(The author of this blog nervously shuffles into the room, where expectant faces await him from a circle of chairs, some with a marked undertone of resentment.)
Hi, everyone. It’s been a bit since I used Ars Pro Concreta as a soapbox for practical performing arts advice. Life in the form of my day job, my side gig, finally having active social interaction regularly, and just plain lack of a sense of direction for the blog has gotten in the way.
However, I’ve got something personal I’d like to share with you today, since October 11 is National Coming Out Day. Namely, it’s the story of how I came out, my early missteps in romance, and where I stand about stuff like the relevance and importance of Pride celebrations. If you want to loosely tie it to the arts besides their being my profession and my life, consider this my audition for Paul from A Chorus Line. That description, though tongue-in-cheek, is accurate to a certain extent, as you’ll soon discover for yourself.
(Also, minor warning: I speak in traditional gender norms for much of the post as it pertains to recounting my life experience. As far as I’m concerned, trans women are women, trans men are men, and there’s room for everyone in this world wherever they fall within — or without — the binary, but it wasn’t a concern in my head at the time I lived these experiences. If it seems exclusionary, it was, but it was a lack of knowledge at the time, not a willful omission, on my part.)
I was in the range of 7 to 9 years old — single digits, at least — when I met the first guy I ever fell in love with. I’ll call him Roxy since I always kind of felt like the Cyrano to his Roxane. We were close enough that we considered each other family (and I remained on good terms with his family for the longest time, even through some of the events I’ll be talking about shortly), but I could tell my feelings were something more, especially when I began admiring his physical form (specifically his ass) during sleep-overs, though what that “something” was I couldn’t define until I was a little older.
I’m not 100% sure if it was because of my crush on Roxy, but I remember getting very upset when other kids at school called me gay as an insult (as kids did back then), and confiding in my mom, who was trying unsuccessfully to calm me down, that I was only so emotional about it because I thought they might be right. She was doing what she thought was best, and certainly not homophobic in her intention, but she shut me down: “Would you love a man? Would you hug and kiss a man?” Well, no, and I told her so, but in my head, she was asking me about a grown-up when she said that, not about someone my age. I didn’t get crushes on grown-ups. Ew! (Still not fond of significantly older men to this day; some stuff never changes, I guess.)
But life goes on, and when you’re a clueless teenager, shit happens. I first came out in eighth grade, in the middle of creative writing class, and it was assuredly not meant to happen. I had, and still have, an awful habit of starting a train of thought in my head and finishing it out loud. This was one such occasion; namely, I was puzzling over confusing feelings about both guys and dolls (see, keeping it theater), because kids think in very binary terms once that’s been introduced to our thinking. I knew I was into dudes, no denying it, but I was confused that I got along with women and could appreciate their beauty. My limited experience from exposure to straight men was that they liked girls and they hated the thought of being with guys to the point of disgust, so I assumed a gay man was supposed to be the exact “vice versa” opposite. From this, I (mistakenly, as it later turned out) concluded I must be bisexual. And that was the part that came out of my mouth in a room full of judgmental assholes, as most people are in their early teens. Worse, a classmate overheard me, and the problem was compounded when I repeated it without thinking when she asked me what I’d just said.
After an initial hubbub of attention and nonsense that died down when I never actually “dated” a guy and tried to pursue what I thought were crushes on girls, complications were added on top of complications as the next few years rolled by. Among those complications, what I’ll call “stuff” started happening at sleepovers with Roxy. And it continued, growing increasingly sexual by the time we were in our junior year of high school. I’m not gonna say it happened every time he slept over, I’m sure there were times it didn’t, but most of the time, and “mild contact” gradually spilled into our waking hours as well. The more this happened with Roxy, the more any presumed attraction to women died off.
He never once complained or gave any indication that he didn’t want to hook up, for lack of a better way of putting it, or that he was uncomfortable with the guy-on-guy stuff, and it didn’t affect our friendship. So, in my naivete, I believed that this meant if I was gay, then he must be gay too. (In retrospect, and in the present day, I respect and accept his self-identification as straight, but honestly, my vote’s in the “bi” category. Nobody enters a massive crisis period like what I’m about to describe if they weren’t frightened by what our encounters might mean about them.) Turned out my mistake was in thinking we were on the same page.
