Bi? Asexual? Gay? Who cares?

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'Research can be wrong'
But both Bailey and Bogaert say that a lot of this sort of thing is still up in the air. “We all need to be aware that research can be wrong,” Bailey cautioned me.

Remember Freud? Maybe future researchers will decide Bailey’s work is a crock. Maybe not. The science of this is still crude. We’re strapping guys in lab chairs, putting electric devices on their weenies and asking them to watch porn. It’s not exactly champagne, 400-thread-count sheets and Penelope Cruz.

And anyway, they are trying to describe, not prescribe. So why mass behind little Maginot Lines, stamp our feet, shake our fists and say, “I’m bi, bi, bi!” or “I’m straight, straight straight!”? That makes it so much easier for those who see any variation from their own preferences to demonize others as alien.

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If you say you’re an asexual, are perfectly happy being an asexual, why do you care what a psychologist thinks or I think or Pat Robertson thinks? If you’re bi, if you are ethical and tell potential partners (whose business it really is) you are bi, if you are happy being bi, why worry about what “bi” means?

Besides, I just don’t care if the barbershop has a big rainbow flag out front. I want to know if they can cut hair.

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A few years ago, I was researching a story and spent several days in a store owned by a gay man. One of his clerks was partially transsexual from male to female. She dated another partial transsexual, also male to female, who had undergone some surgery but not the full Monty. A helper in the store was also a gay male who had sometimes worked as a transvestite prostitute.

As Daffy Duck might say, this caused some pronoun trouble.

Lucky for me all these people had a sense of humor. Half the time, they joked, they weren’t sure what pronoun to use either. They told me to relax. Over succeeding days I grew to like all these people very much. They were, among other things, hilariously funny, and I admired the way they had carved out a family for themselves from what were very complex and often painful histories.

That’s all I needed to know. I never thought to ask them for definitions.

Brian Alexander is a California-based writer who covers sex, relationships and health. He is a contributing editor at Glamour and the author of "Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion" (Basic Books).

Sexploration appears every other Thursday.

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