If you’re a bisexual, gay or sexually fluid man, there’s a good chance a therapist, a website or your own head has already told you your porn use is a symptom.

It usually comes as one of two stories, and neither is kind. Story one: you’re gay and in denial. Story two: you’re a porn addict whose habit has “escalated” into something weird. Either way, something about you is broken and needs fixing.

I’m a bisexual man, and I’ve lived some version of both stories. What I eventually figured out is that the categories were the problem, not me. This post is about why bisexual, gay and sexually fluid guys get the “sex addict” label tossed at them so easily, what the research does and doesn’t say about it, and why I think shame is doing most of the damage.

A short history of calling it a disease

For decades, bisexuality and homosexuality were treated as pathology, and homosexuality stayed on the list of mental disorders until the 1970s. For a long time the “treatment” was trying to change a person’s attractions. Those efforts didn’t work, and they did real harm, which is why major medical groups walked away from them.

Here’s where the “addiction” story comes in. Dr. David Ley, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist whose work I cite throughout my book, wrote in 2015 that when conversion therapy came under fire, some practitioners started describing same-sex attraction as a sex addiction instead. Different label, same goal. His blunt take: “It is unethical for licensed medical professionals to endorse the idea that homosexuality is an addiction.”

A fair note on that. It’s an opinion piece from a clinician, not a study, and he doesn’t cite the research behind some of his claims. But the logic is easy to follow. Take a normal variation in human sexuality, declare it a disorder, and sell the cure. If that sounds familiar, it’s the same move that gets run on porn.

What the numbers actually say

This is where I want to level with you, because the data is messier than a slogan.

Start with what Dr. Ley says in that same 2015 piece. He writes: “Study after study has demonstrated that same-sex attracted men are heavily overrepresented in sex addiction treatment.” He doesn’t name the studies in the article, but he’s a clinician who has spent his career in this field, and the claim fits the sociology and the history. It also lines up with what a national survey found a few years later.

In a national survey of 2,325 American adults, published in 2018, about 8.6 percent scored high enough on a scale of distress over “out of control” sexual urges to cross the researchers’ clinical cutoff. Bisexual, gay and lesbian respondents had roughly three times the odds of crossing it than straight respondents did. The authors pointed to minority stress, meaning the grind of living in a world that treats you as less than, as a plausible driver. They also noted that sexual minority people in the sample might have more partners or more access to sexual outlets, and that they couldn’t rule out the scale itself skewing the results.

Two cautions. The bisexual and gay groups in that sample were small, roughly a hundred bisexual and sixty gay or lesbian respondents. And a high score on a distress scale isn’t a diagnosis. It measures how bad someone feels about their sexual behavior, which brings us right back to shame.

Now the twist. A study of 546 mental health professionals gave each clinician a case about a client with compulsive sexual behavior and varied the client’s gender and orientation. The clinicians were less likely to pathologize the gay clients, not more. The researchers’ explanation was that a biological view of sexuality made clinicians more relaxed about it. That study tested gay and straight clients, and bisexual clients weren’t part of it, so nobody knows from that work whether bi men get the same pass.

So I’m not going to tell you every therapist is out to get you. What the evidence seems to support is narrower. Sexual minority men may report more distress about their sexual behavior and, by Dr. Ley’s account, show up in sex addiction treatment far more often than their numbers would predict. The label is sitting right there waiting for anyone who feels bad enough to reach for it.

Shame is the likelier culprit

I’ve written about this elsewhere on this site, and it keeps coming back to the same finding. Researchers like Joshua Grubbs have shown that how guilty a person feels about porn, and how strongly they disapprove of it, tracks closely with whether they call themselves addicted, sometimes more than how much they actually watch.

Sex researcher Justin Lehmiller found something similar in a survey of about 4,000 people. The amount of negative emotion someone attached to their favorite fantasy, things like guilt, shame and disgust, predicted more sexual problems. It didn’t matter what the fantasy was about.

Put those together and think about the guy who grew up hearing that wanting men was sinful, then discovers he does. Or the straight-identified guy who clicks on something he never expected to. They’re the ones carrying the heaviest load of “I shouldn’t want this.” That’s the same ingredient the research keeps pointing to, and it’s not the porn.

