181. dilly

This afternoon a friend of mine posted an article from the Guardian about the top five regrets people have as they come to die. As an atheist who doesn’t believe in any kind of afterlife and that each of us only gets one shot at life, being intentional about avoiding regrets has been a major motif for me in the past few years. I don’t want to arrive at the inevitable end of my mortal coil with the taste of an unlived life in my mouth.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This is the principle reason why I finally came out gay almost five years ago, and as an atheist almost two and a half years ago. As a self-identified Christian, I wasn’t being honest with anyone (including myself) about the fact that I didn’t really believe in God, and that church was basically about socializing for me. And after coming to the realization that my sexual orientation wasn’t something that was ever likely to change, and that I didn’t even want it to change, I decided that living in fear of what my parents and community thought wasn’t worth wasting the opportunity to express who I truly am. Worse, it’s not worth the opportunity to experience life through the lens of marriage and intimate relationship, and to learn to love and be loved by another human being — in my case, another man.

I didn’t want to get to the end of my life with the knowledge that I’d missed the chance to find someone who I couldn’t live without.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

For me, this has less to do with working long hours and more to do with the nature of work that I do. For most of my working life I’ve taken the safer path and accepted jobs that paid the bills or didn’t provide much challenge. Even my degree I chose in college was something I knew wouldn’t carry much risk in terms of accomplishment. But ultimately, I’m most happy when creating, whether musically or with words. The best times in my life, when I felt most alive, were when I was working on a show, or writing an opera or novel, and so on. And life is too short to not be remarkable and do what brings you.

“It’s not so much do as you like as it is that you like what you do.”
– Dot, Sunday in the Park with George

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Heh, as anyone who reads this blog or follows my Facebook posts knows, this is not an area where I often hold back. Even my face frequently betrays what I’m thinking and feeling. I was a very outgoing and exuberant child, but there was a span of years during my childhood where I was shut-down and self-repressed. I’m not entirely sure why that happened. There were troubles with my parents, as many boys experience, but few photos from those years show me smiling. I’d become very self-critical, a trait that has survived well into adulthood, and remember being very dissatisfied with myself, particularly how I looked when smiling.

Thanks to one drama teacher in junior high, however, I rediscovered my ability to express myself, to smile and to laugh again. It wasn’t until after I came out as an atheist that I was really able to start expressing the pain and hurt that I experienced growing up. And once I’d given voice to the hurt, and truly grappled with the concept of the finality of existence, start expressing to people in my life how much they truly mean to me.

Words from the Bible that I grew up hearing and reading now take on a new, ironical meaning: “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Only that “me” ended up not being some religious figure.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

I’m trying to do better about this, but as an introvert with some hard-to-shake social anxiety and hermit tendencies, it’s a daily struggle. To that end, and thanks to the influence of a friend of mine, I’ve started maintaining a spreadsheet to track who I spend time with, and how often. It was partly in response to wanting to be more intentional about my social life, but also getting tired of saying, “It’s been a while!”

Quite a few friendships were burned in the process of coming out twice, some on my part and some on the part of others. You do learn who your true friends are when you show them your true self, and they can either live with that identity or reject you because you’re not who they wanted you to be. And it made me realize the importance of choosing your friends wisely, and spending time with truly good people whose company I covet and value.

One of the bedroom decorating tips in feng shui is to “choose images that you want to see happening in your life.” That’s how I’m approaching friendships now. Quality over quantity.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is probably the hardest one of all. As Aslan says in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew,

“… he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam’s son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good!”

Part of the impetus in starting therapy last September was to find a trained, impartial third-party observer to help me identify the ways I’ve tied myself in knots over the years. As Bob Wiley realized, “If I don’t untie myself, inside the emotional knots, I’m going to explode.”

Baby step: untie your knots. Life’s too damned short not to let yourself be happy.

180. genethliac

This weekend was my nephew’s third birthday party. I’m still unsure how to feel about being an uncle since I’m not really that excited about kids. Even as a child, I had no idea what to do with other kids, especially other boys, whose interest in intellectual pursuits was about as pronounced as their desire to have teeth pulled.

