265. stultify

Earlier this year I touched on realizing that, in addition to being gay, I’m also a demisexual.

After a great deal of reflection over recent experiences, I’ve made the decision to no longer identify as gay. For reasons I’ll get to in a few hundred words, I identify chiefly as a homoromantic (or androphilic) demisexual.

To explain, I’m going to respond to questions from an online “Are you a demisexual” test. It’s not scientific at all, but does hit on some of the key aspects of the demisexual identity.

Here we go. This will probably go over my 1,000-word limit, but to hell with it.

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1. I fall in love with the inner character of a person after becoming close to them. Their outer qualities are unimportant to me.

This is a mixed bag. While there are physical characteristics about guys that I do and don’t find attractive, and am more likely to find attractive, there are things that become non-issues if I’ve fallen for a guy’s inner beauty.

2. When experiencing sexual pleasure with another person I haven’t bonded closely with, I focus more on the feelings in my body than on my attraction to the person.

This was definitely true during my slutty hookup years. Sex was something I pursued because I thought that’s what gay men were primarily interested in, so it was something I thought I should pursue. While the sex was sometimes good and there were things I enjoyed doing, it wasn’t much different from masturbating. It was only with guys who I felt a strong connection to, like Seth, where physical pleasure became more transcendent, where I could get out of my head and focus on my partner. That happened only a handful of times.

3. I’m aesthetically attracted to certain people’s faces and bodies, but I’m rarely interested in them sexually.

Case in point, Tom Daley. We’ve been watching a lot of the Olympics around the house, men’s diving in particular… for reasons. I recognize the attractiveness of the faces and bodies of certain guys, but don’t want to fuck them.

4. It’s extremely rare for me to take any sexual interest in the body of a stranger.

See previous.

5. I find relationships very daunting and difficult. Sometimes I’ve gone into them without having any true feelings of attraction.

While there were aspects of my previous boyfriend, Jay, that I liked and was attracted to, I wasn’t attracted to or in love with him. Fear of being single at age 30 overrode my better judgement.

6. I’ve never experienced “love at first sight”.

I experienced what may have been a version of this with Seth the first time we met, but it wasn’t love. It was the idea of him I found attractive.

7. I’ve been single a lot longer than most people I know.

Type “single” into the search box above and see how many entries return.

8. I’d much prefer to masturbate than be sexually involved with a person I have no feelings for.

See answer to question 3.

9. I have a libido, but I rarely sleep around. The thought of having a “one night stand” makes me feel a bit sick.

This is what complicates everything. I do miss sex. Namely, the good parts of it, fleeting moments where I felt a connection, where I got the faintest taste of what I’ve been looking for.

10. Sometimes I find myself developing sexual attraction in close platonic friendships.

This has been one of the biggest benefits of realizing I’m demisexual—understanding why I tend to fall for guys I get close to. It doesn’t necessarily help me not fall for anyone, but it does help contextualize what’s going on.

11. Watching lustful scenes in movies rarely makes me horny. I find them either boring or amusing.

I’ve definitely experienced this while watching movies with gay guys, especially scenes depicting sex between men. I only find myself getting turned on if there’s a suggestion of emotional connection and intimacy between the characters. Otherwise it’s just weird.

12. I notice that the culture I live in is very sexually-charged, so I tend to feel a bit alienated.

Definitely true of me when I’m around gay men. Everything is about sex in some way, whether it’s innuendo, an overt comment about the speculative size of a guy’s cock, or discussion about some fetish someone’s into.

13. I rarely cheat in relationships.

See question 15, below.

14. I’ve never understood the attraction to porn. I’m not at all aroused by it.

This is and isn’t true for me. As with question 11, the only porn I find at all arousing is depictions of actual couples in which there’s real affection and intimacy.

15. When I’m in a relationship with someone who I’ve bonded closely with, it’s almost impossible for me to feel sexual attraction to anyone else but them.

Jay and I had several three-ways when we were together. For me, it was a kind of dissociative experience where it was difficult to stay aroused with the other guy. The only good time for me was when I bottomed for him and a friend of ours, and <rant> I was reminded of what it was like to be with a partner who didn’t just lie there and expect me to do all the work.</rant>

16. Sometimes in close friendships or relationships I spontaneously develop sexual feelings of attraction. It confuses me.

See answer to question 10.

17. I often feel asexual. I’m just not that attracted to people.

See answers to questions 3 and 9.

18. I’ve been called “cold” or “frigid” before in relationships.

This is unfortunately true, and in hindsight it was a consequence of not actually being emotionally attracted. It was confusing for everyone.

19. I’ve only been attracted to a very small number of people in my life. I rarely have crushes.

Genuinely attracted, yes. There have been brief crushes and flings, but they never lasted. Seth was the closest thing I’ve had to a long-term attraction.

