Self-identification is often a struggle because identities are complex and shifting, confused by definition and political intent, but for the sake of an About, here goes:

Sexuality-wise (which in relation to the heteronormative mainstream draws with it an inherent  politicisation) I would reference as a queer man who has sex with men (MSM) with bicurious aspirations:

The queer aligns with that dissident political sexual identity that attempts to posit sexuality beyond the neatly de-marked or designated, but has become a designation within itself. It is placed in conjunction to inform the MSM coda which has be drawn as apolitical, beyond the politicisation of sexual identity yet is also innately dissident politically as the writing of a sexual practice beyond a sexual identity, such as is used with MSM, implies an understanding of the continual tie between the political and the sexual.

By refuting the gay, bi or queer designations for same-sex sexual activity, MSM speaks to those who step into same-sex sex whilst attempting to maintain the societally valued heterosexist and patriarchal identity of ‘straight man’ and the power benefits gained therein. I acknowledge, and occasionally revel in, the classist and classic signifier man with all its patriarchal significance and loading of power and privilege with regard to having sex with men (those equally identified, characterised and signified with power) whilst at the same time refusing to endorse such auspices of power that men maintain within patriarchal society. Simultaneously using sex with men as a way to underscore the privilege in male power whilst at the same time subverting it through the disintegration of that identity within the context of same-sex sex. Is a man who has sex with men ever a man having sex with men?

Bicurious aspirations refers to the binary nature of the 70’s and 80’s hostility towards sexual fluidity and development within a pathologically oppositional sexual self, where an individual must be resolutely stratified in extremes of either heterosexual or homosexual. Without the fluidity of sexual self realisation, more common but still far from common today, the bicurious aspiration relates to a sense of sexual self beyond that conditioned binary towards a more fluid form yet one that is rarely realised in the sexual interest or eroticisation of the non-male-gendered personhood or object, from fem to female.

Sometimes, I’m forced by the constraints of time and situation to simply say “I’m gay” even if it does grate like fingernails down a chalkboard.