Bisexuality is now everywhere (and nowhere)

I’m not aware of knowing many bisexual people. Or indeed, off the top of my head, any bisexual people. Which is odd, really, because back in my student days you couldn’t move for them. Being bisexual was quite the thing. Or, at least, claiming to be was. The girls really dug it.

This was back in the mid-1990s, not long after the lead singer of a band called Suede, who is a man called Brett Anderson (married to a lady now; two kids) had declared himself ‘a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience’. That, at the time, was very much the sort of sexual identity that a trendy, bohemian young chap, of the sort I very much wanted to be, was supposed to be aspiring towards. Or, as Irvine Welsh had Renton put it in Trainspotting, ‘One thousand years from now, there won’t be any guys and there won’t be any girls, just wankers. Sounds all right to me.’

It wasn’t easy, though. For one thing, I wasn’t at all sure which men to pretend to fancy. Normally people overcompensate wildly in this sort of situation — as with closeted young men who put up posters of Pamela Anderson and suchlike — but if I’d claimed lust for, say, Sylvester Stallone, I’m not sure anybody would have believed me. The safe option was Johnny Depp. Everybody fancied Johnny Depp. He had big beautiful eyes and long hair and perfect cheekbones, although I wasn’t really sure what I’d actually want to do with him. It would have been so much easier if he’d had a vagina.