293. circumspect

You didn’t see my valentine
I sent it via pantomime
While you were watchin’ someone else
I stared at you and cut myself
It’s all I’ll do ‘cause I’m not free
A fugitive too dull too flee
I’m amorous but out of reach
A still-life drawing of a peach

– Fiona Apple, “Valentine” from The Idler Wheel (2012)

tumblr_o1htgfvsun1qhmfh4o1_r1_400 One of the depressing aspects of being single in your mid-30s is that virtually everyone else you know is probably in some manner of relationship by this point. You’ve become the token single friend.

And it sometimes goes like this:

You had a close group of friends. They’d make plans for Tuesday nights; go on outings to apple orchards or see a film; get together to play games or make dinner a few nights a month. You feel a sense of kinship and belonging here.

Then, gradually, everyone starts to pair off. Maybe a few people in the group start dating or find partners outside the group who then Yoko their way into the fold.

You progressively find yourself more on the outside. Activities become couples-oriented since you’re pretty much the only person who isn’t dating or married now.

They ask if you’re seeing or interested in anyone and you watch them exchange worried glances when you say “no.”

Eventually they start doing couples-only dinners and get-togethers.

You find out about plans after the fact because so-and-so forgot to include you on the group email/chat (but they “totally didn’t mean to leave you out”), but you feel increasingly out of place and othered when they do invite you to do things.

Wedding follows wedding like supernovas going off in a star cluster. You get invited to some, always RSVP’ing for one; are part of the wedding party in some and a musician in others. At receptions, you get seated with random family members or the other misfits who don’t know anyone else there.

People start having children and soon their lives have room for only other parents and families. Talk involves school, vacation plans, sickness, and other familial things. You “wouldn’t understand until you have children of your own.”

When you do get together with someone from the old group, you both feel like such different people, with little in common. It’s like being on an awkward first date.

You didn’t really know how to say anything to prevent it, but somewhere in there you fell through the cracks.

Of course, none of this was intentional. People change as life circumstances change.

Their personal life choices are shaped by the considerations of another’s. Yours are not.

Their sleep is interrupted by their bed partner snoring or a child crying. Yours is not.

They have to coordinate multiple family schedules over the holidays. You have just one family to deal with, yet even those feel lonelier as your siblings and cousins get married.

Le temps passe.

This is the world in which I increasingly find myself. I had such a group of friends after college that gradually dissolved as people started dating and getting married. Our ties, too, dissolved.

In some ways, I feel like a human talisman who brings romantic fortune into the lives of people I’m close to. Every flatmate I’ve had started dating their current partner shortly after we moved in together.

A new friend group forms and the cycle repeats.

This matchmaking power seems to work for everyone else but me.

However, I don’t know if it’s they who change towards me or me towards them. Maybe a bit of both, with my anxiety backseat driving.

And one truth I’d rather not admit to is my inferiority complex around those who are in relationships. I feel I’m somehow not as mature or put together in their presence, like I should have achieved the same things and haven’t, and am therefore not as worthy.

One way this manifests is with guys I’ve long held a torch for, despite all evidence to the contrary that anything would ever come of it.

My response when they inevitably start dating someone is to withdraw and tacitly cut them out of my life, or limit contact to occasionally commenting on or liking a social media post that isn’t of him and the new girlfriend (and hiding those that do).

This just happened with a guy who I’ve known for a couple years—and on whom I’ve been crushing for some time. I’ve never said anything since he’s insisted that he’s 100% heterosexual, and didn’t want to jeopardize the friendship by having that conversation, make everything totally awkward, and in all likelihood lose the friendship.

The crazy thing is I always know this will be the outcome; disappointment is inevitable. It happens over and over because it seems I have zero control over who I’m attracted to. It’s always hetero or bi guys who aren’t interested in me that way.

This is unfortunately how demisexuality works. My brain and conscious mind are in separate departments and never consult each other. So it’s a perennial hazard that, despite ourselves, we tend to fall for friends or people with whom we’re close.

He posted the relationship status last week so I’m faced again with the choice of whether to protect myself and preemptively distance myself before he, too, drifts away; or break the cycle and find an emotionally healthy, mature way to proceed?

In light of all this, I have been asking myself two questions:

Why do I care so much about this?
What exactly do I want/expect from a relationship?

The second question is probably the more important one, but the answer to the first is, again, the intense desire and need for the permanent, secure home I lacked as a child. The emotionally violent reactions I experience to rejection or disappointment is the raw, unregulated response of that child to pain and the fear of abandonment.

We learn how to deal with stress and disappointment from watching how our parents react. As the first born, my mom especially treated scrapes and bruises as if I’d been shot. So instead of being shown how to calmly assess a situation and its actual seriousness, I learned to go into fight mode to protect myself.

In other words, I developed anxious-resistant attachment.

Thus, the need for learning to reparent myself to become more secure.

290. circadian

“I don’t think I’m very good at gay… I used to sit there and watch [the Mardi Gras parade] and go, “Where are the quiet gays supposed to go?” I still do.

“… the pressure on my people to express our identity and pride through the metaphor of party is very intense. An afternoon of that … [and] I need to express my identity through the metaphor of a nap.”

– Hannah Gadsby. “Nanette.”

What does it actually mean to be gay—aside from being attracted to other men (which I tend to think of as the defining criteria)?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself the last couple of years, in part because my brain is incapable of not overanalyzing everything.

Thankfully, society seems to have firmly settled opinions on this for me.

