Bisexual men, invisibility and chemsex spaces

There is a particular kind of invisibility that bisexual men describe that I want to start with, because without it the rest of this piece does not fully make sense.

It is not the invisibility of being closeted, of having your sexuality unknown to the people around you. Many of the bisexual men I work with are out, at least partially. Their sexuality is known. And they are still invisible, in a way that is different from and in some respects harder to address than the invisibility of being closeted.

Being visible as a person and invisible as a bisexual person.

Bisexuality is disbelieved. Not always explicitly, not always with hostile intent, but consistently and from multiple directions. Straight people often treat it as a phase or as incomplete coming out. Some gay men treat it as a failure of commitment, a hedge, a convenient ambiguity. The cultural scripts available for bisexual experience are thin. The community structures that exist for gay men, the scene, the apps, the social world, were largely built around a binary that bisexuality does not fit. And the result is a specific and often unnamed experience: being out and still unrecognised. Being visible as a person and invisible as a bisexual person.

You cannot work through shame about an identity that no one around you is willing to recognise as real.

This invisibility matters for the work because it is one of the specific stressors known to be particularly damaging for gay and bi men. External stigma is harmful. Internalised stigma is harmful. But the particular harm of invisibility is that it removes the conditions in which either can be addressed. You cannot work through shame about an identity that no one around you is willing to recognise as real.

The bisexual male experience in clinical work

Bisexual men arrive in this work with a specific configuration of experience.

Many have had sexual and romantic lives that span both same-sex and different-sex relationships, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in different periods of their lives. That complexity is rarely simple to navigate and almost never simple to talk about. Partners may not know the full picture. Friends may know part of it. The man himself may carry significant uncertainty about how to understand his own desire, not because bisexuality is inherently confusing but because the available frameworks for understanding it are so inadequate.

The shame bisexual men carry tends to have multiple sources. There is the broader cultural shame around same-sex desire that gay men also carry. There is the specific shame of bisexual erasure, of having an identity that is not taken seriously. And there is often an additional layer: the shame of having kept different parts of their sexual lives separate from each other, of having operated in compartments, of having presented different versions of themselves to different people. That compartmentalisation is a common response to an identity that does not fit available categories. It is also a direct structural precursor to the kind of double life that is one of the most consistent features of compulsive sexual behaviour presentations.

Where chemsex enters the picture

Chemsex, in the clinical experience of working with bisexual men, often operates as a solution to several problems simultaneously.

For bisexual men who are not fully out, chemsex spaces, which are primarily gay male spaces, offer a context in which same-sex desire can be expressed without that expression being integrated into a wider identity or a wider life. The session is contained. What happens there is not required to be consistent with what the man presents elsewhere. The drugs lower the threshold for that compartmentalisation, reduce the anxiety that might otherwise make it difficult, and produce an experience of acceptance and belonging that is not available in other contexts.

For bisexual men who are out but who still carry the specific loneliness of bisexual invisibility, chemsex spaces can offer something else: a community of men who are openly sexual, where the complexity of desire is at least partially more legible than in mainstream straight social contexts. Even if bisexuality itself is not explicitly represented or celebrated, the gay male sexual culture of these spaces can feel closer to somewhere a bisexual man belongs than the straight social world that does not acknowledge his same-sex desire at all.

In both cases, the chemsex environment is doing something beyond providing a sexual experience. It is providing a context. A temporary resolution to the problem of not having a stable, recognised, community context for a significant part of who you are.

The specific risks for bisexual men

The risks that accumulate around chemsex are the same for bisexual men as for gay men: the pharmacological risks of the substances, the exposure to sexually transmitted infections (STIs), the escalation of the pattern, the way the social world can narrow around the chemsex circuit.

But there are additional dimensions for bisexual men that are worth naming.

The compartmentalisation that made chemsex feel manageable tends to become harder to maintain over time. The session that was supposed to be contained begins to generate consequences that are not: health events that require explanation, financial costs that become visible, emotional states in the aftermath that affect how the man shows up in the rest of his life. The wall between the chemsex world and the rest of life develops cracks, and the anxiety around those cracks can itself become a driver of further use.

For bisexual men in relationships with women, the specific fear of disclosure is often acute. Not only the disclosure of the behaviour, but the disclosure of the identity that the behaviour has been expressing. The two cannot always be separated, and the anticipated response to the identity can feel even more frightening than the anticipated response to the behaviour. The result is often a deepening of the silence and a deepening of the compartmentalisation, which is a deepening of the conditions that make the pattern harder to address.

What the work holds

The work with bisexual men does not begin from the assumption that bisexuality is the problem. It begins from the recognition that bisexuality has been inadequately supported, inadequately seen and inadequately accommodated by the structures that exist, and that the behaviour that has become compulsive is a comprehensible response to that inadequacy rather than evidence of something fundamentally disordered about the man.

The specific work involves several things that are not always present in more generic approaches. Making the full identity legible: creating a space where the bisexual experience is neither doubted nor simplified, where the complexity of having desire that spans more than one gender is held without the pressure to resolve it into something neater. Addressing the compartmentalisation: not by forcing a particular kind of integration or disclosure, but by helping someone understand what the compartments are costing them, and what a different relationship to their own complexity might look like. By addressing the invisibility directly: naming it as a real and specific harm, rather than treating bisexual experience as a minor variation on gay experience that does not require its own clinical attention. If this describes your experience, or the experience of someone you support, Time To Talk About Sex offers six-month group therapy for men with compulsive sexual behaviour (CSB), with up to 100 free places. Information about applying is at the applications page of this site. Saunas, chillouts and the gay sex scene provides more context on the community function of the spaces that bisexual men often enter first, and Growing up gay or bi: the stress driver explains the stress underneath all of this.