20. I’m extremely uncomfortable with sexual advances from other people.

Huge YES to this concerning gay guys. It’s not just that I’m not emotionally attracted to them. A major part of the discomfort is that I realize they, as gay males, think I’m similarly wired to them, and want the same things—fun, flirty, frivolous, no-strings-attached sexy times. This ends up making me feel even more broken, hopeless, and out of place than ever, and combined with the sense of missing what moments of physical and emotional intimacy I’ve had (along with the existential worry that I’m never going to find a guy with whom to build that sense of home I’ve been writing about) becomes intensely, emotionally upsetting.

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So those were the questions. It wasn’t scientific by any means, but it really helps paint the picture of how I’ve been mislabeled all these years. Just because I’m attracted to other men doesn’t automatically make me gay. There was another prefix that was always a better fit.

264. mesmerism

I promised you more details about my sex life in the last post, and here it is, in two parts.

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Part I

Like many gay men, I hate my body. It’s not that I’m overweight or even ugly. On the contrary, I’m still relatively slim for my age and level of physical activity (if you call pacing exercise), and objectively speaking my visage is not unpleasing. Yet still I’m not sure if I meet the standard of what other gay men are going to find attractive and desirable.

This is a game I can’t figure out the rules to.

This issue with being uncomfortable with my body goes back to early childhood. As a boy, I didn’t like going around without a shirt—I didn’t want anyone looking at me, thinking I was skinny, pale, or funny-looking.

There was also a degree of cognitive dissonance because I was aware that other boys—other men—thought nothing of displaying their bodies.

So what was wrong with me that I was so inward-looking?

I recently finished watching the Netflix series Stranger Things. One of the things I came away with was reflecting on the friendship between the four main boys. As a homeschooler, I had no such close friendships at that age. The only other contact I had with boys my age was at church, and that was limited—maybe once or twice a week.

Aside from my father, who I had a pretty distant relationship with, my journey through puberty and adolescence was a lonely one. There was no one else to normalize the changes my body went through, from hair appearing on my face, legs, and chest, to my voice deepening, to the hurricane of male teenage hormones and emotions.

Although I read and studied about these changes, I resented my body for dragging me into this new and confusing experience, especially given the conservative Christian community this took place in. The gist of the advice I received was basically: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.” For me, the only gay in the village (even though I didn’t know it), this was even more lonely once I figured out why I wasn’t interested in girls like the other guys were.

So I’m envious of guys who can go around shirtless or wearing just hot pants, seemingly without a care. They don’t seem to worry about what other people think, and I can’t help wondering how my life might’ve been different had I had close male friends growing up who could’ve helped me acclimate and integrate fully into my adult male body.

(To be absolutely clear, this isn’t gender dysphoria. It’s more that I feel like an outsider, a pariah, or out-of-phase within my own body.)

As it is, I can’t wear shorts without feeling anxious.

Even short-sleeve shirts are a challenge.

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Part II

As I’ve written about in several other posts, sex is something of a psychological minefield for me these days. Again, I’m definitely not asexual.

Rather, to quote U2, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

In addition to Stranger Things, I’ve also been watching season 2 of Showtime’s series Penny Dreadful, and just got to the episode where a character is tormented by visions of her dead children clawing their way out of their graves, beckoning her to join them in death.

Curiously, this scene actually helped clarify what has been happening to me mentally in past sexual encounters for me over the past few years.

In the years following my breakup with my first boyfriend, I transformed myself into a bona fide slut. At one point I was using three different hookup apps to find guys around me to have sex with. In the back of my mind though, I was hoping that at least one of them might turn out to be boyfriend material.

If you kiss enough frogs.

Following the catastrophe with Seth, I literally tried to fuck him out of my system, and over the course of just a few months had actually grown tired of sex. Bouncing from one guy to the next was not only exhausting and degrading: it was depressing.

Once I’d called it quits with Jay, my last boyfriend, nearly nearly three-and-a-half years ago, dating became an exercise in futility. With a trail of failed relationships, the chances of anyone deciding a gay thirtysomething was worth it seemed remote when there were more cute, fun, flirty guys around.

Either during or following my last couple of sexual encounters, the ghosts of all the past guys who I was attracted to and who rejected me came crawling up out of the recesses of my subconscious to remind me of how undesirable I am, how unattractive I am compared to other guys, how once sex happens the guy bails, how much of a fucked up fixer-upper project I am, and how no one has the time or patience for that bullshit.

Remember that cute blonde, Chris, how you went out a couple times before you let him fuck you, and afterwards he couldn’t wait to get rid of you?

It’s not as if I haven’t had enough sex—some of it good, even fun. As I get older and know myself better, sex is just one dimension for me of knowing someone.

Unfortunately, as a demisexual, there needs to be a solid emotional foundation of trust first before adding any kind of sexual element.

