u/Gasoline_Theobromine

TW: Mentions of childhood trauma and depressing thoughts.

As a closeted gay man in Russia, I have a painful trigger toward bisexual men. I really want to hear your perspective.

Body:

Hello everyone. I’m sharing this story not with Russia, but with the rest of the world. It’s deeply important for me to be heard. I’m a 30-year-old gay demisexual man living hidden in a very conservative society. To protect my safety, I have to pretend to be asexual, which makes me feel like a ghost in my own country.

I have a heavy psychological trigger. Whenever I see a bisexual man showing deep tenderness, affection, and safety to a woman, a painful wave of envy and heartbreak wakes up inside me. Part of my brain knows it’s just an illusion, but it still crushes my mind. At the same time, I want to emphasize: I absolutely do not hate bisexuals. I understand that orientation, fidelity, and responsibility are completely different things.

It's just that in Russia, it’s almost impossible to find a man who openly says he is gay. But men who say they are bisexual are just much more common if you start looking. That's why I'm talking about this. The probability of finding a future relationship for me is way higher with a bisexual man, and that's exactly what sparks my fear.

This trigger is a toxic knot made of a few things:

Childhood trauma: My mother abandoned me for men when I was a kid. In my subconscious, the female sphere became linked to chaos and loss of stability. When I see a man voluntarily giving his warmth to a woman, my inner child feels a double betrayal.

Starvation for warmth: I got into a relationship at 18. We have been together for 13 years. After his infidelities, we tried to fix things, but now it’s completely cold between us, and we only have intimacy once a year. I'm left without protection and love.

Fear of the environment: A gay man is trapped in the closet with me. But a bisexual man has a "legal passport" out of our shared prison. I am terrified that under societal pressure, a bisexual partner would eventually choose the "traditional scenario" for social approval, go back to a woman, and leave me abandoned.

Envy of the future: I feel a deep envy that a bisexual man can legally have a wife and kids. I will most likely never have children, and realizing this is very depressing.

For me, a bisexual man has the key to the safe fortress I want, but his door to the world of my trauma is always open. I don’t need manuals or advice on how to fix my life. I just really need human validation, understanding, and some genuine warmth.

If you are a bisexual man, especially in a same-sex relationship, how do you handle this social pressure? Can a bisexual partner truly offer a safe, exclusive fortress? I would love to read your thoughts in the comments.

!TW: Mention of past suicidal thoughts at age 15, and non-consensual sexual contact! Possible minor NSFW details in the text!

Hello, Everybody! I am sharing this story not with Russia, but with the rest of the world. It was incredibly important for me to not only share my difficult childhood and traumas, but also to provide a detailed description of my interests, hobbies, and personality, so that you can see and understand who I am from a variety of perspectives.

I am 30 years old, I am gay, demisexual, I live in Russia. I have a lot of energy, charisma, and I can stand up for myself with my word (I don't know how to fight), and I don't reach into my pocket for it. I don't pretend to be holy. I'm an ordinary person, and the Russian mat is literally in my blood. When necessary, I can swear very strongly and sharply in rude Russian. I know about the flaws of my body, but I don't consider myself ugly I am a very charming person, I have blonde hair and blue eyes. I'm small, I have an Egyptian foot. I can be sloppy in some small things, but I clearly know my responsibilities: I am an excellent cook, I know how to clean the house and I strictly observe hygiene. I have been working in the office in a medical chat for more than three years and I sincerely love my job I get great pleasure analyzing a huge layer of complex medical information in various fields. I work as a hairdresser in my spare time. I've been left-handed since birth, but for some reason I only cut my hair with my right hand I can't do it with my left. According to the zodiac sign, I am Virgo, but internally I feel more like a fiery Sagittarius. My brain is uniquely designed: I remember a huge number of things, thousands of frames are stored in my memory, even the most insignificant ones. I can open the calendar and remember any, even the most insignificant situation from the past, up to the time of the year.

I have very diverse interests. I am madly in love with cats (we have two of them now). I don't dislike dogs at all, I even sincerely feel sorry for them, because they are very attached to people. But at the same time, I'm afraid of them: as a child, two large puppies suddenly attacked me from the bushes. As they explained to me later, they just wanted to play, and no one bit me, but I was very scared. My only favorite dog breed is the collie. When I was a child, my mother told me that they were very kind dogs, and it was forever imprinted in my head.

