To The People Who Assumed...

One day, I may be more open about my same sex attractions.  I'm not saying that it'll be the start of every conversation, but one day I hope to have it be something I don't hide.

There are a number of things that give me pause, though.  And I'm sure that, over the course of blogging, I'll mention a number of them.  There's one particular thing, however, that has made me recoil from the thought of ever admitting to my struggle openly.  This one thing has so much power that for years it sent me into denial harder than I can say; I spent years unwilling to even admit to myself that I really had same sex attractions.  

And what is this one thing that I have let control my destiny for years?

Simple:  All the people who would say "I knew it all along."  

You see, from puberty onward, I had people assume that I was gay.  In fact, I didn't experience a genuine sexual attraction to other men until my mid-teens, and even before that, people still called me gay.  I was called all the slurs, all the ugly words that to this day I hate.  It hurt.  But it wasn't just the language they used.  It was the fact that they had assumed at all.  Because they didn't assume that about just anyone.  Why me?  Was there something wrong with me?

We're sorry, but your condition defies diagnosis.

Even when I began to experience attractions to other men, those old assumptions never stopped hurting.  It might seem like realizing "they were right" would cause me to be less offended by the thought of people pegging me as "gay."  After all, when most people say "gay" they don't necessarily mean that you live a gay lifestyle.  They just mean that you find people of the same gender sexually attractive.  By that definition, I am gay.  Then why did I go through all the effort of changing my mannerisms, of painstakingly changing the way I speak, of becoming more "straight acting?"  Why do I worry that I'm still not "straight acting" enough, despite all the progress I know I've made?  Why does it cut me so deeply to think that when someone meets me, the first impression might be to think I might be gay?

It's because when the gossips and bullies made those assumptions, they were implying so much more than just the attraction to other men.  They were reducing me to a label.  By taking traits and mannerisms that are inherently meaningless--and if you don't believe me, all you have to do is consider that countless "gay" men don't act a particular way, and many "straight" men have qualities often considered gay--and concluding that I must be gay, they were telling me that I was only a two dimensional joke.

When you say that a man must be gay because of the way he talks, you disregard his voice as being a tool for communication, for song, for loving, for connecting, and you reduce it down to nothing more than an indicator for whose pants you think he'd like to get into.  When you say that the way a man walks means he is gay, or that his physical mannerisms are a good sign, you disregard his entire body, his whole way of moving; you reduce it from a complex, beautiful creation of God or the sum total of all his life experiences and environment (all of which can affect those things), to being nothing  more than a signal of his sexual desires.  You cheapen him.  He's no longer a man.  He's a shallow stereotype.  

Saint Joan of Arc:
Saved France, inspired countless soldiers, heard the voice of God...
....wore short hair?
Pft.  Gay.  Move along, folks, nothing more to see.

That's why it still hurts.  Yes, I'm attracted to men, but I'm so much more than that.  I talked and acted the way I did when I was young because the most constant person in my life was my grandmother, with no man who was ever in my life as much as she was.  I emulated her.  I looked up to women, because a woman was my biggest hero in life.  As much as I loved and respected the man who would become a father to me, for reasons beyond his control, such as only coming into my life after I'd already started forming memories, I was incapable of really looking up to him as "what I should be" until it was far too late and the damage was done.  But even then, I never thought of myself as "feminine."  I wasn't trying to be a girl.  I wasn't trying to reject my gender.  I even had crushes on girls, and wanted to grow up and have a family with a wife someday.

So all those mannerisms by which I was judged were not about sexuality.  There was a deeper story behind it all.  There was a real human being behind them, with depth and aspirations and dreams, many of those dreams explicitly "straight" in nature.  But the people who assumed things about me were not looking any deeper than the surface.  They looked at a few shallow aspects of me and decided on the spot that they "knew" what I was.  It wasn't right.  Even if I had grown up to be flamboyantly gay, leading the gay pride parade, it would never have justified those assumptions.  

So if one day I'm more open about this struggle, and some of you who confidently assumed I was gay come across this blog, I have something to tell you:  You didn't "know it all along."  You assumed it.  And it just so happened that I did ultimately come to find other men attractive.  But you could have easily been wrong.  You were wrong.  Because all the "signs" that you used to judge me had nothing to do with who I am, or who I'm attracted to.  I'm more than that. I was always more than that.  And I can guarantee you that, if you applied your logic to many other men in my shoes, you've been wrong at least once even about the man's attractions, even if it's only a man you passively judged on the street one day:  Somewhere out there, there are men who have no attraction at all to other men, and yet who face unjust, shallow judgments because people have chosen, like you have, to make quick conclusions on shallow evidence.  It's not right.  You don't "know" what you think you do. 

So if I could ask one thing of you, something that can redeem all those assumptions you made about me, it's this:  Pray for me instead of taking satisfaction in being "right."  Realize that there was always so much more to me.  And in the future, when you meet a man who reminds you of me, who has similar mannerisms or behaviors to those that made you judge me, don't jump to conclusions.  He may not be attracted to men.  And even if he is, he's more than that, just like I am; he deserves to be looked at as a complex human being, he deserves for people to get to know him and find out the facts before they make such sweeping assumptions about him.  

And if you can give him that, then you'll be pointing to your own depth, beauty, and humanity too.