According to mass media, in no particular order, gay men:

Are extroverted, gregarious, youthful, and always happy, and ironically witty. They especially love clubs. And dancing. (So much dancing.)
Go to the gym, are underwear-model fit, and are comfortable stripping to their Aussiebum briefs/jock strap in public. Especially at the club or pride.
Speak in a higher pitch, often reminiscent of speech patterns and inflections of teenage girls.
Love pop music, especially dance music (e.g., Madonna, Carly Rae Jepsen, Cher, Gaga, etc).
Have location-based dating (i.e., hookup) apps (e.g., Grindr, Hornet, Scruff, Jack’d, Recon, etc).
Are rapaciously flirtatious, unabashedly promiscuous, attracted to all [physically fit] men, and sort neatly into the categories of top and bottom.
Walk quickly and with excellent posture, are very tidy and smartly dressed, and are often more than a little eccentric (which is why they can’t sit properly in chairs).
Can plan your wedding, organize a brunch, and redecorate your apartment in a single afternoon.
Belong to at least one kink community. (Leather is a given since every gay man owns a harness, armbands, and tight black t-shirts.)
Primarily have open—or monogamish—relationships (because #6).

Of course, these are stereotypes.

As such, they do not accurately reflect individuals or an entire population.

That said, as with most stereotypes, they exist partly because there are gay men for whom many of these are true. (Also: gays make great supporting characters.) But many of them do have a basis in the history of gay communities, especially leather and bars.

They also present a wee brain teaser to those of us who are trying to figure out where we fit in all this, and who often wonder “where the quiet gays are supposed to go”.

For me, I’m largely incapable of flirting, partly because I’ve no patience for the subtle rituals men (especially gay men) perform when they’re interested in someone.

Mostly because my style is so distinctly German.

Ditto patience for clothing or grooming habits that take more than two minutes.

Mostly, I just don’t care.

Meaning that it’s difficult to find where—and with whom—I might fit.

This past weekend, as recounted in the last post, I was surprised to find myself both attracted to and flirting with a guy at the gaming mini-con. Granted, we were both pretty inebriated due to a miscalculation of 1) the amount of food I’d had that evening and 2) the strength of an alcoholic beverage a friend of mine had made.

Also, the guy in question was married and avowedly monogamous, even as he was coming to terms with the possibility of being bisexual.

There were a number of reasons why I was surprised at suddenly being attracted to this person and experiencing over the next day or so what can be described as a crush. He wasn’t my usual “type” and was also, for all intents and purposes, unavailable.

In hindsight, that was perhaps what made acknowledging that attraction so easy—the low risk it ultimately presented.

Again, it wasn’t sexual; it was probably more aesthetic or emotional, and even a little romantic. Our deep conversation allowed for a space of vulnerability to open up, where it was safe to acknowledge that I was attracted to him. It’s a bit hazy who first admitted it, but it’s the first time I’d done that in a very long while.

It was kind of nice.

There are moments when I miss sex, of being intimate with a guy. These are moments when I question if I’m truly on the asexual spectrum, but on further reflection, sex has always been secondary to connection, like a palpable extension of the emotional bond that exists between us. Of course, that’s only happened a handful of times, but it was always intense.

Those times also amounted to just a moment in the woods.

That’s part of what frightens me so much about attraction based on past experiences: their one-sidedness. What puzzles me about so many gay men is their casual attitudes towards sex, as if it were just another fun activity—one guy’s much like any other. To be fair, this is probably men in general, though exceptions (as usual) abound.

But, at least outwardly, there seems to be little ruminating or emotional fallout.

I get so caught up in what everything means, whether or not we mean something to each other now, the nature of the new context (if one exists), and if I’m ever going to even find someone with whom I’m compatible.

It’s all a bit of a mood and fun killer.

A healthier, less tortured way of approaching last week’s flirtation may be as practice: just a simple step towards easing back into dating. Because if a partner and emotional connection is what I want, that won’t happen if I just complain about being lonely.

Learning to hear and acknowledge my inner voice’s worries and fears of disappointment would certainly help allay anxieties.

Approaching it in an experimental manner might also be healthier: setting aside biases, setting expectations low, and simply exploring what’s there rather than worrying about what might happen—not to mention trying to make something happen.

Plus, being less resistant to experiencing attraction sounds less tense. Simply noticing when it’s happening without judging it.

(It also makes me ponder whether I really need a boyfriend or if a small group of guys with whom I had an intensely close bond would be enough.)

There’s also knowledge of what didn’t work the first time around: that I was “trying” to be gay, following models set by others for how gay men were supposed to behave rather than following my intuition.

I can find my own way of “being gay.”

288. plasticity

nexus Hi, friends.

The 454 intervening days between my last post and today have been quite eventful.

For one, I finally started seeing a psychiatrist and learned that the symptoms I’ve been experiencing for a while are likely due to the combination of anxiety and depression. I’m currently on Lamictal to stabilize my ever-changing mood.

I discovered I have a pretty severe vitamin D deficiency, which could explain my energy level, cognitive slowing, and back pain. It could even exacerbate my depression.

I also finally got around to scheduling an appointment to see a new primary care doctor, which is something I’ve been avoiding for a while because of how anxious it made me.

So I’m gradually getting a handle on my health and planning for the long term.

I’m also seeing a new therapist who is helping me process the complex trauma of growing up in a deeply dysfunctional and emotionally abusive home. It’s difficult to pinpoint any one incident from those years since it was more like a steady stream of hurtful and toxic messages that were repeated so often that I simply accepted them since there was nothing to compare it to. It was just normal.

