Invisibility
Note: the following story includes derogatory terms used frequently to describe gay people, more specifically homosexual men. I am not condoning these terms, I am discussing their typical use in everyday life.
When I was younger, I had the power of invisibility. That can be cool as a super power, but maybe not so much when it comes to everyday life. Nobody could see me for what I was. I could be out an entire day of school and nobody would miss me. That actually happened!
I got called "faggot" in middle school and high school. But it wasn't targeted at me specifically, just a general slur. I was so invisible that nobody knew about me. Nobody had a clue that I was gay, least of all me. I also didn't meet any other gay people that I knew of, because nobody was out. I still to this day don't know who the other gay k**s were in my high school. So there was no dating, no socializing, none of that awkward coming of age stuff that's so critical to our development. Invisibilty might be safe, but it's lonely. Right before I went to college, I started coming out to friends, then family. I felt this was important, so those I was close to could see more of the true me.
My freshman year of college, I heard about a gay student group, Lambda, that met weekly on campus. I didn't get up the courage to go to a meeting. I maintained my invisibility. That entire year the people I shared my major with demonstrated an obsession with the "fags" in Lambda. Every chance they got to say anything derogatory about gays, they would. The irony of course is how they spewed all this poison, usually sitting in one of the campus dining halls, while one of the hated queers was sitting right across from them staring them in the face. By the end of the year I had come out to a few friends and they kept my secret. Each time was fraught with fear of rejection and often met by surprise. I learned that gays were the last group it was socially acceptable to demean in public. That is progress, I suppose. That same year I believe I wrote an op-ed for the school paper. I think it was metaphorical or expressed my own support for diversity or even gender expression. While I didn't announce my own homosexuality, I tried in my own small way to say that I wasn't a sympathetic ear for bigotry. Some friends congratulated me on my progressive opinion piece, but I think most didn't notice it or bother to mention it. I think later on in college I wrote a 2nd opinion piece that did include a coming out.
By the time I started my sophomore year, I felt more and more like going to a Lambda meeting. They advertised in the student paper, so I knew the when and the where, but I kept getting cold feet. I was living in a frat house that year, so I guess I could imagine the brothers finding out and beating me up or worse. Here I was, almost 20 years old and still feeling completely alone in the world. I knew there were other gays, but I never could meet one.
Loneliness finally won out over fear and I decided to go to a meeting. I don't recall having to contact anyone to inquire about meeting details, which does seem odd. I think sometimes groups that desire some level of anonymity require at least the minimal effort of contacting someone to ascertain where to go. I do remember finding the meeting room in a campus claasroom building and walking by a few times. The reason I did this was to look into the room and see if maybe there was a location that could not be seen from the hallway. I was apparently deathly afraid that every person I knew would take time out of their busy schedules just to come by and see who the queers were. Some fears seem so silly in hindsight. I settled into a seat and quietly watched, hard to believe I was in the same room with actual gay people. A couple people said hi. One very flamboyant guy came over and introduced himself, "Hello, c***d, I'm Harvey!" I'm ashamed to say I was more than a bit overwhelmed at first. My little straight-raised, sheltered brain didn't know how to handle "femme" in a man's body. So I did what any scared mammal might do, I froze (I guess that's somewhere between fight and flight and a marginally better response). I eventually got to know Harvey and we became good friends. He would sometimes ride with me to the one gay bar in Western Virginia (I had a pickup truck with a camper top, so I could load up half a dozen gays for a short road trip). Harvey also worked graveyard shift at 7-11 so I'd swing by from time to time when he was working to talk and keep him company. He was a bright spot in the dim Lambda firmament. I lost touch with him and miss him quite a bit. But at this first meeting, I was not handling in your face gay very well.
So, it got closer to meeting time and as I'm waiting for the meeting to start I see someone walk through the door...someone I know. Is he lost, just passing by, coming in? I panic! I think I tried to scrunch up into a tiny fearful ball, crawl under the table, anything to remain unseen (again, some strange compromise between fight or flight instincts). No such luck, the cute frat brother who lives across the hall from me walks in, heads straight for me, sits down and casually says hi. Now I have a crazy mix of emotions going on. Fear, excitement, lust, I couldn't believe the coincidence. Because it's so often what gays do when there's mutual physical attraction to any extent, sometime soon after this new discovery we got "nekked" and got busy exploring. I'll spare the details, except to say I was so nervous, this 19 year old virgin, that as we were attempting to initiate physical intimacy, I started trembling and shivering uncontrollably. I was literally just that scared!
