Another thing that I could feel, I could hear in the moment of clear semi-awakeness last night was the words “gay boy, gay boy — but what type of ‘gay boy’?”
These two words keep coming back to me when I think of myself on my own and even when I describe myself to friends or close acquaintances that I trust: “I am a gay boy”. And to me this description feels quite complete as it encompasses both my gender-identity (mostly) and my sexual orientation (although the latter is feeling up in the air and controversial at the moment).
But I don’t really know what it means to be a “gay boy”, a ”gay guy”. I don’t have any close friends who are gay men and I was socialized as a woman. So what do I mean when I define myself as a “gay boy/guy”?
However, what hit me last night was more along the lines of “What type of ‘gay boy’ am I?”
And this question has more than one facet for me, more than one layer to it.
I could ask myself, and try to answer, like Nick in TJ Klune’s series of The Extraordinaries does, by exploring the lists of definitions of “twink”, “twunk”, “bear”, etc. That is one part of it, a part that I haven’t figured out yet and might want to explore or understand.
But there’s also another side that to me feels even deeper. This is more along the lines of “What type of guy do I want to be?” Which is a question that has been prompted in my head, repeatedly, and brought more keenly to my attention, on one hand, by the loss of my father (& thus not having had a close “male model” available) and, on the other, by the conversations between Nick and his teenager friends in series of The Extraordinaries, particularly when it comes to how & why to use their extraordinary powers.
Now, I know those are just books, and with a lot of fantasy, and that there’s no superpowers in real life. However, as I start appearing as a “man” to the outside world around me, I am somehow endowed by society (strangers, not my friends) of some power that comes along with being a white cis male. The fact that I am not, and do not feel like, a cis-man is partly irrelevant (to society at large, to strangers) since that is how I am perceived. So I need to ask myself: “What type of guy do I want to be?”
It weighs on me. And it’s hard to find an answer.
When we’re raised, we’re strongly conditioned and socialized to become either a “man” or a “woman” (at least, my generation and previous ones were). And when we’re growing up, we’re asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But what that question really implies to ask is, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”, i.e. who do we want to be only on the professional level, what career do we want to have, and maybe whether we want to have children of our own or not. We’re not asked what type of person we want to become. At least, I wasn’t prompted that way nor were my friends growing up. And now I find myself asking myself this question insistently, prompted mostly by my gender journey.
I am terrified of becoming a “creepy guy”. And I’m also very confused about the meaning of being a “gay boy” in my case. And this fear and this confusion are often becoming paralyzing for me in social interactions. When I’m around my cis-male friends and only two or three of my very closest queer friends, I loosen up and let myself truly be “my whole masculine self”. But when I’m with (or talk to) any of my other (AFAB) friends, no matter how close or trusted, I find myself involuntarily “dialing it back”: my voice gets higher again, I try to soften my manners, my language changes. I’m afraid of being “too much of a guy” with them. And when it comes to social interactions in public, with strangers, I basically freeze. On Sunday, I went for a dip in the creek with one of my close cis-male climbing buddies and a cis-woman friend of his. I asked the two of them how they had met and they replied, “In a café”. I had to bite my tongue to avoid asking, “How do you do that??” Yesterday, I was spending time with one of my closest queer friends who was visiting from California and I told them about Sunday and asked them: “How the heck do people make friends and sometimes even meet sexual/romantic partners randomly in cafés? That seems to be something everyone is capable of doing except for me!” To which my friend reminded me that they & I actually became friends because I started chatting to them and offered to exchange phone numbers outside a swimming pool back in California during the pandemic. Yeah, good reminder. But there was a huge difference, which I pointed out: I looked like a woman back then and as such I had two advantages: on one hand, I had been conditioned and socialized for decades on how to behave in such situations so the interaction was performed following a clear, well-known, almost automatic script for me; on the other, presenting as a woman (even if personally/internally I mostly didn’t feel like one), I knew almost instinctively that I would not come across as a “menace”, I would not appear “creepy”. [I’m not saying this is right or wrong, or that it makes any sense.]
Now, everything is — or feels — super complicated for me. I wasn’t brought up (i.e. conditioned or socialized) as a “guy” and I’m only very gradually coming into this identity for myself, my gender journey having become clear to me only recently, after decades of suppression/repression. And I feel a lack of role models, at least partially. I have had many “surrogate father figures” who made up for the absence of my biological father in my life; and I have, and have always had, plenty of cis-male friends who are really nice guys, “good guys”. I guess these could be my role models, although none of them (with the exception of my European queer ex-lover) were/are gay. So there’s a lot for me to figure out right now, which is why I can relate to, and identify with, teenage characters so much now. And also why I keep insisting that this gender journey of mine is a “becoming”, a “coming into myself”, rather than a “transitioning”: I’m not “changing side” (as the term in a binary worldview could imply); I’m “becoming myself” — or, at least, I’m trying to.
So, what type of guy do I want to become? And, as one aspect of that: what type of “gay boy” am I?
The Little Prince and the Fox 