From an early age, I considered sexuality to be primarily a spiritual issue. The Bible and the church were the only sources I could consult on the issue of sex and sexuality. I accepted it as an implicit truth that it was a sin to be anything other than straight (even for a moment), but beyond just a sin, it was a shame. A shame on yourself, your family, and all kinds of things could go wrong if the secret were to be revealed.
As I have come out of the closet, I have allowed aspects of myself to finally relax in ways that I wasn’t ever able to do. I have allowed myself to embrace my gay cultural interests. I have allowed myself to embrace my gay social, relational, and style interests. But for a long time I was still repressed in my intellectual life. Even as I started to read and watch and embrace gay culture, my brain wasn’t thinking critically about any of it in the way that I have loved to think about so many other things. Over time I have realized that I trained my brain to immediately set aside any thought that might have been deemed too gay to share. These thoughts were set aside long before they could form a sentence or an essay or even just come up in conversation. With some conscious effort I’ve started to catch myself just before setting an idea aside. With encouragement, I’ve started to write these ideas down as blog post drafts. I’ve started to accept that I have tons of opinions on gay culture, history, humor, and theory and these have always informed how I see the world even before I was aware of it.
Becoming aware of my own thoughts has been a process of liberation. When I lived in fear I was trained to contain myself within the boundaries of a homophobic culture and religion. Being liberated from that culture and religion meant truly believing that they had no control over my life, present or eternal. Once liberated, my mind still needed acceptance and exposure to gradually become confident enough to start to share. Friends, family, and significant others have been a safe haven for me to share as well as a source of inspiration, new directions, healthy disagreement, and perspectives.
Early on in my coming out journey, a friend (we love our straight allies) shared with me a beautiful speech by Stephen Fry on the significance of Oscar Wilde. I was so incredibly moved by aspects of the story of Oscar Wilde that I had never heard before. I was also moved by the confidence of this gay man who was able to inform his interests with his personal experience while still maintaining a level of intellectual rigor. I had been extremely aware of Wilde as a teenager, I knew he was gay or at least rumored to be gay, and I noticed whenever I saw his name or a picture of him. Despite my obvious interest, I consciously avoided Picture of Dorian Gray my senior year and even avoided talking to classmates that read it. Instead, I chose to read (most of ) the more socially acceptable Crime and Punishment. I was somewhat interested in Dostoyevsky and the book was interesting, but I really didn’t enjoy reading it and I wasn’t really excited to research the life of the author and the cultural themes of guilt, mental illness, etc. I was actively suppressing my desires – I didn’t even know what it felt like to do otherwise.
More recently, I finally did read Wilde’s famous novel and loved every page. Looking back I wonder if I would have been thrilled as an adolescent to find a book that was so personally engaging and to read about an individual with a story and a sexuality that I could relate to. If at that young age I had read Wilde instead, would that have changed what I studied in college and grad school? Would it have affected the direction of my career and other life choices? It’s cathartic to reimagine the past in a way that was more free, accepting, and intrinsically motivated. A past where I trusted myself, listened to my heart, and shared what was on my mind. I’m not regretting the choices I made, I’m wondering how I can change the way I make choices today and going forward. Along the way I have been grateful to receive book and movie recommendations that have given me so much joy, catharsis and perspective.
I’m early in this journey of allowing myself to be gay intellectually and at times it’s been a little embarrassing to feel so behind. I know I’m not quite ready to be a critic because I’ve loved nearly everything I’ve read and basically every gay story makes me cry. Even the acknowledgements section of some books has made me cry as I have considered the partners and community that support an author in their work. I have more emotions to release than I could have ever imagined. At the same time, while my heart is being nourished, my mind is being coaxed into the light, invited to make connections and observations, compare books and movies, consider timelines, politics, cultures, and geographies. With the desires and emotions of my heart, I also care personally about these issues and feel strongly about them in a way that I think will make the intellectual work come naturally – I don’t have to convince myself to be interested.
Over the past few years my brain has finally started to naturally make connections . I have wondered about the political usefulness of homophobia for blackmail, the lasting cultural affects of France and Italy being some of the earlier European countries to decriminalize gay sex, the connection between replacement theory and the religious demands of procreation. In general, these have been passing thoughts, but eventually I think they may start to become something I would write about and share. Before coming out, I didn’t even have a base of knowledge to draw from, a sense of what has already been explored, and references to help me understand. Now that I’m out and exploring I’m excited to write, and speak, and live more from the heart as well as from my mind. My primary goal right now is to enjoy myself and the journey. I have a lot of energy, previously spent on repression, that I am more than happy to put to a better use.
Highways and Hallowed Halls 