I don't remember much more about our encounters. He took me to my first gay bar. I didn't much enjoy it at first, but I finally learned to enjoy the dance floor and that became my life for the next few years.
His most enduring legacy was he said the strangest thing to me. He taught me about an element of gay subculture called the tearoom trade. If you're unfamiliar with that term, Google it and you'll find out what passed for gay dating. I didn't understand what he meant, but being 19 and full of hormones, that didn't stop me from going to check it out. So I had a new friend in my frathouse neighbor. I enjoyed spending time with him as I could vocalize such things as "look at that hot guy!" for the first time in my life. He eventually faded as a close friend, though we remained acquaintances for years.
I continued going to Lambda meetings on and off, but never felt like I belonged. I remember making a recommendation to the Lambda leaders, with obvious need for sideboards, that they should institute a type of big brother/big sister program to welcome newcomers. I'd watch people perhaps even more shy than me show up for a meeting, be ignored, and disappear. I tried to befriend a few, but I couldn't reach out to all of them. If you didn't somehow have the personality or the looks, you were not welcome. I must have been going often enough because one of my Junior year roommates, also in my major, asked me one time where i kept disappearing to on Thursday evenings. It was like some weird question someone would ponder about Bruce Wayne and Batman never being seen together. So I got up in his face and said something like, "I've been going to Lambda meetings and I'm gay!!!! What do you think of that?!?" He responded with the equivalent of, "meh, good for you, I'm cool with that." No drama there!
None of these forays (sporadic coming out, attending Lambda, tearooms) dispelled my loneliness and I still mostly felt invisible. I'd write little notes to guys, asking them if they wanted to meet and would be turned down time and again or the guy would agree to talk, maybe give a fake phone number, and then disappear forever. I guess I finally felt so discouraged with it all that during my junior year I broke down one evening, literally writing in my journal, "Why do they hate us? What did we do? Why are we unnatural?" I think it was teetering on a potential suicide situation (I did finally attempt suicide years later). Thankfully my inclination at the time was to call a friend of mine who was also a crisis counselor. She put me in touch with a small support group that met weekly and I started attending. For the first time ever I felt like I belonged somewhere, was able to finally open up and express who I was, as it was a small, intimate group focused on support, not socializing. I credit that group with saving my life, but I still didn't open up to the world.
One reason I remained invisible to most people is I have rarely conformed to gay stereotypes and mannerisms. Here's where we add a 2nd layer of derogatory on top of the typical "faggot". I don't think it's as common to hear them in this day, but my coming of age included such fun terms as "flaming", "queen", "effeminate", "femme", "mincing/ prancing/ lisping", "fairy". As an aside, gays also love to call each other "sluts" which is disturbing since one of the very things gays have been reviled for is perceived promiscuity. So instead of displaying stereotypical mannerisms such as the limp wrist, the jutting hips, the pitched voice, or flamboyance, I exhibited dreary and drab behavior at the other end of this particular spectrum. Think of a bird of paradise versus a house sparrow. One stands out; the other, not so much. I usually felt about as flamboyant and out there as Droopy the cartoon dog, and so if a label is needed, the label was "straight acting". How many of us stop to consider the self loathing built into a label such as "straight acting"? Shouldn't the definition of "straight acting" be attraction to and/or intercourse with the opposite sex? I'd say in that regard I'm actually very "gay acting". But no, that term is synonymous with not looking or acting in any way like the typical gay, whatever that means. In a police lineup to identify the gay man, the "straight acting" would be least likely called out. It's pretty sad that we have faced so much discrimination and prejudice as gays, and yet we find ways to put ourselves down and further segregate. Not only do we have the spectrum of physical attraction (homo-, bi-, hetero- sexual), but we also have a variety of ways to experience and display gender that either conform to our biological sex at birth (cis-) or depart from it in any number of ways (trans-). There are seemingly infinite combinations now of ways to either express ourselves or continue hiding our truth.
