The Pride Parade in Chicago yesterday was fantastic. It was my first time at that kind of event, and I couldn't help the tremendous grin that spread over my face as I watched lesbian couples on their motorcycles, or a boy and his two dads marching with flags and signs. I could really see how someone who had been closeted all their life could come to something like this and find their life meaningfully changed.
Being closeted is not an experience that I've had. I was pretty asexual when I was younger. That had a lot to do with the horrible way my peers treated me. Boys either ignored me, or picked on me. I don't really remember having any interactions with the girls. In high school things were better, though it was in the sense that there was much less picking on, but just as much ignoring. In retrospect, that had a lot to do with me. I wasn't exactly going out of my way to get to know people. At that point, I hadn't figured out the broken parts of my brain nearly as well as I have now and, to be honest, other people were deeply frightening. I did get a kiss on the forehead from a girl I was in the Summer Shakespeare program with. Just a friendly gesture before going onstage. I had trouble keeping track of people and I don't really know for sure who that was, but it was sort of my first kiss, and I certainly remember that, if not who it was who gave it to me.
My earliest ideas of a connection beyond friendship with other people involved women. (Or perhaps I should say females. There was a Star Trek novel that centered on a race of humanoid felines that was pretty formative for me. I think that has something to do with having always gotten along better with animals than with humans. They felt safer. Less real and threatening. But I digress.) When the first person to ever show any interest in me turned out to be male, I wasn't quite ready for that. I was about twenty one and had never had a girlfriend or boyfriend, never been honest-to-goodness kissed, never gone on a date. But it only took a few days of consideration to decide that this was a good thing.
I was never deeply conflicted about being finding men attractive. Maybe that's because I was never connected to my society enough as a kid to have its expectations sink into my personality. Maybe that's because I have the most open-minded and accepting parents I could ever wish for. There was nothing in my personal life to ever make me think that being gay was bad. As for public opinion, I mistrusted public opinion on general principles. It was just something that I didn't have any personal experience with. I didn't have any instinctive rapture or revulsion toward the concept. Instead, I looked at it logically. Why self-limit to half of the available population when looking for someone who would make me happy? I couldn't think of a reason. This was no great revelation either; just a new path branching off that I decided was worth exploring. (The way things came to pass for me makes me wonder a lot about nature versus choice in my own sexuality, but that's another post.)
I was confident that my parents would not be unhappy. I knew, as I know now, that no matter what I do, they'll love, care for, and support me, as long as I do those same things for myself. The fact that they did so for me got me through a difficult childhood as functional as I am. I would have been horribly depressed, a lot more than I was, if not for them. But even knowing they would accept me, it was still nerve-wracking, sitting up early in the morning with a favorite childhood movie and waiting for them to wake up so I could talk to them. A lot of times I get nervous talking to people about something big because I don't trust myself to be able to explain very well; I feel pretty inadequate in speech, compared to text. But as well, I feared plainly stating my attraction to someone of my own gender. (They were, of course, unphased. I love you Mom and Dad.)
It's so prevalent in this society. I'm completely out with my immediate family and my social circle, and have been nearly since I decided I was bisexual. (It's never come up with my extended family, but I doubt they'd have issues either.) If I didn't listen to news, or read books, or browse the internet, I'd think that everyone in the world was accepting of chosen gender identity and sexual orientation. But of course they're not. And though I really haven't ever been closeted, hearing about so many hate crimes against gays and lesbians, or about transgendered men and women who can't find work, gives me a view, from my position a little bit down the way, of what it's like to be a discriminated minority.
At work, I choose not to show my pride parade pictures to a co worker who I've shown my ruins pictures to because I don't know how to have the conversation about why I was there and what the event means to me. Or someone makes an off-color comment about gays and I choose not to say anything in response because I'd want to explain just how that sort of thing is personally offensive to me and to my friends and I'm not sure how to do it. I want to help people understand, and I don't trust myself to be up to the job. And I feel like in that small way, I'm letting a lot of people down.
I've always found myself on the edges of social groups; not deeply involved in much of anything. I've been thinking a little lately about why that is, and whether and how to change that. Be more a part of something. I don't know what. But yesterday, I got to be on the fringes at the Chicago Pridefest, and it was a really good place to look in from.
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Adam and His Dads
© Stormdog 2010
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I swear the first time I wrote this it was better. Everything just flowed like water from my fingertips. Sometimes I have these moments where all the gears mesh in my brain and words fill the page from some magical well inside me and everything just works so fluidly I barely have to edit it. It's an amazing feeling. I hate when something I wrote under the influence of divine inspiration gets lost. This took me four times as long to write and it still isn't as solid. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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