When I was growing up in Ireland there were straight people, who made up more or less everyone in my universe, and there were gay people. I thought of gay people as flamboyant, extroverted, easily identifiable. There was nothing in between: there was one way of being and then there was its opposite. This is why when I felt the desire to be close to girls, to touch and to know them, I didn’t understand the feeling as a crush because I knew I wasn’t what people called gay — I liked boys too, and more of them, so I had to be called straight.
Michael Amherst’s debut work, Go the Way Your Blood Beats, presses us to consider those labels. It’s a book that resists formal structure, a moving and intelligent reflection on categorisation and desire with bisexuality at its heart.
What could have been a dry work of theory is given life by lucid and beautiful writing, and the two elements at its heart: it’s querying spirit and James Baldwin inspired title (“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”). Interspersed throughout are excerpts of a first person memoir: letters to a lost lover that reveal the author’s very personal relationship with his subject.
“The book ended up being very different from what I’d originally imagined,” Michael told me, when we met at the British library. “I thought it would be a really traditional essay in which I would write about the Kinsey scale and the idea of spectrums and possibly even arguing that everyone is bisexual, which I’m now not sure is something I would agree with.
“As I was working on the pitch I received a phone call to tell me that my ex, Rudolph, had died. I thought, ‘I’ve got seven days to finish this pitch, it just isn’t going to happen’. But because he had informed so much of my understanding of sexuality, and was really such an inspiration to me in so many ways, I thought, no, if ever there was a reason to keep going, this is it.”
At the centre of the book, Amherst is making a case for us all to accept the fluidity of desire and attraction. He investigates the need to push everyone into strictly delineated categories based on the traditional binary of gay or straight. This need seems to look more absurd when it is viewed in his clear-eyed way. In the first pages, he details the media reception to Tom Daley’s announcement about his boyfriend to illustrate this.
“I expect that there may be some LGBTQ people of an older generation who will find the talk of fluidity and a rejection of labels threatening. But there are others too who may welcome it.”
“In 2013,” Amherst writes, “British Olympic diver Tom Daley released a YouTube video in which he announced that he was in a relationship with a man. He said he was attracted to both men and women, and simply wanted to make the fact of his relationship clear. The UK press termed this a “coming out” with Pink News, the UK’s largest LGBT news agency, using the headline: ‘Tom Daley comes out as gay’. This he had demonstrably not done.”
This reaction towards a man having a relationship with a man is typical. The widespread perception of bisexuality is that one must find members of both sexes equally attractive to adhere to its rules. Otherwise, in the case of men, you are presumed to be merely not yet brave enough to come out as gay. Conversely, women are often considered to be by-default straight and dabbling in bisexuality as a means of attention seeking, acting out, or simply performing for men. In either case, the idea seems to be that any association with a penis is somehow eternally definitive, and that sex without a penis is somehow not real.
When I think back on my own childhood and adolescence, these strict divisions stopped me from even acknowledging the possibility I might find other girls attractive. In school and into my early twenties there would be girls I felt a desire to be close to, to spend time with, to be physically near, but I never identified it as sexual attraction until I happened to move country and be in a context where nobody knew or presumed the parameters of my sexuality. Suddenly it was easy to be with women, because there was nobody around who knew me well enough to assume I wouldn’t. It’s reasons like these that I feel myself so sympathetic to this book’s arguments against labelling.
I wonder if Michael thinks that the determination to label each other based on sexual partners is something handed down to us, i.e. if it is to do with the vastly different experiences of LGBTQ people in past decades. I often think, when I feel myself tire of sexual labels, that it may be because I’ve grown up in a circumstance in which I am relatively free to behave and be as I please. I wonder if it is this privilege that allows me — and Michael — to resist labels.
“I expect that there may be some LGBTQ people of an older generation who will find the talk of fluidity and a rejection of labels threatening,” Michael responds, “But there are others too who may welcome it. I know people who feel far more categorical about themselves, for whom this book maybe won’t say much. I’m not so sure it is as simple as a generational thing. I suspect Rudolph, who taught me so much and who this book is for, really, would have disagreed with much of it. In the end I realised I could only assert how it is for me, and hope it has some resonance with others.”
While acknowledging that many people do indeed feel comfortable calling themselves gay, straight or bi, Go the Way Your Blood Beats lays bare the absurdity of communally policing one another’s desires by making assumptions. It’s a reminder that we don’t, and don’t have to, know the end of our stories before they happen; that we are not obliged to name everything we see; that the boundlessness of attraction and curiosity is a joyful thing.
Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On Truth, Bisexuality and Desire is out now.