carolinacurious: Coming in very late, I thought I'd add a few personal observations.
At least in my experience in the south, being an "out" bi-sexual hasn't seemed like the easiest road to travel.
I've received a lot of hostility from SOME gay guys, I think at least some of it comes from so many gays initially stepping out as bi. Religious nutjobs like to use it for ammunition in their, "It's really a choice" arguments, so that doesn't help. I didn't choose to be bi-sexual, nor can I ever choose to be straight or gay. I CAN and do choose to be monogamous when I'm in a relationship but I'm still Bi.
It was a lot to deal with when I was younger (not that it's all roses and sunshine now), I bought into a lot of the crap that was being handed out; after having sex probably over a thousand times with a FEW different girlfriends, and loving every minute of it, I still found myself thinking, with a couple of homosexual experiences under my belt (ha!
, that I MUST be gay. I tried to be "gay", if I hadn't kept hooking up with the women out at the gay bars I might have succeeded too.
I don't know about the 50/50 thing... I'm probably as close to 50/50 as anyone I've ever met, but it seems to change. There have been times in my life where I've felt as much as 70/30 one way or the other and been convinced that that was what I truly was.
In my experience, it hasn't increased my sexual possibilities, it has decreased them. In S. Carolina, when I was in college, being out as Bi might as well have been Gay because the girls weren't having it and my friends stopped introducing me to women as well. Later, I got to discover the whole "gay hostility" thing too.
It has amazed me to discover that for so many people of my aquaintance that being Bi has meant "impossible to be faithful" to them. If I knew that that was what people thought I meant I might have had more opportunities with women (and men) over the years.
I've found that women are more likely to believe that a bisexual person can be monogamous than men but that (straight) men seem a little more likely to believe that someone can be bisexual than women. (Just my unscientific sample)
A lot of these things completely reversed from being in/after college. It wasn't until after college (or at least the age where I was supposed to be out of college) that I discovered the whole "gay hostility" thing. The straight guys I knew in college were totally from the, "suck a dick once and you're Gay with a capital G!", school of thought.
There also was a special situation involved in the timing. Actually, I think some of my ex girlfriends started to talk, and I didn't really hide much although I'm just not an effeminate person, back in high school and times were good. I think a lot of the girls thought it was kind of hip, and I was very open to their atempts to "convert" me. My freshman year of college was "rocking" and so was the first half of my sophmore year. Then it was 1986, I came back from Christmas break to the new year and within a week or so, I remember one girl that I used to "pal" around with asking me if I had heard about "this new terrible sexual disease", immediately I was like, "Oh, shit! not something worse than AIDS!" (which I had known about [and had been in all the papers!]) for years. No, actually she meant AIDS. Apparently, Christmas break 85-86 was when straight girls in South Carolina heard about AIDS for the first time.
Suddenly, instead of being "hip" I was now the "vector" for transferring this "gay" plague into their world. I knew so many people who had to go through so much worse at that time so it seems silly to even mention it but the party was suddenly over.
