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Cal is in his early 40s and I first met him a few years ago when he started working as the bartender at my favorite bathhouse. He impressed me right away with his friendly disposition and quick wit. I also couldn't help but notice that he was attractive, fit, and a bit of a flirt.

One day Cal and I were making small talk as I waited out my refractory period in between tricks, when Cal casually mentioned that both he and his "wife" also liked to write. "Wife?" I thought to myself. Did I hear him right? "Did you say you were married?" I asked him: "As in 'to a woman'?"

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Yes," he replied. "I'm married to a woman and I also work in a bathhouse and fuck men. I'm a bisexual," he declared. I've heard that story before, usually from closet cases that just can't accept their homosexuality and keep one foot in the straight world so that they can keep up appearances and live happily in denial.

I rather wondered if that was the case with Cal. A friend of mine, who also has a propensity for spending a lot of time in bathhouse bars, also got to chatting with Cal. He didn't believe his story for a minute. "He's a total queer," my friend said to me. "What straight guy works in a bathhouse?" I played devil's advocate: "He doesn't say he's straight; he says he's bisexual," I argued.

"There's no such thing as a bisexual," my friend suggested, half laughing at the naiveté he perceived in my comments. "If you sleep with men you're gay, and straight men don't sleep with guys -- ever," he said to me. "It's that simple."

I didn't think it was quite that black and white, but, at the time, before I discovered my own bi side, I tended to agree. Everyone I had ever met who had told me they were bisexual were only using it as an intermediary step on the way to coming out. They weren't quite at the point where they could say they were gay, so they kind of came out half-way and said they were bi. But eventually, they all ended up total screamers.

But over time, in the following months of sitting at the bar night after night drinking drink after drink, I got to know Cal a little better. He often talked of his wife, his good relationship with her, their happy and active sex life, and the open nature of their commitment to each other allowing him to fuck men on the side. It really struck me that this was not a guy hung-up about his sexuality. He truly seemed happy fucking both boys and girls.

So one day I asked Cal to meet me somewhere, other than where he worked, for a drink where I could do a little more probing into his life without the audience of the baths. He graciously agreed and we had a long talk one afternoon.

Turns out Cal is the second youngest of eight children raised by devoted Catholic parents. He went to Catholic schools and was inculcated with the view that Protestants were tools of the Devil. Other than that, his childhood seems unremarkable. He did what a lot of kids do and played doctor in the woods with his friends, both boys and girls. He got hard-ons, but there was no actual sex. The farthest he went was to look up some girl's cunt and asshole.

One of his favorite things to do was go to mass and be a choirboy because, he says, "I liked to be on stage and wear a little frock." At around the age of 11, one of the priests started to get a little friendly with him, inviting him on trips where they would spend nights together in the country and sleep together in the same bed. I'm sure you can see where this is leading.

It took a few years, but around the time Cal was 14, the priest finally made a direct advance and gave Cal a blow-job. "That was my first sexual experience," he tells me. He says it moved him from the realm of a nonsexual being to a sexual man. Physically it felt good, as any blow job does. But emotionally he said he was numb and in a kind of dissociated state where he made no judgment about what was happening. Cal never had sex with another person until he turned 18.

Then one night, at a party, he got friendly with a girl and they ended up in bed and fucked. "We were both virgins. I even heard her hymen pop," he told me. Some time later, on a trip to Toronto, he got lost and asked a guy for directions. The man ended up inviting him home and they had sex. "It was just oral, and I almost threw up when he came in my mouth," he recounted. "But after that, there was no going back. I started fucking everybody."

He found some easier than others. "Men are fucking easy to pick up, but women come with a lot of strings," he told me. He says men just want to get laid, while woman are looking for relationships and you usually have to be dating them before they put out. This fact is reflected in the numbers. He says he's slept with twice as many men as women.

At around the age of 35 Cal met his future wife at a restaurant where they both worked. Not only was he not looking for a relationship, he had pretty much given up hope that he "would meet someone who would accept me the way I am." But then along came Tina, and he knew right away she was the one.

They've been together now for nearly seven years and they've negotiated an open relationship that allows them both to see who they want for sex. They're both secure in their commitment together and neither worries the other will leave them for someone else. As Cal says, "I'm perfect. I totally rock. Why would she want to leave me?"

It's true that she may not want to leave him for another man, but she recently had a different kind of proposal for him. She went to a party several months ago and ended up in bed with a man. When he told Tina that he was also bisexual she got the idea to bring him home for a little three-way action with Cal. To make a long story short, what ended up happening was the three of them developed feelings for each other and it has become something of a love triangle that they're all enjoying. Enjoying all the more, Cal says, because true bisexual men are so hard to find that he thought something like this would never happen.

Author Profile:  Joseph Couture

Joseph Couture is a journalist based on London, Ontario.