This is my first post here, but I have spent a few hours reading many posts.... a lot of heart and soul in here, and great posts on the human story. But so far, the discussions referring to BBM all seem to springboard from the assumption or catchphrase "the gay cowboy movie."
I don't mean to detract from the depth of anyone's posts, but I don't feel it's trivial at all that we're referring to "gay" experiences rather than bisexual experiences. Ultimately, BBM is about love, of course, but it also is about sex and commitment. It's as if as soon as one has had a homosexual experience, that they're instantly and forevermore "gay". To much of the domesticated "hetero" population, it is the fear of this stigma which I believe is the guiding principle for all other homophobic thoughts, urges, and actions/reactions.
I believe the vast majority of humans are on a sliding scale from absolutley and completely "hetero" on one side, and absolutely and completely "homo" on the other. A large minority are strictly heterosexual, a very small percentage strictly homosexual, and the vast majority of us somewhere in between. That is, most of us are bisexual in nature. Separating thoughts/whims from actual experience, and discounting the fantasizing during sex or masturbating, I would hold that most of us are hetero in action, but significantly bisexual in nature. We are at once both
sexual beings encased in a very complicated soup of genetic material, and also
social animals conditioned to interact with a high density of a wide variety of similar sexual/social humans... (geez that sounds so cold and logical, but it really isn't :-\)
In the wild, male animals sometimes mount other male animals. Dogs are a good domestic example of this natural occurrence. In 9th grade biology, over a few generations of fruitfly experiments, I saw that there were always some males that pursued other males and did the "courtship dance" with other males...
Throughout recorded human history, male/male sexual encounters have always happened... Sodom and Gomorrah, Alexander and Hephaestion, the Greek and Roman civilizations, the Egyptians, the list goes on. Aside from the religious and societal taboos that have been placed on these minority acts, and
larger than those same religions and societies that have come and gone, human sexual encounters are MUCH larger than that and more a part of who we are than a particular fad/view/rule/paradigm/era's current outlook or taboo on any subject, science included. However oppressed or liberated in any historical moment, human sexuality is greater than the confines of that one lifetime --- it is our very being.
Now I've gone too deep on the analytical side.
Let me bring it back to everyday talk.
A quick analogy, then the final point. Rock music is now several decades old. Pick any random artist, and we will attempt to categorize the music -- classic country, motown, emocore, bubble gum pop, intelligent dance music, progressive house, be-bop, Christian rock, deathmetal..... the list goes on. Rather than a futile attempt at saying X artist is in Y category, it would be more accurate to say that they have "leanings" or "tendencies" or "elements of" country or hard rock or gospel, etc. Of course, most people don't talk like this, but only because we've been conditioned this way, and it is how "everyone else" talks. Easier to categorize, to lump the world into black and white, gay or hetero.
My point is,
with the Internet, this new revolution of sharing human experience from a grassroots level rather than a handed down, scriptural or societal or other other authoratative source or myth, with the Internet and these forums,
we are re-educating and re-evaluating ourselves from a very honest and personal level. If we are pioneers in enlightenment then, shouldn't we tread boldly but carefully with each step we take? Should we not say "bisexual" more often? Is this not closer to the truth?
Who would've thought a couple decades ago that a good number of us actually have "their own Brokeback Mountain"? In those same decades enormous human rights strides have been made.
There is a reason for ethics and morality, but at the same time, there is the just progress towards integrity and enlightenment.
All I'm saying is, if these BBM forums are a starting point for discussions which can change the outlook of mainstream for the better, shouldn't we start by properly framing the starting-point of our discussions using more accurate terms like "bisexual" rather than "gay"?
Actually, we're kinda doing this already with the testimonies in the "your own private BBM" posts where the stories are told, without the use of the words bisexual or gay, but just the true hearltfelt love stories
Pushing semantics and details aside, the epic truth still stands: Love is a force of nature.