On Being a Better Gay, No. 1: Out

A few things have happened lately that have had me contemplating my big gay existence. First, I met my partner in prude, who has donated more hours to gaytalk over the past two weeks than anyone else I’ve met in my life. Then, as anyone who’s read this blog before knows, I’m facing the gay world alone for the first time in a few years (i.e., I’m single), and finding myself not really enjoying it. Also, Saturn return + single + abundant time alone = this type of thing. Right now, on a Saturday afternoon while I’m simultaneously pontificating about Whitney Houston, making pesto, and drinking a beer, it seems like a good idea to write up the first installment of “On Being a Better Gay,” and I’m going to start with the tired—but maybe so tired it is fresh—subject of coming out.

I still have not “come out” to many of my friends and extended family. The moment I realized I was gay, I had this conviction that gay progress was so advanced as to render coming out obsolete—as in, the psychological risk (great or small) of coming out is equal for both the gay and the non-gay. This seems reasonable, right? For you to know that I am attracted to and want to have sex and monogamously make a life with someone of the same sex is as awkward for me to bring up as it is for you to. So if you aren’t going to ask, I’m not going tell.

And—okay, I never told my mom. I grappled with it. Wouldn’t she want to know who I really am and wouldn’t she want to know that I had finally met someone who I was in love with (at that time I had recently met my first [only, so far] real boyfriend) and wouldn’t this be the ultimate gesture, to crack through the filter that had propped up between us over the past few years? But in the end, and as the end became more imminent, it just seemed crude: crude to force upon her a constructed aspect of Who I Am, crude to inadvertently bring up sex, crude for me to expect her approval, or even her interest, at such a moment. So she died with the question of my being gay never having been addressed. I don’t know if I regret it, but, for the sake of gay people, I feel guilty. (Also, I don't think I'd be writing this if I had told her.) Ideally she would have said “Duh, who cares”; worst-case scenario, it would have made her uncomfortable and irritated that my timing was so bad and she would have thought me selfish for imposing myself on her. (I didn’t fear outright rejection, because my family just doesn’t roll like that.) One thing I have learned from the very few times that my coming out has been of consequence is that you need time; some people need a few weeks, months, years in order to think and feel about the newly addressed outlines of their relationships, and I had let this luxury pass me by as far as mom was concerned.

So I guess the place for me to begin in terms of being a better gay, and maybe some other guys would begin here, too, is to be more out. My biggest problem has always been that I don’t like drawing attention to myself and I don’t like confrontation. (The type of activism that I’ve historically favored has been the kind that comes with enrolling in a class called “Re-imagining Queer” or mingling at the cocktail party after a Kessler Lecture [do you know that I used to think I would meet my future husband in such a venue?].) Well, I say that, and it’s true, but there’s also some cultivated homophobia that comes with being non-confrontational. Like when my grandmother recalled a wedding to me, when I was ten or twelve, and at her table during the reception were two guys who wore matching wedding bands (and whom she knew to be a committed gay couple), and how she thought it was just perfect because otherwise no one even mentioned it—there was no in-your-face nothing, no selfish broadcasting, no icky details—which come to think of it doesn’t seem so bad, but at the time I interpreted as she doesn’t ever want to know, and which is how I legitimized never telling her and how I continue to not address it directly with my grandfather. One would think I’d have learned by now.

But, oh! The disappointment! I was the good kid, the one with straight A’s who enjoyed practicing the piano, who never got a speeding ticket (I didn’t turn gay until college), who always preferred hanging out with his parents to basically anyone else. How disappointing, that after such potential, he should end up as an aberration. When you grow up in Idaho and most everyone you know is a Republican and you’re a status-quo-inclined person, this is what you impulsively think until you get smart enough to question that impulse. It took some distance and a few gay lit/gender theory classes before I could recognize—first, in myself, and then in others—that being gay was not a throbbing character flaw.

Where am I going with this? Well, okay: I don’t really like separatism. When I came to New York and in my soft-soled-shoes way ingratiated myself to the gay scene, I wasn’t quite ready for how isolated it would be from the world that was familiar to me at the time. Even now, almost eight years later, I am still struck by this discrepancy. Why is it that we do so many of our gay things in the exclusive company of other gays? I assume it’s a comfort level thing and that it has something to do with being part of a minority and because otherwise it is exhausting and endlessly disappointing, and honestly what’s the alternative? And maybe all that I’m talking about is bars and crystal meth and XTube and insane sexual histories, and maybe I’m just a prude. But there is some truth to the fact that lots of us make very bad choices, and that our “culture” is not helping us to make better ones. What I’m trying to not say, because I gather it’s a profoundly incorrect thing to say, is that by living this way—publicly amongst ourselves, i.e., privately, i.e., by making our way alone and largely by our own terms, and with a strong emphasis on instinct gratification—there might be some lingering shame about said lifestyle choices. Am I not alone in feeling that it would be a better thing to be more “out”?

Or maybe the fact that it is now Saturday night, the first in a long time that I’ve had off from work, and after the pesto I made “saag” with chickpeas, and then I made hummus, and now I’m three-quarters the way through a very nice bottle of Grüner Veltliner—maybe this puts the whole issue in high relief: I have very little first-hand knowledge of what I’m trying to write about. I do sometimes wonder how it is that the gay “identity” transitions from one of romantic desire to something bigger than that—for example, I have a hard time making gay friends if I have not previously been in love with them; desire has always been the basis of the identity—and I think constantly about how difficult it is to chart your own path when there’s not much of one before you to use for reference.