So as a "straight acting" homosexual, i.e. conforming to societal norms of male behavior, all cis- and no trans- of any sort, whether -gender, -sexual, or -vestite, just a regular dude, I don't trip people's "gaydars" that rely on all these cues that in reality have nothing to do with whether I'm attracted to a guy or a girl. Enter the metro-sexual as an example of the fallacies of relying on external, visible cues. This breed of male came to light in the mid-1990s and was the polar opposite of the "straight acting" gay. This was essentially a "gay acting" heterosexual. I wonder how many personals ads led with "gay acting male seeking sexy female"? Perhaps I should coin the term "rural-sexual" to replace "straight-acting" and as a contrast to "metro-sexual".
I don't know how early I learned it, but I did learn quickly to hide, to be invisible, and hiding became my survival mechanism. I heard family, friends, people I loved and who expressed love for me, as well as the world at large speak out about the sick, depraved faggots, how they deserved their plague (these were the very dark days of HIV in the US, where someone wouldn't even want to sit on a toilet seat after a gay person). Try as I might, some of that bile got internalized and sexuality became equated to shame. Society can be every bit as efficient and ruthless as the human body's immune system at identifying, destroying, and expelling that which is deemed foreign. And so those that can't escape detection are targeted from an early age and must learn quickly to survive in some other way. I think some of our gay culture, the biting humor, the insults, throwing shade, feigning indifference or even turning the narrative on its ear and acting superior have evolved from the need to survive. So you might hear a gay person say something like, "Look at those sad breeders, all beaten down by their wives and rug rats! Honey, I'm gonna go put on my face and go clubbing tonight! It's not easy being fabulous!" If you don't find ways to roll with the punches, you die young, too often by suicide or at the hands of others.
The invisible gays though, they don't automatically have the fight brought to them, they can choose when, where, how much of themselves to reveal. But each act of hiding one's true nature is like a tiny little death. Even after all these years and progress made in living openly, I have noticed that when people gather at whatever passes for the water cooler, recounting their weekends or talking about the big game, I can still be vague or evasive. I developed another superpower, the ability to deflect the conversation back to others. I'll call this the power of conversational redirection. I can make anyone forget they asked a question about me and make them talk about themselves instead. Ask any k** if they'd like a couple superpowers, invisibility and mind control, and they'd probably be all over that if they couldn't have invulnerability, adamantium claws, or super strength.
But my super powers have strictly been survival mechanisms. They bring no joy, they don't save others, and they sure as hell don't make me a superhero. Also, as noted above, they come with a price. But oftentimes power is portrayed in this sense, as being costly to use. The magic in "Excalibur" came with a price, as did that in the "Sword of Shanarra" books. The use of these powers fuel shame and a very hard to penetrate barrier to genuine and meaningful human interaction. Every time I am in a social situation where, however fleeting, I weigh the pros and cons of saying "this is my husband", I inflict another wound on myself. Don't get me wrong, there really are still proper times and places for such revelations. I don't think you wander into the local Proud Boys meeting mistaking it for an opportunity to express gay pride. Discretion is sometimes the better part of valor.
However, the more you get used to hiding, to being invisible, the harder it is to lower those barriers, to decide to open up, to be vulnerable. As hard as it has been sometimes to be gay, I count myself fortunate that I think I am part of the first generation of gays able to live and love openly, at least in some places. It wasn't always easy, but I had the freedom to be gay, to love another man and proclaim that to the world without being overwhelmed by fear of retribution. Granted the potential for retribution is still there, but it hasn't overshadowed all else.
Those just a few years older often felt obliged to live their lives completely in hiding, often cheating on wives and girlfriends, going on the downlow to have sex with men, when the urges could no longer be contained. We've met the guys whose opposite sex significant others have no idea where they are or what they are doing, they are even more skilled at the deception: working late, going to the gym, hanging out with the guys (the "Brokeback Mountain" scenario), or taking advantage of business trips. When they do come home, it's not just that they cheated, but they have to look at their wife or k** with the knowledge of what they just did. With the hiding comes shame. I don't condone cheating (I've done it myself, it destroys the fabric of a relationship), but I also have not walked in the shoes of those who felt they had no choice but to try and conform to what society told us was appropriate behavior and try with all their willpower to quash the unwanted same sex attractions. Unfortunately sexual attraction is not something one chooses. As fun as it is to be gay sometimes, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Those who tried to conform, it seems, were subject to the toxic lie of omission compounded by the shame of not being strong enough (a devastating blow to one's masculinity) to rid oneself of same sex desire. This can lead to abuse and v******e against sexual partners, or engaging in other unhealthy sexual or antisocial behaviors. Healthy desire to pleasure another human can be twisted into a degrading act of subjugation. Addictions, d**g abuse, depression run rampant. The gay fiction I read when younger rarely seemed to have a happy ending. To be gay was almost equated with the inescapable outcomes of addiction in 12-step programs. If you are gay, your sexuality will lead you to jails, institutions, or death. The gay non-fiction was equally as challenging. Try to read "Conduct Unbecoming" without becoming enraged at the injustice of how gays in the military were treated. Those who sacrificed and served with honor were subject to anything but honorable treatment. Every time I'd see a "Support the Troops" bumper sticker that made it seem as simple as baking cookies or wishing a homeless vet to have a nice day I wondered if any of those people wrapped in their flags and bumper stickers would truly support those unfairly persecuted just for desiring to serve their nation while also having the gall to be gay.
