First time out

By the time I was eighteen, I was easily aware of my attraction to both genders. My same sex attraction never bothered me because I never self-identified as homosexual. My attraction to girls—my bisexuality—somehow eliminated guilt and discomfort I might have felt about being attracted to boys. I was so comfortable in my bisexual skin.

At any rate, I spent my teen years enjoying more male sexual contact than female because I was not very successful at attracting and dating girls. Furthermore, I attended an all-boys school where contact with girls was limited. Other boys undoubtedly developed strategies for attracting girls; I developed a game plan of sorts for initiating encounters with other boys. At that level, I liked boys more, but at the time I’d have enjoyed more heterosexual encounters.

Before I was eighteen, I had already experienced “adolescent” contact with several different boys, but recognized that I would have to lose my virginity to a girl. Naturally, this prospect excited me, and in my sixteenth year I pursued my goal with single-minded enthusiasm. Now attending a small co-educational boarding school, I established a relationship with a female student, and eventually consummated the act.

I remember my first heterosexual “lovemaking” as unpracticed and hurried fumbling in the dark. It was probably little different from anyone else’s first-time adolescent fumbling. The deal, however, was done, and I wore my new status with pride among my peers.

No question: I liked the sex and wanted more. The short story is that my girlfriend and I continued our trysts until we got caught and expelled from school. I finished high school at a public school where I enjoyed the cachet of mystery and rumor that surrounded me. The irony is that I got in more heterosexual trouble throughout my early life than I ever did homosexual trouble.

At eighteen I entered college at a time when the Vietnam War was sucking up young American men like a bellicose vacuum. A couple of years later I succumbed to a lifestyle that had little to do with academia and lots to do with skiing and partying. I dropped out of college which put me directly in the crosshairs of conscription and a potentially one way ticket to Vietnam.

I avoided the draft by being gay, which was my first trip out of the closet. I told my father, equivocating that I wasn’t really homosexual, and that I was only claiming the orientation to avoid the army. Still, I said the words out loud; the army psychiatrist believed me and wrote HOMOSEXUAL large across my paperwork. And I wasn’t even ashamed as I walked to the door past the drill sergeants and the poor saps headed for basic training and Vietnam.

I suppose it’s also ironic that calling myself homosexual led to my first overt and complete sexual congress with another man. I was always bisexual, never exclusively heterosexual, but now utterly and absolutely homosexual. It’s been a long, strange and I think unique trip. I wouldn’t change a bit of it.

Gay pride

I reconnoitered. I like knowing the ground before I enter a situation, especially one involving thousands of people. Denver’s PrideFest 2009 anticipated attendance by upwards of a hundred thousand people at Civic Center Park. Before I become part of a crowd like that, I want to know where stuff is located before it gets difficult to find.

I attended PrideFest on advice from my friend Brian, who recommended it as an essential component of my coming out. At first I didn’t understand why gay pride is so important, and thought it enough just to say I was gay. Now I enjoy greater understanding; enjoy is the active word. Being gay means helping other gay people come out of the closet, to accept themselves and expand that acceptance to family, friends and community.

My first impression on walking into Civic Center Park was of homeless people inhabiting whatever shady and comfortable places they could find. They contrasted sharply with more well-heeled vendors and gawkers like me. My thought was that homeless people don’t have the luxury of celebrating their sexuality; they’d be happy celebrating something to eat.

When I returned to the park the following morning, homeless folks were not in evidence. They were replaced by a full throng of gay and gay-friendly people browsing booths now stocked with all manner of services and merchandise. There were petitions to sign, causes to join, message tables, animal care and adoption offerings, psychic prognosticators, music and hundreds of mostly yummy food booths. Gay pride was paramount; diversity was the name of the day.

But the most striking thing to me was that here there weren’t—didn’t need to be—any closets. Everyone, from gawkers and tourists to vendors and practitioners, were either gay or gay-friendly. They assumed I was gay or that I accepted gay as viable identification and lifestyle. Freedom and authenticity were liberating. I could be who I am and meet with not just acceptance, but approval. I wandered among my tribe.

Although I had fun almost beyond description, my experience of “outness” and continuity taught me being homosexual is my personal orientation. Being gay, however, brought me together with a community of like-minded people. It was inclusive, enclosing and accepting; it was all okay, it was all good.

We gays have come a long way in terms of public acceptance of homosexuality. A hundred thousand gay people and allies walking openly and blatantly through Denver streets, demonstrates that times have changed. Yes, as a community of gay souls we still have much to do. We may not have it all, but as community we have it all together. Boy did it feel wonderful.

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.