraught with enough peril and heartbreak potential without adding the complication of being involved with someone who is playing shirts and skins. Army or Navy, pick a team!

Go to the mountain, or let the mountain come to you. Just don’t insist on taking a woman along to hold your hand.

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Contact Samantha Bonar at [email protected].