Why can't we just be open about our sexuality? I remember I got zero sex education or advice from my parents. It was apparently traumatic enough to have to talk to their supposedly straight c***d about that dark zone of shame from the thighs to the neck, I can't imagine their discomfort if they had to deliver the gay birds and bees talk. "Son, I don't know where you're supposed to put that thing with another man!"
Enter one of the unsung heroes of pop culture, Dr. Ruth Westheimer with her very distinctive, "Sexually Speaking you're on the air" in the crisp German accent. Yes, there used to be good things about talk radio. I'd stay up way past bedtime on Sunday nights, clinging to the lifeline she offered. My unknowing mother would sometimes hear the radio and fuss at me to go to sleep. Dr. Ruth would have the rare gay caller, desperate for advice. What was AMAZING for the day was that Dr. Ruth listened to them, treated them like any other caller, and she would actually say it was OK to be gay. Mind blowing!
And that's where I'll leave it. Invisibility is great for an X-man or Avenger, camouflage is wonderful when you're life depends on not being spotted by the enemy sniper. If you have to be invisible to cope with an intolerant family or society, if your life depends on it, use whatever survival strategy you have. If you have the strength to fight for a better world and can do so, then fight the good fight. But live to fight another day. Regardless of how you survive, don't internalize the hate, the shame, the intolerance of society and the world. Don't make hurting others, physically or emotionally, part of your means of coping either. We are all unique and deserving of love. How we survive, how we fight to make the world a better place, and how we treat the love we're given, those are the things that can be deserving of respect.
-Pup
When I was younger, I had the power of invisibility. That can be cool as a super power, but maybe not so much when it comes to everyday life. Nobody could see me for what I was. I could be out an entire day of school and nobody would miss me. That actually happened!
I got called "faggot" in middle school and high school. But it wasn't targeted at me specifically, just a general slur. I was so invisible that nobody knew about me. Nobody had a clue that I was gay, least of all me. I also didn't meet any other gay people that I knew of, because nobody was out. I still to this day don't know who the other gay k**s were in my high school. So there was no dating, no socializing, none of that awkward coming of age stuff that's so critical to our development. Invisibilty might be safe, but it's lonely. Right before I went to college, I started coming out to friends, then family. I felt this was important, so those I was close to could see more of the true me.
My freshman year of college, I heard about a gay student group, Lambda, that met weekly on campus. I didn't get up the courage to go to a meeting. I maintained my invisibility. That entire year the people I shared my major with demonstrated an obsession with the "fags" in Lambda. Every chance they got to say anything derogatory about gays, they would. The irony of course is how they spewed all this poison, usually sitting in one of the campus dining halls, while one of the hated queers was sitting right across from them staring them in the face. By the end of the year I had come out to a few friends and they kept my secret. Each time was fraught with fear of rejection and often met by surprise. I learned that gays were the last group it was socially acceptable to demean in public. That is progress, I suppose. That same year I believe I wrote an op-ed for the school paper. I think it was metaphorical or expressed my own support for diversity or even gender expression. While I didn't announce my own homosexuality, I tried in my own small way to say that I wasn't a sympathetic ear for bigotry. Some friends congratulated me on my progressive opinion piece, but I think most didn't notice it or bother to mention it. I think later on in college I wrote a 2nd opinion piece that did include a coming out.
By the time I started my sophomore year, I felt more and more like going to a Lambda meeting. They advertised in the student paper, so I knew the when and the where, but I kept getting cold feet. I was living in a frat house that year, so I guess I could imagine the brothers finding out and beating me up or worse. Here I was, almost 20 years old and still feeling completely alone in the world. I knew there were other gays, but I never could meet one.