(Granted, this was in central Kansas in the 1990s, where my family was until we moved to Minnesota when I was 10 years old.)

At the recommendation of a friend, I paid a visit to Creative Kidstuff in Saint Paul. At age three, most kids have an attention span limited to anything colorful or dynamic. My nephew likes running around, being active, and doing things with his hands, and my sister informed me that he does like crafts, but also likes books.

After being pointed in the direction where I’d likely find presents for active, creative three-year-olds, I spoke with an adorable young guy who gave me several ideas for things that would be age-appropriate, aid in tactile development and hand-eye coordination, and fun. (I tried not to think about all the fun things I wanted to do with him, but that’s another story.) One was a paper bag hand puppet craft kit that I thought both my nephew and his mom would have fun with.

Crafty, fun present – check!

Then it was over to the book section where I saw a collection of the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit stories. These were stories that my sisters and I grew up reading and hearing, and I especially remember the vivid illustrations. It was one of the first books I can remember reading out loud by sounding out the syllables, much like the scene in the play Wit where a young Vivian makes the association between the word “soporific” and the picture of the sleepy bunny.

Then I saw another book that also occupied many happy hours of my childhood – Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. My parents had a copy from what must’ve been the 1950s that looked very much like this one. As I leafed through the book, memories came flooding back, of poems like “The Land of Counterpane” and “Foreign Lands.”

“Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.”

I had the thought that even if he didn’t appreciate books as presents now, he might someday find himself in search of a present for his own nephew, and nearly break down in tears while remembering the stories he read as a child. And those books will be around long after I’m gone, which is more than can be said for the flashy toy cars and games other people gave him. Toys are played with and forgotten. Books endure.

So I may not be the “fun” uncle who plays jokes and steals noses, but I can be the uncle who takes an interest in my nephew’s intellectual development. And for whatever the reason, my sister tells me that he was asking if I was going to come to the party. So apparently I’ve done enough to warrant being memorable!

I was surprised to see that a classmate of mine from college who had roomed with my sister years ago was also there. We’d fallen out of touch over the years as we graduated, and even before as we went our separate educational ways – me on the music performance track, she on music education. We were close our first three years of college, having most of our core music classes together, but she and the other music education majors had an extra year of courses to complete so I didn’t see much of her or them after junior year.

We chatted for a little bit, and of course one of the first questions she asked was whether I was doing much composition! I always feel guilty when saying no, that I’m squandering the talent that I invested so many years in developing, or that I’m not living up to my potential or expectations that everyone had for me.

In an unexpected turn, she disclosed that the previous year she and her (smoking hot) husband (who was swimming just outside the party room and walking around shirtless and in swim trunks, showing off his washboard abs and sexy pecs) had lost a child due to a rare genetic disorder. They’d been advised that the child likely wouldn’t survive, and that if he did it would be with significant disability, but they brought him to full term anyway, like the Evangelicals they are.

Even though the baby lived for only five minutes after being born, she talked about the peace she was able to find in God, in her church, and “in the Word.”

Given how long it’s been since we last spoke, I’m not sure if she knew that she was talking to an atheist, but in a moment where a mother was describing her experience of losing a child, it didn’t seem appropriate to bring up the fact I don’t believe in God anymore. I’m glad that she as able to find comfort and solace in her religious beliefs, but it’s one of those moments as an atheist when you realize how much privilege Christians still enjoy in this society.

Of course, my atheism isn’t really that big of a deal in my own life. Frankly, I don’t identify as an atheist except when dealing with fundamentalists pushing their Christofascist agenda on the rest of the population. I don’t hide the fact that I don’t believe in God, but there are more important things to care about – guys, music, literature, philanthropy, current events, friends, science, etc.

I do wish, however, that I could bring up my non-belief with old friends without being interrogated and politely judged. It is a significant life event, after all…

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179. balk

“Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change… You have never been my enemy. I am very sorry that I have been yours.”

Dear Alan Chambers,

I read your funny little note today. Or it would be funny if it weren’t so deeply offensive to me and to every gay person you’ve helped murder, maim, mangle, dehumanize and abuse over the many years of your “ministry” as president of Exodus International.

