John Paulk used to be gay. So was his wife, Annie.

In a supposedly growing wave of success, conservative Christian groups calling themselves Exodus and Transformation and Courage use prayer and therapy to help unhappy gay men and lesbians "return" to heterosexuality. John and Anne Paulk are the poster children of this movement, posing stiffly in front of two incongruous plates of fried eggs and bacon in media all over the country. Gays supposedly can convert to heterosexuality because homosexuality is nothing more than a misapprehension of emotional needs caused by one's parents and Satan, in that order. (Conveniently set aside is the concurrent belief that gays can also convert heterosexuals to homosexuality -- the well-known phenomenon of "recruiting" -- which would seem to indicate that heterosexuality is also a rather malleable condition. When Anne Heche, after years of sexual relationships with men, fell in love with Ellen De Generes, everyone from Newsweek to CNN decided she had "become" a lesbian.)

The techniques used are not the height of sophistication; in Exodus workshops, gay men are encouraged to play sports and gay women to wear makeup. At least some of the converters don't really expect prayer, therapy and makeup to work for everyone. They don't all claim to end homosexual attraction or create heterosexual attraction; the most many hope for is an end to homosexual activity. Their "patients" are simply sentenced to abstinence and frustration, and conservative politicians can point to the vast minority of people involved as "proof" that being gay is choice, not chance.

I first had sex with a man when I was 16. But I wasn't heterosexual -- I was still attracted to women. Mad about them, actually. I first had sex with a woman when I was 18. But I didn't come out of the closet, hurrah! I thought about it, anguished about it. But the terrible fact was that I was still attracted to men. I was just a mess, loving men and women both, and so I spent about 10 years wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

One word: bisexual.

No one, bisexuals included, loves the word. It sounds divisive when it means inclusive. It has a laboratory ring to it. What it means to me and to the many bisexual people I know is simply the ability to find emotional and sexual satisfaction in people of both genders. This broadly based sexuality, one enjoying but not bound by gender, explains much.

I do, in fact, believe it's possible for a person to spend years in sexual relations with people of one gender and then find true happiness in the other. What I find sad is how many times people feel they need to either repudiate the past or deny the present. Whether a woman who considers herself a lesbian but occasionally sleeps with a man continues to call herself a lesbian, or a long-married woman still in love with her husband finds herself also in love with her best friend and then thinks she has to call herself a lesbian is something of the same thing. Closets are closets no matter what they're called.

The mainstream media lately has accepted and used the phrase "converted gays" as if it were a statement of fact. Newsweek devoted a recent cover story to the conversion movement without using the word "bisexual" once. I believe it is bisexuality that allows any so-called conversion -- or recruiting -- to take place, because what is happening is only the awakening of something dormant in many people.

I'm not one of those obnoxious people who go around saying, "Everyone's bisexual," either. I think most people are actually mostly heterosexual, and some portion of the population is exclusively so. I also think a significant percentage of people are mostly homosexual and a portion of them exclusively so. It's the mostly that interests me, because within that lies the possibility of surprise and change and something not at all like conversion.

I suspect there is a genetic template of sexual orientation made unique by environmental details. People don't change their sexuality. Sexuality just changes, period. Sometimes in big ways; more often in small, slow ways, throughout each person's life. But stark change is rare.

I am concerned with the sudden visibility of the conversion movement because I think homophobia should interest everyone. But I'm especially concerned that the response of the gay community not be one of increasing rigidity inside itself. Misunderstanding isn't the special province of the conservatives and the converters. The gay community sometimes acts a little like the "reparative therapists" in its insistence that sexual orientation is defined at birth and we are all sentenced to one side or the other of a fence too high to climb. In that worldview, there is nothing in between; in-between does not exist. On one side of this fence, your sexual and psychological intimacies are met by people of one gender, and on the other side, those same intimacies are met by people of the other gender. All or nothing.

Many gay activists see any talk of bisexuality as diluting the coherence of the community, particularly damaging in a time of attack. James Collard, editor of OUT, recently tried to start a discussion of what he calls "post-gay" sensibility -- a community identity not based entirely in sexual orientation -- and was met with anger. We have met the enemy, and it could be us if we're not careful.

Others simply don't believe in bisexuality, seeing through the lens of their own difficult coming-out experience. To those who've claimed their own sexuality the hard way, bisexuality sometimes looks like internalized homophobia, confusion, shame -- or sexual opportunism. Bisexuals hear the same things from straights and gays, friends, lovers and perfect strangers: You can't be both. You can't be neither. You just haven't faced the truth. You're secretly wishing for A or B. Insert gay, insert straight, and it comes out the same -- something essential is denied.

The conversion movement claims to be big and growing bigger, but Exodus International (why does that name sound so much like a swinging singles club to me?) has had to close 13 chapters because the directors returned to their gay "lifestyles." Two of the founders of Exodus -- men who had left homosexual relationships, married and had children -- fell in love with each other. And yes, they ran away together and seem to be living happily ever after.

It is normal to me to have a flowing and unpredictable sexual orientation, although in my case it hasn't been entirely unpredictable -- there are patterns of who and when and how I am attracted to people, of who populates my dreams, and there are patterns in what I've chosen to do and not to do about those patterns. But my experience of attraction is nothing like a fence between opposing camps. My sexual self feels more like a winding river, going only vaguely in one direction, with gentle curves here and there, fast water and slow, occasional storms.

I have often wished to be another way, to "convert" fully and completely into a person whose community would be obvious -- and welcoming. But there is something wonderful in this, too. The only limit is how tiny the word "bi" sounds, as though I lived in a world of two and not billions. What I live in is a world where sexual attraction can surprise me in the middle of doing the laundry, where I have discovered myself drawn to a person who didn't meet a single one of the multiple criteria by which I had previously judged partners, where sexual attraction can disappear without notice and reappear where it is least expected, where in the course of the many decades of my life I have come to expect a library of possibility. I don't know where the converters would even begin.