Loneliness finally won out over fear and I decided to go to a meeting. I don't recall having to contact anyone to inquire about meeting details, which does seem odd. I think sometimes groups that desire some level of anonymity require at least the minimal effort of contacting someone to ascertain where to go. I do remember finding the meeting room in a campus claasroom building and walking by a few times. The reason I did this was to look into the room and see if maybe there was a location that could not be seen from the hallway. I was apparently deathly afraid that every person I knew would take time out of their busy schedules just to come by and see who the queers were. Some fears seem so silly in hindsight. I settled into a seat and quietly watched, hard to believe I was in the same room with actual gay people. A couple people said hi. One very flamboyant guy came over and introduced himself, "Hello, c***d, I'm Harvey!" I'm ashamed to say I was more than a bit overwhelmed at first. My little straight-raised, sheltered brain didn't know how to handle "femme" in a man's body. So I did what any scared mammal might do, I froze (I guess that's somewhere between fight and flight and a marginally better response). I eventually got to know Harvey and we became good friends. He would sometimes ride with me to the one gay bar in Western Virginia (I had a pickup truck with a camper top, so I could load up half a dozen gays for a short road trip). Harvey also worked graveyard shift at 7-11 so I'd swing by from time to time when he was working to talk and keep him company. He was a bright spot in the dim Lambda firmament. I lost touch with him and miss him quite a bit. But at this first meeting, I was not handling in your face gay very well.
So, it got closer to meeting time and as I'm waiting for the meeting to start I see someone walk through the door...someone I know. Is he lost, just passing by, coming in? I panic! I think I tried to scrunch up into a tiny fearful ball, crawl under the table, anything to remain unseen (again, some strange compromise between fight or flight instincts). No such luck, the cute frat brother who lives across the hall from me walks in, heads straight for me, sits down and casually says hi. Now I have a crazy mix of emotions going on. Fear, excitement, lust, I couldn't believe the coincidence. Because it's so often what gays do when there's mutual physical attraction to any extent, sometime soon after this new discovery we got "nekked" and got busy exploring. I'll spare the details, except to say I was so nervous, this 19 year old virgin, that as we were attempting to initiate physical intimacy, I started trembling and shivering uncontrollably. I was literally just that scared!
I don't remember much more about our encounters. He took me to my first gay bar. I didn't much enjoy it at first, but I finally learned to enjoy the dance floor and that became my life for the next few years.
His most enduring legacy was he said the strangest thing to me. He taught me about an element of gay subculture called the tearoom trade. If you're unfamiliar with that term, Google it and you'll find out what passed for gay dating. I didn't understand what he meant, but being 19 and full of hormones, that didn't stop me from going to check it out. So I had a new friend in my frathouse neighbor. I enjoyed spending time with him as I could vocalize such things as "look at that hot guy!" for the first time in my life. He eventually faded as a close friend, though we remained acquaintances for years.
I continued going to Lambda meetings on and off, but never felt like I belonged. I remember making a recommendation to the Lambda leaders, with obvious need for sideboards, that they should institute a type of big brother/big sister program to welcome newcomers. I'd watch people perhaps even more shy than me show up for a meeting, be ignored, and disappear. I tried to befriend a few, but I couldn't reach out to all of them. If you didn't somehow have the personality or the looks, you were not welcome. I must have been going often enough because one of my Junior year roommates, also in my major, asked me one time where i kept disappearing to on Thursday evenings. It was like some weird question someone would ponder about Bruce Wayne and Batman never being seen together. So I got up in his face and said something like, "I've been going to Lambda meetings and I'm gay!!!! What do you think of that?!?" He responded with the equivalent of, "meh, good for you, I'm cool with that." No drama there!
None of these forays (sporadic coming out, attending Lambda, tearooms) dispelled my loneliness and I still mostly felt invisible. I'd write little notes to guys, asking them if they wanted to meet and would be turned down time and again or the guy would agree to talk, maybe give a fake phone number, and then disappear forever. I guess I finally felt so discouraged with it all that during my junior year I broke down one evening, literally writing in my journal, "Why do they hate us? What did we do? Why are we unnatural?" I think it was teetering on a potential suicide situation (I did finally attempt suicide years later). Thankfully my inclination at the time was to call a friend of mine who was also a crisis counselor. She put me in touch with a small support group that met weekly and I started attending. For the first time ever I felt like I belonged somewhere, was able to finally open up and express who I was, as it was a small, intimate group focused on support, not socializing. I credit that group with saving my life, but I still didn't open up to the world.
