Noted NY Times Columnist Explains Why He Does Not Want To Be Called Bisexual

Charles M. Blow, a popular New York Times op-ed columnist who also appears on CNN, says that calling him bisexual doesn’t come close to describing who he is — and nearly ruined his life.

In an eloquent and deeply-moving revelation, veteran New York Times visual Op-Ed columnist Charles M. Blow explains why the term bisexual, for him, is “woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate.”

In his soon-to-be released memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Blow writes that “while the word ‘bisexual’ was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations.”

But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate. It reduced a range of identities, unbelievably wide and splendidly varied, in which same-gender attraction presented in graduated measures — from a pinch to a pound — to a single expression. To me it seemed too narrowly drawn in the collective consciousness, suggesting an identity fixed precisely in the middle between straight and gay, giving equal weight to each, bearing no resemblance to what I felt. In me, the attraction to men would never be equal to the attraction to women — in men it was also closer to the pinch — but it would always be in flux . . .

Blow explains how his battle with his sexuality almost ruined him.

In addition to being attracted to women, I could also be attracted to men. There it was, all of it. That possibility of male attraction was such a simple little harmless idea, the fight against which I had allowed to consume and almost ruin my life. The attraction and my futile attempts to ‘fix it’ had cost me my dreams. The anguish, combined with a lifetime of watching hotheads brandishing cold steel, had put me within minutes of killing a man. . . .

A single father of three living in Brooklyn, Blow has spent most of his professional career at the Times. His work “led The Times to a best of show award from the Society of News Design for the Times’s information graphics coverage of 9/11,” his biography at the paper notes.

Blow’s NY Times columns are often poignant, insightful, and incisive. 

 

Hat tip: Eliel Cruz at The Advocate and Richard Prince at the Maynard Institute
Image: Google+