I repeat, with a slight emendation: when you’re a careless, clueless, and horny teenager, shit happens. During a sleepover, assuming everyone else was out like a light, Roxy and I got down to what we usually did. Well, you know what happens when you assume… turned out someone in my family saw some stuff they shouldn’t have. More than that, it was someone who wasn’t known for exaggeration, so if they told others, I couldn’t get out of it by saying what they saw didn’t happen without being utterly disbelieved by everyone, or, worse, without the story getting back to adults (and as a teen, though some of my family knew about my orientation, I didn’t consider my escapades their business). So when this relative raised the issue to mutual friends because who the hell else could they talk to, and these friends asked me about it, bearing the above in mind, I decided not to deny what was going on.
This was a big mistake. Roxy was not interested in confirming any of this. My once-constant friend went completely berserk for a few years — distanced himself from me for a long time for “trying to bring [him] down with [my] shit,” became a substance abuser, a thief, and a klepto (in no particular order), and had a series of increasingly unsuccessful relationships with women.
(Postscript: Joining the military straightened him out some — no pun intended — and he’s now married with two kids, one of whom I was supposed to be the godfather. I remained close to his family for a long time, at least until political differences drove a deep fissure into our relationship, and reestablishing contact was probably easier than being awkward around me. We don’t talk about back then, and we’re not nearly as close as we used to be, because time and distance wound all heels, as John Lennon once put it.)
I wish we’d at least been able to talk about it, unpack how we both felt, and proceed from there; I feel like the friendship could/would have been a lot stronger as a result. But, aside from occasionally wondering what might’ve been had he been a little more secure about being bi, that’s my only regret. Sexually speaking, I had a good time once I knew what I was doing, and more importantly, he had a good time once I knew what I was doing. I have much deeper regrets about what happened next.
Shortly after I began the long road to accepting that a relationship with Roxy was a non-starter, a road sprinkled along the way with several boyfriends that I wouldn’t consider any kind of serious, sex and the tangled webs we weave with our partners almost wrecked my life.
From the time I was in third grade, I’d been friendly(-ish) acquaintances with a guy I’ll call “Tom” (not his real name). We grew up a few streets away from each other in the same neighborhood, and while I wouldn’t call us close per se, we got along and knew each other pretty well. I always suspected he was gay, but I never let on. In high school, our social dynamic changed. He wasn’t really in the popular crowd; for that matter, neither was I. But we considered ourselves on opposite sides of the fence because we disagreed (high school, I find, always brings out the most unpleasant side of people). We’d spar at the lunch table, trading barbs and wisecracks like a couple of bitter old queens. (I remember that his term of endearment for me was “smegma bucket,” which gives you some clue of the quality human being he was; that said, I don’t fault him for this particular sin, as he and one of his female friends had just discovered what smegma was and so they were using the word in nearly every sentence, like a toddler who’d learned a swear.) Now and then, I’d write him, trying to rekindle the friendliness, or at least clear up that I didn’t mean the shit I said and I hoped he didn’t either, to zero response. One time, on a desperately lonely night when I was horny and knew he lived nearby, I took the risk. I asked him if he was gay and he denied it.
During my issues with Roxy and attempting to figure out what was going on with Tom, other stuff was going on in my life, including my mother’s divorce. I couldn’t control what someone else did to us, but I also couldn’t help feeling that maybe there was something else I could’ve done. I developed a self-destructive personality. A lot of things happened that I had no control over; sometimes I made the wrong choices just when things were getting better, with disastrous results. A series of those wrong choices was with Tom.
I was dating a guy, “Shane,” who lived a state away at the time, and for reasons I won’t go into, we temporarily lost contact with each other. (That part is relevant, and will come up later.) During that time, a high school chum died in a really bad car wreck, and I ran into Tom at his memorial while I was emotionally distraught, to the point of nearly physically leaning on Tom. That night, he wrote me asking if I wanted to hang out. So I said sure and named a day, and he came over and brought me to his place.
That day, two things rapidly became apparent: Tom was lying when he said he wasn’t gay, and my having a boyfriend seemed no obstacle to his coming on to me. I’d blame it on mixed emotions following my friend’s death, issues stemming from my mom’s divorce, or loneliness because I couldn’t get in touch with Shane, but no explanation excuses what happened: Tom and I began a sexual relationship. I was still technically with my boyfriend, but, during the time he wasn’t able to reach me, I was nearly always over at Tom’s place, messing around, to the point that I was very nearly (according to him at the time, anyway) the first person to “top” him.
