Are you out as bisexual, but not out as a swinger?

[funcoupledayton 2,708]

I listen to Dan Savage a lot. I should probably just call him and ask this on the podcast. But I thought I might get feedback from swingers first.

 

Dan Savage talks a lot about how the biggest way people who are gay or bi can support the gay rights movement is to be out. Especially bi people who appear to be in a heterosexual arrangement. This is me. I can totally relate to what he is saying.

 

I have a friend who from the sound of it has a closeted gay teenager. She says to him, "You know I'll love you no matter what, but you do like girls, right?" She has a conservative religious background. I feel like for both their sake I should say something to her (like, "Whether he does or doesn't like girls, saying that isn't going to change anything and is going to make him afraid to disappoint you."). I feel like if I included that I am bisexual it would help. She knows me and knows I'm a good person leading a happy life. Maybe knowing me and who I really am would make things easier for her son?

 

I also have the situation with vanilla acquaintances who say and do things that are homophobic.

 

I'm not really afraid to come out as bi. The problem is that the way I express my bisexuality is through swinging. My husband is not in a position where we can be fully out as swingers. Plus, I feel like swinging is part of our sex life, therefore not everyone needs to know about it. I worry that if I tell people I'm bi, it will turn into a big discussion and I'll end up telling them about swinging.

 

What do you think? Please tell me your experiences.

[Guy1964 177]

My first experience was just playing, NSA, with a girl I worked with. I had always thought of sex as something I had to "earn" from the woman in some way; by measuring up to some criteria. I found great relief in finding out that someone could just want to be with me for the sake of being with me.

 

I'm a professional in a small city. Being outed, right now, would be bad for me. I love and respect what you guys do here, but I understand your husband's plight.

[Chicup 41]

If you come out as an active bisexual then yes, trying to explain will be difficult.

 

If you come out as a bisexual who is married and no longer has sex with women, you won't have to explain swinging.

[mauijanedoe 1,414]

M. and I have both known people who introduced themselves to strangers thusly: "Hi, my name is X. I'm a queer, sober alcoholic, poly incest survivor." We don't do that. I don't make a big deal out of being bisexual, but I also don't hide it and I certainly speak up when people assume I'm hetero or when someone says something homophobic (it hardly ever happens, unless I'm with my family of origin ). I've been told that it helped one of my young relatives to know that I thought being queer wasn't something noteworthy. For M., if the subject comes up (it did a few weeks ago with an acquaintance), he'll usually say that he's had some experience with men, and that he doesn't identify as straight. I don't talk about swinging at all, even with the friends who know we do, but we've both had conversations with people where it's been clear we don't have strong ties to monogamy.

 

That latter conversational topic is optional, though. Sexual identity doesn't depend on whether you're actively having sex and you no more have to explain how you're bisexual than others have to explain how they're straight.

[JustAskJulie 2,595]

Where I'm out as one I'm out as both.

[asncpl 729]

My husband and I are both bi but we too only express it through swinging. He has no desire to play one on one with another guy and neither do I with another girl on our own. If we come out as bi and being a married couple, the inevitable next question is are we active sexually to satisfy our bi urges and how do we do that? So I think if one comes out, so does the other.

[ViSexual 1,008]

With our vanilla friends I would love to be out as swingers but my wife wouldn't, so we aren't. I make sure that all of our vanilla friends know that we are not homophobic or racist, for that matter! I just don't want friends who are. I'm out as being bisexual with all of our swinger friends.

[naturefun 174]

I agree that visibility is important. I'm bisexual too as is my fiancée, and we both have the challenge of being out despite being in a heterosexual relationship, and neither of us ever having a homosexual relationship in our past. While's it's unfortunate, cultural ingrouping is a real thing and prejudice correlates positively to a lack of exposure. What does that mean? People tend to seek the company (romantic and platonic) of people similar to themselves, and we develop prejudices against people we don't have contact with. It follows simply that developing prejudice against people unlike ourselves is a natural occurrence. The facts that racial prejudice is much better than it was in the 1950s and that we hammer home the point to children in their formative years that skin color doesn't matter are not coincidental.

