Sagittarius
[COLOR="Red"]"For you personally, is being gay something that is strictly an attraction to your own gender, or do you think it influences other aspects of who you are as well? Like if you suddenly met a straight version of yourself, how different or similar would you two be?
What does gay mean in terms of an identity? Your personal identity or a broader social/cultural one. " [/COLOR]
Well, I am sober as I begin to reply to this though I am about to have a bit of Irish to free me. God knows what it will do to the 18 lovely things I take each day for various ailments. This however is a serious enough question for a dour Scot to seek help from the neighbors.
No, being gay is not merely a matter of going for the guys. It sways all of me and has since I was a boy. It holds my mind. It tells me I like what I like and not just guys for sex. No sissy here. No raging macho with sporty muscles and engine grease all over, either. Just me. My interests run from cooking to serious prose to woodworking and poetry and pottery and, most of all, classical music or at least they used to until I receded into the land of no friends and no confidence in myself. My mind is eager to consume large helpings of fantasy and color and living texture and more than a little dick and ass and foot and hair and all the rest of what sex is, close in and far out of the body, or at least it did until I receded into the land of no friends and no confidence in myself.
I talked it over with my roomie as to what I would be like if I were straight. Keep in mind that he is straight. His first reaction was, "Well, you wouldn't suck dick!" He can be frank, that one. Then after a bit of embarrassed back and forth to get used to the question he said that I probably would not be any different at all. He said that folks who do not know I am gay do not grasp it quickly, or even at all, that I am. He mentioned one of his friends who has known me for a long time and said he probably has no idea. So much for the acting gay stuff. And I guess that has something to do with not attracting guys, though I would really, really like to. So a straight me would be just me. Sorry that is not more exciting.
Not coming across as gay may be a couple of things in my case. As far as cases go, I am a lifelong closet case. A while ago, I decided not to be but I didn't tell anyone else. It was just that I got to be in my late fifties and decided to me a Nobody Asks Because Nobody Cares sort of out gay guy. [second drink] A number of you have mentioned that being in the closet can lead to a life of loneliness. Yup, it happens and that is how, in at least one way, being gay influences "other parts" of who I am. It isn't just going after dick, it is a life of having nearly no close friends. I have had a few. Very few. And for the most part they have not been aware of me being gay. Thus there was an unbreachable gap in our closeness. There was an aching that governed relationships. It wasn't that I wanted them sexually, though some I did. It was that we could not know each other fully and honestly. Inevitably, there were a few girls. Along with knowing them there was the pain of not saying why I could not be closer. After 40 years one still haunts me more deeply than others. So being gay to me is not merely about loneliness, it is about pain and seeing unanswered questions in the faces of others. It is about not having relationships when others did.
"Hey, you over there. Why are you different, alone, shy, off putting, so stiff and intellectual when you should be free, so unwilling to know me?"
Well, it is because it is 1959, or 1967 or even 1998 and you wouldn't understand, worse yet, you might even hurt me with words or fists, but certainly with rejection. That is what I have been taught.
Cultural identity, until very recently, and even now, for gay people, means being something quite "other." Now that is changing. There are young guys who are able to be out, but, being older, the closet is and always will be a formative part of my identity. Culturally, I will always be on the edge. I will often think that it was only the greatest of poets and painters and musicians and artists who could be out of that closet because the rest of their lives overshadowed their gay selves. And there will be the "others' who knew who they were but had better not say or be themselves. They had better not say that fellow walking by was... Does that count as a cultural identity? I think so. Though, as the song many of you have never heard goes, "The times they are a-changin." The cultural identity of gay men, you and me, is a matter of change. We simply view it from different angles. [third drink]
Being gay is all of this and many, many unresolved questions. How about that? And I am, by the way still sober. [fourth drink}
What does gay mean in terms of an identity? Your personal identity or a broader social/cultural one. " [/COLOR]
Well, I am sober as I begin to reply to this though I am about to have a bit of Irish to free me. God knows what it will do to the 18 lovely things I take each day for various ailments. This however is a serious enough question for a dour Scot to seek help from the neighbors.
No, being gay is not merely a matter of going for the guys. It sways all of me and has since I was a boy. It holds my mind. It tells me I like what I like and not just guys for sex. No sissy here. No raging macho with sporty muscles and engine grease all over, either. Just me. My interests run from cooking to serious prose to woodworking and poetry and pottery and, most of all, classical music or at least they used to until I receded into the land of no friends and no confidence in myself. My mind is eager to consume large helpings of fantasy and color and living texture and more than a little dick and ass and foot and hair and all the rest of what sex is, close in and far out of the body, or at least it did until I receded into the land of no friends and no confidence in myself.
I talked it over with my roomie as to what I would be like if I were straight. Keep in mind that he is straight. His first reaction was, "Well, you wouldn't suck dick!" He can be frank, that one. Then after a bit of embarrassed back and forth to get used to the question he said that I probably would not be any different at all. He said that folks who do not know I am gay do not grasp it quickly, or even at all, that I am. He mentioned one of his friends who has known me for a long time and said he probably has no idea. So much for the acting gay stuff. And I guess that has something to do with not attracting guys, though I would really, really like to. So a straight me would be just me. Sorry that is not more exciting.
Not coming across as gay may be a couple of things in my case. As far as cases go, I am a lifelong closet case. A while ago, I decided not to be but I didn't tell anyone else. It was just that I got to be in my late fifties and decided to me a Nobody Asks Because Nobody Cares sort of out gay guy. [second drink] A number of you have mentioned that being in the closet can lead to a life of loneliness. Yup, it happens and that is how, in at least one way, being gay influences "other parts" of who I am. It isn't just going after dick, it is a life of having nearly no close friends. I have had a few. Very few. And for the most part they have not been aware of me being gay. Thus there was an unbreachable gap in our closeness. There was an aching that governed relationships. It wasn't that I wanted them sexually, though some I did. It was that we could not know each other fully and honestly. Inevitably, there were a few girls. Along with knowing them there was the pain of not saying why I could not be closer. After 40 years one still haunts me more deeply than others. So being gay to me is not merely about loneliness, it is about pain and seeing unanswered questions in the faces of others. It is about not having relationships when others did.
"Hey, you over there. Why are you different, alone, shy, off putting, so stiff and intellectual when you should be free, so unwilling to know me?"
Well, it is because it is 1959, or 1967 or even 1998 and you wouldn't understand, worse yet, you might even hurt me with words or fists, but certainly with rejection. That is what I have been taught.
Cultural identity, until very recently, and even now, for gay people, means being something quite "other." Now that is changing. There are young guys who are able to be out, but, being older, the closet is and always will be a formative part of my identity. Culturally, I will always be on the edge. I will often think that it was only the greatest of poets and painters and musicians and artists who could be out of that closet because the rest of their lives overshadowed their gay selves. And there will be the "others' who knew who they were but had better not say or be themselves. They had better not say that fellow walking by was... Does that count as a cultural identity? I think so. Though, as the song many of you have never heard goes, "The times they are a-changin." The cultural identity of gay men, you and me, is a matter of change. We simply view it from different angles. [third drink]
Being gay is all of this and many, many unresolved questions. How about that? And I am, by the way still sober. [fourth drink}
I bid NO Trump!
![[-]](https://gayspeak.com/images/duende_v3_local/collapse.png)