There was a reason I chickened out of that, though. Anyone who’s ever been cheated on will say the cheater can’t imagine what their loved one is going through once they’ve found out. I’ll tell you… before Shane ever found out, I was feeling far worse. I’d never been in this situation before, and as fun as things were with Tom, I felt like absolute shit for letting it continue to happen (I say this because I feel like I was never completely in control of the situation; there was a long time in my life back then where I mentally checked out and things had a knack for “just happening”). I cared deeply for Shane (how deeply did not become apparent until much later), and my conscience made a lot of noise. So when it came time to be Tom’s first, an alarm sounded in my head that this was putting things on a far more intimate level than I was ready to accept.
It seemed fate had allowed me an easy exit when Shane reestablished contact, and we concluded that our feelings for each other had died mutually during the time of little to no contact, so our relationship fizzled out, though we didn’t stop talking as friends. You’d think this would mean I could now embark on a relationship with Tom guilt-free, but on top of still feeling guilty about cheating on Shane, Tom didn’t want to make things official because he felt our chemistry in high school reflected the reality of our relationship, and he didn’t want us to tear each other apart. (I suspect it was also less fun for him without the forbidden aspect.) I resented that massive assumption, but I wasn’t going to push the issue, so we both tried to ignore how we felt about each other. Big mistake.
At this time, I was starting my second semester of college, and I was attracted to a guy I’ll call “Neville.” He was a bouncy, eccentric, stereotypically effeminate-sounding fellow, with a stereotypically masculine look (plus or minus the occasional long hair). He was also the type of person you couldn’t help having fun with. (Indeed, long after the events that follow, I still enjoyed his company — assuming he wasn’t being bitchy — when I ran into him in social settings; just the kind of guy he is.) But when I got to know him personally, I learned he had a lot of demons which he camouflaged with his fun-loving personality. More than that, he had a very self-loathing side — he’d seen a lot of the fuzzy end of the lollipop when it came to the LGBT community, at one point referring to himself as an “honest homophobic homosexual.” This young man, starving for positive attention and affection he hadn’t received in childhood, had become easy prey to the awkward roads some of us walk, and developed a negative view of himself and his fellow gays.
I was initially introduced to him by a high school acquaintance as someone I might approach when I was desperately seeking what I’ll call a friend with benefits. They were wrong, and my initial advances — unskilled and blunt as they were — led him to despise me the entire time he knew me, painting me with the same stripe as others who’d used him. With his past, who could blame him? But I was unaware of either his past or his feelings at the time. I wanted him desperately. At the same time, I still had the residual thing with Tom.
The night before Valentine’s Day, 2009, Tom and I were hanging out when Neville reminded me we’d made plans. He’d later paint this after our relations had soured as me ineptly trying to lure him into seduction, but in reality, we’d talked about this for a couple of weeks prior, and had been trying to find a day to get together. I was going to sleep over at Tom’s, a fairly common occurrence at this point, and I figured, “Tom’s a hang loose kinda guy, I’ll invite Neville along.” So I did.
Here’s how that night played out from my recollection: Tom wanted to play “Never Have I Ever,” I didn’t want to drink because alcohol is disgusting to me. Between the two of them, and a little nudging from me and Neville thinking we’d have a kooky drunk to laugh at, the bottle of wine disappeared. As it did, so did any sense that there were sparks for Neville and me. I sensed something growing between them, electricity in the air, but as much as I tried to ignore it and pretend I could deal with it, I could feel the other shoe about to drop. And finally, it did after they went into Tom’s younger brother’s room, where pot was readily available, and we all know what pot does for one’s libido. That night, I found myself in Tom’s bed trying to sleep (and crying quietly when I could manage them not hearing me) while Neville and Tom consummated their new-found passion on a futon on the floor.
In looking back, I realize I was traumatized on many levels by the almost-psychotic rudeness of that act, both in general (you don’t get explicitly sexual with someone if a non-consenting third party is in the room, period, end of report) and specifically (I had feelings for both of them, they knew it, and yet they were the kind of people who cared little enough about that to hook up in front of me).
The next morning I wanted to just leave and forget the whole thing happened. I collected my stuff from various corners of the room. (Neville would later claim I trod on/over them trying to wake them up or make things unpleasant, but things couldn’t get worse than they already were, and I remember my “mission” being to grab my stuff while trying to avoid looking at them wrapped around each other like kids clutching teddy bears. Forcing a confrontation was the furthest thing from my mind; I wanted to avoid waking them at all.) And I left a note along the lines of “You two seem to be happy, I’ll just leave you here. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Break a leg, enjoy your freak show, au revoir.” Okay, the last one was only in my head, but still… a rational, if bitchy, response to the situation, frankly.
