Friday, April 10, 2009

Do I really have to find a word for it?

I don't talk about this so often, but an e-acquaintance of mine wrote this article, and I agree with a lot of what it says. And it quotes my favorite book ever.

Male Sexual Fluidity

I identify as gay, because honestly I don't find women overly physically attractive. To be more specific, I think the female form is beautiful, but I don't get aroused when I see it. Which is not a problem I have with men, and I'm happy with my boyfriend. But sometimes I wonder how much of these feelings are how I really feel, and how much is what society expects of me. I'm lucky, because a lot of my feelings really are gay, but I'm getting exceedingly tired of the label and all of the expectations that go with it.

For some reason, society feels the need for everyone to fall into a black or white category regarding their sexuality, and I've always seen it as more of a spectrum. I think when we force people to align themselves into one of two categories, it causes all sorts of problems. Why can't someone just like who they like? A straight guy may fall in love with another guy, but in general isn't gay. But he can't admit it because he has to fit into a box, so he can't be truly happy. And there's enough pain in the world, I don't see why we have to add to it.

Of course I think the first step is to get rid of this misconception that gay is bad, or weak, or less in some way. People might be more willing to admit that they have had a gay thought if it wasn't implied that such thoughts make you less of a man. This is rapidly turning into a soapbox issue for me, and not because I have a personal stake in it. It's not that I'm secretly in love with woman, it's just that I find this push to "fit-in" to be exhausting. Adam does a much better job of explaining things than I do. He's a pretty good writer (I especially like his autobiographical online story), so the article is worth a gander if you have a chance.

1 comment:

Lauren said...

Amen. We don't live the rest of our lives in black and white -- why should we have to in this case? I really like the idea of a two dimentional scale, because it never made sense that A implies Not B. If we didn't try to place people into tidy little boxes, there would be so much less hate in the world.