Bi guys can get squeezed from both directions, too. Dr. Ley has pointed out that the “you’re not really bi” pressure doesn’t only come from conservative circles. Liberal and sexually diverse communities sometimes run the same shaming playbook, which can push a guy to hide it even from the people who should be his people. Researchers Eric Anderson and Mark McCormack, who interviewed 90 openly bisexual men in the United States and United Kingdom for their 2016 book, describe stigma coming from both gay and straight communities as a recurring theme.

Desire doesn’t sort itself into boxes

In a 2017 interview with sex therapist Michael Aaron, Dr. Ley made a distinction that clears up a lot of panic: behavior, arousal and identity are three separate things. What you do, what turns you on and what you call yourself overlap, but they don’t have to match. Guys act on things they’d never build an identity around. Guys get turned on by things they never act on. His summary of the whole subject: “Bisexuality is not simple. It’s complex, contradictory, nuanced, and context-dependent.”

So if you catch yourself noticing the other man in a video, that’s information about arousal. It isn’t a verdict on your identity, and it sure as hell isn’t a symptom.

Research backs that up. Researcher Lisa Diamond presented findings from a survey of 159 women and 179 men in Salt Lake City, roughly equal numbers of bisexual, gay or lesbian and heterosexual participants. Among the straight men, about a quarter reported same-sex attraction in the past year, and about one in ten had same-sex contact. Among gay men, nearly one in three had recently been turned on by a female fantasy. Most of the men who had come out said they’d changed their identity label at least once.

I’m leaning on a blog summary of a conference presentation there, not a published paper, and it’s one city, so hold the exact numbers loosely. The pattern, though, matches what I keep hearing from guys. Attraction isn’t a light switch with two settings. It’s more like a dimmer, and where a particular man’s dial sits might not match any of the three or four labels the culture hands out.

There’s a real upside too. A review of the research on porn’s benefits, by researcher Emily Rothman, found selective positive links for some people, including greater self-acceptance among bisexual, gay, lesbian and other sexual minority people. Rothman is careful to warn against turning that into a blanket “porn is good” claim, and I’d say the same. But if a young man in a small town sees, for the first time, sex that looks like something he feels, that can matter.

The guys in the middle

Ritch Savin-Williams, a developmental psychologist at Cornell University, has spent years studying the territory between the boxes. In a 2012 survey of about 1,700 people recruited through Facebook ads (not a representative sample, so hold the percentages loosely), he and Zhana Vrangalova found that a five-category model fit the data better than the usual three: straight, mostly straight, bisexual, mostly gay or lesbian, and gay or lesbian. About 9 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women picked “mostly straight.” Plenty of people who chose an exclusive label weren’t exclusive in their attractions or their partners. Savin-Williams put the takeaway this way: “having more same-sex sexuality does not necessarily mean having less opposite-sex sexuality.” Two dials, not one slider.

A 2013 review of the research found that mostly straight people look like a distinct group. They have their own pattern of attractions, an orientation that stays fairly stable over time, and a label that feels meaningful to the people who use it. Dr. Ley points out that this group may be the largest sexual minority of all.

Then there’s the health side. A 2014 review of 60 studies across 22 datasets put mostly straight people at roughly 7 percent of adults, about 4 percent of men and 9 percent of women. Compared with straight people, they reported more depression, anxiety and body dissatisfaction, along with more victimization and weaker social connections. They did somewhat better than bisexual people on most measures, though the authors called that comparison tentative. Their explanations were stressful environments, victimization and thin social ties, plus the fact that there’s no visible “mostly straight” community to turn to. That’s a general health finding, not a porn finding, but it rhymes with everything above. When guys sit between the boxes with nowhere to belong, distress tends to follow.

In his 2017 book Mostly Straight, built on the stories of about 40 young men, mostly Cornell students, Savin-Williams goes further and argues that more young men now call themselves mostly straight than call themselves bi or gay combined. I couldn’t find figures behind that claim, so file it under “worth watching” and not “settled.” One reviewer also noted that the sample was mostly white, middle class and college educated, and wondered how new the category really is. Still, if you call yourself straight but your attraction doesn’t always stay in its lane, this is probably your neighborhood. It’s close to what a lot of guys mean by heteroflexible.