Finally, in 2018 I co-wrote an original musical over the spring summer and music directed a concert in the fall, so from about April to November was an absolute wash. It was often stressful and exhausting, but it was so good to get back into being creative.

The work I’m currently doing in therapy is to identify ways that trauma has shaped my life, how I view myself, and the myriad of ways my parents manifest in my unconscious behavior. For instance, my mother is a control freak, possibly a consequence of moving around a lot as a child and not having a stable environment, which results in going overboard to hold on to people and relationships and thereby driving them away.

For me, this often manifests in anxiety around uncertainty and in outbursts of anger when I feel out of control or blocked in achieving a goal. I also don’t like surprises.

My father had a truly fucked up childhood, enduring physical abuse from his father, his mother dying when he was six, his father remarrying a woman whose son tortured him, and finally being sent to a boys’ boarding school. As a result, he was often emotionally withdrawn as a father but quick to discipline or criticize.

Consequently, I have serious issues with authority figures and get incredibly angry whenever I feel misunderstood or betrayed.

It’s remarkable how much trauma resembles a virus, infecting each generation. There’s even evidence that trauma can be passed on at the level of our DNA.

Because I never felt safe or able to be myself as a child (especially once I understood the ramifications of my sexuality), I have lived in a survival mode, anticipating rejection or judgment whether or not there’s evidence of it. I resort to wearing masks in social situations where I feel uncomfortable or uncertain, limiting my ability to truly connect with people, which my therapist and I have identified as a core need.

Also, because my parents never let me fail growing up or overreacted when I did, I was never immunized against stress or disappointment, so both of things hit me harder than most people. And because I was homeschooled for most of my childhood, I had little opportunity to develop social or coping skills for dealing with adversity.

Consequently, I often feel a lack of agency or fear making wrong or miscalculated decisions for myself. I’ve avoided seeking out a primary care physician for just that reason, worried that the patient-doctor relationship will be a poor fit, that I’ll freeze up or forget to ask important questions, or that they won’t be well versed in LGBTQ issues.

Because of the deeply repressive environment and culture in which I was raised, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the effect that it had on my ability to thrive as a sexual being. Because that is an important aspect of our evolutionary development, and it is something that’s important to me.

Since discovering I was demisexual nearly three years ago, I’ve wondered what effect my upbringing had on my development and the absence of lust I experience. The closest thing to it for me is essentially an intense emotional crush. But I have wondered if my being on the asexual spectrum is somehow related to having grown up repressed, and the concurrent effects of stress, trauma, and worry on all of it.

I do not experience primary attraction, that instant attraction one feels based on some quality of another person that may lead to sexual desire. What I do experience is a secondary attraction that develops over time as the emotional connection grows deeper.

In his matrix of needs and satisfiers, Manfred Max-Neef identified how axiological human needs (such as subsistence, affection, identity, and freedom) intersect with the existential human needs of being, having, doing, and interacting.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to being demisexual and why I’m feeling frustrated and stuck on the subject of dating and sex.

For most gay men, it seems, relationships begin with sex and either dissolve or progress to something deeper if there’s enough compatibility (emotional or sexual).

For me, relationships begin with the emotional connectedness and eventually progress to the physical. Because I’m not purely asexual. I do have a sex drive, but 99.9% of the time it’s not directed towards anyone.

There’s a disconnect somewhere on “Affection” axis.

max-neef-affection

It seems that that’s a problem for many gay or bisexual men who expect to have sex on the first or second date—as if to establish sexual compatibility at the outset. I, however, move at a comparatively glacial pace.

And this is where I feel frustrated, because while I’d like to get back into dating, finding someone with whom I’m compatible has seemed virtually impossible.

More later.

286. oppugn

Holy ****, kids, how did it already get to be September 1?

Recently, I have been getting a number of singles ads geared towards… mature adults, which is a special feeling. I’m not sure whether this is due to fact that my internet search history reads like a Stephen Ambrose text, or the fact that I am in my mid-30s.

Do all librarians experience this type of thing? Is Google trying to tell me I ought to be dating older guys?

… on the subject of dating older guys…

Yesterday I learned that one of my ex-boyfriends is now dating a guy I went on a date with several years ago, which is a weird feeling. It’s weird because virtually everyone I used to date is now with a long-term partner of some sort, and I’m the only single denominator left.

As of today, September 1:

I came out 9 years and 8 days ago.
My longest serious relationship to date is roughly 8 months and 20 days.
I have now been single for 4 years, 5 months, and 8 days.
It has been 3 years, 2 months, and 17 days since I last went on a formal date.
The last time I had sex was 1 year, 10 months, and 16 days ago.

There’s a lot of emotional baggage wrapped up in those abstract dates. They’re like mini tombstones, with start and end dates neatly defined for each instance.

Possibly the most sobering is that, as of next year, I will have been out as gay for ten years.

That’s a huge fucking milestone.

I’ll also be turning 35 years old.

company_opening

It means something to be months away from having a master’s degree, having finished my undergraduate degree roughly thirteen years ago, yet having not held a significant job, not having formally entered a career, or not having had a significant romantic relationship that lasted longer than nine months.

I have my theories as to why I still place so much stock in the institution of the traditional, committed, long-term dyad relationship. Perhaps it’s just the longing for a family unit of my own, something I have never really known or felt safe around.

