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1. Lovage. They have one album: Music to Make Love to your Old Lady By. It’s a DJ with so e other musicians, perhaps most notably Mike Patton of Faith No More and Mr. Bungle fame. The lyrics can be a bit much sometimes, but they also have an instrumental version of the album. It’s just fantastic beats at the perfect tempo.

2. Tempel. That’s spelled correctly- not “Temple”, but “Tempel”. They’re an instrumental metal band that just flows really well. No vocals (or lyrics) to worry about being distracting. Honestly a little bit boring for me to listen to isolation, but it’s great background music for when we went to go a bit harder and maybe get into a bit of bdsm.

3. Neon Nox. A vaporware artist I came across and like a lot, mostly instrumental but not 100%.

Those are when we want something specific. In general, I often just search Spotify for “Chillwave” and I’ve founda few of those playlists are particularly good. If we want to go a bit harder I’ve found “Dark Synthwave” to be pretty good too. Lo-Fi beats are good too.

I’ve found these all have a few key pieces in common. First is minimal vocals. My 3 partners all struggle with ADHD to various extents and get distracted by vocals and lyrics easily, so I try to avoid that. Next is a good mid-range tempo. If we wanted to get really fancy maybe we could build a custom, order-dependent playlist that starts slow and then ramps up and down over time, but I’m lazy so I prefer to just turn on an album that I know is good or shuffle a playlist. Next is vibe: any Tenacious D fan knows that sometimes you fuck hard, but sometimes you fuck gently.

Finally, the songs need to be similar enough that the transitions are not jarring, but different enough that the transitions can still be detected. This is a great way to loosely keep track of time without fumbling around with phone alarms. Stuff like “let’s keep this position for one more song and then switch” or “you aren’t allowed to cum until this song is over”. Sometimes it not even discussed- as I’m going down I’ll start at gentle, light touches and escalate every time the song changes.

In my experience, such labels tend to exist solely for the use by people who don’t need to know. I think a lot of the talk about ‘gay-bi-straight’ has a lot of similarities to other conversations, like music genre.

As a musician, as a teenager my friends and I used to have long conversations trying to figure out what genre a band is. Is Alice in Chains “metal”, for example? Does grunge count as a sub-genre of metal or is it separate? Because Alice in Chains certainly flirts with metal a lot, but not all grunge bands do that… And then we get into all the subgenres with words like “core” and “post” tackled on seemingly at random. As I got older I listened to more music, read interviews with artists, and wrote more of my own music. I realized my best music was written without any thought given to genre at all as a writer, and usually blurred the lines between genres. I noticed how some bands change genre completely- either gradually over decades, or from album to album, song to song, or even within songs. The conversation about genre was really more relevant to the people trying to market and sell music than the actual artists.

The human brain is designed to find patterns and associations. To take the hundreds or thousands of independent variables it is exposed to and forget connections between them and sort results into broad, and often imperfect, categories.

I view sex as similar. Is pegging gay? Are femboys gay? Are muscle mommy’s gay? Is a MMF threesome gay? I think the real question is “why do you care?”. If you’re filling out a profile on a dating site, identifying as straight, gay, or bi will probably help you to get better results, especially if you happen to fall within those categories nearly. It helps to organize porn catalogues too. But for understanding yourself and your partners, I think it is important to look beyond those broad classifications to the multitude of little variables of what someone does or does not like. If you don’t intend to have sex with someone, your sexual preferences are none of their business.

And even those variables are not necessarily boolean ones. For example, I’ve been with women who love anal, women who like having their butthole played with a bit but not penetrated, and women who don’t want any stimulation anywhere near that.

Personally, I’ve always identified as straight. A few years ago I started to explore prostate stimulation with my wife- first fingering, then pegging, then massagers and eventually a fuck machine. My wife has always been bi and we had a 3some with her bi-curious female friend a while back. We also had a few other close encounters where we almost had 3somes with other women too.

About a year and a half ago we made friends with another couple- a fully bisexual man with a lot of experience with men, and a bi-curious non-binary vagina owner with almost no experience with women. A few months ago they asked if we wanted to swing. We had some preliminary conversations about it and discussed man-on-man activity, and I said “I’m not vegan and I would never seek out vegan food on my own, but if I’m hanging out with my vegan friends and there are vegan snacks I’ll eat them and try to enjoy them”.

So yeah I’ve been messing around with a guy a bit for the past few months. Making out, oral both ways, fingering both ways, using toys. We eventually plan on doing anal both ways but there’s a lot of logistics to that (he’s also been dealing with ED, and we all had the flu for a bit).

It’s all been… Fine. I think I can safely say I am far more attracted to feminine traits than masculine ones. It’s fun to have something to do while watching our spouses together. But I have not gotten close to cumming with him and occasionally have had difficulty staying hard… Until one of our spouses comes over and starts touching me. Sometimes we will also watch TV or a movie and the 3 of them will start talking about how hot a male actor is and I just can’t relate.

So weird though it may be, in spite of the fact that I’m regularly having sex with another man I still identify as straight.