WHO AM I REALLY?

Gay Bi Trans men mandated to grow up straight

 

Perhaps you are a man around 50. When you were a teenager, wasn't everyone straight? Those who weren't were “weirdos” or “losers” and whispered to be just “messed up” straight people. Was there any way not to be straight and not be ostracized? Fitting in was the thing. It was clear by implication if not verbally explicit what was expected to “become a man.” No pressure! Likely you complied because if you didn't “what would people think!?” And “what kind of life would you have!!?” But every step toward conformity gave you a sense of getting in deeper and deeper into some way of being you didn't quite want. Perhaps at times you felt like you were suffocating or disappearing. School was a little less intolerable when you caught sight on one of those fascinating guys whom you likely didn't have the courage to befriend but just seeing him made you feel better though probably you didn't admit to yourself it was a crush. If you have forgotten what that time was like, Edmund White's recent novel Jack Holmes & His Friend (2012) may bring it all crashing back.

Decades have passed. Perhaps you have “arrived” -- wife, kids, career, mortgage, white picket fence -- but it feels like you did it all for reasons other than your own, even for someone else. You have transported yourself into a world that, while you may be proud of it in certain ways, still feels like someone else's reality, and at times, this life you have created defines and confines you more than it expresses who you are. Of course we are all somewhat situationally defined by all the roles we fill in life, but beyond that you know those roles aren't all you are or perhaps aren't really you at all. There is an unexpressed part of you that has had no occasion to take part in the world. You may not have clarity about what this part of you is, but denying its existence any longer seems more of a threat than exploring it.

Sexual expression and the truths of your parents and teachers are in progressive disarray as society changes. Sex! Remember when it wasn't “polite” to say the word. If it was said at all, it meant gender, never an activity –clinical not erotic. Though this “erosion of values” is chronicled daily in the newspapers, somehow reflecting on the relevance of these changes may not have been a priority for you. With growing urgency, perhaps you've come to feel that these topics are somehow important to you personally. As you may continue to be ambivalent, you listen more than you comment, and you read about these things when you can do so without anyone else noticing. You may watch strangers with false casualness, trying to see what makes them comfortable with lives apparently so different from your own.

Eventually, one says Enough! The desire to be eventually wakes one from the Stockholm syndrome of collaborating with the kidnappers of one's identity.

Who Am I Really? is a personal growth group at All of You Wellness Centre that addresses the identity crisis experienced by some men in mid-life who have overtly lived their lives as heterosexuals, although this has been ego-dystonic to varying degrees. If some of the above resonates with your inner experience, you will find a place in this group to work through these unvalidated parts of yourself.

The aim of Who Am I Really? is not to radically change your life or to upset the lives of those around you; rather it aims to bring you peace with the person you have always intuitively felt yourself to be, even if you never choose to tell anyone else about this inner transformation or change anything in your outer life.

Who Am I Really? WILL ADDRESS:

• questions of identity. “Who have I been all these years?”
• self-esteem
• internalized homophobia. “Why me?”
• fears of being seen as stereotypical
• fears of social stigma
• belief that there is a social expectation of behaving in particular social and sexual ways
• fears of family reaction/rejection; being disavowed/disowned
• age-ism
• body image / attractiveness in mid life
• seeing life to date as failure
• feeling pathetic / an “old fool”

To Register for Who Am I Really? or for more information, visit http://www.allofyou.ca/events/events.html?eid=7319.

CONTEXT

Before gay liberation in the '70s and '80s, there were few breaches in the monolithic hetero-normative culture of the time for competing views of the self to develop mainstream legitimacy. In the case of gay self-identification, few apart from avant guard writers and artists dared present themselves as such and had to contend with repressive laws, conventional disapproval and marginalization: gay, bi or transsexual were not for the common man. It took great courage and an uncommonly certain sense of self to reveal oneself to be an individual apart from the mainstream. The notion of Gay Pride was coined to crystallize this ontological intent.  Despite the publication around 1950 of Alfred Kinsey's

startling research findings on the diversity of sexual preference and variation in its (often hidden) expression, including the prevalence of bisexuality, the received view of sexuality largely persisted that the world is 99.9% heterosexual and everything else is aberrant, sinful, disgusting or worse. We are not that far from this monosexual view today in largely parsing the world into straight and gay in everything from social discourse to civil law.

In this milieu, men born in the 50's were likely to feel obliged to follow conventional mores to marry and have children or to pass themselves off as celibate bachelors whose sex life, if any, presumed to be heterosexual and even that held in public disdain because it took place outside conventional marriage. Those aware of interest in other men may have dismissed or repressed it, and certainly had a difficult time thinking of it as healthy and legitimate. The smothering embrace of the mainstream culture rendered some totally unaware of these proclivities unless accidentally awakened by unique circumstances. Edmund White's recent novel Jack Holmes & His Friend (2012) depicts very well the unconscious insinuation of hetero-normative thinking into every waking moment in America during that time when there were no ameliorative conceptual categories for non-heterosexual identity and behaviour. The notion of a person independent of sex roles had yet to make its way into the collective consciousness. One was a man or a woman; not a male or a female choosing role based behaviour. We are only now truly evolving the idea of gay independent of conventional sex roles .

These men are now in their 50s and 60s, their children, adults, and if still married, may be in marriages of estranged inertia. Many feel a confusion, that they have missed something or that there is something about themselves they ignored, failed to discover, have yet to discover or are curious to discover; or worse, lies like a buried bomb, a vague hidden threat. As mature men who have paid their dues to conventionality, some are at least willing to grant themselves the (private) intellectual freedom to turn possibilities over in their minds. Some come to realize that the missing passion throughout their married lives is related to a misunderstanding of their sexuality. Even though at this stage in their lives, they may not want to do anything about what that might be, they may still want to know what it is and understand this enigma about themselves if only to feel a greater sense of inner peace. As they proceed into this journey of self-discovery, other issues emerge, some of them existential: “If I've been really gay all these years, has my life been a lie? Who am I really? What is the real meaning of my life if this is true about me?” Self-esteem and self-confidence may falter. New fears arise of rejection should anyone find out. Anxiety and depression may manifest. Curiosity and nascent pride may alternate with feelings of self-loathing and repression. To some extent these questions and psychological reactions point to a blind spot concerning what it means to be human, to be always learning and discovering, and as such lack self-compassion. These questions need airing in a compassionate context, examining how culture often masks the realities of biology and of lived experience, and supporting the shift in psychological landscape of the individual seeking a new inner equilibrium.