Yet most of my attempts at finding a partner have either been abortive or disastrous. My relationship with Jay lasted a mere eight months and 20 days. Since then I haven’t met anyone who I was remotely interested in who was even remotely interested in me.

(Alas, note the careful wording in the last sentence.)

A few weeks ago, I went to see one of my favorite musicals, Sondheim’s Pulitzer award-winning Sunday in the Park with George.

There are a several reasons why it’s my favorite.

As Joss Whedon once observed, the first half is about the struggle of living with the weight of genius; the second is about living in the shadow of it. Through most of my life, I have lived in fear of the shadow of expectation, whether of greatness or genius I’m not sure.

There’s another reason, though.

The Georges of both acts struggle to connect with people around them, and that is something I have never been fully able to do thus far. To an extent, I have been able to connect with people through my writing, to affect them and effect some small changes.

“Connect, George, connect!”

While I am good at a number of things, I have always felt acutely separated from those around me. While other children began learning how to negotiate social relationships in kindergarten and preschool, my formative years were spent at home, largely alone.

Because of the repressive, restrictive religious nature of my upbringing, I learned to censor myself, what not to say, who not to be. To protect myself from judgment and censure, my formative years were spent perfecting the art of keeping people away.

While other children had to learn to externalize their thoughts and organize them for an audience, my formative years were spent in my head, with my own thoughts.

In my silences, it’s not that I don’t have anything to say. It’s that I don’t know how to contextualize for others the long, ongoing conversation I’ve been having with myself for those on the outside. I don’t know if this is a skill one can learn at my age.

When I write about the improbability of finding a romantic partner “at my age,” what I mean is that I am terrified it will never happen—that in spite of my desire to connect and to belong, I lack the requisite social and emotional skills to sustain a relationship.

When I worry about seeing an increasing number of grey hairs in my beard, I think of how long I’ve been working at all this, and being nearly 35 and finishing grad school, and still feeling hopelessly behind.

When I think about dating older guys, I worry about being 35 and how much less time I’m going to have with them before they inevitably die, or before I die prematurely due to stress or the effects of my lifestyle of drinking and, frankly, lack of nutrition.

I think about how I never got to experience the insouciance of dating as a young gay man, and the joys and sorrows that go along with that.

I’ve also been asking myself recently what I really need in a relationship. Do I need monogamy, or will emotional fidelity be sufficient? In the land of gay men, where kink and open relationships are widely the norm, can I afford to be picky? If he’s into leather, am I okay with being the vanilla partner?

Frankly, forming one stable intimate relationship sounds exhausting by itself. I can’t fathom the emotional energy required to establish a constellation of trusted relationships to meet my needs.

These are still uncharted waters, and we’re writing the rules for same-sex relationships as we go along.

281. maffick

Friday evening I had a pretty positive experience in my summer practicum class, and I have been trying to hold on to the feeling that went along with it.

We recently had an assignment to put together a mock resume and cover letter for our target jobs. I had an anxiety attack reading job requirements for entry-level cataloging jobs, realizing how much I still don’t know and how much is expected of candidates.

What I ended up taking away from Friday though was feedback that my resume and cover letter was actually pretty strong, that I know more than I think I do, and most everyone is worried that they’re unqualified for the job they really want.

It’s one of the downsides of ADD and anxiety that my brain tells me that I’m not good enough, that I’m far too behind and will never find a salaried job or able to support myself, and that no one will ever love me—or be willing to accept my crazy.

One comforting thing about the ADD community is that these kinds of feelings are almost universal, so it’s not just me.

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how to manage my dating life as a demisexual, because dating doesn’t work the same for us as it does for everyone else.

Mainly, I’ve been thinking about attraction.

There are several different kinds of attraction¹:

Sexual attraction: attraction that makes people desire sexual contact or shows sexual interest in another person(s).
Romantic attraction: attraction that makes people desire romantic contact or interaction with another person or persons.
Aesthetic attraction: occurs when someone appreciates the appearance or beauty of another person(s), disconnected from sexual or romantic attraction.
Sensual attraction: desire to interact with others in a tactile, non-sexual way, such as through hugging or cuddling.
Emotional attraction: the desire to get to know someone, often as a result of their personality instead of their physicality. This type of attraction is present in most relationships from platonic friendships to romantic and sexual relationships.

What I have observed is that (at least in most people) most of these attractions overlap. They might overlap in different ways, and some attractions might be more dominant than others, but they seem to work in consort towards bringing people together.

For me, it’s rare for any of these to overlap. I might experience aesthetic attraction for a guy, but not have sexual or romantic desire for him. Similarly, I might be emotionally attracted to someone, but not aesthetically or romantically.

In short, sexual attraction is basically the last stop for my brain, which takes the long way around through every other type.

It’s rare to meet a guy who either understands this or is on the same wavelength. I’ve never met anyone like that, at least. Most gay men seem to run on aesthetic and sexual attraction, with little thought to romantic or emotional.

This is ironic for me, with my ADD brain, since impulsivity is a hallmark of the condition. Maybe it’s that sexuality is based in a different area of the brain, or that my sexual desire is bogged down by anxiety.

This is relevant because my previous sexual history back when I was much more active needs to be explained.

What I think was going on in those days was that I was applying a “fake it ’til you make it” mindset, working under the assumption that I needed to overcome internalized homophobia by having as much sex as possible.

What I learned was that I just wasn’t into the sex. A handful of the guys I found attractive, some I was sexually attracted to, but at no point did I encounter anyone I wanted to date.

A friend of mine pointed out later that some of that was probably where I was finding these guys—hookup apps, mostly.