One reason I remained invisible to most people is I have rarely conformed to gay stereotypes and mannerisms. Here's where we add a 2nd layer of derogatory on top of the typical "faggot". I don't think it's as common to hear them in this day, but my coming of age included such fun terms as "flaming", "queen", "effeminate", "femme", "mincing/ prancing/ lisping", "fairy". As an aside, gays also love to call each other "sluts" which is disturbing since one of the very things gays have been reviled for is perceived promiscuity. So instead of displaying stereotypical mannerisms such as the limp wrist, the jutting hips, the pitched voice, or flamboyance, I exhibited dreary and drab behavior at the other end of this particular spectrum. Think of a bird of paradise versus a house sparrow. One stands out; the other, not so much. I usually felt about as flamboyant and out there as Droopy the cartoon dog, and so if a label is needed, the label was "straight acting". How many of us stop to consider the self loathing built into a label such as "straight acting"? Shouldn't the definition of "straight acting" be attraction to and/or intercourse with the opposite sex? I'd say in that regard I'm actually very "gay acting". But no, that term is synonymous with not looking or acting in any way like the typical gay, whatever that means. In a police lineup to identify the gay man, the "straight acting" would be least likely called out. It's pretty sad that we have faced so much discrimination and prejudice as gays, and yet we find ways to put ourselves down and further segregate. Not only do we have the spectrum of physical attraction (homo-, bi-, hetero- sexual), but we also have a variety of ways to experience and display gender that either conform to our biological sex at birth (cis-) or depart from it in any number of ways (trans-). There are seemingly infinite combinations now of ways to either express ourselves or continue hiding our truth.
So as a "straight acting" homosexual, i.e. conforming to societal norms of male behavior, all cis- and no trans- of any sort, whether -gender, -sexual, or -vestite, just a regular dude, I don't trip people's "gaydars" that rely on all these cues that in reality have nothing to do with whether I'm attracted to a guy or a girl. Enter the metro-sexual as an example of the fallacies of relying on external, visible cues. This breed of male came to light in the mid-1990s and was the polar opposite of the "straight acting" gay. This was essentially a "gay acting" heterosexual. I wonder how many personals ads led with "gay acting male seeking sexy female"? Perhaps I should coin the term "rural-sexual" to replace "straight-acting" and as a contrast to "metro-sexual".
I don't know how early I learned it, but I did learn quickly to hide, to be invisible, and hiding became my survival mechanism. I heard family, friends, people I loved and who expressed love for me, as well as the world at large speak out about the sick, depraved faggots, how they deserved their plague (these were the very dark days of HIV in the US, where someone wouldn't even want to sit on a toilet seat after a gay person). Try as I might, some of that bile got internalized and sexuality became equated to shame. Society can be every bit as efficient and ruthless as the human body's immune system at identifying, destroying, and expelling that which is deemed foreign. And so those that can't escape detection are targeted from an early age and must learn quickly to survive in some other way. I think some of our gay culture, the biting humor, the insults, throwing shade, feigning indifference or even turning the narrative on its ear and acting superior have evolved from the need to survive. So you might hear a gay person say something like, "Look at those sad breeders, all beaten down by their wives and rug rats! Honey, I'm gonna go put on my face and go clubbing tonight! It's not easy being fabulous!" If you don't find ways to roll with the punches, you die young, too often by suicide or at the hands of others.
The invisible gays though, they don't automatically have the fight brought to them, they can choose when, where, how much of themselves to reveal. But each act of hiding one's true nature is like a tiny little death. Even after all these years and progress made in living openly, I have noticed that when people gather at whatever passes for the water cooler, recounting their weekends or talking about the big game, I can still be vague or evasive. I developed another superpower, the ability to deflect the conversation back to others. I'll call this the power of conversational redirection. I can make anyone forget they asked a question about me and make them talk about themselves instead. Ask any k** if they'd like a couple superpowers, invisibility and mind control, and they'd probably be all over that if they couldn't have invulnerability, adamantium claws, or super strength.
