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Even non-politically, being out does matter, and not just for the Kinsey-6s, and it's complicated to completely avoid anything slipping out even if you're not in a relationship.
I'm not redblooded enough to like football (or the various beer-drinking rituals), but I'm in for guns and engines, and outside of that do woodworking in the splinters sense in addition to the Freudian one. The mechanics I work with do find me a lot less uncomfortable to work with than a flame-on dude with a bunch of rainbow wristbands, true.
But there's a whole bunch of other unpleasant considerations whenever my work schedules hotels, or when dealing with security checks, or considering travel plans (who wants to visit the UAE? Not fucking me!). Socially, there's a ton of jokes my coworkers can make that would be absolutely inappropriate for me to consider. I'm a lot more circumspect about personal matters than anyone else in a mentorship role for the STEM outreach group.
((And, uh, the redblooded nature of those environments add a lot of unpleasant complication to staying under the radar. My coworkers going on a group trip to Hooters isn't just awkward because the distaff counterpart Peckers doesn't exist, or because even while bi I'm not going to look at the same things they're looking at: even the ones who aren't aware of my orientation wouldn't be as comfortable with me there because at best my body language and eye focus read as 'bored'. There's a lot of gay jokes going around, and I'm not gonna make a big deal out of any of them, but I'm also tempted to respond in kind at times; I consider it the height of restraint to not burst them out when someone inadvertently made a M/M 110v power cable.
And that's when you're lucky and don't run into outliers. This guy's obnoxious in a number of political ways, but very few of them because he's gay as opposed to how he's Frenchian, and he's actually guns and football Republican.))
That's still less likely to make waves (or enemies) than being even closetedly queer, but it leaves me pretty skeptical of the strong form of this thesis. Even if it's not a big part of who you are, it effects enough about what you do outside of the bedroom that it does show up unless you put a lot of effort into avoiding it. There's a weak version where sexual preference would be a bit like cilantro, where you might not notice unless you're looking for it or just in the right circumstance, and it doesn't really turn into a thing when someone does notice, where it matters but it doesn't matter. But... there's a reason that when trying to imagine such a world, it keeps coming closer to a Braeburned-style porn logic universe than this one.
I don't necessarily disagree, I'm just commenting more on the fact that historically some low-grade bisexuality was at times openly tolerated, even valorized, and cracked down on in others. In our current culture, with all its obsessions and hangups, things may go exactly as you describe, and in other contexts might change. The social context of "gay" can change wildly from one time or place to another. Ancient Thebes famously (and perhaps apocryphally) had, as its hardcore, Navy SEAL, Specops Delta Force unit a hundred and fifty homosexual couples. I daresay the context of "gay" was different in those days. I wonder if it coded "ultra-masculine"?
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