This article was originally published in Prism and Pen in Medium.com on Aug. 18, 2023.
It’s hard to be convincing when you lack motivation and experience
As a young teenager I thought of myself as straight. Though I didn’t actually feel straight. Since it wasn’t coming naturally, I tried to understand straight males through direct observation (they were everywhere around me of course) and from the media. It was kind of an anthropological endeavor, since I wasn’t predisposed genetically to be straight, though culturally I was expected to be.
By culturally I mean that I was born the second son of Catholic parents whose own parents were immigrants with large families. No member on either side to my knowledge was gay. I was born in industrialized Detroit during World War II, conceived before my father joined the army, but carried by my mother in his absence. I sometimes think that my mother passed to me in utero the anxiety she had about raising a second male child whose father might not make it back from war. She made no secret of wishing she was carrying a girl. Alas, for her, she was not.
Understand that this is pure conjecture on the part of someone who years later wanted to know the reason for his being the way he was. There’s no knowing for sure, though, except to say that this is who I am and it’s all good.
The straight male behavior I took as my task to explore wasn’t just about who these guys lust after and how they go about it, but about all the interests and posturing that attach to being male and straight: acting macho, butch, cocky, competitive, insensitive. I know that’s overgeneralizing, but those are the things I witnessed in certifiably straight males. I embraced these traits as surefire ways to disguise the real me. But the truth was that I sucked at them. Practicing them only made me come across as phony and cartoonish.
The teen version of straight males makes use of these hyper-masculine character traits to help them reach their sexual goals. For example, sexual yearning, abetted by an uncaring, unsympathetic attitude, can lead young males to brag about imagined conquests over girls. They visualize girls tossing their bras and dropping their panties to receive the holy communion of their dicks.
They think it be should be this way because that’s the effect real men have on women, right?
Fantasy, sure, but it’s a trope of the male adolescent initiating himself into actual sex. I’ve watched enough teen movies to assume there’s some truth to it. I guess it’s no more harmful than any other kind of lying, though it can certainly pathologize into hate and violence toward girls. Slut shaming and date rape, for instance.
As a teenager I shared the inexperience part, but it was by choice, not by rejection. I wasn’t curious about sex with women. But because of peer pressure, I did for a time believe that I needed a girlfriend. My imagination conceived this as mainly hand holding and smooching. Very vanilla. My experience with bras and panties was zilch, and even if I was inclined to boast about fake conquests, I wasn’t actor enough to weave a convincing story or to come across as urgently hormone driven. Verisimilitude has to come from actual experience, even if minimal. I lacked that.
My sexual fantasies, when the hormones wouldn’t let me suppress them, came shirtless, dressed in tight Levis. Men, that is. I did not verbalize any of these fantasies, because there was no one I knew who wouldn’t be shocked. Or so I thought at the time. Sixty some years ago, you believed you were the only one of your breed. A mutant of some kind.
The Catholic Church, which I was committed to for the sake of my eternal soul, condemns man-on-man sex. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I eventually found out that the proscription applied only to us peons. Many of the clergy granted themselves an exception.
That realization hit home when at 18 and deep in mortal sin from my first sexual encounter with a real live gay man, probably in his 30s, I went to confession before the proverbial bus hit me and I was sent down to fiery damnation for eternity. I purposely went to a priest known to mete out three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers as penances. In and out in a couple of minutes. The religious equivalent of a fast food meal.
Instead, he kept me in that hot, claustrophobic confessional booth for a half hour or more.
He wanted to know all the sordid little details of my encounter with this other guy. Remember, though, that I was unpracticed and still uncertain about sexual protocol and procedures, straight or gay. In other words, there wasn’t much to tell. It was probably my evident embarrassment and general newness to all the dirty-deed details that prompted him to invite me to the rectory for “spiritual counseling.”
Pardon me for feeling that I was being propositioned.
I refused his offer, respectfully of course so as not to nullify my absolution, and exited the booth to confront a long line of fellow sinners who had been patiently waiting to be absolved in three minutes of their likely more tepid sins. “Wow, now there’s a real sinner” was written over the few faces I made eye contact with before I reached an empty pew and hung my head in humiliated contrition.