But my super powers have strictly been survival mechanisms. They bring no joy, they don't save others, and they sure as hell don't make me a superhero. Also, as noted above, they come with a price. But oftentimes power is portrayed in this sense, as being costly to use. The magic in "Excalibur" came with a price, as did that in the "Sword of Shanarra" books. The use of these powers fuel shame and a very hard to penetrate barrier to genuine and meaningful human interaction. Every time I am in a social situation where, however fleeting, I weigh the pros and cons of saying "this is my husband", I inflict another wound on myself. Don't get me wrong, there really are still proper times and places for such revelations. I don't think you wander into the local Proud Boys meeting mistaking it for an opportunity to express gay pride. Discretion is sometimes the better part of valor.
However, the more you get used to hiding, to being invisible, the harder it is to lower those barriers, to decide to open up, to be vulnerable. As hard as it has been sometimes to be gay, I count myself fortunate that I think I am part of the first generation of gays able to live and love openly, at least in some places. It wasn't always easy, but I had the freedom to be gay, to love another man and proclaim that to the world without being overwhelmed by fear of retribution. Granted the potential for retribution is still there, but it hasn't overshadowed all else.
Those just a few years older often felt obliged to live their lives completely in hiding, often cheating on wives and girlfriends, going on the downlow to have sex with men, when the urges could no longer be contained. We've met the guys whose opposite sex significant others have no idea where they are or what they are doing, they are even more skilled at the deception: working late, going to the gym, hanging out with the guys (the "Brokeback Mountain" scenario), or taking advantage of business trips. When they do come home, it's not just that they cheated, but they have to look at their wife or k** with the knowledge of what they just did. With the hiding comes shame. I don't condone cheating (I've done it myself, it destroys the fabric of a relationship), but I also have not walked in the shoes of those who felt they had no choice but to try and conform to what society told us was appropriate behavior and try with all their willpower to quash the unwanted same sex attractions. Unfortunately sexual attraction is not something one chooses. As fun as it is to be gay sometimes, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Those who tried to conform, it seems, were subject to the toxic lie of omission compounded by the shame of not being strong enough (a devastating blow to one's masculinity) to rid oneself of same sex desire. This can lead to abuse and v******e against sexual partners, or engaging in other unhealthy sexual or antisocial behaviors. Healthy desire to pleasure another human can be twisted into a degrading act of subjugation. Addictions, d**g abuse, depression run rampant. The gay fiction I read when younger rarely seemed to have a happy ending. To be gay was almost equated with the inescapable outcomes of addiction in 12-step programs. If you are gay, your sexuality will lead you to jails, institutions, or death. The gay non-fiction was equally as challenging. Try to read "Conduct Unbecoming" without becoming enraged at the injustice of how gays in the military were treated. Those who sacrificed and served with honor were subject to anything but honorable treatment. Every time I'd see a "Support the Troops" bumper sticker that made it seem as simple as baking cookies or wishing a homeless vet to have a nice day I wondered if any of those people wrapped in their flags and bumper stickers would truly support those unfairly persecuted just for desiring to serve their nation while also having the gall to be gay.
Why can't we just be open about our sexuality? I remember I got zero sex education or advice from my parents. It was apparently traumatic enough to have to talk to their supposedly straight c***d about that dark zone of shame from the thighs to the neck, I can't imagine their discomfort if they had to deliver the gay birds and bees talk. "Son, I don't know where you're supposed to put that thing with another man!"
Enter one of the unsung heroes of pop culture, Dr. Ruth Westheimer with her very distinctive, "Sexually Speaking you're on the air" in the crisp German accent. Yes, there used to be good things about talk radio. I'd stay up way past bedtime on Sunday nights, clinging to the lifeline she offered. My unknowing mother would sometimes hear the radio and fuss at me to go to sleep. Dr. Ruth would have the rare gay caller, desperate for advice. What was AMAZING for the day was that Dr. Ruth listened to them, treated them like any other caller, and she would actually say it was OK to be gay. Mind blowing!
And that's where I'll leave it. Invisibility is great for an X-man or Avenger, camouflage is wonderful when you're life depends on not being spotted by the enemy sniper. If you have to be invisible to cope with an intolerant family or society, if your life depends on it, use whatever survival strategy you have. If you have the strength to fight for a better world and can do so, then fight the good fight. But live to fight another day. Regardless of how you survive, don't internalize the hate, the shame, the intolerance of society and the world. Don't make hurting others, physically or emotionally, part of your means of coping either. We are all unique and deserving of love. How we survive, how we fight to make the world a better place, and how we treat the love we're given, those are the things that can be deserving of respect.
-Pup
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