It’s a testament to how fucked up I was about this emotionally, an accurate gauge of how badly this messed with my head, that I immediately followed a rational response with an irrational one: I returned to Tom’s place later that morning. I felt bad about the way I’d left, and that I should show them I was okay with what had just happened! When no reasonable person would be! As it happens, I didn’t get much satisfaction from attempting to be the better person; Tom was hung over and, as far as I know, hardly together enough to think of pretending to be asleep to make me go away, much less doing it, as Neville later alleged was their plan to make me leave. No one said much, although I believe I was scolded for writing the note. Ain’t that a bitch!
If this were a fictional account, I’d make myself a stronger person, pretend I didn’t stick around to watch — and play a part in — what happened next. But that’s not what happened. I was fresh out of high school, a rebel without a clue, and traumatized, and I decided to try to hang on to a friendship with the two people who’d done it. They had a whirlwind, long-term, off-and-on relationship in which they loved each other one moment, but couldn’t stand being together the next, and I was stuck in the middle trying to maintain both friendships. Sometimes I’d even warn them when each plotted against the other because rather than let karma deal them a hand, I felt bad. When it was over, and it often was, Tom always blamed me for introducing them. (Never mind that I’d warned him what he’d be getting into, based on Neville’s track record, and that he’d flipped out, asking why I couldn’t ever be optimistic or happy for him. I felt like responding, “Well, prick, given the circumstances…” I sometimes wish I did.)
At one point in their affair, they were “models” together on XTube. The videos are still up, and not worth watching. As porn goes, it’s amateur hour basically, and I can’t imagine who’d pay for it. But somebody did, because money started coming in, and to administrate their income from it, they started a joint bank account. I don’t care how in love you think you are, it’s a stupid decision — that only crazy kids could make — to start a joint bank account with someone to whom you’re not committed for life, and even sillier to act surprised when one of you continues using it after you separate. I don’t recall specifics, but someone drained it, to the point of issues with the bank; each accused the other and acted surprised such a thing would ever happen to two people who broke up; and Neville, who’d removed the videos at Tom’s request when they were done being “models,” put them back up and used the revenue to alleviate that issue, a plan with which Tom wasn’t thrilled. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there head over heels for both of these ten-grade whackaloons, maintaining the friendship and hoping it’d be my turn next… as Bill Engvall once said, “Here’s your sign!”
Further complicating my emotional state, when Tom and Neville weren’t sniping at each other, they were unloading both barrels on me, playing new, torturous mind games. Example: they somehow befriended Shane, my ex with whom this whole ball of wax began, through the dating site on which we’d met, and I can’t recall whether they genuinely liked him or thought they could hold my past with Tom over my head. Either way, when he came down to visit them (they kept him from seeing me, as I wasn’t talking to either of them at the time, even though he wanted to), they were in the middle of a prickly patch. That night, karma was a bitch and revisited Tom in the worst way: Neville and Shane hooked up on one side of the bed while Tom tried (and failed) to ignore it on the other.
But turnabout was fair play: Tom and Shane hooked up as well, and, even though Tom mouthed off to me about Shane becoming dependent and needy, they began dating. Somehow, that hurt even worse than the first trauma I experienced at Tom and Neville’s hands. I think — rightly or wrongly — I felt I’d have a second chance to do right by Shane somewhere down the line, and that door was slammed in my face because the only thing worse than two people you want to be with linking up is a group of people you want to be with linking up. Soap operas had nothing on this.
Even this I could have lived with, in my fragile mental and emotional state, were it not for the fact that this wasn’t the last time for Tom. He seemed to glom on to every guy I spoke with, to the point that I almost felt like I was being stalked. On at least two occasions, after I started talking to guys, Tom not only struck up conversations with them and dated them, but turned them against me. Finally, like we’d done frequently in what I couldn’t bring myself to call a friendship anymore, Tom and I “had had enough of each other” and separated for — truly — the last time. I haven’t spoken to him in seven years.
As for Neville, I got tired of wishing for things I knew would never come to fruition. When I found an opening to leave that friendship, however immature it may have been (a fight over not being invited to a social occasion I did not expect to be part of in the first place), I took it. I suspect we were equally willing to be rid of the other, and have remained in blissful ignorance of each other’s activities since, barring brief periods when a mutual friend tried to patch things up and we just couldn’t hack it after all the water (and caps locked, profanity-laden rants and slanderous blog entries, on Neville’s part, in the waning days of LiveJournal no less) under the bridge.