I love playing Sims, Mario, Disco Elysium and even World of Warships. My favorite sport is badminton, and I also really like swimming pools and saunas. I can watch both deep, complex films and absolutely dumb comedies with equal interest. I love discovering new places, I deeply love painting and architecture I like Gothic, Romanesque and classical styles equally much. My favorite artists are Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Mikhail Vrubel and Konstantin Vasiliev (Vasiliev, in my opinion, was especially amazing and good at painting trees there is an incredible atmosphere in his landscapes). When I have time, I enjoy reading books (my favorites are "Jane Eyre", "1984", "Dead Souls", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "Dracula"). I also really like alternative history, and I'm always open to a wide variety of points of view.

I love different music, especially from the USA and Europe of the 80s-90s, and I really like to listen to it on physical media on audio cassettes and CDs. My main idol since 2008 is Lady Gaga, although I am a restrained and not an expressive fan. Yes, I know that in the beginning she had a lot of simple and frivolous songs, but in fact she is a deep, incredibly multifaceted artist, and over the years she has proved it with a vengeance. She's not perfect either, but she's a real person. At one time, it was she who gave me a strong desire to move on, and the thought of her literally kept me from suicide at the age of 15. I also really like Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer, Madonna, Elton John, Def Leppard, Duran Duran, Roxette, Led Zeppelin, Bee Gees and so on. I have a bit of mannerism in me, but at the same time there is also a purely masculine audacity: over the years I realized that I don't have my own ready-made fortress, and only I can stand up for myself. But at the same time, to be completely honest, I would really like to show more femininity in myself that gentleness and refinement that I simply cannot afford in our rigid patriarchal society.

I like big hairy men, and now I'm not shy about it at all. I also like guys with big Greek or Roman feet. I used to think it was ugly, but now I even see it as very beautiful. At the same time, having huge muscles is not important to me at all, but men who are too fat are also not my thing. My truth in terms of partner's build lies somewhere in the middle. It is important to understand that it was women who raised me, trained me, and were and still are my main mentors. Women's beauty and mentality are not a mystery to me, I perfectly find a common language with many of them. Because of this easy, close friendship, other men have been jealous of their women about 20 times all the time. At the same time, I have no dislike for sex on the contrary, I really like it, and with all my heart I would like to fully engage in it with my loved one. I also like oral sex. I'm incredibly close to the idea of rubbing against each other, exploring each other's bodies and not being afraid of any physical flaws. In my intimate life, I like to give oral pleasure to my partner, but for myself I prefer anilingus. I really like dirty talk during intimacy, and I know that I'm really good at it.

I've always wanted to be myself, and I've paid a high price for it, because it's hard to be yourself in a country like this. But I needed this inner freedom from double standards and hypocrisy. My unwillingness to openly say that I am gay, where I live, is an established, fully conscious and adult choice. During all this time, I confessed my orientation to only two people: my second cousin, with whom I have been in close contact for more than 20 years, and my friend, with whom I have been friends for more than 10 years. I tell everyone else that I'm asexual (if asked). Calling myself bisexual for the sake of a cover is like a blow to my head. And it's not about hate at all, but the fact that I physically cannot romantically bind a woman to my image. For me, even at the stage of reflection, it looks like betrayal: to betray myself and betray her this hypothetical woman whom I would simply deceive. It's better to let people think that I don't like anyone at all. I do not know if this decision was completely correct, but thanks to him, I just stopped asking questions. At the same time, it is important to understand that the vast majority of people in Russia know nothing at all about other orientations, except for the four basic letters: gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals. In normal cases, you even have to explain what "asexual" is in conversation, and talking about demisexuality here is completely pointless no one will understand you. But at the same time, I remained true to myself in the main thing I chose a man, as I originally intended. Maybe it happened when I was 18, but I needed it. Yes, I'm still hiding and not talking about it openly. But I was, am, and will remain myself until the very end. I would like to live in a society where I would be truly free. I can't know for sure, it's just my guesses, but I feel like being there, at least subconsciously, makes me feel better.

