How Male Bisexuality Got Cool

From TV bromances to political man crushes, male bisexuality has gone mainstream. But is it a sign of true sexual attraction—or just an act?

Last year, when Charles Forman, the 29-year-old heterosexual founder of the popular gaming Web site I’m In Like With You, was caught on camera holding hands with 22-year-old Tumblr founder David Karp (also straight), the first thing he did was send the photo to the gossip blog Gawker. “Did you see the gay picture?” he instant-messaged the Web site, which then posted an entire photo montage of the two boys in various states of PDA. Forman then linked back to the montage from his own blog.

“He wasn’t the typical macho straight guy,” says one woman of her bisexual boyfriend. “I got off on it.”

The whole episode had more than a whiff of publicity seeking. (Gawker calls Karp and Forman “fameballs.”) Still, the very fact that the pair of Internet wunderkinds decided that cultivating a mystique of bisexuality could help their careers says something about the moment we’re living in. “Why would any straight guy call a press conference to announce his bisexual inclinations, unless the whole thing was intended as a joke?” asks Ron Suresha, editor of Bi Men: Coming Out and Bisexual Perspectives on Kinsey. “I don't know why these famehounds claim to be bisexual, but they don't set off my ‘bi-dar’ one whiff. While I'm hopeful that their posed bisexuality is a harbinger of a new generation of heterosexual men who are actually willing to face their bi desires, from a distance this photo-op male ‘bonding’ seems completely contrived.”

Still, whereas bisexual women had their fling with pop culture in the 1990s—when everyone from Drew Barrymore to Madonna messed around with women, not to mention the famous Vanity Fair cover showing Cindy Crawford shaving k.d. lang—“bromances” are now the driving force behind Hollywood comedies and Style section features, as men find more ways to play for both teams, or at least act like they do.

Examples are everywhere. In John Hamburg’s recent movie, I Love You, Man, the gay guy who unwittingly goes on a date with Paul Rudd isn’t just played for laughs, but to some degree, sympathy. This summer will also see Lynn Shelton’s buzzed-about Humpday, in which two straight male friends decide to make a homemade porn video. And Brody Jenner’s reality show Bromance blurs the line separating friendship and attraction in what Videogum’s Gabe Delahaye calls “basically the gayest thing ever, made more gay by everyone's desperate attempts to provide chest-bumping proof of their heterosexuality.”

The term “man crush”—which, like bromance, connotes a male relationship that resides somewhere between platonic and romantic—is already this year’s official media catchphrase. “Rams GM Devaney Has a Man Crush on Eugene Monroe” gossips manlier-than-thou NFLGridironGab.com. “Warren Buffett’s Chinese Man Crush” titters the headline on a Business Insider profile of CEO Wang Chuan-Fu. And while it’s not all that surprising to find Newsday’s music critic proclaiming his “man-crush renewed” after a Seal concert, it’s less expected in a Boston Globe story about President Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy, or in an AOL News piece about the King of Saudi Arabia. 

It’s an emerging version of male bisexuality that’s more pose than sincere. The celebrities who engage in it take pains to make it clear they’re straight—half-ironically goofing around, often as a blatant grab for attention. But the fact that they’re even taking it that far is something new. Take Jimmy Kimmel’s 2008 YouTube sensation “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck,”  created in response to his then-girlfriend Sarah Silverman’s “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” video. Five years ago, few male celebrities went there, and the ones who did were often already branded as outsiders, like Michael Stipe. Now, the most mainstream of leading men clamor to act bi for the camera.