Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto

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Zane is clear from the start that this empowerment and visibility is important because he never had access to out bi men when he was younger and it led to some of the negative experiences in his life. Sure, some people use sex as a distraction and secretly wish for more intimate connections, but some people just like having sex, plain and simple. Most fascinating, I thought, was the casual way it traced Zane's sexual evolution, from considering himself straight to bicurious to bi to polyamorous.

This doesn't mean they are in any way didactic--they're always accessible, often funny, and, best of all, they leave the reader with the admonishment that "being kind doesn't cost you a dime. Admittedly, I was a little taken aback by the frankness with which Zane discusses drug use, and the way he so casually dismisses STIs, but I realized you can't pick-and-choose your stigmas. It started sounds like a pamphlet you’d find at planned parenthood about a lot of statistics with the word fuck and ass sprinkled in.He attended the "Bisexual White House Briefing" at the White House (under Obama) and has been featured as an expert on a number of podcasts, including "The Savage Lovecast" and “Whoreible Decisions. The heteronormative hunter/hunted dynamic helps no one; it’s only made masculinity more toxic and exacerbated male privilege, enabling men to keep treating women horribly. But labor conditions for sex workers are generally suboptimal, and to leave that unacknowledged and unaddressed strikes me as careless, as in uncaring. Boyslut is a series of personal and tantalizing essays that articulate how our society still shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit.

I would not have written this book if someone else had shared a similar story about their male bisexuality. I definitely went into this memoir expecting mostly to have some fun reading about sexual exploits of a self proclaimed slut, but actually came away from it learning about more than I anticipated. I’m sorry Zane has a hard time coming with a condom on, but them’s the breaks if he wants to behave responsibly, not only toward his partners but also toward readers of his advice column and of this book.Queer Majority is a project of the American Institute of Bisexuality, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, and your donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. Boyslut is a memoir-manifesto in which Zane articulates that, even today, we live in a world that shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit. The book has some interesting tidbits about concepts I didn’t know about - “top privileges” for example, but it was riddled with personal anecdotes described in such detail that I wasn’t expecting. Then there’s the fact that our language around sex and sexual dynamics is often exclusionary of nonbinary people, and that’s by design. And lots of talk about the importance and the struggle of finding good queer-friendly therapists, especially since gay and bi men are 4x more likely to die by suicide than their straight counterparts.