Auntie SparkNotes: How Do I Convince My Boyfriend He’s Gay?

Dear Auntie,

I have recently accepted that I’m bisexual. It’s not something I feel the need to come out about because I am happy with my boyfriend and frankly don’t feel that who does or doesn’t turn me on is anybody’s business. Nonetheless, it took me a few years to work out for myself but I eventually realized that while I’m primarily attracted to men, I have the capacity to be attracted to women too.

I’m sharing this because I think my boyfriend is just like me. He is constantly making gay jokes and it’s gotten to the point of making some of his friends uncomfortable. He’ll joke about how good-looking his friends are or touch them for the sake of humor and it’s okay because he’s *obviously* joking around. He’s aware of it himself and it’s known that he can slide into the role of being gay when he’s drunk. He has a big personality to start with so everyone kind of accepts that this is his weird thing, while also joking all the time that he’s actually gay.

The thing is, I’ve tried to have honest conversations with him about this before and he gets despondent and somewhat offended, saying things like, “You really think I’m gay?” with his sad puppy eyes. Of course I try to explain to him that sexuality is a spectrum and there’s nothing wrong with having attractions to other genders (or your own), but he doesn’t like to hear it. It makes him uncomfortable. I don’t want to push or pry or anything. I’ve only brought it up a handful of times and I can take a hint when I should drop the conversation. It just makes me kind of sad that he thinks that way. Like he’s repressing a part of himself because of his own judgments, and he deals with it with a cocktail of coping mechanisms that seem clear as day to me: projection, sublimation, displacement—you name it, he’s rockin’ it.

While it could simply be that he has poor taste in humor and he’s sensitive to the topic from having been accused of being gay so often, I wish I could open up his mind to the possibility. I’m far more open-minded than he is with just about everything, and he has a hard time understanding things he can’t relate to (for example, we debated about transgender issues at length once because he couldn’t wrap his mind around the subject). I guess what I’m asking is if there’s another approach to opening his mind up? If not for himself, then just in general so he’s more sensitive to these kinds of issues? If he doesn’t want to consider his own sexuality that’s fine (although I think he’d be happier if he did take that mental journey, even if only to discover he is not romantically or sexually attracted to anyone other than women).

Let me just make sure I’m getting this, Sparkler: You’re convinced that your boyfriend would be happier if he’d only explore the possibility of being gay to your personal satisfaction—as opposed to, oh, I don’t know, being given the benefit of the doubt that he knows who he is and what he likes and doesn’t need to be poked about it every five minutes?

And he’s the one projecting?

[Insert five-minute pause here for some discreet face-to-keyboard contact.]

And look: of course it’s not impossible that your boyfriend really is something other than totally heterosexual, and that his touchy-feely jokester act when drunk is an expression of those otherwise unacknowledged desires. It’s also not impossible that he’s straight, but also hasn’t figured out how to comfortably live within the (let’s just be honest here) incredibly narrow parameters our culture permits for men to have fond, intimate, affectionate friendships with each other before one of them is contractually obligated to yell “NO HOMO!”, which is something a lot of guys struggle with, particularly when they’re young.

But regardless, for all the same reasons that we don’t subject our gay friends to intrusive and condescending and repeated questioning about whether they’re sure about their identities, you seriously need to stop presuming to know your boyfriend’s orientation better than he does, especially when he has made it abundantly clear that your fixation on it is upsetting him. How many times do you have to see the guy become “despondent and offended” in response to your insinuations before you do the decent thing, and stop making them? (Hint: Once should have been enough.) Not to mention that you’ll have a much better chance of getting your boyfriend to be sensitive to LGBT issues—if that’s really a problem, or causing problems for him—if you don’t make that conversation a referendum on his sexual orientation. If he’s alienating people, or upsetting you, then just say so: “I know you’re trying to be funny, but it actually really bothers me to hear you make jokes like that.” He doesn’t need to have an identity crisis to change the way he behaves.

But before you say that, please do this: think really, really, reeeeally hard about not just what you want to accomplish, but why. Why is it so important to you that your boyfriend consider the possibility that he’s gay? Why does he have to prove his open-mindedness by tolerating repeated, relentless interrogation about whether he really is who he thinks he is—and why does his desire to have his identity respected make you sad, of all things? (If one of your gay friends took exception to you repeatedly suggesting that he might actually be straight, would you find that similarly distressing? Why or why not?) And you talk an awfully big game about how open-minded you are, but tell me: how do you square that with your dogged inability to accept that your boyfriend thinks differently about his sexual orientation, and about LGBT issues in general, than you do? Is he really failing to understand your perspective, here—or is the real problem that you’re completely uninterested in understanding his?

Don’t get me wrong: if your boyfriend is actually doing something objectively inconsiderate or offensive, then there’s nothing wrong with alerting him kindly and directly to the effect he’s having on other people. But if the actual sum total of your complaint is that he’s thinking about this stuff all wrong, and won’t admit he’s gay no matter how much you harangue him about it (and sadly, given that you sent me this email under the subject “Sexuality Denial”, I suspect that it is), then sweet pea, he is not the problem. The problem is that you’re dating someone you neither trust nor respect, and treating him pretty terribly as a result. And if you can’t bring yourself to stop that—and to stop invalidating and dismissing his unhappiness because you’re convinced that you know him better than he knows himself—then please, break up with him so that he can find someone, of whatever sex, who will treat him right.

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