I don't hate this world and I don't hate my hard-working family or those around me. Now I don't blame any of them, and I understand everything: all my relatives come from the Soviet Union, and there, as far as I know, almost no attention was paid to the psychological state of people. These people could have their own deep traumas that they simply could not and could not work out, and I myself, because of my otherness, could be a trigger for them. In Russia, in particular, many elderly people do not understand or may take it very badly and aggressively that you are of a different orientation. It's depressing, but I had to consciously accept these rules of the game because my need for safety always came first. At the same time, I don't consider myself perfect at all. I also have my flaws, and it's likely that I've hurt someone in my life too. I can't say that I'm the only one who's good and everyone around me is bad that's absolutely not the case. Unfortunately, it's very rare to have a heart-to-heart conversation about gay issues in Russia. In addition, it is important to understand the specifics of our environment: in Russia, many people can hide their true attraction behind a mask of bisexuality, because openly calling themselves gay or lesbian is a crushing blow (although in our society, lesbians are still treated much easier and more tolerant than gays). In a sense, as a gay man in Russia, I am a ghost. But at the same time, I want to emphasize that I don't hate Russia at all. On the contrary, I am grateful to her, because she gave me life itself, an excellent education, and my first great love, despite all the hard things that happened to me. That's why I'm openly sharing my story with this world for the first time.

There is a deep inner dissonance inside me. I treat bisexual women absolutely neutrally. I also don't hate bisexual men at all on the contrary, I find many of them very attractive, and there are probably many decent people among them. But when I see in porn how bisexual men have sex with women (especially how they give them tenderness, caress them), a painful feeling of envy and pain wakes up in me. At the same time, a part of my mind clearly understands that everything that happens on the screen is just an illusion, a commercial picture, but subconsciously it still puts incredibly much pressure on me. Heterosexual sex doesn't bother me at all. I understand that every choice in life has its price.

Childhood in the kitchen, alcoholic period and trauma treatment

I was born and raised near the Western border of Russia — it would seem, in a place where there should be more liberal views on life, but the reality turned out to be very difficult. Dad's grandmother constantly took me to church, as well as to the witch grandmothers, because, in my opinion, she considered me "abnormal." But I'm not mad at her she's done a lot of great things for me, just like many others in my family. My mother and father also did good things for me sometime in my early childhood. I haven't lived with my mother since 2005. I spent my childhood with my grandparents, but there was simply no physical place for me in their apartments I used to sleep in the kitchen. My mom's grandmother dragged her cousin into the apartment, and she slept on the same couch with me.

Over the years, my mother's grandmother became even more of a close friend to me than just a grandmother, and we began to communicate very closely. She's actually very nice, and I genuinely love her, but she still doesn't know the whole truth about me I just don't want to tell her about it for her own peace of mind. My aunt lived in the next room with her husband and child, and my grandfather got drunk on weekends and insulted everyone, including me, right before school. When he was drunk, he yelled at me, calling me a "Judas," a "Jewish brat," and a "puppy." It is important to understand that due to the bad relations between his parents' families, he probably saw me as my father, whom he hated fiercely. At the same time, it has never been proven or confirmed from the paternal family that anyone was Jewish. I have an absolutely Slavic appearance, but my grandfather, who insulted me, looked much more like a Jew in his features than I did. I was scared. I constantly had to frantically ask permission if I could even take something out of the refrigerator to eat this oppressive control over food haunted me both at my mother's grandmother and at my father's grandmother.

Putting a lot of effort into my studies, I enrolled on a budget, successfully studied as a teacher of geography and biology, received a diploma as a tour guide in the 5th year and graduated as a hairdresser in order to prove to relatives who reproached my parents that my hands grow from the right place. I've been working through some of my fears and childhood traumas with a psychologist. I managed to partially work through this nightmare: now I understand in my mind that everything I saw as a child was the life of my mother and those men, it has nothing to do with me. I mentally gave it to them, and it made me feel better. I also had a trauma related to geographical space: previously, when someone offended me, the space itself, the city or the area where that person was from, became unbearable for me. But I've managed to work through that fear, too. Now I communicate with my mother and even pay for her room every month so that she doesn't have debts.

