Way back when, a comforting slogan kept jumping up off the page of 'coming out' self-help books I was devouring: "homosexuals are the same as heterosexuals, except what they do in bed". As a 20-year-old proto-homo--anxious not to stick out from the crowd--I grabbed hold of this assurance like a life-preserver. Damn right, I thought, I'm just like anybody else, except for this one teeny-tiny aspect of who I am: what I do in bed and who I wish to do it with.
Over the next few post-closet years, I came to see how sexuality was anything but a minor part of me. I also began to appreciate and embrace gay culture, its incredible throb of creativity: artistic, erotic and social. I got involved in political activism, fueled in part by the hatred my friends had endured.
So that eventually, at least for a time, I gleefully espoused the converse slogan: except for what we do in bed, queers are utterly different than straight folks. A uniquely queer viewpoint on the world, diverging so sharply from white-picket fence family values. This was around the time that "queer" gained currency: a word clawed back from the homophobic lexicon, reclaimed for our own, in-your-face celebration.
In a few years, then, I went from a conservative, assimilationist perspective on my gayness to a radical embrace of queer difference. Today, while I still more often than not locate myself on the radical end of that spectrum, I am also more honest about the many--often conflicting--ways I relate to the world, the ways I choose to be gay on a daily or hourly basis.
My life--inner and outer--has grown too fabulously complicated to be categorized as transgressive or conservative. I identify with lots of straight folks, their concerns and steppingstones and joys and sorrows. Too, I celebrate the unique queer spaces--cultural and intrapsychic--where I can map and puzzle over Eros, through which I connect with men in ways white picket words cannot describe. I am a befuddling blend of possible responses to the world.
Coming out requires courage. Many of us initially circumscribe our difference, proclaim our normalcy. As we move along through life, some gay men evolve into a more curious place, questioning their relationship to society at large.
Here is Mike of Dream, recently musing on this crossroads in his 19-year-old life:
I don't feel comfortable around other gay boys. I'm actually a bit scared of the gay scene, let alone a part of it. Maybe that's why I haven't had the desire to go into the city lately. Maybe all of that anxiety about being around other gay people is due to the fact that I never fully took the time to deal with being gay myself. Not that I'm saying that I necessarily want to be some wild Kurfew boy, throwing my half naked glittery body around the NYC club scene every weekend and going home with a different hottie in leather bootcut pants each night. That's just not me any way you cut it. But sometimes as I walk by Big Cup or Cafeteria, or hell, anywhere in Chelsea really, and get stared at or just see a group of typical Chelsea boys standing around, I can't help but feel nervous or sometimes downright opposed to them. It's as if I had convinced myself to be so incredibly cool with my own gay factor that I'd crossed the line into feeling negatively about it. Like, "yeah I'm so 'whatever' about being gay that I don't even like it." I forced myself to believe that being gay was honestly no different than being straight, just that I choose to date guys. To a point the theory is true, but in so many other ways, it's totally off the map. Being gay, no matter how chill you are with it, is different. There is more that goes into it than simply dating guys. Unfortunately, I think I sped my way past letting myself understand that. The question now is how to redirect myself into understanding it and understanding fully what it means to be gay? I don't think I can stay on the level I'm at without adding something to support it.
I am excited for Mike, the questions he asks. Not because I think I know the answers: I don't. But because I remember, fondly, my own early curiosity that opened up a whole new queer world. When such inquiries begin to animate life, pat answers cease to be the goal. Living the queeries becomes a fabulous end in itself.
I continue to resonate with a more radical sense of my queerness precisely because it requires such creative inquiry. Some gay folks who live a 'normal' life--monogamously coupled, perhaps even adopting kids--remain nonjudgmental and curious about other choices made by gay men like me. That's great. But all too often I find a distressing intolerance of difference beneath the desire to "fit in".
For example, here's 29-year-old Christopher, a gay man writing recently in his journal about encountering a stereotypically-effeminate gay waiter:
I remembered last night why I don't like gay people. Mind you, I am gay myself, and comfortably so - I just don't like the stereotypes any more than most straight people do. I ate at Carlos O'Kelley's with a friend, and we were served by a waiter who was so queer it was almost painful to watch him walk. His mannerisms, his comments, his attire, his grooming, his voice, his very presence insulted all that I've struggled to achieve in my life. The phenomenon is bizarre, rather like black Americans fighting for the freedom to end Segregation only to segregate themselves in other ways. Gay people strive in their own flamboyant civil rights movement to be recognized as "normal" citizens, deserving of all the rights and priveliges thereof, and yet they (we?) make themselves out to be circus freaks at every turn. The logic boggles me.
I'm all about legal rights, in my mild-mannered way. I have no political inclinations, and frankly no interest in getting them, but I have been on the receiving end of discrimination and harassment, and government protection (the same protection other minorities receive) would be nice. I just don't like gay people, and would be happier if I didn't have to deal with them. It sucks that my future husbandish-guy will likely be gay; seems like sort of a requirement, huh?
It saddens me that gay men can trigger such reactions in one another. And, I cannot deny that I used to have similar responses to girly-boys, to drag queens, etc. But for the most part I've moved past that; more important, when my Inner Homophobe gets triggered by some gay stereotype, I now recognize that this is my problem. I can only hope that some day Christopher begins to accept all parts of himself, and thus more of what he sees in the world.
Increasingly reminiscing about high school lately, Mike wonders if unanswered questions from that phase of his life--probably having to do with "coming out"--are now offering themselves up for further exploration. Indeed, I think he's on to something there. Unfinished business can emerge like this, in the form of daydreams and memories; these cues can be used to articulate forward-moving questions.
For so many gay men, our sense of self was painfully bruised in adolescence. I go months without consciously thinking about the violence and homophobic hatred that shaped my high school experience; then, all of a sudden, memories overwhelm me or dreams burble up for no apparent reason. I might shove those images and emotions back down again; or, I could weave that residue into my year-2000 life. It's up to me.
The best book I've read about gay life is Frank Browning's The Culture Of Desire: Paradox And Perversity In Gay Lives Today. Here, Browning captures the dynamics of queer adolescence:
Of course, nearly all modern adolescents, gay or straight, face sexual anxieties, but the library of heterosexual plots is full--from the gynecological to the mythic-archetypal--and readily available on the paperback-romance racks of every corner drugstore. Any adolescent can find the landmarks by which to plot the points of a heterosexual journey, because the culture has already charted the basic route. But there was available in my youth no equivalent queer plot--and I mean queer not only in the schoolyard epithet sense, but queer in its standard sense, as in "What a queer story you tell." There is an unmistakable queerness in realizing that the emerging story of your internal desires has little in common with the tales of straightforward desire recounted in dime-store novels. By its very absence, the queer plot tantalizes. Because we do not recognize ourselves in the available popular plots, we are drawn--liking it or not--to probe further mysteries of fate and flesh. The peculiarity of our inquiries, we find, propels us onto the journey of difference. Because we persist in asking queer questions, we find that we have become queer people.
Indeed, does not healing lie in alchemizing those adolescent wounds into the peculiar, lived curiosity of today? Creating selves supple and inquisitive, not judgmental and rigid? Envisioning queerness as a becoming, not some pre-fab identity to step into or reject?
And here's the fabulous paradox: in such creative, exploratory terrain, we not only cross paths with like-minded queers. We also encounter oodles of straight folk stretching out of their own boxes, spilling forth from their own bright scars.