Even outside that though, in social circles, work, and volunteer settings, I still never met anyone. Statistically, that should have happened, right?

Or were all my chances in my early twenties, when I was closeted?

Where does one meet a guy who’s fine with dating a guy who takes longer than others to connect? I don’t belong in the queer community, am unlikely to find a guy amongst the heterosexuals, and I’m too principled to change myself just to snag someone.

It seems a problem without a solution.

I skipped Minneapolis Pride again this year, mainly because I don’t need additional reasons to feel bad about myself.

It’s not a place where I fit in. I’ve never been much of a reveler, and my body image issues prevent me from wearing anything short of long pants and a short sleeve shirt.

Also, I don’t belong to any kink/fetish communities and my identity isn’t sexuality or gender nonconformity-based, which seems to be a big thing at Pride. Cataloging and role-playing games are more compelling, and I haven’t found any guys in those realms.

Maybe it’s just the community I find myself in now, but it seems like almost everyone I know is into leather, bondage, drag, pop culture, etc. A relationship founded on shared core values and a deep emotional bond feels almost outdated for my age group.

The curse of being an introverted gay man on the asexual spectrum.

So what am I doing about this?

To start, I’m trying to be aware of when I’m attracted to someone, and what type, trying to think of them all like indicator levels. With this hypothetical guy, the overall rating is 43%:

Whereas with this guy, it’d be 78%:

Second, I’m trying to do better at boundary setting. This can be difficult for ADD brains, thanks to under-performing anterior cingulate cortexes, which regulate things like impulse control.

So I’m trying to be aware when my anxiety activates and resist the impulse to fall back on mirroring the other person’s behavior, which is how I find myself in unhealthy situations.

Having to write a manual for this from scratch is SO MUCH FUN.

278. esoterica

There hasn’t been much time to write recently, nor is there much time to write today, so this is going to be a bit scattered. We’ll see where this goes.

Eighteen days ago was the four-year anniversary of my breakup with Jay, the narcissist ex-boyfriend who nevertheless turned out to be—as I rightly feared—my likely last chance at a relationship before I turned 30.

I was hoping for some spark of insight about lessons learned about life choices, but instead I found little more than regret at having stayed with him for nine whole months.

Besides, there isn’t that much of my mind free to reflect on things like that these days.

One of the insights that I did have after things ended with my last therapist is that one of the reasons I feel so ambivalent about my parents is that there was a time when I was very young when I was happy with them.

This was before I was self-aware and able to internalize the bullshit theology that they were feeding me.

The world was simpler, brighter, happier, and there’s a part of my mind that still remembers what it felt like. A gulf of time and trauma now stands between me and that previous proto-self, and there is no way to get back.

You can’t go home.

I suppose that’s one of the things I most hate my parents for—robbing me of my childhood (and my future adult happiness) by teaching me to hate myself.

They also robbed me of the ability to truly enjoy things since I constantly view things that I like with suspicion or skepticism. There was always a fear growing up that one or both of my parents would disapprove of something I enjoyed or liked, for whatever reason, and would take that thing away.

I’ve also been thinking about my emerging asexual/demisexual identity as of late, where it came from, and whether I’ve always just been this way.

The present hypothesis is that, yes, I have always been this way. My hypothesis acknowledges that the relevant events happened between twelve and fifteen years ago, and that memory is an imperfect reconstruction of past events.

There’s also the reality that my sexuality formed under hostile, repressive circumstances, so it’s possible that my resultant sexual identity is a product of emotional trauma and abuse, isolation, and cult-like psychological programming.

That being said, while I definitely experienced the Saturn V rocket-like explosion of male sex drive during my teenage years, I do not recall ever being sexually attracted to specific guys. I had crushes, yes, to varying levels of intensity, but I don’t remember wanting to do anything sexual with any male peers.

Was that because I was unconsciously suppressing those desires on account of the then-impossibility of realizing them? Perhaps. I was intelligent enough then to have done that. Yet while my peers (even the Christian ones) seemed preoccupied by their sexual impulses (and, naturally, the struggle to resist and remain “pure”), I was more aware of the absence of such impulses in myself.

Piano, writing, research, or literally anything else held more interest for me than sex.

For my male friends especially, the struggle to tame their sexual needs and desires seemed ever-present, something that created a mountain of anxiety for them. I, on the other hand, struggled with just the reality of being same-sex attracted rather than any specific desires.

Being gay was largely an abstract concept for me.

What I experienced in terms of desire for other men wasn’t even necessarily sexual. Even today, I don’t have sexual fantasies about guys. What I do have are emotional fantasies—imagining going on vacations with a partner, buying our first house together, brushing our teeth, curling up on the couch together under a blanket while rain patters on the window.

It’s more the desire for intimacy than it is for sex.

That’s the homoromantic aspect of my orientation.

However, I’ve also been thinking back over my experiences as a sexually active gay man, because over the course of just a few years, I did have a lot of sex. I’ve been thinking about what that meant, especially considering how emotionally unfulfilling and empty it was.

To use a metaphor, I felt a lot like Dharma and Jane when they pretended to be German tourists and were confronted by an actual German speaker.

When I was sexually active, I largely went through the motions, doing what I grew up doing in most social situations—mirroring behavior, and generally faking emotions without understanding what was going on.

Fahrvergnügen?

At the time, I thought I was “discovering” my sexuality after years of repression. The discomfort I felt was internalized homophobia, I thought. Yet no matter how many guys I fucked, I didn’t feel any less confused or empty.

