I am 28 and gay. I have been out since the summer before I entered the tenth grade. By the time I reached Jasper Place High School, the halls had already been queered a few years earlier by two guys: a flamboyant straight guy who didn’t care that everyone thought he was gay and an out (and out to lunch) gay guy who didn’t really care about school. They were both such authentic and enigmatic individuals that my chubby, nelly, slightly grating presence barely even registered.
Aside from the culture at school, the culture in general back in the mid-’90s was more willing to consider gays. Rickie was using the girl’s bathroom on My So-Called Life and everyone knew that Ellen was gay (even before she said so). I easily slipped in amongst the drama nerds and school newspaper geeks—high voice, turtleneck and all. If a jock was going to beat me up, it was most likely because I was in his way—not because I was re-enacting a Madonna video in the hallway. My sexuality was never really a bone of contention (and for that matter, my bone was never really contended with, but that’s another column entirely).
Fast-forward to almost a decade later. Even though I have, uh, played fetch a few times in the interim, it is only in the last few years that I am beginning to understand what it is to be a homosexual.
For the better part of my adult life I have been a self-neutered homo—a castrated figure for comic relief, someone who bamboozled my minority status while being disconnected from the pivotal aspect that made me so. I played the roll but never rolled with the play.
In high school and even into my early 20s I never mentioned anal sex unless I was making a joke, I made fun of “flamers,” I held the hands of girls as they told me their boy problems and I never hit on guys who said they were straight. I went shopping a lot, worked retail and waited in line to see Evita; I found band frontmen dreamy and never spoke about my personal life—because I didn’t have one. I had a few boyfriends but never really dedicated myself to the relationships (sorry Matt). I was so wrapped up with being a likeable, respectable gay guy that I forgot to find out what it meant to be gay (let alone queer). I took being gay for granted because my homosexuality was basically accepted.
Like so many homo dudes before me (and, some could argue, most of the current mainstream “gay movement”) I got lost in the struggle for acceptance. I watered down my own desires and urges for the comfort of others. I disconnected with myself to the point that I became a caricature of what it is to be gay.
By cutting myself off from the primordial thrust of being gay, I cut myself off from a lot of experiences. Just recently I’ve begun to find out who Harvey Milk is and have started to understand the deep-seated scars AIDS continues to leave. Just now am I enjoying the sensation of waking up to a heavy hairy arm on my chest that is not my own. Just now am I experiencing the joys and specific agonies of guy on guy problems.
And I’m lucky, because even though I feel like a late bloomer there are still tons of neutered homos out there. I see them with their t-shirts on under dress shirts lest they show some chest hair, fidgeting with their hands, picking away at beer bottle labels or playing with their cell phones, scared of what their hands may do if they are left to their own devices. Even a few weeks ago at Edmonton’s Pride Dance—an event existing for no other pretense than to get drunk, be gay and have fun—the room was full of tucked in torsos with both feet firmly planted on the ground, guys standing in awkward semicircles talking about condo fees.
There are so few of us gays who want to be the odd man out—hence the whole reason we self-neutered in the first place—that neuteredness in public settings becomes contagious. At the dance, once I realized how gone my balls were from my surroundings, I passed up the best pick-up line I have experienced. I was talking to this dude when POP!—out of my hand went a bunch of tickets I was holding. As I was picking them up, the guy said—with what I could tell was a perverse grin—“while you’re down there ... ”
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