Actually, I don’t know how much my characterization of straight male sexual awakening is justified. I’m inferring a lot from the hyperbole of screenwriters, a group not known for subtlety and nuance. These would be the people who now portray high schools as so many Sodoms and Gomorrahs. Back in my day, high school was all about sock hops, going steady, crushes, puppy love, and petting. There were some films about teen pregnancy in the 50’s, but I never saw any of them.
But back to the straight teenage male character. I remember one incident where a self-anointed teenage alpha male three years older than me was bragging on his conquests. He drew his index finger under his nose, inhaled deeply, and said, “Man, I love pussy.”
I was only just 15, and I had to think about that. I wasn’t sure what his finger had to do with sex. When I finally caught on, I thought, “Oh yeah, I guess that’s like heavy petting.” I was strictly above the belt in the couple of sexual encounters I had with girls. Very tame stuff. And I was just as glad to abide by my mother’s admonition not to “get some girl in trouble.”
No problem, Ma.
In those days the feeling that you’re alone in the world, that you’re deviant, and that you’re caught in a rip tide toward eternal damnation was a lot for a 15 year old to process. It’s no wonder that so many of us tried to convince ourselves that we were something we were not. But that confessional confrontation, as humiliating as it was, taught me an important lesson, namely that the Catholic Church had it all wrong.
Its condemnation of sexual experimentation before marriage, especially same-sex forms of experimentation, is what’s unnatural, not to mention cruel.
I think about how many gay men and lesbians found themselves in unhappy marriages to satisfy societal norms. I think about how many desperately unhappy queer people made tragic life decisions, including self harming and suicide. I think about how our society tolerates and condones violence toward queer people. I think about how many sexually frustrated gay priests turned to pedophilia, maybe because it afforded them a safe way to hide.
I finally came to understand three things from what turned out to be my final confession.
First, the Catholic church and I weren’t compatible, and I had to leave it. I did do that, although it was a good number of years before I stopped being fearful of the bus smacking me dead and sending me to hell. I came to understand that the Christian adage, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” is so much hypocritical bullshit.
It’s not a sin for a man to love another man. Stigmatizing gay sex, I believe, gets in the way of our society condoning any expression of man-to-man love. I don’t mean just sexual love, of course. It can’t even be affectionate or emotional love. It’s one reason that male bonding, as a surrogate for love, is so often framed around sports, military duty, drinking, and womanizing.
Second, I wanted to be genuine much more than I wanted to be straight.
For me, the concomitants of male straightness in the USA started to look like impediments to being a good person. Why on your death bed would you want to be remembered as someone who pushed and shoved your way to the top, whose most memorable accomplishment was beating the shit out of queer people, who couldn’t honestly say “I love you” to someone of your own sex, who reveled in the misfortunes of people you despised?
Nah, I didn’t want to be straight anymore.
Third, I didn’t want to be humiliated anymore for being gay.
However, I didn’t understand until many years later that if I didn’t want to be humiliated for who I was, then I couldn’t be OK with someone different from me being humiliated for who they are.
And so I became a progressive snowflake libtard cuck. I wear those badges proudly.
All the coming-out I’ve discussed here happened more than 60 years ago, and I’m glad to see that the “becoming who you are” process is different now. I can’t honestly say overall that it’s easier, though. Queer people in their teens are still struggling their way out, but they don’t seem to have to claw their way out or lie down and play dead.
I recently penned an article for the local newspaper I write for (the Spirit of Jefferson, in West Virginia) about social services and recreational programs available for queer teens in my largely rural and small town slice of America. And there are many such services I was honestly surprised by. These efforts recognize the need for interventions (the sad reality), but also acknowledge and, importantly, affirm the very existence of queer kids.
This recognition and acknowledgment was not there 60 years ago, so things are better in that respect.
But the other sad reality is that America, God bless us, still suffers under the heavy hand of the same kind of straight male, chest-pumping, take-no-prisoners bravado as I lived through back then. And just when you think things are getting better, as they evidently seemed to be with the legalization of gay marriage, the haters manufacture some reason for why they should dump on one of the other LGBTQIA letters. I wish they’d lighten up.
And to answer Westboro Baptist’s question, posed in the lead image. Yeah, I do see the nature of Jesus as being more mellow than mean. I reject the hellfire preaching of Christians making him out to be a hateful person. As a corollary, I just don’t visualize Jesus as needing the pretext of a football match to hug another man, me included.
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