Yet all gay guys these days seem to want to do is jump straight to having sex, because for most of them it’s just a fun romp. And me being the one who is different, I don’t know how to negotiate when I know someone well enough to trust that they aren’t just going to bail on me once they get what they want from me sexually.

Ironically, I’m actually as celibate now as I was prior to coming out.

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So those are the gritty details of my sex life.

You are welcome.

263.blandishment

Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten.
Mir blassen durch das dunkel die gesichter
Die freundlich eben noch sich zu mir drehten.

I feel the air of another planet.
The friendly faces that were turned toward me
but lately, now are fading into darkness.

Stefan George, Entrückung [Transport] (trans. by Carl Engel)

There are good days when things seem to be going okay. My spirits are relatively high, I feel optimistic and hopeful about the future, I halfway like myself and other people.

Then there are days, like today, when it’s an achievement just to get out of bed, go downstairs, or leave the house, to not be entirely ruled by the nightmares of my anxiety.

It’s compounded by the further anxiety of knowing that this is all in my head, that people aren’t really thinking that, as well as knowing that I’m literally wasting the remaining years of my life by fearing all of these mental phantasms.

From the video below:

We should use the thought of death not to make us despair of life but to shake us into more committedly pursuing the life we know we need to lead. We will act when the fear of death is finally allowed to trump the fear of failure or humiliation, compromise or shame.

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A few weeks ago, about a week after the attack I wrote about in the last post, I had a meltdown during a gathering of friends.

There were four of us altogether, and we’d been playing games that evening. Things were actually going well. I wasn’t feeling anxious, defensive, or threatened. Then we moved outside to the hot tub, which is when things got… well, frisky.

Here I’ll mention that all four of us are gay men: two are a couple, one a “pup” (for those unfamiliar with kink culture, go here to learn what a “pup” is), and then me, a bristling combination of Bernard Black and Malcolm Tucker.

It was mostly groping, giggling, and making out to begin with amongst the three of them, but sex was clearly on the agenda. And I was feeling very uneasy with the situation, and increasingly morose—and here is where it all goes a bit wibbly-wobbly.

As I wrote about not too long ago, sex is an emotional minefield for me these days, a reality made more uncomfortable because I do still have a sex drive. I miss it, but this whole gay, casual sex culture is, frankly, incredibly unhealthy for me.

Because: I have had plenty of casual sex, and it ultimately left me feeling more lonely and disconnected.

So I was feeling left out, not because I was being ignored (if I’d been into it they would’ve included me), but because I’m in something of a sexual exile.

Et l’arc-en-ciel est exilé
Puisqu’on exile qui l’irise
Mais un drapeau s’est envolé
Prendre ta place au vent de bise.

And now the rainbow is in exile,
as one who changes his colors must be;
but a flag flew away
to take its place in the north wind.

Guillaume Apollinaire, “La grâce exilée”

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I don’t entirely remember what I said after getting out of the water… something about how I’m broken, how I’m going to die alone, and how everyone (gay guys, that is) just seem to want sex and nothing else, and it’s all bullshit.

This is because my emotional brain is wired to work a lot faster than my rational brain can keep up with it, the prize for having grown up in an environment where being hyper aware meant survival. In a matter of seconds, my thought process went something like this:

Me: Why can’t I just be in the moment and enjoy sex like these guy? Why do I have to take things so seriously?
Greek chorus of my mind: Because you’re fucked up and broken by your past.
Me: All gay men are like this, aren’t they?
Greek chorus: Yes. Except you. Remember? You’re broken. You’re not normal.
Me: Oh my god, it’s not them, it’s me. I’m the aberration. That means there’s no one right for me out there, is there? No one who will get my crazy.
Greek chorus: If the past is an indicator of the future, no, you’re never going to find a boyfriend.
Me: I’m going to die alone!!
Greek chorus: Yup. You’ll never have sex again.

That’s the concise version. It was very Eyes Wide Shut in my head, a collaboration between Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick.

After things had calmed down, I realized that this wasn’t about sex necessarily. It was about my fear of never finding a home.

That’s what is behind the surging resentment I feel when seeing gay couples, whether in pictures, video, etc. Because I’m terrified that I’m never going to have that for myself.

A sense of home, something I’ve never felt once in my life.

As I’ve written about, my home life growing up felt like anything but home: safe, secure, welcoming. My mother could be unpredictable and volatile at times, and my father was distant and unresponsive. We talked unconditional love, yet our value and worth was based on how well we conformed to the teachings of our fundamentalist Christian faith.

Then, for most of my adult life I lived and worked amongst evangelical Christians, terrified they’d find out I was gay and shun me.

Add to this the reality that, at 33, I’m woefully unskilled in the art of flirting or responding to flirting due to having had to repress all of that for most of my adult life.

Basically, I’m a gay, male Liz Lemon.

