How can you know what is bi when you don't even know what is straight?
I’m still transitioning off Substack. My preference is to have people on Patreon rather than Buttondown or Mailchimp or whatever because I’m already set up on Patreon and have some cool rewards for paying readers. The downside to shifting to Patreon is that I cannot add you as a patron myself. You have to sign up, even if it’s just at the free level (which I support fully!).
So that’s why I keep reminding you to sign up for my Patreon. Did you know that $5+ patrons got access to this essay yesterday?
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Another day, another "teehee was/is this famous person bisexual????" item from an absolutely clueless queer media.
This one comes to us from The Advocate, which repackaged an equally brief exclusive interview from The Messenger, all in service of the posing the following to the internet masses: "Hugh Hefner famously slept with many women. But did he also sleep with men? His ex-wife who desperately needs you to pay money to read her memoir says maybe! He did sometimes have men in his bed when he was having orgies, and maybe they touched weeners and butts?"
Guys it's so fucking stupid, I just can't.
Let's just cover some basics here:
I don't fucking know if Hugh Hefner was straight or bi, and I don't particularly care. Short of a sealed letter that was only to be opened after his death that read, "Now that I am a skeleton, I want the world to know I was a total bisexual," I don't think the question of Hefner's sexuality could ever be particularly newsworthy. And there's something particularly grim to me about a former partner of his milking speculation about his possible queerness in order to sell a book.
But what I do know is this: there is nothing inherently queer about two men being naked and doing sex in the same room or even bed as each other, unless we are taking the narrowest possible definition of "straight" here, and why would we do that?
Heterosexuality makes a ton of room for men to bond with each other sexually while not being sexual with each other. It's the back bone of multiple porn genres (the straight MMF threesome, which is very different from the bi MMF threesome; gang bangs; bukkake; cuckoldry; etc). The Lonely Island even made a whole song about the concept. Two men doing sex near each other isn't a sign that they're attracted to each other or interested in sex with one another or really anything beyond the fact that they're wiling and comfortable to have sex near another man, and may find it arousing to either bond with other men about sex or subtly (or not so subtly) compete with them.
That is not bisexuality. It is just straight men being straight men.
So does it surprise me that Hugh Hefner, the ur hetero man, was doing sex around other men? Not particularly! Does it make me think he was bisexual? Not particularly! And to float the idea that it does — to wink, wink, nudge, nudge that he had his weener out around other weeners and we all know that's kind of gay — is to simply flatten the spectrum of human sexual experience in a way that I find deeply distasteful.
Also, the man is dead! Stop using his sex life to try to sell your book! Or if you must, at least, like, have something interesting to share, not this bizarre and baseless speculation.