2001-01-21 - 13:52:49
Notes On Intimacy: I've Got That Thinking Feeling

Notes On Intimacy: I've Got That Thinking Feeling

Recent re-exposure to academia reminds me I am not much of a theorist. Yet--in a suspicious sort of way--I find theories seductive. Rigid systematization of anything--life, literature, selfhood or society--is not only laughable but can also oppress in terms of what or who gets excluded; but the attempt to form larger meanings and models from what I read and what I remember and how I experience the world is always irresistible, yet necessarily tentative. So I prefer half-baked, inchoate theorizing: firmly rooted in the empirical, endlessly revisable through the nexus of further experience.

In that spirit, I've got this half-baked theory about myself, eh? I have no idea whether it's a "gay thing" or merely a "Queerscribe thing", which is partly why I'm attempting to sketch it out.

My hypothesis is this: the intimacy of my post-closet relationships with gay men runs deepest when steered--when allowed to flow--along the trajectory of my pre-closet connections with straight men. In other words, I sense a continuum of experience from before I came out until now: I tend to form my closest attachments with men along the lines of platonic friendship emerging from previously ruptured romantic and erotic attachment.

Like Oscar Wilde once wrote, "I cannot think other than in stories." So, here goes.

Can So Fight

First, there was Lorne. We were nineteen, first-year university students; Lorne and I met through mutual friends and bonded with an intellectual and emotional intensity that swept me off my feet. I fell head over heels in love with him; more terrifyingly, I sensed my affection was not unrequited. "Unrequited" becomes an important word in this story; I learned it in English class, and one day employed it in conversation with Lorne. He--a writer, poet and brilliant fellow--didn't know what it meant; a running joke grew up between us about my superior vocabulary.

When I was over at his place and he would leave the room for a minute, I would often snatch a pair of his dirty undies up off the floor, drape them over my face, dangerously infusing myself with his sweaty, sour essence. (Once, and only once, did I get a chance to masturbate while thus engaged.)

As the signs grew--at least in my mind--that Lorne desired me back, I--who did not accept my homosexuality one iota, who kept that demon at bay by an increasingly-tortuous dimming of awareness, who had not come out to a soul, especially myself--took the unprecedented step of declaring myself to him in a letter. I blame the song "Can't Fight This Feeling" by REO Speedwagon for strengthening my resolve; fighting back tears, I listened to it often as I thought about my yearnings for Lorne at this time:

I can't fight this feeling any longer.
And yet I'm still afraid to let it flow.
What started out as friendship,
Has grown stronger.
I only wish I had the strength to let it show.

I tell myself that I can't hold out forever.
I said there is no reason for my fear.
Cause I feel so secure when we're together.
You give my life direction,
You make everything so clear.

And even as I wander, I'm keeping you in sight.
You're a candle in the wind,
On a cold, dark winter's night.
And I'm getting closer than I ever thought I might.

And I can't fight this feeling anymore.
I've forgotten what I started fighting for.
It's time to bring this ship into the shore,
And throw away the oars, forever.

Oh, how I wish I still had that letter! I remember the agony with which I wrote it, the abstruse vagueness of its wording. The closest I got to enunciating any queer truth was in the declaration--after pages and pages of hazily ambiguous references to the signs I was picking up from him--that "It is not unrequited."

One night I slept over at Lorne's place in the guest bedroom adjoining his in the basement. As he used the washroom just before bedtime, my heart pounding, I placed my missive on his pillow, retreated to my room and hid beneath the covers in my dark room. Lorne returned to his room, exclaimed "What the fuck?" at the envelope, and set about reading it. I heard my pages rustling.

I lay there, trembling. Ready for him to clasp my confused body against his once he'd read these befuddled words; my flesh was willing to take that next unimaginable step with his.

Within minutes, Lorne collapsed into high-pitched peals of laughter. I was not prepared for this; his hyena-like amusement at my words triggered an immediate evacuation of my befuddled body. I lay there, humiliated, frightened, unspeakably alone. When his laughter subsided, Lorne turned out his light without attempting to speak to me. I lay awake most of the night; selfhood reduced to a global body-cringe. I snuck out of his place early in the morning so as not to have to face him.

He phoned me the next day, said we needed to talk. He picked me up that evening and we drove out to our usual tete-a-tete location, a riverbank on campus. We sat together in his car.

"I want to apologize to you," Lorne began. "I didn't realize that note was serious."

Muted, I accepted his apology. "So," he continued, "um, what did it mean? I've read it through several times, and I have no idea what you were trying to say."

There I was, all set to somehow deal with the fact that I'd just outed myself to my best friend on the catastrophically mistaken impression that he'd been on the same page; I was totally broad-sided by his insistence on my text's inscrutability.

I am not proud of my response. Armed with Lorne's admission that he hadn't understood what I'd tried to convey in the letter, in an effort to recuperate the oppressive comfort of my closet, I resorted to revisionist duplicity.

I explained my letter to Lorne this way: what I'd been trying to say therein was that as we'd become closer, I'd grown concerned that his affection was homosexual in nature. That I'd written the letter to address this concern, to somehow deal with and exorcise the queer energy he'd been displaying. In other words, in my verbal summary of the unintelligible letter, I positioned myself as the straight male hero of the story.

Lorne was shocked. I felt like a total heel, listening to his agonistic response to my accusation. Gently but firmly, he expressed that the nature of his love for me was not homoerotic in any sense, that he was as straight as they come. My heart sinking, I expressed my relief at his clarification.

