I spend a lot of time inside my own head. I hash stuff around, fantasize, indulge then eschew guilt; I ponder how to arrange the rest of my life and generally bounce around inside my cranium. All this time spent wool gathering puts me in a pretty self-centered, self-indulgent head space. While this perhaps isn’t always healthy, my fallback excuse is that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. So I examine…and the rest of it.
The greatest danger with self-indulgence is in its interaction with other people. In the first place, if I don’t carefully monitor how I act and what I say, my actions can turn selfish fast. Self-indulgence is one thing; self-centered and selfish are entirely different kettles of fish.
Pressing my process—coming out—on other people is not necessarily selfish or self-centered, but it is by every metric self-indulgent. Honestly: who wants to hear about someone else’s sex life all the time? Understandably, people don’t go around constantly talking about sex; it would lose its mystery and become unbearably mundane. People may think about sex a lot—I do—but we aren’t always particularly self-disclosing about it.
One school of thought is that gay people should voice their preferences and orientation. Theory behind this strategy holds that straight people can thereby learn there is nothing weird or scary about gay people. That enlightenment reduces prejudice and frees closeted gays to more honestly enjoy their own lives and enhanced sexuality.
So on the one hand, it is considerate not to belabor others with my sex life. On the other hand, I am not fulfilling my responsibility as a gay man if I don’t tell others: hey, I’m just a regular guy. I’m gay, but I’m the same guy I always was. Nothing to be scared of in that, is there?
Of course, I’m not the same guy I always was. There is more to me now. But enough about me. Yeah, right!
The greatest danger with self-indulgence is in its interaction with other people. In the first place, if I don’t carefully monitor how I act and what I say, my actions can turn selfish fast. Self-indulgence is one thing; self-centered and selfish are entirely different kettles of fish.
Pressing my process—coming out—on other people is not necessarily selfish or self-centered, but it is by every metric self-indulgent. Honestly: who wants to hear about someone else’s sex life all the time? Understandably, people don’t go around constantly talking about sex; it would lose its mystery and become unbearably mundane. People may think about sex a lot—I do—but we aren’t always particularly self-disclosing about it.
One school of thought is that gay people should voice their preferences and orientation. Theory behind this strategy holds that straight people can thereby learn there is nothing weird or scary about gay people. That enlightenment reduces prejudice and frees closeted gays to more honestly enjoy their own lives and enhanced sexuality.
So on the one hand, it is considerate not to belabor others with my sex life. On the other hand, I am not fulfilling my responsibility as a gay man if I don’t tell others: hey, I’m just a regular guy. I’m gay, but I’m the same guy I always was. Nothing to be scared of in that, is there?
Of course, I’m not the same guy I always was. There is more to me now. But enough about me. Yeah, right!
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