Darren Hayes on Jessie J: ‘Role model – an impossible job title’

In his latest column for attitude.co.uk, Darren Hayes discusses the hornet’s nest Jessie J poked last week when she revealed she no longer identifies as bisexual…

One day last week I woke up to the Twitstorm of online outrage about Jessie J. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, I’m referring to the fact she had expressed in an interview and clarified in more detail on Twitter that she no longer identified as bisexual. It was a ‘phase’, she explained. The comments proved inflammatory to many.

Now the dust has settled a bit I thought it might be helpful to have a look at the situation from an obtuse angle: one of understanding and compassion.

I will admit when I got my head around the situation I was shocked. Not by Jessie J’s admission but by the level of vitriol directed at her by some of the LGBT community. The gist seemed to be that she’d deceived us, or that she’d failed as a role model. The truth is I think Jessie J was trying to be honest and it’s a shame that bravery has been shrouded by an awkward delivery.

Of course Jessie J’s word choices were unfortunate. In subsequent comments defending her words, she appeared to dig an even deeper hole for herself by using verbs like ‘choose’ to describe how one might identify their sexuality.

The most unfortunate part of all of this is I genuinely don’t believe she intended to offend anyone, yet she has inadvertently poked a hornet’s nest. It’s a shame because at the heart of her revelations was an opportunity to have an honest discussion about bisexuality. It was also an opportunity to discuss that for some people, orientation doesn’t neatly fit in to a box.

We live in an era where sexuality is a preference on a drop-down menu.

It’s a generation where every tweet is cached, every comment potentially immortal on YouTube. An era where every awkward moment or blunder is streamable forever. Celebrity is a culture of soundbites and boxes and ironically Jessie J was trying to get out of a box she had constructed for herself, perhaps innocently, years before.

I don’t care to get into the semantics of Jessie’s J’s word choices. I genuinely believe they were made in naivety but I sense her intention was not at all to discredit bisexuality – even though some of her comments seemed to mirror the arguments of those who have often ignorantly described any sexual variance as one of choice. I think Jessie J was describing her own experience of experimentation as confusion. Weirdly I identify with her experience.

As a man who is gay yet was once married to a woman, I do not consider myself bisexual. I know sometimes that confuses some people but my journey has been pretty well documented in Attitude. It took me a long time to accept myself. Did I love women? Yes. Did I fantasise about having sex with women? No. I never really did. But I enjoyed sex with women at the time. When I fell in love with my best friend at University, it was a spiritual connection and there was a lot of love but I avoided the deeper truth that I was sexually attracted to men. Prior to getting married to a woman I didn’t have sex with a girl until I was almost 19, which was not the behaviour of my red-blooded heterosexual male friends. I made excuses about how I wanted to wait for marriage, or how I ‘respected’ girls. I did. But I was also terrified of sex. So I focused on the parts of relationships I could understand: the emotions, romance and intimacy. When I lost my virginity I discovered sex with a woman was beautiful. It was spiritual, deep and real. But it was a substitute for me.

I’ve never been one of those gay men who are repulsed by the idea of sex with women. From my point of view, skin is skin. Perhaps that was Jessie J’s experience. For me the truth serum was the nudie magazine test. To put it rather bluntly: show me a magazine of naked men or naked women and only one of them makes me hard. Make sense? Good. But you’d be surprised how long it took me to admit that to myself and how much easier life was once I knew the results.

Last week was the 19th year anniversary of the day I married a woman. My ex-wife messaged me on Facebook to reminisce about our wedding day. We are still dear friends and though it was a painful period when we divorced we’ve both more than moved on. Neither one of us consider that I was fraudulent for having been in that relationship or bisexual because I’m now married to a man. We understand that we were young, I was very confused and it took me a while to work out who I was.

I didn’t describe my time with women as a ‘phase’ but then again, I didn’t think of it that way. I saw those as relationships I had when I hadn’t finished growing up yet.

There’s a nasty insinuation about bisexuality – that it’s a state of denial on the way to being gay. For a number of people, maybe thinking you are bisexual is a transitional state on the road to your own understanding. But for many people being bisexual is a permanent reality sometimes marred by negative perceptions and ignorant presumptions. Perhaps that’s why Jessie’s J’s comments cut so deeply for some. No one chooses their sexuality. It dawns on them and perhaps this is what happened with Jessie J.

What I’ve learned in my experience is there are no absolutes. If the Kinsey scale has taught us anything it’s that when it comes to sexuality there really is no black or white. There is only a spectrum of greys upon which the majority of us identify strongly with one polarity or the other. Some people sit somewhere in the middle and that’s also completely normal!

Where I feel for Jessie J is that her initial admission to having dated women was an honest confession. She was labeled bisexual and she felt the need to clarify differently in subsequent years. It would have been easier for her to lie but she chose to be brave. Regardless of how she identifies today I do believe her intentions were in the pursuit of honesty. I hope people can move on from this and allow her the opportunity to understand why her words struck such a negative chord. But surely we can accept that those words can be separated from her intentions. I’ve said and done plenty of things I regret in and out of my public life. We all have. The fact of the matter is Jessie J was not required to let anyone inside her journey at all. Yet she did. If in five years time, she announces she was confused about these recent statements and that she now identifies as something other – then so be it. That’s her truth and if we are a community of any tolerance we must support honestly and bravery above all else. No more boxes.

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