Although I was heartbroken, I got my closet back. As Lorne's heterosexualizing words sank into me, I wanted to cry; more than that, I was relieved to have so skillfully averted exposure of my shameful desires.

We sat there talking a long while, Lorne laughing at the uncanniness of it all. At one point I said that I would like to get that letter back from him, that I wanted to destroy it. Lorne pulled it out then, and I froze. He said he just wanted to point out the part that had made him laugh the hardest the night before; as my heart raced, Lorne flipped through the pages and found the passage.

He read it aloud: "It is not unrequited."

Referring back to our running joke about this word, Lorne cited this sentence as the trigger for last night's hilarity at what he thought was a gag letter. But those four dangerous words hung ominously in the air, threatening to topple the rhetorical edifice I had just so desperately erected.

Without a word, I grabbed the letter out of Lorne's hands, tore it into pieces. The matter was closed.

Our friendship continued unabated; neither of us referred to this awkward muddle, and I felt a sense of clarity emerge about my feelings for Lorne. Sure, I had been confused--misled by the inane sentiments of REO Speedwagon, the flawed tears those lyrics elicited--but I wasn't confused anymore. I wasn't gay, and neither was Lorne; we were just close buddies, that's all. I stopped jerking off thinking about him; I left his dirty undies on the floor where they belonged. I never listened to REO Speedwagon again.

Within a year, those shameful feelings of lust and romance reared their ugly head in other of my male friendships. I lapsed into alcoholic depression at the realization that I could not fight them, that this warped kind of love would always emerge in new relationships. I was fucked. I withdrew from everyone, isolated myself away in morose self-flagellation.

Lorne noticed, kept asking me what was wrong. Our intimacy being of such magnitude, I promised him that eventually I would be ready to open up to him about this unnameable struggle. That summer, he came out to my parent's farm; we inhabited the hired man's quarters up above the garage, in separate beds. I had never spoken these words aloud; even though it was no longer true that I was in love with Lorne, the enunciation of my homosexuality filled me with terror. That night, I suggested we go for a walk; along the country road, far far away from my parents' ears, I haltingly told him I thought I might be gay. I coughed the words up like hair balls: gritty, stripped of any obscurity, scrutable.

Of course I referrred back to the letter incident; I admitted to my past romantic yearnings for him, assured him that I no longer harbored such designs, and apologized for the way I'd manipulated my letter's ambiguity to put him on the defensive about his sexuality.

So Lorne was the first person I'd ever come out to. He reacted wonderfully, with an empathy and encouragement that extended far beyond his understanding of what I was going through. We got closer.

Months later, when my roommate--another close male college friend--discovered male porno magazines in my room and anxiously blabbed his discovery to several other guy friends, I forced myself out of my closet. I assembled the lot of my university friends together that night, a mickey of rye in my belly, and gave them the speech. Lorne did not attend that awkward, life-changing assembly, but I went directly over to his place afterwards to debrief. He gave me an incredible amount of support, and also expressed curiosity about the gay porn magazines that had brought all this to a head. Confused by this, I lent him the incriminating magazines; when he returned them a few days later, he expressed wonderment at his first encounter with a male hard-on other than his own. His interest was explained in terms of wanting to size up his endowment. I remember being titillated by this conversation, and also uncomfortable.

Once, months later during a phone conversation, Lorne casually said that some day he might ask me to jack him off. It was an experience he was curious about. I did not have much to say in response to this, and Lorne never broached the issue again.

We stayed close friends until I moved away from that city in 1988. Since then, we keep in touch more episodically but connect on a deep level when we do visit.

A year later, in January 1989 Lorne was engaged to be married. I dreamt that I was attending Lorne's wedding and that he was wearing a track suit. I was surprised at his casual garb, but I thought he looked good in his sweats. That's all I remember. (The engagement was later broken, and his ex-fiancee later came out as lesbian.)

Nearly two years ago, Lorne emailed me in Toronto to tell me a dream: he dreamt that he was attending my wedding, that I was getting married to some man he didn't know; the wedding appeared to take place on my family farm. When he arrived at the house, I was preoccupied with all the last-minute stuff, getting guests settled in, etc. etc. and barely had time to even acknowledge his presence. When I did notice him, I gave him a quick up-and-down look and said "You're wearing that to my wedding???" Lorne was wearing camping/hiking type clothes. He was hurt by my disapproving comments, and left the house, went back to his car where his wife was and they drove to the nearest city and he rented a tux. But there was a snowstorm on the drive back to my farm so by the time they returned, my wedding was over and I and my hubby had left. End of dream.

Lorne is now married, by the way; he and his wife are expecting their first child in May.

So what light does this story I'm telling myself about Lorne and I shed on the half-baked theory I proposed about my same-sex relationships? Once I'd moved past--or stifled--or exorcised--my lustful romantic yearnings for him, did we in fact become closer? If so, what does that say about my concept of intimacy? Given the hint of Lorne's ongoing interest in sex with me--admittedly, only a faint hint, open to many interpretations and explanations--and my passive refusal to open all that up again, what does that reveal about my relational schema at the time? About the rigid boundary I seemed to maintain between desire and friendship? How have I--how has my theory about connectedness--changed since then? Has it changed?

To what degree do I define intimacy in my male relationships as a safe space where I can pretend erotic desire and romantic yearnings are not at work? Is there a way to talk about that without subsuming the dialogue in psychological discourses of dysfunctionality?

Is it possible to risk and express more of myself in my connections with men without a reflexive, shaming comparison to a master narrative of romantic coupledom?

Hmm....

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