Not Gay Enough

alt. “Interstitial Static”

I spend a lot of time in an environment with a pride flag in the window. A place defined by an approachable air of acceptance. This is an organization and a group of people committed to being a safe space for all. We’re a hub for youngin’s and nearly every day I see someone on their journey to find themselves. We have one of the coolest elder Queers in the city in our club, and he’s the man I feel an incredible pull toward. But, something makes me shy around him to the point I can’t do much more than say “hi.” After sitting with this for months, I realize that I’m scared to death of what his presence in my life would represent: a total acceptance of myself in the face of what I believe other people think.

I’m the type to absorb what I believe the most admirable qualities in a person are, and if he became my friend—I’d be faced with what I believe to be the last bastion of inauthenticity within my own life. But even just thinking this thought has shone the light enough to make me pause and ponder.

For the first time since I embraced my sexuality nine years ago, I have found myself scared back into the closet in arguably one of the safest environments around. It’s an inverted pressure forcing from the inside out, the kind you get when you pull a deep-sea creature to the surface, and it’s rooted in my ability to “pass.”

In this day of loud, openly militant gays, a quieter finocchio like myself finds the crowd a bit bristly. I overcompensate by squashing the things I want to say and the movements I want to make. I alienate myself rather than show myself. I’d rather pass and be excluded than to just take the dive and be me, because “me” doesn’t feel gay enough.

We have trans people in our community, we have non-binary people, we have all shades of the sexuality and gender spectrum, and then we have the cis-het ally crowd. And within this crowd, there are loud cis-het voices that are just… overeager allies.

It’s resulted in me feeling like I need to write two thousand words on a blog that’ll hopefully float in front of some of them to prove my gayness. The safe space makes a quiet finocchio like myself scared that I’m taken for something I’m not, when I’ve lived that life. I was ready to just be me; I’m pushing 40 for Christ’s sake, but kids are scary and militant and one day I’m going to say something that’s authentically me, and people might think it’s something else.

I’ve lost count of how many young people just assume I’m something I’m not until I make a point of mentioning things they have no business knowing. I feel like I need a lanyard from GayHQ to prove myself. The most noticeable thing to me these days has been the readiness to judge by appearance from those committed, out loud, to not doing that. But thankfully, the positive thing that outshines this hitch is that gay is so visible now.

It’s visible in a way that makes all of these kids my hero because I can hardly fathom being that comfortable with myself. I come from the world of being called a fag in class for my laugh. Performing straightness has always been the status quo for me.

I had junior high teachers say that I should have been born a girl because of all the giggling I do. Whether it be gender based or sexuality based, my laugh—my giggle made me a target when I was growing up, and it makes me laugh like Seth fucking Rogen now.

The elder Queer I mentioned before is named Gordon, and I actually had an incredibly meaningful conversation—almost in passing with him, after I started writing this piece. It wasn’t until that conversation that I realized we have far more in common that I ever knew, and its because I never got to know him.

He represents the same thing I do, the space in the middle. Neither of us are flamboyant, but neither of us are stoic-types. From Johnathan Van Ness to Ian Mckellen, we’re both just kind of… Neil Patrick Harris? But, here I thought he was “a gay man.” The wording in this piece until before publishing it was “Elder Gay,” but he explained it to me and that’s where I found our common ground still exposed the same inauthenticity. I projected onto him this “secure being within the binary on the spectrum of sexuality” persona because of his age, and that’s exactly what our conversation ended up being about. Time doesn’t dull the experiences of a person.

Gordon has a Power Puff girl profile picture on Facebook, and it brings a proverbial tear to my eye—I once proposed a Power Puff girl tattoo to my sisters and they responded with the picture that has a large man in a Buttercup costume alongside Blossom and Bubbles when I just wanted to be one of the girls.

I’ve always been one of the girls. I was the only boy; dad worked a ton. Swimming lessons as a kid were always “girls and Joel.” I’ve worked in two separate workplaces as the sole man, and others as one of few. My closest friends, other than for a single period in my life, have always been women. I’m not trans, but I have such a huge part of my soul that identifies in femininity that I barely consider myself “a man” as it’s been defined.

The happiest I’ve ever is when Ashlee and I would go shopping at RW&Co. and give each other fashion shows. It was a sublime freedom I didn’t know was gone until it had scabbed over. I met Ashlee in one of these places where I was the only man, and our energy connected right away.

I look like a straight guy. I’m dating a woman right now. From the outside, I am your typical cis-het white male. I am well aware that I look closer to a skin head or mass shooter than I do Lance Bass, but when I’m with Ashlee, it’s the only time I’m truly myself. Her femininity is so strong and tangible that it’s a garden of comfort for me to embrace my own. If I am a Pikachu, she’s my thunderstone, and I only ever become Raichu around her. Big gay Raichu, because let me say without ambiguity, my true self is a total fag in the best possible way.

There’s an aspect of my personality that only recently has come out around my family and initially found its strength in Ashlee’s presence. Its limp wristed, it’s a bit offensive in a ‘bitch I dare you’ type of way, and its me—I think? I’ve been using extreme language to walk up to this point the entire time. Its an ownership of things that have harmed in the past, combined with an absurdist touch of “can you believe these are real words". (i.e. “poofter”).