In high school (in 2009-2011), I started drinking from all this pressure. It was easy for a teenager to buy alcohol and cigarettes back then. Not only beer was used, but also whiskey, cognac, vodka, absinthe, wines and aperitifs. Now I have been practically not drinking for many years (I only smoke). I deliberately gave up alcohol because it doesn't help me forget. Moreover, now it works in the opposite direction: even rare doses of alcohol instantly bring back to me all the memory of the pain, longing and depression I experienced. I like drinking regular tea much more.

13 years of relationship: A conscious choice of loyalty

I've been in a relationship with my gay partner for 13 years now. At the age of 18, I deliberately gave him my virginity. Choosing one partner at the age of 18, not leaving or cheating on anyone else for all these years, was my personal, conscious choice at such a young age. Even then, I sincerely wanted a deep relationship. I've spent a lot of time and effort on them, I've never had casual relationships, while my peers had them in full swing. But I have never regretted my choice.

For almost 5 years we were at a distance (there was only a transfer through Moscow between the cities), and I was totally loyal to him because I trusted him. I moved in with him in 2018. At first, he helped me: he closed the debts for housing and communal services from his mother, paid for a hairdressing school in 2020. We went to St. Petersburg and China together in 2026. The problem with China was not in this country itself it was just that my little child, who was sitting in me, wanted with all his heart to finally be in another country, to set foot on another land, because I was always afraid in Russia. I've already saved up for this trip myself. We also went to Vyborg, which became my real outlet. I've been there three times already; Vyborg mentally calmed me down, gave me a much-needed feeling of warmth and love. Now I am completely independent: for more than 3 years I have been working in a medical chat office, moonlighting as a hairdresser, I manage everything myself and do not ask for money.

But emotionally we are dead. After his infidelities, sex stopped. In 2023, there was a period when he brought a "heterosexual" friend (of questionable origin), went to drink beer and spent the night with him for 2 months, and then brought him to sleep on our only sofa. It was humiliating. The finale was "Sleep Violence" in 2024: he came into contact with me when I was sleeping exhausted after 8 shifts of 12 hours. It is important to understand that I have completely reformatted this act of sexual violence in my head. I found the strength to treat it simply as rough sex, and now it's just an echo of the past that has stopped bothering me forever. On the same day, I found out that he was trying to cheat on me again. Now we have sex once a year. At work, I see the devaluation of my thoughts, at home I see the indifference of my partner. I've never wanted to go to a woman it's alien to my nature, I don't want to deceive anyone. If relatives ask questions about marriage and children, I firmly put them in their place. At the same time, I don't consider my partner to be a bad person he has also done many good, noble deeds over the years. I don't hate him, I genuinely and deeply loved him, but now I'm just completely confused.

The essence of my trigger and the acceptance of the experience

In 2024-2025, after that incident at home, I temporarily logged on to online camera sites (now that's over) to regain control of my body. It was there that I started encountering a lot of bisexual men, which exacerbated the internal dissonance.

When I think about how a bisexual man caresses a woman, I feel a sharp envy for her safety and this male tenderness. My subconscious connected the female sphere with the chaos of my mother, who abandoned me for men. In addition, a hypothetical trigger scares me in Russia: if I get involved with a bisexual man, he may already have a wife and children. I'm not saying that I absolutely do not want children myself in the future I may well want a son or daughter. But I am horrified that, under pressure from society, a bisexual man will choose the "traditional scenario" for the sake of public approval, return to a woman and leave me with nothing.

All this is my past, my experience, which I fully accepted. I cannot and do not want to erase this from my memory, because I survived and was able to find incredible creative strength in myself. I absolutely don't feel like a second-rate person, even for a hypothetical bisexual partner. I also sincerely don't want bisexuals or people of a different orientation to feel guilty about my triggers - that's how you were born. My trigger is solely an echo of my personal pain.

Conclusion: Why am I here

I am not writing this post to ask you for advice on what to do, how to change my orientation, or how to fix the past. I don't need instructions. For the first time in my life, I am openly sharing my story with this world simply because it is infinitely important for me to be heard. I'm tired of being a ghost. I wrote all this because I desperately need human support, understanding, and that sincere love and masculine warmth that I have been sorely lacking in my life for so long. If anyone wants to know more details about my experience, I am open to sharing them. Thanks to everyone who read to the end.