Fortunately, I am not one of those “ex-gay” survivors (i.e., victims). I was never desperate enough to fully buy into the lie that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, or that my sexual orientation needed “curing.” Frankly, I’m not sure why this is when so many of my friends willingly subjected themselves to the brand of psychological terrorism your organization helped promote. They did this out of a desperate, last-ditch hope that it would make them acceptable enough for your so-called God, and for their families who ultimately failed in the duty to show them unconditional love.

Perhaps it was my parents’ instilling of critical thinking skills in me at an early age that never allowed me to fully accept their and my church’s teaching about homosexuality. There was a small but present voice in my mind (that, thanks to teachings about demons and “spiritual warfare,” I attributed to the Devil tempting me) that said, “This doesn’t make sense.”

And why should it? Why would we willingly choose a “lifestyle” that for too many of us results in the hostile rejection of our friends and family, being taunted, called names, beaten up (and too often brutally murdered), demonized and hated — all for simply loving a person of the same sex?

That’s right — straight people have relationships; faggots just want sex.

“… If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

I was never desperate or foolish enough to pursue so-called “reparative” therapy. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t spend the majority of my teen years in pained anguish over what I believed were filthy and repulsive sexual feelings, pleading with God almost every single night growing up to take those feelings away.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t 25 years of my life that I’ll never get back because I believed the bullshit that God’s “design” for human beings was heterosexuality.

It doesn’t mean that my young adult life were desperately lonely and miserable as I watched my straight friends date, fall in love, and get married, something I thought wasn’t an option for me because our holy book said that marriage was between a man and a woman.

So forgive me if I find it infuriatingly laughable when you say that you’re not my enemy. You’re worse than my enemy. You’re a disgusting quisling, a self-loathing, self-hating collaborator against your own kind. You’ve ruined lives with your teachings. You’ve all but put the gun in the hand or kicked the chair out from under who knows how many innocent LGBT people who couldn’t live with the life you and others told them they had to live in order to get to Heaven — all because they were unfortunate enough to have been born different than 95% of the human population.

And for that you’re sorry? Like Steve Urkel lamenting, “Did I do that?”

The only good thing to came out of this nightmare for me is that I was well prepared for the realizations that (1) religion is nonsense, and (2) there is no God. For me, these conclusions were inevitable. I was never the kind of person who can blindly accept given propositions as fact. It would’ve been nice if these realizations could’ve come earlier, and with less grief and pain, but they are hard-won, and they are mine. And I’m building a new, happier, freer life for myself, without the lies and self-hatred that I was fed growing up.

It would’ve also been nice if I could have accepted my sexuality earlier, and in a family where I could’ve been accepted for who I am rather than who they believe I should be. But then, I wouldn’t be the unique, strong, dynamic and caring individual that I am today. It has been a long, difficult road to accepting myself, but I doubt that I’d appreciate the joy of love and relationships in the same way had I not known the despair and broken loneliness first.

However, I hold you personally responsible for the grief, loss and pain I suffered, in the full knowledge that you’re merely a part of the system that oppressed and subjugated you too. Yet you willingly participated in that oppression and subjugation by becoming an oppressor yourself. You taught millions of gay men and women to hate and loathe themselves, and to bury themselves alive in unfulfilling relationships with members of the opposite sex because the leaders of your church taught that this is “God’s will.”

So until you figure out a way to go back in time and prevent every person from going through the life of pain and misery you inflicted on them, there is no forgiveness for you, or your kind. All I hope is that you devote the rest of your sad life to dismantling the lies about LGBT people that you’ve promoted and fostered over the years.

But there is no forgiveness for you. There may be others who can find it in their hearts to do so, and good for them. But you will be my enemy until the day you die and leave this planet to those of us who want to build a more kind, peaceful and tolerant world.

 

178. diglossia

This past weekend I saw the following list on a blog I follow. I’m not entirely sure why I still follow this guy. Morbid curiosity? He was a Xanga blogger I subscribed to back when I was a Christian. I still get occasional email updates from him when he posts, and am always curious what conservative hijinks he’s getting up to. On Thursday he wrote:

“… if you have a little sister or younger female friend, please ask her a few questions or make these comments when she says she’s with someone.”

