I have more to write about tonight!
A quote from Mr. Stephen Fry’s letter to his 16-year-old self:
“Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed … the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out.”
As much as i adore Stephen Fry, i have to personally disagree with some parts of this, although, bigger-picture wise i admit he is right. Personally however, ive come to believe that far more than 10% of my current “suffering” in regards to love is due to my being gay as opposed to love itself, why? The being gay part of it drastically hampers by ability of experiencing it. It befuddles me daily how straight people can complain about their inability to find love, when every day perfectly suitable people to share it with are staring them in the face. If the ratio of straight people they know to gay people they know was 50:50, we’d be in the same position and i wouldn’t have to wonder this. But the fact is, probably less than 5% of their social circle identifies as gay, or bisexual, giving them 95% of the people they know as potential lovers (subtract a few percent for being already in a relationship etc.). I however, go months and months without conversing with a single person i know identifies as gay in the slightest. Everyday they interact with hundreds, thousands of afformentioned potential sharers of love and yet still fail to find what they’re looking for. If thousands and thousands of people they meet aren’t acceptable to love, what chance do i have with the occasional very rare gay male i meet.
My friends daily tell me it’ll get better, and ill meet more gay people eventually, but i cannot help but seriously doubt this hope. University was to be the great opening up of myself, i would meet new people, hopefully some of those guys, hopefully some of thoese gay guys. I was so looking forward to it, the fact that i might actually have even a gay friend to discuss these very issues with face to face, and know that they understood exactly the aprehension a gay teenager (or person in general) feels daily about life. It didn’t happen, in fact i don’t even have any straight friends from University. The underlying anxiety issues i always had didnt go away, and nobody seemed interested at all in extending their social circle in my direction, regardless of my atempts to make it happen. I have little hopes for better success this coming semester, the pure statistics of my finding a gay friend are mind boggling, especially in a subject area where there are only about 3 males in a course (and contrary to what my friends try to tell me, that does not increase the 3 males chances of being gay. Infact the idea that they would be kind of insults me).
So where does this leave me? My 3 social circles, high-school-friends, university and work, all gay free as far as i can tell (and no im not being so naieve as to suggest that out of the 15000 students at my university none are gay, im just saying none directly interact with me by being in a class of mine). There is infact one gay guy at work, but apparently i dont wear fashionable enough clothes, or have good-looking enough hair to be worth the time of day. My only active social circle, friends i went to high school with is also slowly dwindling. Im the only person out of that group that goes to UQ, they all seem to have made better progress in the endeavour of finding university friends then i have, and have infact integrated them into the pre-existing circle, leading to “Uni friends only” type events, leaving my out in the cold. The girl i consider to be my best friend, expresses her desire frequently for gatherings with just us high-school friend people to be non-existant, (im not sure if she’ll read this or not, i know i gave her the link to my blog, i doubt she read anything but anyway the following is what i feel). Sure this might be great for her, afterall she has far outgrown the intellectual capacity and maturity that they all have, she has her University friends, and her boyfriend and his friends to keep her company. But what do i have? Only my high-school friends, which includes her. If she no longer wants to associate with them, what am i to do? If those social events no longer occured, i would never leave the house except to go to work, or to University by myself.
I think i diverged from the quote a bit there, anyway continuing with the quote. I do agree with Stephen in the actuation of love however. I do only blame about 10% of the failure of my last and only relationship to be that of gay issues alone. The rest was 90% the failure of love. The 10% gay issues were probably my not being totally out with my family, and therefore having to tiptoe around them in order to spend time together. The other 90% was failures in my personality, and the point i was at in life the time.
There’s more to the letter, and id like to talk a bit about the next paragraph as well:
“Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature. They – poor normal lambs – naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander’s words, “the course of true love never did run smooth”.”
Following on from what i was saying about not being able to experience love because of being gay, i guess i do blame that part on being gay and not actually just being someone who is obviously not desierable by any other gay male. Ive met one gay male since i broke up with my last and only boyfriend, and consequently, at this rare happening of meeting a gay person, i spared no motivation in organising a date to hopefully take things futher. It did not go well, all it did was prove to myself how undesireable i truly am to your average (and when i say average i mean stereotypical) gay male and how undesierable they are to me, and remind me how much i should’ve stayed with my ex-boyfriend, infact i spent the bus/train ride home from the date thinking about exactly that, while the guy i was on a date with was still sitting next to me (which goes to show you how much conversation was going on). But isn’t this undersirability a gay issue in itself, rather then just an affair “of the heart and loin going wrong”, as Mr. Fry put it? The fact that there is a sterotype personality of a gay male, which appears to be the most prominent one in society (or at least the most out-spoken and therefore noticeable one) and the subsequent outcast-feeling of anyone who doesn’t belong to it is nothing but a gay issue. Its not the same for straight males, these days there is a womens market, so to speak, for the sport-playing jocks and the quiet indie kids, both have an equal number of female counterparts to pursue. If there is a similar market for both outspoken femme gays and your average guy such as myself, im yet to find it or even hear about it from any of my internet-compadrae average gay guys, who all seem to share precisely the problems im currently discussing.
Its tough, and im glad i have my blog to vent to, and my music to comfort me, because try as they might, my friends just cannot seem to grasp why all of this is so difficult for me to deal with, they cannot understand why not having any gay friends is so difficult for me to deal with, or why unavoidably developing feelings for straight friends and knowing they will never in a million years feel anything remotely the same is equally difficult (at least straight guys have some kind of hope when they have feelings for girls, because at least the person they’re interested in is attracted to their gender) But as Stephen Fry said all this “is tough for straight people to work out.”
(Stephen Fry’s letter to his 16-year-old self: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/30/stephen-fry-letter-gay-rights)