If anything, I actually felt resentful.

No automatic alt text available. — Wolf, Tikva. “Kimchi Cuddles.” Comic strip. 2014. http://kimchicuddles.com.

Reactions to my demi or asexuality have been interesting. There’s been a lot of Oh, I’ve felt that way before. I must be demisexual too.

Or: Are you sure I can’t convince you to give me a try?

Or: Your view of sex is just too traditional.

The notion of the absence of sexual attraction is apparently stymieing to many people. It’s the air they breathe, familiar and comfortable. Gay men especially seem to have a difficult time imagining life without being aroused by any hot or cute guy.

That’s one of my worries about dating again—finding a guy who:

I manage to establish an emotional connection with that’s strong enough to move into sexual attraction;
I find physically attractive;
Is fine with not rushing into sex, and even waiting for me to determine if I’m attracted or not;
Isn’t scared off by my crazy.

So yeah… I don’t know how this is supposed to work. Ultimately, my goal is to build a family of my own to make up for the one I didn’t have, but that doesn’t seem likely.

274. draconian

A few months ago, I experienced something that hadn’t happened in a while.

Now, I’m not reticent about my sexuality.

True, I don’t talk about it non-stop, and (contrary to how much I write about the subject) it isn’t the sole thing that defines me. But if asked or if I am in company where gender and sexuality are discussed, I am not shy about opening up about my experiences.

So it takes me aback when I have to come out to someone.

This episode happened following a gathering of friends in November as we were discussing a post-Thanksgiving get-together at my house. One of our newer attendees asked whether the decor would be Thanksgiving-themed.

“Decorating really isn’t my thing,” I said, and then joked, “I tend towards more of a sparse Scandinavian style, myself.”

She gave a look of mock surprise. “What kind of gay man are you?” she exclaimed. She was mostly joking (I think), but there was a hint of true incredulity in her tone.

I got this a lot in the first few years after coming out. Women would assume that I wanted to check out hot guys with them and provide brilliant, witty insights on the male psyche in between shopping breaks or redecorating their living room.

Sorry, heterosexuals. Your token queer I am not.

However, the episode got me contemplating the assumptions people might make about me as a gay man (specifically, what I’m interested in and who I have sex with), the various tropes and trappings of gay culture, and whether or not it was helpful to continue identifying that way.

Since the end of this past semester, I haven’t had much to occupy/distract my mind, so I’ve been mulling over what it means to be demisexual.

The common usage is to treat it as an adjective: you might only fuck people you have a close emotional bond with, but you’re still gay.

“You’re still one of us,” seems to be the subtext.

However, the fact that I experience sexual attraction but rarely, and then only with men with whom there is a strong emotional connection, indicates that I seem to fall more on the asexual spectrum rather than the homosexual.

It’s not that I’m seeking a label to define myself by, or a tribe to identify with, but rather to better understand myself (short-term goal) and hopefully develop strategies for managing friendships and finding a partner (long-term goal).

The challenge of dating is summed up in an article by Emma Lord:

… while you can generally tell on a first date whether or not you’d want to be friends with someone, it’s nearly impossible for a demisexual person to decide whether or not [they’d] be sexually attracted to [you] without the element of friendship and trust already in place… And you can’t exactly explain your feelings to someone you just met, particularly in an age when not engaging in romantic or affectionate activity on dates is considered a rejection.

While I have expressed frustration with the hypersexuality of large parts of the gay community, I am still cognizant of the history and significance that underlies its various communities and institutions.

Pride parades, for example, emerged shortly after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, and was a radical and political act of defiance in an age when being out was illegal. Although derided by many now as commercial and mainstream, they encouraged unity and solidarity in the face of oppression and later as friends and lovers were dying during the AIDS epidemic.

Gay clubs, too, served as safe spaces for self-expression, identity building, and community networking. Same for institutions such as white parties, drag shows, and leather bars.

Writers and activists encouraged LGBT people to reject the heteronormativity they had been raised with, to throw off the shackles of “traditional” models of sexuality and relationships, and express their liberation via total sexual freedom.

Kiyoshi Kuromiya wrote in the Philadelphia Free Press in 1970,

“Homosexuals have burst their chains and abandoned their closets… We come to challenge the incredible hypocrisy of your sexual monogamy, your oppressive sexual role-playing, your nuclear family, your Protestant ethic, apple pie and Mother.”

So, I get that all that silently informs, shapes, modern gay life.

Yet it doesn’t feel like my history, my institutions, ones that feel true to who I am.

Thus, when someone assumes I am mad for decorating, dress shopping, strapping on a leather harness, or running upstairs for a quick romp in the sheets, it feels like a denigration of my needs, values, and identity.

That the only way to be is to be a gay clone.

There’s another variable at play, however.

Yesterday, I learned that a friend of mine is randomly connected to Seth. (Yes, that Seth, of the 2011 birthday.) I noticed my friend had commented on a post of Seth’s, and asked how they knew each other. Turns out they’re in a gayming group.

My friend wrote: “There’s an inkling at the back of my head that I should be wary of him, though.”

Even though it’s been nearly six years, the shockwave of that night still ripples, supernova-like, through my life today.

Seeing that name again, catching a glimpse of his thumbnail profile picture, brought a sea of unwanted emotions and memories back.

That incident, and a handful of others (where I’ve experienced attraction, decided to open myself to the possibility, and been rejected), left me distrustful of my taste in men and ability to make healthy romantic decisions for myself.

