And while she may be married to him, Crabtree isn’t necessarily doing much to perpetuate Rothenberg’s heterosexual image. “Experimentation adds to your perspective-it doesn’t limit you,” says Rothenberg, who, along with Crabtree, transformed his experience into Regretrosexual: The Love Story, a two-person play that they perform to sold-out crowds in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, instead of trying to run from their pasts, these men feel extremely grateful for having gone through what they did-and some even believe it makes them all the straighter. “I’ve only run across men who came out of the closet and pursued their gay identity but couldn’t withstand the pressures of family and society so returned to being closeted and heterosexual relationships,” says Ian Kerner, Ph.D., a sex therapist and the author of Sex Detox. While these men all think the switch from gay to straight was a definitive experience, some experts are skeptical that such a turnaround happens in any but the rarest cases. I was like, ‘I’m not gay, I’m not gay, I’m not gay.’ It was like the flip scenario of when I thought I was gay.” “And finally it hit me when I was in bed with the guy I was and he said, ‘You’re not into this.’ My dick wasn’t hard. Then, while he was in his second relationship with a guy-during which he would have to fantasize about women in order to have an orgasm-Bob realized his decision had been premature. He wasn’t wholly convinced he’d been right until he was 25 and went on a date with a girl but ended the night by going home with a male architect the two of them had met at a bar. Although he had sex with girls in high school, an extremely close friendship with a neighborhood boy, combined with homophobic taunts from his sports coaches, only strengthened his belief that he was gay. Bob (not his real name), a 33-year-old artist from Los Angeles, decided he was gay when he was about 10. “It wasn’t what I ultimately wanted.” The switch back to women wasn’t complicated, in part because he was never officially out.īut for some men the sexual confusion is a little longer-term.
“I remember watching her and thinking ‘There’s no way words can describe how much I want that.’”Īfter that relationship fizzled, Robinson dated another guy but eventually realized that he wasn’t gay. “I happened to see a female friend getting dressed,” he says. Although it took about a year to admit to himself that his Castro days were over, one incident stands out. Five or so years before that, Rothenberg was paralyzed by fear over the realization that he wasn’t actually gay. Rothenberg and Colleen Crabtree, both 35, met seven years ago. I don’t like coffee.” Fifteen years later, he sits outside a West Hollywood Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf reminiscing with a woman about his days as an out-and-proud gay man. A regular at the Stud’s disco night, he was known for starting off his routine at local comedy clubs by saying “I like my women like I like my coffee.
A rising comedian in San Francisco, he spent his nights at clubs in the Castro, where he discovered, to his surprise, that he was “a bit of a boy magnet.” Rothenberg, then in his early twenties, was for pretty much the first time in his life finding hooking up with people easy. In the early nineties, Dan Rothenberg was having a gay old time-literally.