Guys also get to the middle by different roads. Dr. Ley says sociologist Eric Anderson and Mark McCormack have proposed a long list of bisexual subtypes (he puts it around 34, and I couldn’t find the typology itself, so treat the count as his summary). Two he mentions are situational bisexuality, where otherwise straight men have sex with men in places where women aren’t around, prison being the classic example, and gay for pay, where men do porn with other men while identifying as straight. Neither one is a diagnosis. Both are reminders that behavior and identity are different things.

What the research can’t see yet

Some of the numbers Dr. Ley rattles off in that interview show how much of the map is still blank. He cites a British survey in which 49 percent of millennials said they weren’t entirely heterosexual. He also gives rates of same-sex experience of about 17 percent for women and 6 percent for men, with roughly 6 percent of women and 2 percent of men identifying as bisexual. He doesn’t name the studies in the interview, so read those as his summary of the field, not one dataset. Even so, the gap between experience and identity is the interesting part. A lot more people act on same-sex attraction than claim the label, and that’s before you count the guys who never tell a researcher a damn thing.

That gap matters when you hit the less flattering claims. Dr. Ley also describes research, again unnamed, suggesting bisexual women report higher libido than bisexual men, and that the highest-drive men tend to get filed as “very gay” or “very straight” instead of landing in the middle. I’d hold that loosely, and here’s why. The science on bisexuality is still young and thin. Many bi men, maybe most, never come out, call themselves something else, or haven’t figured out that they’re bi at all, because bisexuality is taboo enough that most of us stumble through it alone. Researchers can only study the men who show up, and that’s likely a narrow slice of the bi men who actually exist. Savin-Williams describes the same problem for mostly straight men: “We don’t have ‘mostly straight’ symbols and marches, so it’s a somewhat hidden identity.” Hidden groups are hard to count. If the guys in the data skew toward certain types, then findings about libido, or about bi men looking secretly gay or straight to the experts, may say more about who got counted than about bi men as a whole. That’s my reasoning, not a finding, but it seems a fair caution.

One more idea from Dr. Ley, which he presents as a developing theory and not settled science: men’s erotic templates may be more rigid than women’s, which tend to stay more fluid across a lifetime. If that holds on average, it could help explain why bisexual men are so hard to find in surveys and so often labeled gay or straight. It also sits in some tension with the Diamond numbers above, where plenty of men weren’t rigid at all. Both can be true. An average difference between men and women says little about any one guy, and the men who show flexibility in a survey may be the ones the labels fit worst. Dr. Ley is also upfront that binary models don’t fit everyone.

If this sounds like you

A few things I’d tell a friend.

  1. You don’t owe anybody a label. Not a coming-out speech, not a tidy explanation. You’re allowed to notice something about yourself and let it be what it is.
  2. Run the two-question test. Is this costing me something I actually value right now, and do I keep doing it anyway? If the honest answer is “no” and “no,” you’re probably dealing with shame, not a problem. My free Habit vs. Problem Test walks through it in about two minutes, and Am I a Porn Addict? explains why a late-night quiz is a poor way to find out.
  3. Watch for the cure pitch. If any provider frames same-sex attraction as an addiction to be fixed, or promises to change your orientation, walk out. That’s the history above repeating.
  4. Interview your therapist. If you want help, look for a certified sex therapist, with credentials from the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) at aasect.org. Ask what they believe about porn and about sexual orientation before you book.

None of this means nobody struggles. Some men, bi, gay or straight, really do feel out of control, and the World Health Organization lists compulsive sexual behavior disorder in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision (ICD-11), filed under impulse control rather than addiction. If that’s you, get real help. The point is that “I’m struggling” and “my attractions are an addiction” are two very different sentences.

In my book, Chapter 7 has a short section I call the bisexual asterisk, and it sits next to a bigger idea: your turn-ons aren’t a character reference. If you’re tired of apologizing for what you want, you can find it here.

Get the book and the bonuses here.

The short version

Same-sex attraction was once called a disease, and the “addiction” label has been used as a sequel. The numbers show real distress among some sexual minority men, but they point at minority stress and shame more than at porn. Your attractions don’t have to fit a box, and they don’t need a cure. As Dr. Ley puts it, “What matters is how you do it, who you are, and who you choose to be.”

This post is general education, not medical or mental health advice.

Sources

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Trey Lyon

Trey Lyon is a sex educator and the author of No More Porn Shame. He's not a therapist, and nothing here is medical advice. If something is really costing you, talk to a certified sex therapist.