So, I had all this energy from fighting to maintain worthless relationships, and nowhere left to put it. What was I to do?
I’d always had an ambivalent relationship with Pride celebrations. The parade — and everything associated with it — looked like a lot of fun, but I’d never really gotten into it, in part due to Tom and Neville’s influence. Whenever I brought up going with them, they dismissed it (some of these quotes are verbatim):
- “Do you want to be in a place with that many homos?”
- “I’m sorry, but being in a place with that much rainbow color makes me a little iffy.”
- “I just feel uncomfortable going to it, it gives me a bad feeling.” (In Tom’s case, that may have been true; until later on in his relationship with Neville, he was still very uncomfortable with explicitly identifying as gay.)
- “The only reason I go is that friends are there, and trust me, I don’t stay long. Every cheating, lying homo in R.I. is gonna be there. Besides, I’m gay and I hold my head high every day. I don’t need a special day to do it. I don’t see the straights having a straight pride. The way I see it, it’s a way for people to make big fools of themselves.”
So I avoided it. I didn’t feel comfortable going without friends, and my two most actively gay friends wanted no part of it. But once they were out of my life, I took a second look at Pride and — for once — did some thinking of my own.
Why didn’t they have straight pride? Well, that seemed easy to answer, on the face of it: Pride is about awareness, most of all — making straight people aware that LGBT people exist, and are worthy of the same rights and privileges they’ve enjoyed without a second thought. It’s impossible to be unaware of heterosexuality. When a negative stigma was associated with heterosexuality, when straight people needed to muster the courage to come out as straight (aside from, say, wandering into the wrong bar and getting hit on by the biggest gay biker in the room — that, I could maybe understand), when straight folks had to hide their sexual orientation from anybody for fear of reprisal, then they could throw a parade. Until that time, their pride celebration would be their ability to walk around free to be themselves every day. We’re still not, and we’re gonna keep the fire burning in this grill until the food is cooked, you dig?
Could gay people hold their heads high every day without a parade? By and large, no. People think because the world, in general, is so much more accepting now in certain places and that we’ve made certain strides forward, we’ve won the war; we haven’t. Many would argue we lost it in the early to mid-Eighties during the AIDS crisis, that we lost it when they found Matthew Shepard beaten to death and tied to a fence, and that we continue to lose it any time discrimination or hatred runs free. For people who can hold their head high every day, and believe it or not, there aren’t many, then Pride is a time to remember that you’re able to hold your head high in the first place, a time to remember who did it first and made it possible for you to hold your head high now, and to encourage others to keep their head held high in the face of adversity. Pride celebrations are your opportunity to be the bigger person that people weren’t to you, to help erase the shame for people who shouldn’t have to live in fear.
Do gay people have something to be proud of? Well, we should be proud of coming this far, if you ask me, but that’s not why Pride is called Pride. We don’t call it Pride because we’re proud of ourselves. Gay pride does not mean that gay men and lesbians are proud of their sexual orientation itself. As George Carlin once said about ethnic pride, it’s hard to be proud of something that’s an accident of birth. Rather, in this context, “pride” functions as an antonym for shame. It means that we have overcome the shame we once associated with being different, revealed our sexual orientation or gender identity and allowed ourselves to seek happiness as queer folks rather than settling for a miserable, closeted life. That’s what it’s all about. It’s important for the same reason that “I’m black and I’m proud” was shouted during the civil rights movement. It’s people declaring that despite the ignorance, hatred, and violence that exists out there, they refuse to back down.
As for their more specific complaints about “lying cheating homos” and people making fools of themselves, all I could say to that was a) trust is earned, not automatically granted, and b) anybody will invariably make a fool of themselves at a party, which is what Pride is. Gay or straight, people make fools of themselves every day. What’s one more opportunity?
Once I stopped avoiding the parade and started marching in it, I found the sense of community and pride that I was looking for in these misguided relationships. I discovered my place in the world, for which I’d searched for so long. When I’m ready to try dating again (beyond the odd hook-up here and there), I’ll do it with a wealth of experience under my belt to help me know what to avoid, and with self-love that wasn’t there when I started walking the walk.
So, if it’s safe for you to come out and start expressing yourself, give it a try. Seek out your community, and try to be a part of what it does. And before you object, do me a favor: listen to Harvey Fierstein. He might have something to say about any of the fears or concerns you have about all that. As for dating, don’t sweat it, and don’t rush into it. That’ll come along in its own time, experience breeding wisdom.
I’m gay, and — at long last — I’m proud. Are you?