 

Asking about whether we should be out as swingers to increase our visibility as a community begs the question of what the goal is of being out. I'm bisexual. I'm denied quite a few state and federal rights depending on who I fall in love with. Swingers aren't in the same position. We aren't disenfranchised of rights. What do we have to gain by being more visible? I post to a fetish-themed site this debate comes up quite frequently in. Personally, I recognize that we don't have much to gain through visibility in the practical sense. We don't face disenfranchisement. If me an my fiancée want to have sex outside our relationship there aren't any legal barriers preventing us from doing so. The only ones that I can think of don't count as disenfranchisement because they affect people in vanilla relationships equally- laws regarding prostitution, public exposure, consent, etc.

 

However, I belong to a religion that has as its first pillar the need to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I don't have the data on hand to back up the assertion, but a quick look at the media demonstrates that societal acceptance of co-marital relationships is low. Yet swinging isn't an uncommon activity. In 2005, the Kinsey Institute estimate that there are 4 million swingers in the US. Another more recent source (2011) on CNN Health estimated the number to be as high as 15 million Americans. That's a significant number of Americans- in the same ballpark as how many Americans are BLGT-identified. There are currently 319M Americans- 15M swingers would make us about 5% of the population. But that number is probably low when you think about what's going into it. The 319M Americans includes children, who I'm going to assume aren't included in the swinging population number (their sexual proclivities be damned) as well as the elderly (you're not swinging if you're no longer sexually active). Remove those two age groups and the percent share of Americans is higher- similar to being BLGT or African-descended. Yet while those two groups have mainstream moral acceptance- even if true egalitarianism remains a work in progress- I don't think we do.

 

It's odd, too. We don't look down on single people who have active sex lives, even though slut shaming exists. We don't look on married couples who go to strip clubs. And a lot of men would get a high five from a buddy after saying they went to a massage parlor and got a happy ending rather than moral indignation. And that last one isn't even legal! So why should we as a community- a community that's a real cross-section of the country and world as a whole, not be treated the same? Why shouldn't I get a high five from a buddy when we share how our weekends went and I say I watched some hung dude bang my SO while I had sex with his wife? Of course, I'm not necessarily advocating a world where people openly discuss their sexual achievements and exploits (though it'd be nice). I'm saying that we should have a world where we're respected for who we are- moral, law-abiding, job-holding, tax-paying, family-oriented people... who happen to enjoy things as diverse as reading, water-skiing, long walks on the beach, movies, bars, and yes, co-marital sex.

 

I realize that I can be part of the problem or part of the solution. I'm a young professional. I work with a lot of people my age in a very liberal community. I'm an upstanding, clean-cut, and generally respected person in my community. I don't run any particular career risk for having my close friends know that I'm a swinger. I'm out as bisexual to my immediate but not extended family. I'm relatively good at controlling where information goes by being selective and deliberate in who I give it to. I recognize that some people can't be open about swinging, and that's fine. But I can. I don't have to be, but I can. This is how a culture changes.

 

My deal with my fiancée is that we have discretion to be out to our peers about swinging. If they're peers that are strictly in her or my social circles (when you live 1,400 miles apart, you don't know most of each others' friends), we can use our own discretion. For shared friends, we need to consult each other first. But the point is that we've agreed this isn't something that by necessity must stay hidden. I've told one person so far. Her response? "Ok." It wasn't a big deal.