1. Does he tell people he’s in a relationship with you?
2. Are you exclusive with him, or not?
3. Has he ever hit you?
4. Does he ever try to emotionally blackmail you?
5. Does he ever demand sexual favors from you?
6. Does he take you places?

The list bothered me on several levels. On the one hand, there’s the chauvinistic notion that women are the “weaker sex” and therefore need coddling and protecting, aren’t capable of taking care of themselves, or of making good decisions without male guidance or oversight. Of course, I highly doubt

Second, there also the concept of males as the predatory sex; that if left unchecked, men will mistreat, abuse and/or take advantage of women. Alyssa Royse wrote last month in an article titled The Danger in Demonizing Male Sexuality over on the website The Good Men Project:

“… girls are told that boys are predatory and somehow out of control. The corollary there is that boys are told they are predators, and out of control. Therefore, not a desirable thing, but a thing to defend against. From the get-go, we are teaching our kids to fear male sexuality, and to repress female sexuality… It means that he who possesses sexuality is assumed a predator.”

Of course, I don’t think the blogger in question meant to imply any of the above; that women are all damsels in distress, or that men are pigs. He simply lives in his conservative Christian bubble where “the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3). It’s a neat and tidy way of looking at the world, where everything has its place and purpose and there’s little to question or challenge.

But it did get me to thinking about relationships and our reticence to get involved in other people’s lives – specifically, to ask questions that might be perceived as prying.

Gay male relationships are an odd bag. In American society in general, men are perceived as being inherently more competent. Some of it is pride in being reluctant to often admit that we don’t know what we’re doing, but we tend to look at men as being capable, independent and strong. That perception is a little bent where gay men are concerned with the cultural trope that we’re more effeminate and therefore associated more with stereotypes of women than we are men. But even then though, there’s still a hands-off attitude when it comes to our relationships. It’s assumed that we know what we’re doing and don’t need guidance or for anyone to look out for us.

I look back at some of my past relationships and wish that someone had had the courage and wherewithal to ask me some of the above questions in that list. Because I’ve dated guys who didn’t tell anyone that we were in a relationship, either because they were reluctant to define the relationship or because they weren’t completely out of the closet. I’ve dated guys who in hindsight were incredibly emotionally abusive, and I didn’t have the self esteem to acknowledge that this is what was happening, or leave and be alone rather than stay and put up with the abuse.

I’ve dated guys who didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. It may have been that they simply prefered to stay in, or that they just didn’t like to spend money. Of course, in the list above the question “Does he take you places?” implies that the man should be treating his lady to a 1950s romantic night out on the town (and offering her his coat for when it gets cold on their after-dinner sidewalk stroll).

(“Of course, you may not have a problem about what to do on a date… but Nick? Well, he has a real dating problem.” Because Nick doesn’t want to date Kay. Nick wants to date Jeff.)

Of course, this problem of not asking questions when something doesn’t seem right about someone else’s relationship isn’t related to gays. We often stand by and let people make terrible life choices that we know will end in tears. We’ll know that two people are going to be a terrible match for each other, but not say anything for fear of stepping on feelings or jeopardizing a friendship.

Yet these friends are always eager to commiserate after the relationship has gone down in flames, after your heart has been smashed to bits, and you find yourself wondering where these friends were before everything went to hell. However, there’s always the question of whether you’d have listened to anyone try to say that dating that guy is a bad idea…

Ah, hubris.

It bothers me that we’d take such a backwards attitude to others’ relationships. We’d speak up if we thought someone was developing a drug problem or eating disorder, if they clearly needed to go to the doctor, or were clearly getting into a life of organized crime. Yet we think nothing of standing quietly by as two people walk headlong into romantic disasters.

What if we took as much of an interest in each other’s emotional health as we do in each other’s physical health and safety? [Edit:] Perhaps not so much making direct, probing inquiries as it is simply asking, “So how’s it going with ______?” and simply letting that friend know that someone is there to talk and non-judgmentally listen should things go south.

177. trachle

Last week on Facebook, I posted an article from Queerty about the results of a study conducted through Hunter College in New York that found that of the 800 gay and bisexual men surveyed, “many subjects received physical and mental health benefits from relationships with some degree of openness.”