I seem only to find myself attracted to impossible guys, or to guys who will end up using me for sex or to stroke their fragile male egos until they got what they came for.

I don’t know if other guys, the George Michaels etc, are simply satisfied with surface-level intimacy, if that’s all they want, or if they simply experience it in different ways.

Can any of us know?

Am I this way because of genes… Seth… my parents?

Who knows.

It is what it is.

273. factitious

That first night when we sat on the trunk of my car and looked at the lights above the Arby’s? When I got up to leave, I looked at you, and I tried to think of how to say everything I was feeling. But I’ve never really been good at describing feelings. I’m only good at describing facts, and love, love isn’t a fact. You know?

Love—it’s a hunch at first and then later it’s a series of decisions, a lifetime of decisions. That’s love. And I didn’t know how to express that and so I just said: “I’m glad I decided to call you.” And now, tonight, I say I’m glad again, for this decision and all the decisions that will come every day after.

Which is to say, scientifically speaking of course, speaking from the point of view of mere facts and logic and you know, what with the science and all… I just thought that it was time for us to make a life together.
— Episode 100 – Toast, from Welcome to Night Vale¹

A few days ago justmerveilleux commented on a previous post that it was “much too cheerful.” I’m endeavouring to bring the tone of this one back to my usual stark, grim, crepuscular realism. 😉

The last few weeks for me have been spent weathering feverish bouts of anxiety as we learn more about the Drumpf administration and what he, his cabinet, and the Rethuglican Congress have in store for the world over the next four years.

Basically, every time I scroll through New York Times or Guardian headlines, it’s a brand new something to haunt my dreams:

The planet is going to be trashed, sea levels will rise, and resulting droughts will bring about starvation and catastrophe.
We LGBTQ+ Americans are going to see all our civil rights gains taken away thanks to ultra conservative Supreme Court justice replacements.
With the almost certain repeal of Obamacare looming, the future of my health insurance is uncertain.

It’s been interesting to compare my reaction to this election to the one in 2008, and look at how much I’ve evolved since then. In short, where I once feared what Obama might have done as our first socialist President (which turns out not to be true—Hoover, Johnson, FDR, and even Nixon were just as Socialist, if not more so), we have a fairly clear idea what Drumpf is going to do. He has filled his cabinet with cronies, homophobes, and bigots who want to enact a theocratic, Objectivist agenda of revenge on this country, regardless of who suffers.

My nightmares don’t seem like a matter of “if.”

More like “when.”

I had a brief exchange with my youngest sister a few days after posting blog # 271. In short, we both feel similarly fragmented, made up of disparate parts, the result of decades of living in fear of our parents, their omnipotent and omniscient god, and a judgmental community of holier-than-thou Christians.

Okay, time for gross generalizations.

From what I’ve observed about most people, I gather that they function largely as a holistic whole, different modules and pieces of their psyches that work together in their functioning as a person.

For me, growing up in secret for nearly three decades feels like being a lump of coal trapped underground for thousands of years, under enormous heat and pressure, until suddenly ripped out of the Earth one day as a diamond.

I grew up managing a complex bureaucracy of desires and needs, making sure none of them drew the notice of anyone who could make my life unpleasant or difficult. I couldn’t be too ambitious, too needy, show too much self-efficacy, and certainly not any of my deviant sexual desires.

Now, nearly six years out as an atheist, I’m still living with disparate parts of myself that don’t talk to each other.

For most people (again, making gross assumptions here), when they want something, they think it and their cogs and wheels work out the specifics. Their child selves talk to their adult selves, sharing memories between them. And when a man is attracted to someone, he feels desire and the rest works itself out.

With me, none of those parts communicate. It is sometimes a daily inner civil war just to decide what I want for dinner—or to decide that I deserve to even want to eat.

I rather feel like No-Face from Hayao Miyazaki Spirited Away, an otherwise neutral being that absorbed the desires and intentions of those around him, a friendly mask disguising a dark and dangerous mess underneath.

When I fully, truly, came out in 2009, after breaking up with my first boyfriend and deciding I needed to “experience” everything I’d been missing, sexually speaking, I was still largely in the mindset of needing to be who I perceived everyone wanted me to be.

It’s how I survived evangelicalism as a gay teenager—by blending in, adapting, never being myself.

The hesitancy and emptiness I felt in hooking up—engaging in casual sex with guys who I knew weren’t going to be boyfriends or long-term partners—I chalked up to a puritanical upbringing; remnants of a lifetime of being told homosexual desires were evil, perverted, and sick.

I just needed to push through that to become the liberated gay man I knew was there, somewhere.

It never occurred to me that my reticence was the result of the reality that I experience sexual and romantic attraction through emotional intimacy rather than my pelvis.

The frustration in being a demisexual is feeling no control over who I’m attracted to. It happens suddenly, mysteriously, and very gradually.

I see couples at Target, holding hands and buying produce or a birthday card, and long for that kind of domestic intimacy. Granted, I have no real frame of reference. It’s academic, but still an abstract direction I’m aiming for in hopes I stumble onto something concrete.

I don’t want spectacular romance. I don’t need suffocating togetherness.

I’m not entirely sure what I want from a boyfriend/partner. Yes, I want companionship, the usual trimmings of a long-term relationship.

It’s more than that, though.

I want the significance of a look shared between two people experiencing something special and beautiful—a sunset, a moment in a Mozart opera, seeing something that reminds them of a moment five years ago before they knew any of it meant anything.