[sunbuckus 3,567]

I agree that visibility is important. I'm bisexual too as is my fiancée, and we both have the challenge of being out despite being in a heterosexual relationship, and neither of us ever having a homosexual relationship in our past. While's it's unfortunate, cultural ingrouping is a real thing and prejudice correlates positively to a lack of exposure. What does that mean? People tend to seek the company (romantic and platonic) of people similar to themselves, and we develop prejudices against people we don't have contact with. It follows simply that developing prejudice against people unlike ourselves is a natural occurrence. The facts that racial prejudice is much better than it was in the 1950s and that we hammer home the point to children in their formative years that skin color doesn't matter are not coincidental.

 

Asking about whether we should be out as swingers to increase our visibility as a community begs the question of what the goal is of being out. I'm bisexual. I'm denied quite a few state and federal rights depending on who I fall in love with. Swingers aren't in the same position. We aren't disenfranchised of rights. What do we have to gain by being more visible? I post to a fetish-themed site this debate comes up quite frequently in. Personally, I recognize that we don't have much to gain through visibility in the practical sense. We don't face disenfranchisement. If me an my fiancée want to have sex outside our relationship there aren't any legal barriers preventing us from doing so. The only ones that I can think of don't count as disenfranchisement because they affect people in vanilla relationships equally- laws regarding prostitution, public exposure, consent, etc.

 

However, I belong to a religion that has as its first pillar the need to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. I don't have the data on hand to back up the assertion, but a quick look at the media demonstrates that societal acceptance of co-marital relationships is low. Yet swinging isn't an uncommon activity. In 2005, the Kinsey Institute estimate that there are 4 million swingers in the US. Another more recent source (2011) on CNN Health estimated the number to be as high as 15 million Americans. That's a significant number of Americans- in the same ballpark as how many Americans are BLGT-identified. There are currently 319M Americans- 15M swingers would make us about 5% of the population. But that number is probably low when you think about what's going into it. The 319M Americans includes children, who I'm going to assume aren't included in the swinging population number (their sexual proclivities be damned) as well as the elderly (you're not swinging if you're no longer sexually active). Remove those two age groups and the percent share of Americans is higher- similar to being BLGT or African-descended. Yet while those two groups have mainstream moral acceptance- even if true egalitarianism remains a work in progress- I don't think we do.

 

It's odd, too. We don't look down on single people who have active sex lives, even though slut shaming exists. We don't look on married couples who go to strip clubs. And a lot of men would get a high five from a buddy after saying they went to a massage parlor and got a happy ending rather than moral indignation. And that last one isn't even legal! So why should we as a community- a community that's a real cross-section of the country and world as a whole, not be treated the same? Why shouldn't I get a high five from a buddy when we share how our weekends went and I say I watched some hung dude bang my SO while I had sex with his wife? Of course, I'm not necessarily advocating a world where people openly discuss their sexual achievements and exploits (though it'd be nice). I'm saying that we should have a world where we're respected for who we are- moral, law-abiding, job-holding, tax-paying, family-oriented people... who happen to enjoy things as diverse as reading, water-skiing, long walks on the beach, movies, bars, and yes, co-marital sex.

 

I realize that I can be part of the problem or part of the solution. I'm a young professional. I work with a lot of people my age in a very liberal community. I'm an upstanding, clean-cut, and generally respected person in my community. I don't run any particular career risk for having my close friends know that I'm a swinger. I'm out as bisexual to my immediate but not extended family. I'm relatively good at controlling where information goes by being selective and deliberate in who I give it to. I recognize that some people can't be open about swinging, and that's fine. But I can. I don't have to be, but I can. This is how a culture changes.

 

My deal with my fiancée is that we have discretion to be out to our peers about swinging. If they're peers that are strictly in her or my social circles (when you live 1,400 miles apart, you don't know most of each others' friends), we can use our own discretion. For shared friends, we need to consult each other first. But the point is that we've agreed this isn't something that by necessity must stay hidden. I've told one person so far. Her response? "Ok." It wasn't a big deal.