The article ignited quite a good conversation, the emerging theme being some surprising indignation over monogamy bashing. I can understand how someone in a monogamous relationship might feel affronted over some labeling them sexually repressed, prudish, vanilla, or old-fashioned. The latter term I find particularly humorous as someone who considers “old-fashioned” anything relating to pre-agrarian society, and thinks of “oldies” as music written before 1600.

And I should say up front that the results of this study should not be taken to mean that all relationships should be open, that monogamy is unrealistic, or anything of that sort. Studies of this kind are always descriptive, not prescriptive – sort of a This is what we see rather than This is what should be. This is also a study of gay and bisexual men, and has little (if anything) to do with heterosexual relationships.

So I thought I’d take a moment to discuss open relationships and what they are (and are not), because there seems to be confusion over what “open” means.

First, it’s not a synonym for “polygamy” or “polyamory.” It merely means that a couple is not sexually exclusive, strictly speaking. This openness takes diverse forms, from a couple simply including a third person, to each partner having one or several outside partner(s), or a combination. And the degree of openness varies widely. A couple may be more (or less) discriminating about who they invite in. There may be one other person, or many. It depends on the couple and each partner’s comfort level and sense of trust and security established in the relationship. Each relationship is as unique as the people in it.

In other words, this is all about practicing good communication and doing what’s optimal for your relationship, and for yourself. If you’re the sort of person who’d experience emotional distress over entering into a sexual relationship with someone outside of your own marriage or partnership, then it’s not a good choice for you. But if you and your partner have both expressed an interest in other people, have talked about it and set parameters that you’re both comfortable with, and are pursuing those relationships in a safe and healthy way that doesn’t harm anyone – why is it even an issue?

I should talk briefly about my own experience with open relationships. Readers of this blog may know that I was raised in a Christian home where sex was barely ever talked about, and that sex outside of marriage was a serious sin. Because our God was the kind who enjoyed micro-managing, and because the Calvinist sect of Christianity that my parents ascribed to believed in predestination, I was taught growing up that from the dawn of time God had chosen one person [of the opposite sex] for each of us to marry (except, of course, for those who God had predestined to be celibate – i.e., homosexual). So the paradigm I had as a child and young adult was exclusive, one-person-forever monogamy.

My first encounter with an open couple happened a couple of years ago when a friend told me that he and his boyfriend were interested in me sexually. Now, even after I came out gay, my relationship paradigm was still exclusive, one-person-forever monogamy. I should also say that my first sexual encounter was with my first boyfriend – and I mean first everything – first kiss, first time being naked with anyone, etc. We dated for about six months, and in that entire time I was faithful to him.

After we broke up, I started to wonder if I could really commit myself to just one person for the rest of my life, now that I’d actually had sex. My parents have been faithful to each other all the time they’d been together. Most of the couples I knew had been faithfully monogamous, and we tacitly considered those who got divorced or cheated on their spouses less Christian for having broken their marital vows.

So there I was, being propositioned by a friend of mine and his boyfriend (who are married now and still happily together), and the odd thing was that it wasn’t that weird once I was actually face-to-face with the question. And since then I’ve got to know many other couples who are at different points on the monogamish spectrum.

I should say at this point that “open” is not a license to cheat, or have whatever you want. (My parents were fond of the saying, “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?”) Cheating implies sneaking around, which itself implies that something is not right in the relationship. All the open relationships I’ve been involved in have had the full blessing of both partners, and I’ve turned down guys whose boyfriends or partners didn’t know what they were doing.

And in a way, the friendships I’ve had with guys in open relationships (at least of the couples I’ve become involved with) have felt closer and more honest, mainly because we’re not tripping over all that dratted sexual tension. No one’s worrying about what’s okay or acceptable because we’ve talked about it.

Are all my friendships with couples in open relationships sexual? No. Only a handful, because I’m discriminating about who I get involved with. Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I don’t have preferences and standards!

Next time I’ll cover another subject I’ve been thinking and talking about lately – monogamy.

In the meantime, if you want to share any thoughts about open relationships, experiences, or angry notes, you can do so in the handy contact form below. Or leave me a comment!

Hugs and kisses.

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