I'm a Woman Who's Sleeping With a Gay Man (Yes, He's Still Gay)

For the past year, I’ve been having regular sex with a gay man I'll call Oliver. We were best friends for years, attending many Pride parades and taking weekend hiking trips. But last year, after a very drunken night, we slept together—and we still are today. He maintains that he still is, and always has been, a gay man.

After the first time, we were predictably awkward and British about it. We laughed a bit that it had happened, and then we agreed we shouldn’t do it again.

That lasted maybe three days. The first few months had all the expected exciting parts of sleeping with your best bud, but they were also tinged with this brand new fresh thing. Oliver had never been with a woman before, and he was completely unaware of what a vulva or a clitoris was. Fortunately, Oliver had the benefit of my feminist Orgasm Gap rants over the past five years, and took to the task of making me come with admirable tenacity. One of the sweetest moments of that year was finding the book She Comes First on his bedside table.

Men I’ve slept with before often have this false bravado around sex, like they need to prove how good they are at it. Sleeping with Oliver was the complete opposite. We both knew that he was doing something new, and our sex felt more like a comradic tutoring session. I would guide his hand around me, telling him which parts were which, and he would enthusiastically ask a lot of questions. What a treat.

While our sex lives have improved from being together, a year later I still feel nervous talking to my queer friends about our relationship. Even though sexual fluidity is now more accepted, I feel like I only hear it talked about in terms of straight people becoming bisexual or gay. I’ve never seen a representation of what Oliver and I have. I understand why: The only people who talk about gays “becoming straight” are extreme right-wingers. Evidence that gay men can want sex with women could be weaponized to suggest that being gay is just a phase, or that conversion therapy could actually work. People could take my story and use it to invalidate the experiences of queer folk. 

So I’m nervous to inadvertently fan the flames of scary anti-queer rhetoric. I haven’t told any other queers I know about me and Oliver, because I’m worried they’re going to say that I’m invalidating gay identities, and that I’m endangering queer people. Maybe they’re right.

Even though sexual fluidity is now more accepted, I’ve never seen a representation of what Oliver and I have.

But it also feels wrong to hide what Oliver and I have. The queer community is famous for their refusal to conform to traditional ideas of what sex, gender, and relationships “should” look like—and that’s exactly what Oliver and I are doing. Maybe other people have this arrangement, too? I would never know, because I’m too chickenshit to bring it up. Talking about it becomes harder when I don’t know how to label what we have. It’s so unusual that there isn’t even a term for it. Oliver and I love each other, and we say it all the time. We have a house and a cat together. We sleep in the same bed almost every night. He probably knows me better than anyone else, and I him. But he’s gay and I’m a woman—what do you even call that?

Over the last year I’ve pondered over how Oliver can be gay and still be attracted to me. He explains it by arguing that being a straight man is defined as loving women, plural. Being a bisexual man is defined as loving men and women. Again, both plural. Therefore, if a gay man were to be attracted to men, but only ever one woman, then he would still be gay. The woman he loves would be more like an asterisk. An exception.

I found this compelling, and it made me think about sexuality in a fresh way. His explanation also makes me feel extra-very special, so obviously I’m on board.  

The straight friends we tell about us ask: Are we going out? Are we fuckbuddies? Is it a situationship? Is he bisexual now? We respond that we’re just really, really good friends. Presumably the second “really” comes from having seen each other’s genitals. Our label mocks the traditional hierarchy of romantic love in a way that pleases me, while also allowing me to never feel the terror and discomfort of trying to figure out what we have. 

This situation is further complicated by our newfangled approach to monogamy. Oliver and I are polyamorous. Way before Oliver, it struck me that demonstrating your love for somebody by dictating who they’re allowed to have sex with seems at best really fucking weird and at worst controlling and quite scary. Despite this, I haven’t slept with anyone else while I’ve been with Oliver. Oliver, however, loves to see other people. 

I feel conflicted about him sleeping with other men (and it is only men). I often feel like I’m missing some crucial part of myself because I don’t feel very jealous—at least, not the type of jealousy portrayed in the movies. Instead, I feel a mixture of genuine happiness for Oliver and a quasi-rational fear that he will stop loving me, and then never speak to me again. 

I say “quasi-rational” because I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how our “really, really good friendship” will end. Or at least, the sex part. I am polyamorous with whomever I date. But Oliver, when dating men, is monogamous. Whatever we have will end either when one of us starts to hate the sound of the other one eating, or when Oliver meets a man he wants to monogamize.

This fills me with an odd sense of calm. In “proper” relationships, there’s the underlying idea that if your love is strong enough, then maybe you will be together forever. In the dating game, you are searching for The One. But Oliver and I are not each other’s Ones. Or at least, not in the sense of getting-married-having-babies-with-side-by-side-burial-plots type of Ones. I think that whatever we have will ebb and flow throughout our lives. Sometimes just friends, sometimes more.

I know that we’ll always know each other, and that seems more hopeful than anything I’ve had in my past relationships. For the time being, I feel lucky to have a really, really good friend.