 

There was something about your post that made me realize the main reason why I wish swingers could and would be more open. Yes, we aren't denied any rights by being swingers but having society know about and be more accepting of other options other than monogamy can help everyone realize that there isn't just one road to follow. We don't have to marry within our race. We don't have to marry the opposite sex. We don't have to marry at all. We don't have to be monogamous. The more people know about different paths and ways of life, the more we can expand our minds to be more accepting of everyone in general.

[naturefun 174]

There was something about your post that made me realize the main reason why I wish swingers could and would be more open. Yes, we aren't denied any rights by being swingers but having society know about and be more accepting of other options other than monogamy can help everyone realize that there isn't just one road to follow. We don't have to marry within our race. We don't have to marry the opposite sex. We don't have to marry at all. We don't have to be monogamous. The more people know about different paths and ways of life, the more we can expand our minds to be more accepting of everyone in general.

 

I think this really hits it on the head, and I'd like to piggyback on it a bit.

 

I once had a prof tell me that it's good to have an open mind, but a person whose mind is always open will never take a stand on anything. You need a mind made up to take a stand. That's really made me think a lot over the years.

 

As we legalize more things, the biggest argument is the slippery slope. It's endured the test of time. If we let gay people marry, what's next? Marrying your dog? Pedophilia? Etc. I think that argument is bullshit, but not for the same reason as everyone else. Logical fallacies come in two flavors: formal and informal. A formal fallacy is a set of reasoning which is always wrong: you won't get HIV from having sex because transmission rates are really low. An informal fallacy is a fallacy that results from anything else (e.g. a red herring). Wikipedia has a fantastic list of fallacies if anyone's so inclined. I could spend hours there myself.

 

The Slippery Slope teeters between being an informal fallacy and not a fallacy. The reason is because there's actually a valid argument that legalizing gay marriage could lead to, say, human-dog marriage. Now I'm not saying that it's a reasonable conclusion. But I am saying that it's not a conclusion that should be automatically discounted. In politics, there's a concept called The Overton Window- conceptually, the window represents the breadth of issues a politician can support and keep his job. As you expand the window to include something new, something that was once far away from the window is now a bit closer. Move public perception of the legalization of interracial marriage from acceptable to popular, and there could be a coattails effect that moves same-sex marriage from unthinkable to "merely" radical. Now, if someone says that legalizing same-sex marriage will consequently lead to the legalization of human-dog marriage, they're wrong. However, if someone says that legalizing same-sex marriage will consequently contribute to a general liberalization of sexual norms, and that such a change could lead to decreased public outrage about bestiality, and that such a change could lead to zoophiles starting an advocacy movement because they're now less afraid of public condemnation... etc etc etc... he or she has a valid point.

 

Also, I would assume that when interracial marriage was the hot button issue of the day, there were probably people screaming that next we'd be letting the homosexuals marry. Are the two issues linked? Not directly, but I also think that the presence of a slippery slope for legalizing and legitimizing more kinds of love is supported by the fact that this image is quite popular among supporters of same-sex marriage:

 

 

See? There were once upstanding citizens supporting a ban on interracial marriage. But history shows us that just because you're a white, clean-cut capitalist doesn't mean that you're on the right side of the argument. We're literally using conservatives' arguments in the civil rights movement about race decades later in the civil rights movement about love.

 

Personally, I think disagree with the slippery slope argument for a different reason. I don't argue with the presence or absence of a slippery slope. I argue for trust in society. I believe child molestation to be wrong. Period. And I believe that a free society with rigorous debate and discourse will, far more often than not, make correct determinations as to what's right and what's wrong. Say that we fully legalize same-sex marriage today on state and federal levels, and tomorrow I get cryogenically frozen for 100 years. When I wake up, it's legal for adults and children of all ages to have sexual relations, and that opinion has 80% popular support. My first reaction will be "holy shit, what the fuck happened while I was asleep?". However, my second action won't be to condemn what society has become. It'll be to find out what the fuck happened while I was asleep, because for there to be that much of a shift in such a short period of time, either NAMBLA figured out how to make the technology from They Live feasible, or there actually existed credible arguments in support of adult-child sex that my deeply-rooted antagonism toward the topic presented me from giving fair consideration to. Now, I realize that I chose an extreme example for this scenario. I did so simply because (1) extreme examples are better at illustrating points and (2), this is the argument I most often hear in public discourse.

