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ecently I was going through
old family photographs trying to figure
out an interesting display for a bedroom
wall. I came across a twenty-five year-old
picture from my past. My elderly parents,
now deceased, were seated in the living
room of their home in South Carolina, |
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surrounded by my two sisters and me,
with our spouses and children.
I felt more than a just twinge of nostalgia
-- I felt a loss, that something valuable
had disappeared from my life. While I love
my life as a gay man, and am still on good
terms with my family members, especially my
adult children, I am no longer fully plugged
into a nuclear family, complete with in-laws,
that are in turn part of the wider heterosexual
community that still dominates the social
order in which we live.
The traditional family gatherings that included
familial connections with my then-wife’s
relatives, combined with a sense of being
part of the -- respectable? -- world, no longer
play a central role in my life. As a gay man,
even with children who love me and family
members and straight friends who take me as
I am, I still experience -- perhaps like most
gay men -- that feeling of being something
of an outsider.
I certainly don’t want to go back to
that old life. The memory of living a closeted
life is very painful. But from time to time,
I do think about what I gave up, or more accurately,
what I might have had had I been born straight
instead of gay. My guess is that most gay
men have experienced that feeling, especially
those of us who are older (I’m pushing
70 real hard). We grew up in a time when to
be gay was to be a pariah, and while we have
welcomed and participated in the post-Stonewall
liberation of gay people, we probably cannot
help but have at least the ghost of that old
feeling that to be gay was not good, but a
condition that guaranteed a life, if not of
misery, at least of missing out on much of
what life has to offer.
It is fashionable today to think of everything
gay as the same as -- or at least equal to
-- everything straight. If they have marriages,
we have relationships that ought to be recognized
as marriages. If we are -- ahem -- promiscuous,
the modern straight world is hardly characterized
by a one-man, one-woman partnership for life.
If they make up 95% or perhaps less of the
population, we are an increasingly recognized
minority with most of the same rights they
have.
My own opinion is that living life as a gay
man is significantly different from living
it as a straight man. Marriage, for example,
is in my experience a far more committed relationship
than two gay men living together. “Open
marriages” between a man and a woman
are rare; few straight men or women have any
tolerance for their partner’s extramarital
affairs (though they of course happen). The
degree of merging of one’s identity
from two individuals to a couple is much more
intense among married straights. From the
get-go, they are building a life together
and will put up with a high degree of compromise
in order to make things work, especially when
children are part of the picture. The pay
off is a closeness and sense of belonging,
not just in the here and now, but to past
and future generations.
This is not to say that they have better lives
than we do, only that they have different
ones. If we deny or bemoan those differences,
however, we may be overlooking the benefits
of being who we are.
Several years ago, I bought two expensive
leather club chairs for my living room. I
had special-ordered them, and when they arrived
-- much too light in color to look right in
the room -- I could not return them. I was
heart-sick. Several days later, I was talking
on the phone to my sister in New York and
told her about my chairs. “Go get some
nice pillows or throws to put in them,”
she advised; “Make them work.”
That, of course, was exactly what I did --
I bought two large pillows made from old oriental
rugs. They draw the eye to the pillows, which
included in their intricate patterns the same
color as the leather of the chairs (I got
the decorator gene). The effect is perfect.
I think of my sister’s advice -- “Make
them work” -- when I am confronted with
the feeling that my gay life is somehow inadequate,
somehow not comparable to what the straight
people have. So my life does not have some
of the respectable belonging that the heterosexuals
seem to have. It has, however, had a lot more
sexual experience, and a lot more sexual variety.
And it’s my job to make sure that, even
if my relationships are not as deeply committed
as those of many husbands and wives, it does
not make them unimportant. If I work at being
close to a man, the relationship can bring
me not just sexual pleasure, which of course
is important in its own right, but an emotional
intimacy, which means so much to everyone,
gay or straight. Whether my loves are as rewarding
as those of the straights is beside the point.
The point is to maximize, primarily through
respect and consideration for my partner,
the benefit of any relationship, long-term
of otherwise, that I might have.
In addition, there is a richness to gay friendships
that is probably more fulfilling than that
enjoyed by most straight men. Getting together
with other gay men who are just friends is
much more easily accomplished if you are gay
than if you are a married straight man with
obligations at home. So is traveling, to fun-filled
gay Meccas like Key West, Provincetown or
Palm Springs, or to the world’s great
gay-friendly cities, like New York and San
Francisco here at home, or Paris, London,
Berlin and Rome abroad. Moreover, gay men
are more likely to be interested in a wide
range of cultural activities that can be shared,
from art museums and concerts to movies. (I
had one friend who even liked stock car racing.)
Some years ago, a flamboyant friend of mine,
who couldn’t have passed for straight
if his life depended on it, had a small sign
on the wall of his kitchen. It read, “Bloom
where you are planted.” The key word
is bloom.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxHoward Williams
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