Dear Straight People: I’m Sorry I Didn’t Believe In You, and I Promise To Do Better (Satire)
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Dear Straight People:
I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you, and I promise to do better. I’ve decided on this occasion of Atlanta’s LGBTQIA+ Pride festival weekend to pursue inner growth, and to share with readers today my solemn promise: going forward, I’m going to accept the existence of straight people.
You see — I’m sorry to confess this, but — I’ve always kind of walked around with the presumption that everyone was at least a little bit bisexual. It’s only natural, I thought. I grew up with ‘straight’ parents and other family members, but I always thought this must be situational — that my heterosexual family members must just not have been put in the right situation. In finding someone on the hetero-binary to spend their lives with, they took away their opportunity to explore their sexuality in other ways — so how would they know?? Clearly, they must have had something in their past experiences or childhoods that led their attraction to be focused in limited ways. Under this logic, being straight wasn’t them, it was just their behavior, which I was sure could be changed under the right conditions.
In the corner of personal-network evidence, I’ve met a number of people for whom I presumed a pattern existed that may apply to the general public — that old anecdotal fallacy, I now recognize. In voicing my secret presumption to people I’ve had connections with over the years, I’ve heard confessions of a few ‘straight’ men who have had sexual incidents in their past with other men, as well as similar confessions from young ‘straight’ women on nights of feeling experimental. Additionally significant in my personal network, when I grew up, one of my favorite uncles who I had always been told was gay confessed that he actually had a slight 10% occasional performances with women in his life; that he was technically bisexual — or perhaps, at least, homoflexible — even with his predisposition to men. I was vindicated. I knew it! 100% just didn’t exist in sexuality scales. Everyone must be in between — at least a little — and just in denial.
The most comprehensive studies on sexuality seemed to reflect this, too. Despite an oft-cited study stating that only 4.5% of the population is gay or lesbian, my…