In his upcoming memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones, New York Times columnist Charles Blow shares that he is attracted to both men and women but doesn’t want to use the word bisexual, as he believes it has “derisive connotations.”

Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute, an organization focused on media coverage of people of color, obtained an advance copy of the book and reports that Blow says he had difficulties coming to terms with his sexual identity. "In addition to being attracted to women, I could also be attracted to men,” Blow, the Times’ only African-American columnist, writes in the memoir, according to Prince.

“There it was, all of it. That possibility of male attraction was such a simple little harmless idea, the fight against which I had allowed to consume and almost ruin my life. The attraction and my futile attempts to 'fix it' had cost me my dreams. The anguish, combined with a lifetime of watching hotheads brandishing cold steel, had put me within minutes of killing a man."