You Knew I'd Get To It Eventually
I've written about damn near everything on this site, whether I knew anything about it or not.
Except sex.
That's partly because, with the exception of the past year, I was in a monogamous, committed relationship for the entirety of this site's existence. Not that I couldn't have written about the subject, mind you, but...well, it's complicated, and out of deference to my former partner and to avoid the total Reader boredom that comes with an excess of authorial navel-gazing, I'll skip the gory bits. (Then again...it's not as though I haven't been diving deeply into my belly for the past month here...no, I'll skip it. You don't need to read it, and I don't need to write it.)
Returning to the subject at hand. As I mentioned recently, there's a slew of issues surrounding the publication of the highly personal on the very public web. This has never been an anonymous blog, and given what I've been writing about lately, there's certainly no reason to make it one now. There is also the small matter of being out. You can't be out and anonymous. The two are mutually exclusive. So yeah, that's me over there on the left in the purple shades. (I have better hair now, but you go to blog with the photo you have, not the photo you might want or wish to have.)
The discerning reader will have picked up hints (or brickbats) here and there about my proclivities, and while I've never made much of a deliberate attempt to hide them in my offline life, I've never made much of an attempt to interact with any sort of like-minded "community," either. Long time readers (both of you) will know that I've always had a problem with identity politics, and defining myself by what I do with my genitalia never seemed like the proper thing to do.
I've always had gay men in my life, mostly because my mother had gay friends. In fact, as the only child of a single mother, the only male available to teach me how to tie a necktie was my gay next-door neighbor. So there was never any question in my mind that yes, some people are gay, and that's a normal thing in the world.
Except...I'm not gay, which raises a slightly different set of issues. Here, let's roll some tape and let Margaret Mead say some stuff:
What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love. Today the recognition of bisexuality in oneself and in others is part of the whole mid-20th century movement to accord each individual, regardless of race, class, nationality, age or sex, the right to be a person who is unique and who has a social identity that is worthy of dignity and respect...Even a superficial look at other societies and some groups in our own society should be enough to convince us that a very large number of human beings, probably a majority, are bisexual in their potential capacity for love...We will fail to evolve in our understanding of human sexuality if we continue to see homosexuals merely as "heterosexuals-in-reverse," ignoring the vast diversity actually represented by society's many varied expressions of love between people.
That's from an article titled "Bisexuality: What's It All About?" that Mead wrote for Redbook back in 1975, when I was four.
Quite a lot has changed since then. The generation of gay men before me--if I can call those who are ten to fifteen years older than me a "generation"--truly came of age in the time of Anita Bryant, AIDS, and a very angry Larry Kramer. The generation after me had Will & Grace, Ellen DeGeneres, and gay marriage on ballots across the country. (Yes, it was defeated...but even the idea of such initiatives was still unthinkable when the trannies rioted at Stonewall in 1969.)
As for myself, I'm somewhere in the middle. I went to DC for my second Pride march in 1993, seven months after Colorado's voters narrowly passed Amendment 2, prohibiting any "special protections" for gays, lesbians, or bisexuals. The Colorado contingent marched with an avenue-wide banner that read, "COLORADO: GROUND ZERO," and I still remember my eyes welling at the sight of it. I didn't realize, at the time, just how right they were.
Later that day, as we rounded a bend, we passed the usual band of Phelps types, with their GOD HATES FAGS signs and their bile. There was one fellow who stood out from the rest, arm outstretched over the police barricade, pointing an accusing finger at us as we walked by. So I stopped, stepped out of the march, and pointed right back at him. We locked eyes for three or four minutes, until he looked away. I won.
I have been fortunate. With the exception of one other incident, which I'll tell you about later, that's the greatest instance of homophobia I've ever experienced, and I had the weight of tens of thousands behind me at the time. I was raised in an environment where homosexuality was an accepted part of life. I've never had the slightest hint of self-loathing or doubt about my varied desires. In that, my experience is radically different from that of many other gay and lesbian folks. I have no coming-out horror stories. I haven't lost anyone to AIDS. No one I know has been fag-bashed. There's an entire range of shared "gay" experiences that, well, I don't share.
Since about 1996, I have limited my exposure to the gay community. In truth, I have more fear of being called a confused fence-sitter than I do of being called a faggot, probably because I know I'm not one. I'm not a fence-sitter, either--they've only got two sides, after all--but for some reason, the idea of being out within the gay community carries more fear of rejection for me than the idea of being out in the straight community. Nevertheless, that's the direction I'm headed at the moment, in keeping with what has become my first rule of living: go where the fear is.
All of this raises much larger issues, not just about sex, but about love. Recent experiences have stretched my mind and heart to near-bursting, and I've learned much--some of it too late, alas--about my own capacity for love outside the bounds of the narrowly-defined spectra of what we're pleased to call relationships in this culture. The birthing pains for this knowledge were intense...entirely overwhelming, in fact. I held fast, with white knuckles and tearing fingernails, to old understandings and old agonies. There's a corollary to my first rule of living: don't make decisions out of fear. I didn't quite manage to pull that one off, and I do feel poorer for it, while paradoxically feeling enriched by my newly-expanded boundaries.
So far, I've had comparatively smooth sailing on the waters of "atypical" sexual identity, but I'm well aware that this is anomalous for many people like me. I'm going to be writing more about this particular subject and other subjects related to it in the future (aren't you just thrilled?). As for why I'm choosing to do so...well, why the hell not? It's pretty much the last frontier for this small unregarded yellow blog in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the IntraTubes. Perhaps it will prove helpful to someone, somewhere, who's ostensibly gay or straight, and in hiding.
