So by the way, I’m gay. I have been all my life. Without going into the details of my childhood / adolescence, all you really need to know is that I have never been physically attracted to girls / women. NEVER. Emotionally, yes. Physically, NEVER. Oh, did I say I’ve NEVER been physically attracted to women?
For all of you who don’t “get” being gay, there’s really not much to it. If you’re a straight woman, imagine what turns you on about men and that’s pretty much what turns me on. For the straight guys who have a hard time understanding, imagine what your girlfriend or wife likes to do to you when you’re engaged in sex. That’s what I like to do to men too! I know, pretty gross, eh? And when I say gross, I mean how I feel when I imagine my tongue in the same “feminine places” that straight men often put their tongues. Seriously. Gross! All joking aside, my point is that what is normal for you isn’t necessarily what is normal for me. Stop judging people based on who they love.
With that out of the way, if you are straight and you choose to continue reading my blog, you accept that this is MY blog about MY life, feelings and experiences. Derogatory comments will be promptly deleted.
I lived most of my life in denial. The shame that society places on gay people is the reason. I spent years hiding my sexuality by being non-sexual. Excuses were common. Although I never attended church, I hid behind religious expectations and “Christian moral principals” to deny my true feelings. No sex before marriage was a very convenient rule for a guy who had no wish to have sex with women. The result of my self-repression was depression, which progressed to a clinical depression during my university years. The feelings of depression discussed with my doctor in first year university were subsequently dismissed for an entire decade.
At age 24.5, living away from my parents for the first time in my life, during a moment of what I thought was utter weakness, I had my first experience with another man. I recall the nervousness I felt at the beginning, the sense of finally understanding what all the fuss was about during, and the horrible disappointment, guilt and self-hatred at the end. It was another 3-4 years before I accepted that I was gay… I just couldn’t say the words, even to myself. My depression became unbearable, affecting my work as a teacher and pretty much every other aspect of my life. I recall one day with a class full of students, hiding in a back room at work sobbing in the dark, in a state of complete despair. When I talked to my doctor about it, he reminded me that I had talked with him about the same feelings 10 years prior. That’s a full decade of living in a fog! Something had to change.
After a year of anti-depression medication and counselling, I awoke one day and realized the fog had lifted. Still, despite finally accepting my sexuality, I almost never talked about it. This is what we call “being in the closet”. It wasn’t for another 5 years or so, around when I was 36-37, that I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who all knew I was attracted to men and didn’t give a shit. For me, this is when my life finally began.
Now for the past 5 years, I’ve grown a lot in both experience in learning how to be comfortable in my own skin. As it turns out, I’m pretty much the same person I was all along. The only difference is I like myself a lot more than I used to. Having said that, I find that in some ways, I’m still struggling to come to terms with being gay.
