Doctor, here are my symptoms: I am confused, I’m questioning my identity and ability to reason and my genitals are swelling up like an ocean wave at the sight of a hot chick. I feel like a teenage boy secretly beating it to his math teacher’s cleavage. Is there a Schoolhouse Rock episode that explains why I have the sudden urge to send a perfectly good hot dog back for a fish taco?

[media-credit id=20122 align=”alignnone” width=”250″][/media-credit] If I’m not a lesbian, what is happening to me? Why does it feel so natural to redirect my flirtation toward a woman at the slightest hint of curiosity? Maybe it’s because I write this column and want to prove to myself that I am as progressive and experimental as I urge all of you to be. Or perhaps, and this seems clearer to me every time I broach the subject, assigning a title to my sexuality no longer makes sense. If I am heterosexual and yet lust after women, even bisexuality doesn’t feel like the right fit. Now where’s the receipt for that Robert Pattinson blow-up love doll?

I used to think bisexuality was like a gateway drug. Surely swinging both ways could only be a temporary distraction on the way to the gay train. But this assumption also discriminated by gender. Swapping a beer-soaked kiss with my best friend to rev up some guy’s engine didn’t make me lesbian, but a guy who dabbles in dick was clear as gay. Though a man’s hairy asshole doesn’t seem like something I would think a straight-shooter would crave on the weekends after a few sake bombs too many, who am I to say that scoping out the playing field isn’t part of the heterosexual experience? Why are we constantly being told to come out of closets we were never trapped in?

For those of you who have never been acquainted, I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a scientist who studied human sexuality in the 1940s and ‘50s. One of his most well-known contributions is the Kinsey scale, which rates sexual orientation from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). What Kinsey suggested — which I firmly believe to be true — is that sexuality is not as black and white as the survey categories we’re used to squeezing ourselves into. I may be heterosexual with a rare tendency toward incidental homosexuality, or a homosexual who is almost equally attracted to partners of the opposite sex.

Ok, I’m boring myself just writing this. The point I’m trying to get across is that I would classify myself as a two and I think you should consider opening your mind to a new way of viewing your own sexuality. Maybe your straight road has a few more windy kinks in it than you thought.

Now that we’ve stripped our brains bare of limitations and conventions, maybe it’s time to remind all you swingers out there that with the rejection of borders comes the possible negligence of necessary boundaries. Just because you’re breaking free of your prescribed sexual identity doesn’t mean you can forget that when it comes to relationships, infidelity is infidelity, no matter what brand of genitalia your flavor of the week may possess. Unless your partner is involved, which is probably his fucking dream come true, a taste of twat is as potent as the scent of another man’s cologne on your dress.

So if you feel imprisoned by your supposed sexual identity and want to explore, ease into it. I’m sure vagina is an acquired taste, just like a fine wine or a conservative’s sense of humor. Just stay true to yourself and spit out anything you don’t like. You can’t dislike something you’ve never tried.

Bottom line is, saying I’m straight somehow implies that any experimentation I indulge in is crooked. If I don’t feel heterosexual, homosexual or even bisexual (since my tendencies toward each sex are hardly equal), maybe I’ll just settle with being, well, ambidextrous.