a conversation around a smoke pit and my feelings on being gay
my relationship with being gay is a complicated thing. while i am grateful for having ended up in the life i have now. in the past, i've thought of it as a curse, another bullet point to the long list of things that made me different to the people close to me. it puts a big strain on my relationships with others; to reconcile who i am with the jokes and preconceptions that people have about me. at times, it feels like a perverse secret i have to distance people from. i still struggle with the feeling of shame that comes with being gay. i like to think the world is fairly open to the nonstandard. when i'm sitting in the subway with my head perched on my boyfriend's shoulder, its only me and him in this little world we've made on those red felted seats. an odd look from a stranger or an influx of people from a busy stop snaps me back into a reality where i once again need to hide this piece of myself. i hope i don't feel this way for my whole life. i think living in toronto is especially hard given how many backgrounds have homophobia as a belief in their culture, there is no one size fits all solution when you have a city of millions in which each has had different means of teaching what it means to be a man.
as much as people tell you they "accept" who you are, as if at any point it was their place to accept who you are, there is always a gap that they are unwilling to cross, a limit to the amount of respect they can afford to someone unlike themselves. i find this especially true among women rather than men. in my relationships with women, there is usually a point where there is a fundamental disconnect in the way i approach relationships and they do, and a frequent thing i find is that they will often give up on their moral standings for the "right" man. the fear i have surround my female friends is often that they'll find a boyfriend who is uncomfortable with me and i end up getting the cold shoulder. it's a sign of poor character, quite simply, but still, i won't get those signs until it happens, and then all we've built is gone. my experience with making friendships with men has been simple so far, in the fact that more often than not, they show me their true colors immediately after they know i'm gay. i've been met with slurs, social rejection, the whole mix, and each and every time, which, while painful, make me grateful for the fact that i've been able to figure out someone's character so quickly. i do think that being able to stay removed from talk surrounding members of the preferred sex has made it easier for me to make deeper friendships with men than women. we aren't converging on topics of relationships in a way that centers around lust and sex but rather how we feel about the people we are with. my relationships have historically felt more validated by the men in my life than women. around women, my relationships end up feeling like things that can only be called "cute" and "wholesome" and ones where i am expected to lay everything out on a line for it to be scrutinized by a crowd. still, with both i feel like there always going to be a level of respect they have for me that would have been different had i been straight.
i recently had this kind of experience with a friend i've know for more than a decade. we had gone to a house party this weekend. while all of us were drunk, she pulled me aside for some reason to ask me how much i cared about her making gay jokes, hoping to get some sort of badge of approval by me or confirmation that i wouldn't feel hurt. i struggle a lot with how i feel about her, and the past few months have had me asking whether she sees me as some toy for amusement, and whether me being gay is some extra multiplier on top of that. she's usually the one to make off hand jokes about the people i see, or attempt to probe into my sex life, and quite honestly, i've started keeping her at arms distance in terms of what i talk about. anyways, later on in the party, there were a few of us sat in the smoke pit and at one point, one of the guys blurts out "i'm not doing no fag shit" so casually in the conversation the five of us were having that i think it only caught my ear. i don't know why i'm so hung up on this, but something about that word, it's casual use, and my friend running along with it like nothing was said instantly turned me off from any fun i was having. while i know she directly didn't say anything, knowing this was someone she invited, and the conversation we had earlier that night has had me reconsidering why i'm friends with her in the first place. i wouldn't do that to someone i care about.