I’m suspicious of the fire, the passion, the Sturm und Drang of the early stages of a relationship. I want the quiet certainty of sitting on the hood of a car, staring up at the lights above the Arby’s, and am glad that I called someone.

These are the cares of a time traveler who lives in both the past and the future, knowing that everything that happens between is uncertain and surprising, but inevitable, unchanging.

Unchanged.

“The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”²

I’m not hopeful that I’ll ever get any of this, but a fellow can dream.

Works Cited

¹ Fink, J., & Cranor, J. (2016, December 15). Episode 100 – Toast [Audio blog post]. Retrieved from http://nightvale.libsyn.com/100-toast

² Nicholson, W. (1989). Shadowlands. New York: Samuel French.

272. wabi-sabi

kintugi ‘Tis the season for retrospection, I guess.

As we turn our faces towards the void of what lies ahead for 2017, I’ve been reminded while listening to the radio this week of some of the high points and low points of the past year. While there were definite low points, I still tend to balk at those who claim that 2016 was the “worst year ever.”

I’m pretty sure 65 million BCE was the worst year ever for the dinosaurs, and you could have your pick of years at the height of the Black Death’s rampage through Europe around 1351-1353.

Ditto during the years of the Great Depression.

1783 was a wretched year for the northern hemisphere when the volcano Laki in Iceland started a chain of natural disasters that led to the deaths of tens of thousands in Europe.

1968 was a pretty bleak year in the United States, with the Vietnam War still raging, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, deadly race riots across the country, and the election of Richard Nixon.

(There are more examples on this Reddit thread.)

Point is, 2016 may have been the worst year in the lifetimes of many under a certain age, but every generation has its go-to .

For me, this has been a year of transformation and growth:

I’ve been doing exciting work with a new therapist in unpacking and overcoming the religious abuse in my past.
Found a passion and calling in cataloging, something that finally feels like a life purpose, that I was born to do.
Discovered the demisexual label and the freedom that comes with realizing that I’m not broken—just different.

That last one had been a huge source of anxiety for me over the past few years. I’d been growing increasingly less interested in sex, dating, and “dating” (i.e., casual sex), which definitely made me an outlier amongst gay men. Discovering that there were others like me, whose sexuality was defined firstly by emotional rather than sexual attraction, was an incredible relief.

However, this has also redefined my relationship to the broader LGBTQIA+ community. Even before demisexuality, I struggled to really find a place of belonging under the rainbow umbrella.

I am not queer in any sense of the word, am cisgendered, still have my natural hair color, have no piercings or tattoos, am comfortable in my masculine identity, and feel no need to “bend” how I present my gender.

Frankly, I have heterosexual friends who are queerer than me.

Likewise, I have struggled to find belonging amongst gay men. My personal experience is that it’s a community defined heavily by sexual activity and sexual attraction—flirting, hooking up, etc. Again, full disclosure, my experience with “gay culture” has been primarily limited to a subset in central Minnesota, which may not be representative necessarily of the majority.

However, many guys with whom I’ve had conversations, who could be considered “mainstream gay” (however you’d define that), do feel liberated in their more extroverted sexuality. Many came out of repressive homes and communities, and found belonging and community in the gay bars and fetish subcultures that make this super introvert very uncomfortable.

The massacre at the Pulse nightclub in June was a conflicting event for me in many ways. Fifty people were murdered because of their sexual orientation. On the one hand, it was a reminder that although we have marriage equality in all fifty states thanks to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling, it is still not entirely safe to be openly LGBT or Q in the United States.

And it’s frightening to consider that the incoming presidential administration could overturn many, if not all, of the advances for LGBTQ rights with a pen stroke or judicial appointment.

Yet aside from a sense of shared oppression, I don’t feel drawn to “gay” spaces—bars, clubs, gyms, bathhouses, concerts, etc. Even “gaymer” events are off-putting for me, mainly because the sexual energy is almost emotionally deafening.

At the 2015 American Library Association conference in San Francisco, when I attended a GLBT Round Table social (and later an independently organized) event, even though we were all librarians, I observed how the gay (and, I presume, bi) men flirted about the room like bees, sizing each other up.

I just wanted to talk to someone about cataloging and archiving.

A few days ago this video came across my YouTube feed.

Dubious genetic explanations aside, I found O’Keefe’s assertion that LGBT people have unique qualities and perspectives for bringing communities together and facilitating healing to be very heartening. While I may not fit any stereotypes of how society envisions a gay man, I do believe that growing up as an outsider has made me a more compassionate, empathetic, and social justice-minded as a human being.

It’s one reason I decided to go into librarianship in the first place: I know what it is to be denied information that might broaden my mind and challenge my comfortable, preconceived notions about the world—and people.

And I can do something about that as a cataloger, an archivist, and as a librarian.

The reason I worry so much about sex, and the hypersexuality of gay men, is the knowledge that androphiles are my field of eligibles. As a demisexual, it takes a while to even recognize that I’m interested in a guy.

While I’m still trying to figure out if we have anything in common, he’s already decided that we should to go back to his place.

I worry that everyone else moves too fast for me, that no one is willing to wait for the intricate gears and dynamos of my psycho-sexual machine to determine if attraction will happen or not.

Will I ever find someone? (And where do I even look?) Will the attraction endure for me, or for him, or will he eventually get fed up with me and my cogitating?

As I consider the theme of loneliness in 2016, I recognize the need to resolve it somehow, to rethink my perspectives.

Good riddance to this year though.

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.

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.

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.