 

I trust that society, in the end, will do the right thing. If same-sex marriage is right, we'll come to that conclusion given enough time. If pedophilia is wrong, then society will never judge it otherwise, whether or not same-sex marriage makes it slightly less unthinkable.

 

Like you said- there are too many things that we don't consider as possibilities simply because they're so far outside the realm of what we consider acceptable in modern society. Maybe I don't want to marry someone of a different race, or of my own sex. But as someone who would potentially want to (and in the case of the former, is going to), I like that I'm able to if I damn well want to. Non-monogamy or not having kids or having kids but not getting married- these are all things that shouldn't be a big deal. Life is short and the one thing I've learned in my 20s is that no one knows what the fuck they're doing, and we're all just making it up as we go along. I'd like the most options possible to do that.

 

If you want a real-life example, I'm Wiccan. I always knew about Pagans and Wiccans, but I never took it seriously. I mostly relegated the title to angsty teenage girls who want attention and to be different. Imagine my surprise when in college, an exceedingly normal, intelligent, and well-adjusted friend of mine tells me that she's Pagan. I was shocked at first, then started to do some reading. Within a few weeks I found that Paganism was the spiritual calling that I'm meant for. I've further honed my focus to Wicca, but the fundamental principle I've been harping at remains. Exposure leads to acceptance, leads to egalitarianism, leads to more people finding fulfillment because they've found the right life choices for themselves.

[gsu22 187]

I'm in a small town...Deep South, hard core conservative, etc. I'm not out as either. When I lived in the big city (Atlanta) I was out to a few as a bi guy and to most of my friends as a single male swinger. It'd be very bad if the town knew that A.) I suck cock AND fuck pussy and B.) I enjoy swinging with married women & men.

[funcoupledayton 2,708]

Since I started this thread almost a year ago I thought I might update since it seems to have resurfaced.

 

My co-worker's son has not come out as gay or straight, so that is still up in the air. I have continued to talk positively about gay and lesbian people around her without outright telling her that I am bi. She does know that we go to a clothing optional resort on vacation each year.

 

I started using facebook again with family and vanilla friends and a few trusted swinger friends. On facebook they have an option in the "about" section for interested in men or women. You can check off both so I did. Now, my friends and family may see that and just think it's me being clueless about the use of facebook since I've had some pretty funny mistakes on there. Also, I don't think many people except me actually look at their friends' whole facebook profiles. But, that was a small coming out step for me.

[JandKinBoise 858]

I found this thread to be an interesting read. The nice thing about a sex life, is that it can remain completely quiet. There is never pressure to put it out there. No one really wants to know, so you can state your beliefs without someone saying "if you are so pro-homo, is this part of your sex life??? HMMM???

 

If anyone does ask an uncomfortable question, it's really easy to put that feeling right back on the person bold enough to risk it.

 

In the swinger community, which by nature is very discreet, sexual preferences should be right there for all to see. That's the reason for the meeting. But water cooler talk, nah.

 

It's been my experience after decades in the vanilla world that swinging is accepted. Those who aren't doing it, wish they could express themselves more openly, sexually or not. People see swinging as an absolute freedom. Sure they'll sneer about STIs but informed people know that's just propaganda bs. Dropping the walls we spent a life building is admired, quietly.

[M1F2KTJ 473]

Why do you need to tell people you are bi? I don't tell anyone that I am a heterosexual.

[herpob 564]

I simply tell couples, "I am game for most anything that helps my cause." Meaning I will do things with the lady (and of course man) if they can help me do things with the hubby. He is not proactive like me.