Round and round...

I am saddened on this day. While much of my process creates a liberated lightness of being, today my baggage is going round and round on my carousel. Last week my former wife and my daughter left our home for a new life in California. I received my final divorce papers in the mail a day after they left.

While there is relief at closure, I also can't help going round and round with the pain and trouble caused by my being closeted and obviously not handling any of that well. I never married to hide my gayness because at the time I was enjoying life hetero. The homo part crept out, however, and although I didn't know it, I must have been unhappy. Can you really be unhappy if you don't know you're unhappy? Denial and hindsight.

So now I will climb back on the horse of my own life and process. This will undoubtedly be a good thing once the baggage spins off the carousel, especially since I figure there are only about twenty years left to enjoy honesty, liberation, freedom, and pleasure.

I cannot deny today's melancholy though, because that would short-circuit my process. I will indulge it for as short a while as I can manage. I'll get over it.

Matters of degree

During my life so far, gay—my degree of gayness—has varied over time. As an adolescent, I was aware of my attraction to girls and boys, and was not ashamed to call myself bisexual. I figured the field was open to more opportunities than as if I self-identified as exclusively gay or straight. There never was any such thing as a closet.

During my twenties, I enjoyed relations with both genders; those with women fit well with societal expectations. During the latter half of that decade, and although I still identified as bisexual, I transited more consistently to the gay end of the continuum. Those were heady and promiscuous days without threat of disease, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.

I reveled in my preference, but with the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s, was grateful for my isolated home in the mountains. There, homosexual contact was minimal. I consciously put gay behind me, and unknowingly built the closet in which I was to reside heterosexually for twenty years.

Then in 2001—I was fifty-two—my orientation shifted again and although deeply closeted, I travelled the curve toward gay. Still professing bisexuality, it required serious mental trauma—the breakup of my marriage—to make me recognize that I wasn’t just bisexual and that I was a gay man living deep in the closet. Admitting that to myself and others has proven liberating and authenticating, as if a weight is lifting off my shoulders.

In the process of coming out of the closet I didn’t know I inhabited, some days I feel more or less gay than I did, for example, the day before. By no means does that mean I feel more heterosexual, it’s just that my sexuality isn’t at the front of the desk. To enjoy the authenticity, though, every morning I say to myself, “Oh yeah, I’m gay, homosexual, queer as the day is long.” And it feels good to say it.

Accidental out

I've been wanting to somehow get out on Facebook because that would save a lot of one-on-one talking. Yet I couldn't completely bring myself to do it, because it's a big, wide and public world out there and more than a little scary.

But a minute ago I wrote something to a friend that it won't take much reading between the lines to figure out what I'm really saying. I didn't totally say it, though, so maybe this was a good way to break the news...subtly. Whatever: it's done. I wish I could take the saying closer to heart: Those that matter don't mind, and those that mind don't matter. Big world indeed!

Indulgence

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!

Community

Apparently, there is a distinction between being homosexual and being gay. Homosexual, perhaps more clinically, is predominantly or exclusively, sexually and emotionally, a preference for members of one’s own gender. Gay, on the other hand, is more than simply homosexual, and implies membership in a community of similarly oriented people.

Which begs the question: Can you be homosexual without being gay? Perhaps I am either not understanding this or not sensitive enough to the issues. These are, after all, the ravings of a newbie.

I have no problem with community; I like community. I established my home in the Colorado Mountains to enjoy mountains and skiing, and stayed all these years to enjoy the natural and human community. I participate in community at many levels.

So in my process, I am consciously and unconsciously seeking like-minded individuals—gay community, although I’m not exactly sure what that is or where to find it. I am a member of two communities: that of which I have so long been a part, and something new and untested. Since the latter may not even exist in my geography, the two are difficult to integrate. Furthermore, it takes years to establish community, and a long time to become part of one.

If I am unable to find “brick-and-mortar” gay community, I will call myself gay but with the caveat that really, I’m just homosexual. Does that sound right? Naw, I’m gay.

In the greater scheme of my process, this perceived distinction probably matters not one whit. Still, if exploration poses such questions, I would be remiss not to worry the answers. That’s what process is all about.

Always becoming

Like most humans, I developed an identity sometime during puberty. I’m not sure I’d call what happened an epiphany because epiphanies happen fast. My nascent identity evolved over time and with conscious thought and intent. I set about to figure out who I was, what I would do, and how I would relate to other people.

Despite consistent sexual contact with other boys, I never thought of myself as queer or homosexual. That came later; in the meantime I lusted after girls. Identity crystallized as bisexual when I needed a label, and bisexual was just fine. It opened the field and during the 1960s sexual revolution, evinced no shame.

I proudly wore the bisexual label for decades, through a bunch of heterosexual relationships that always failed. In retrospect, I recognize they failed because I was not a heterosexual partner. My mostly unrealized bisexual inclinations kept getting in the way. Call it denial—everybody does—but I still didn’t figure myself for gay.

Now I self-identify as gay. This involves the process of coming out both to friends and to myself. I am gay, I do gay; how do I be gay within the context of my life and who I am? I think about that a lot.

I can be no different a person than the one I’ve been all these years. Yet now there is a new component of identity requiring conscious thought and intent about who I am, what I do and how I relate to other people. Although not my first big rodeo, I expect a few saddle sores.

Only ten years?

I lost ten years somewhere, maybe more. Of greater concern perhaps is that I’m not even sure which decade is missing. I think I kept pretty good track of the last twenty years, but before that it perhaps isn’t too surprising that things are a little, uh…blurry.

Back then I was a drinking man, and although I don’t remember the particulars, I remember I got thirsty every day around three in the afternoon. Knowing that, it is fairly easy to piece together what I don’t remember: I sat in a gin mill swilling whatever pleased my palate, Springsteen played, the television above the bar blared and cigarette smoke from my drinking buddies filled the air. Hangovers were a feature of the situation.

But that was almost twenty years ago. Since then I have kept the jug plugged and enjoyed a sober life. That life has provided all the good stuff: passion for mountains, a family that lasted the best part of those children’s lives, and my own complement of self-indulgent fun in the place I have chosen as home. Believe me: I’m not complaining.

Yet I am confused. I feel like I missed something; more likely forgot it. Looking back, I wonder how I got from there to here. Any logical progression is confounded by what life affords: waking up, living the day, and falling asleep. The day, of course, is the crux and determines falling asleep.

Every once in a while I reacquaint myself with one or more of the skeletons I left back in the closet. Almost everyone has skeletons in their closet; mine stand tall and periodically kick the door open to come out and play. I left a lot of skeletons in that closet, and why not? Some of those old bones: I can’t think of a better place to keep them.

It is unsettling to get eyeball to eye socket with some of those specters, albeit unavoidable. I expect to better acquaint myself with those bones as my life progresses. After all, I doubt I can avoid reviewing my life as I approach its end. You pays your money; you takes your chances.

I am looking back at the first two-thirds of life and anticipating the final third. I figure the first third is for acquiring stuff—wherewithal, knowledge, experience—the second third is for enjoying what you’ve accrued, and the final third is for divesting it. Slim it down; there is no point in acquiring any more. One thing I haven’t forgotten: you can’t take it with you. Time winds; seize the day.