In my world, Gay has always been synonymous with Punk Rock. When I was a kid, the edgiest people were gay, even if they weren’t. Jim Morrison was a sexy, slithery magic man, the Sex Pistols and Chii Peppers had their bodies out. Elton John was just Rob Halford with a wider colour palette and fabric selection. John Waters was an infatuation of mine when I was little.

I grew up staring at Zakk Wylde’s midriff, fooling myself into thinking that it was his guitar playing I was staring at. All of my heroes contained an element of sexual attraction, but at the time I was trained to ignore it, to project it onto something else. Gay hindsight is something wild, I’ll tell you. Like being smacked in the face with a wet rag over and over again.

I convinced myself I was “needle straight” while being a voracious reader of a woman’s “sex with rock stars” blog because I wanted the carnal knowledge of these men that she offered her readers. I’d find forums of women detailing all the wonderful and consensual, to all the inappropriate and downright pathetic things this tier of men would do with their dicks out.

I’d read for hours on what was at the time “jackinit.com,” a website dedicated to stories about masturbation. They did have a sister site, “jillinit.com” but that was lame. If you ask me, I still find a majority of vaginas fairly lame. No offense to the vagina-havers out there.

So this is all happening while I’m between 12 and 18. I’m burying this side of me with no ability to self reflect—no ability to sus out my own feelings. Then I was hit by the big gay bus at 27, but it only half runs me over. I had this huge cathartic release at a Lady Gaga concert and realize I’ve been internalizing self hate for a very, very long time. My life was never the same after that.

For years now, I’ve referred to myself as Half-a-Fag, I do it so often that my friends don’t even blink at the word anymore. There’s a scene in an episode of the Sopranos where, on the subject of homosexuality, Paulie Gualtieri mentions a man who took photos of him one time back when he was a boxer, the line he says is something like: “he was half-a-fag, but I took it as a compliment,” and it became instantly endearing to me. I want to make T-Shirts—that’s how much I love the phrase.

It was the Sopranos that really opened my mind about the nature of ignorance. The show was so spectacularly written that while those characters were all unequivocally bad people, they were all played in a way that, for single episodes, you could detach and view them as a proxy for a large issue.

The final season deals with Vito’s homosexuality, and it exposes a real way people talk. Even in 2006, this dialogue is evergreen. Slurs and non-preferred nomenclature are rampant, but the show makes it extremely clear who is saying these words with intent, and who are saying these words with culture.

When Phil Leotardo called Vito a faggot, you felt his hate. When Paulie said the same word, you felt his ignorance laid by culture.  Tony Sirico was such a masterful actor though that when Paulie got in his own head, the hate would fill the slurs.

I make a point of not mincing words in writing because of my larger point; the drag queens who say, and the people cheering them on when they hear, “I’d rather be a faggot than a fascist,” represent something more tangible than online discourse.

Something that’s buried under the polarity of feigned outrage-for-clicks.

The simplest way I’ve ever heard it broken down is that certain peoples have paid the social debt for it in blood and tears; though a shared history the debt is paid. That’s the heart of why I don’t police the language of others, because I have a complicated relationship with the words that I use—other people must have as well. It’s on the individual to hold these words in their own way, with historical context.

When a man like Cornel West says the N-Word, it’s full of power to illustrate his point. When I hear that Queen say she’d rather be a faggot than a fascist, it’s with empowerment that the crowd roars.

History is invoked in both moments, because slurs can be inverted and they’re ten times more powerful that way. Taking what power we can, from where we can, is part of being human. Slurs are the readiest example of the power of language, for good and bad.

Sometimes, reclaiming a horrible word in a conscious moment of juvenile humor is the only thing that can provide the release valve. I think we’re seeing it in society with the use of the word gay coming back—but this time it’s somehow divorced from hate. But like in the 2000s, we’re back to calling things ‘gay.’ The word retard is seemingly making a resurgence, fueled by the feeling of getting away with something. People need that feeling. Is anyone else having a lot of conversations about Simple Jack and Tropic Thunder these days or is that just me?

I call myself a fag because my cousins called me a fag and I cried myself to sleep after they searched “gay pron” on Yahoo so my dad would see it in the history. When I say it, I’m erasing the memory of those moments and replacing them with enjoyable moments, like when my friends open up to me emotionally, and I drop it while making eye contact.

Somehow that feels performative too, though. No matter what I do I feel like I’m performing some version of something and looking for approval instead of just living as myself.

In some cases, I use this ridiculous language, like the deep cut of “finocchio” I got from the Godfather as like a “I DARE YOU TO CHALLENGE ME” childish thumb to the world. I hold my tongue in some scenarios and pretend not to be a part of the club in others scenarios.

I don’t know what the ultimate message of this piece is, other than that today’s landscape of identity politics on biker crank is leaving so many people behind that I’m to the point of just trying to understand the end game, both in society, and to me personally. I know what I believe, and I know what groups I align with, but in this day and age I’d rather be lonely in identity than surrounded by labels being thrust around, because at this point, its the label robbing us of humanity.