With all of that going on, being in a hot tub with three flirty, sexed-up gay guys sent me over the edge.

I’d like to know what it’s like to be loved and accepted by a guy (here I’ll clarify: single and within my seemingly quantum field of eligibles) who doesn’t run screaming at the sight of my craziness.

Blërg.

262. conciliate

“Over the course of just a few years, as I would go home to Spokane to visit [my friends], instead of them asking me what TV show or movie I’d been in, they asked me if I’d met anyone. And I was sort of asking myself the same question—and with growing concern. I thought: “Wait a minute—when did I go from being the cool one that people envied to being the one the people were a little worried about?”

“And I watched my friends’ marriages become longer, more knowing marriages; and their kids getting big and bigger; and the walks after dinner with the dog; and all the talk about the lake cabins. And I began to wonder if maybe they hadn’t made all the right decisions.” – Julia Sweeney, In the Family Way

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It’s been an intense last couple of weeks since last we met.

Let’s work backwards from today.

Last Thursday my housemate’s dog was attacked by what we’re 99% sure was a coyote.

Around 11:30pm, I looked in the back room and there was one dog sleeping but not the other, which gave me a bad feeling. When I went outside to look for him, I found him about halfway out in the middle of the backyard, collapsed and bloody.

I quickly bundled him inside, unsure of how badly he was hurt. We called the nearest 24-hour vet clinic and drove him over. He was in rough shape, with more lacerations and bite marks than we initially saw, and ended up being there a few days until he was eating again and moving around.

He’s home now, on some pretty fantastic pain medication, and slowly recovering, but it was horrific to find him like that.

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Going back further, a week prior to the coyote attack, I was physically assaulted at a friend’s house.

Yeah.

The short version is that me, my friend Ben, and Jason, a housemate of my friends, were talking. He and Ben were in a heated discussion about the causes of the ’91 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and at one point Jason (who is a veteran) held up his arm to display a scar from a bullet wound, as if definitive evidence for his position.

As politely as he could, Ben said something to the effect of, “Just because you were wounded doesn’t mean you’re right.”

(In hindsight, we should’ve realized we weren’t dealing with a rational person.)

This is when Jason stood up and yelled at Ben: “Get the fuck out of this house.”

When we both just stared at him in dismay, he screamed “You think I’m kidding?”, marched over, grabbed Ben and physically tried to throw him outside.

At this point, out of concern, I tried to intervene.

All of this happened in the span of about fifteen seconds, and at some point I should’ve realized how stupid that was. However, I have no experience with physical violence, preferring to leave physical altercations to the Cro Magnons among us.

So this is when Jason grabbed me by the throat, shoved me backwards into the kitchen, and slammed me against the wall several times. I don’t remember much about the attack, but it was horrific. I’m still emotionally shaken from the incident, haven’t been sleeping well, suffering from flashbacks, etc.

All symptoms of PTSD.

Yay. Because I need more emotionally damaged shit to deal with.

The next day I filed a police report, and the officers basically told me that since I wasn’t injured enough that there wasn’t any grounds to take any further action since the city is bogged down enough with violent crime and domestic abuse cases as it is.

To top it off, my friends that he lives with, who I’ve known for some time and whose wedding I was in last year, have no plans to evict him from their home, though he attacked me, unprovoked.

Basically, my relationship with my friends is now strained because, although they acknowledge he was squarely in the wrong, they’ve refused to take any punitive action against Jason, arguing that throwing him out would do more harm than good.

And turns out that, although I filed a police report, prosecutors are unlike to press charges because I wasn’t injured enough.

So no, I’m still not okay.

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My therapist had a few observations to make about all this when we met on Monday.

Aside from my personal safety, she’s concerned about the ultimatum that I made a few days after the attack to the homeowners that so long as Jason continues to live with them that our friendship can’t continue.

Frankly, I’m concerned too, since it continues a pattern in my relationships that whenever I feel threatened or put in an impossible situation (such as with my parents, who saw nothing wrong with wanting me to be part of the family while they continuing to hold hateful and bigoted views about me).

Yes, I cut off my parents.

I cut off friends I’d known for years from college and church who opposed marriage equality in Minnesota in 2012.

I cut off friends who remained friends with Seth after he dumped me in 2011, interpreting that as their taking his side over mine… and turning against me.

Essentially, my therapist mused, growing up in a household where everything was closely scrutinized through a lens of Reformed, Atonement theology, and where I legitimately felt in peril for much of those formative years as a closeted gay man, it’s natural that I’d still be on high alert, fearful of people turning on me or attacking.

How is that past orientation limiting my present relationships, I wondered. Is it?

How is that narrative script of fear causing me to become intractable and stubborn, and how is it closing me off to future happiness?

How, like Uncle Andrew in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, do I cleverly defend myself “against all that might do you good!”

But more on sex next time.

Because you really wanted to know, right?