“Daddy issues”

[Trigger warnings: explicit sexual references/language; childhood trauma/wounds.]

Once again, on Sunday I had an extremely hard time at rehearsal with the gay men’s chorus. I once again had a near-meltdown and then a tantrum afterwards. 

Some of the reasons for the difficult emotions were my own, partly even unrelated to the choir: my general burnout; the stress from my messy, piecemeal move; the renewed wave of grief, or anyway sense of an ending and loss, generated by my move — a clear, concrete indicator of another phase of my life ending, at least partially. So I wasn’t in the best place emotionally when I got to rehearsal on Sunday evening, I really just wanted to be by myself or with (a) close, trusted friend(s), not with a group of what are still basically strangers to me.The three men in the chorus to whom I had written my email earlier last week to express my concerns and difficulties as a newbie and who had responded in lovely, understanding and supportive ways were true to their word and came to find me during breaks in rehearsal and tried to make some conversation and even show some (maybe genuine) interest in me as a person. But I was in such a difficult place myself that I couldn’t fully appreciate that and their kind efforts to help me shrunk completely in comparison to the instances that hurt and upset me in the chorus: the fact that most of the other people still ignore me completely, including the ones I end up sitting next to during rehearsal; the fact that I can see most of the other newbies interacting and socializing with at least one person; and the jokes, the heavily sexual jokes. 

I can take sexual jokes, in a “reasonable” amount. Light sexual jokes, even the fallocentirc ones, with my cis-het buddies feel comfortable to me because I know they’re well-meant and their making those types of jokes around/with me feels affirming because it’s one of the ways that I’m included “as one of the guys” despite my not having a penis. But within the chorus it feels like too much. It doesn’t happen every rehearsal but I’ve noticed that the two or three rehearsals when it’s happened, I have felt more uncomfortable. Within the gay men’s chorus, when this “sexual jokes vibe” is present during rehearsal, it’s all about “coming in” and “coming on strong” and “top” and “bottom” and “bear”, and the sexual references have a very performative, fallocentric vibe that make me — as a person without a penis — feel extremely uncomfortable, left out. Those are the moments when I feel keenly that I am AFAB, feel keenly that sense of “So am I not part of this group because I don’t have a dick and don’t fit into any of your boxes of ‘top’, ‘bottom’, ‘bear’, or whatever else?” 

As I drove home (back to my buddy’s place where I was staying for the weekend) on Sunday night, the fury red and hot inside me, I found myself crying out, “I don’t know anything about tops or bottoms! I’ve never been loved by a man as a man!”  

There. There it is: one of the knots I’m dealing with and that have come to the comb (as the Italian saying goes, “tutti i nodi vengono al pettine”). That exclamation of mine compounds so many of those layers: first of all, the equation of “sex” and “love” — which, of course, are not the same thing. And then the images that went through my head in that moment, driving back on Sunday night, when I cried out, “I’ve never been loved by a man as a man!”: the images included some of my “boy-friends” from when I looked like a girl, my father, and my European (gender)queer ex-lover, i.e. the AMAB people I’ve loved the most, and felt betrayed by the most, in my life. 

There is so much more than just singing involved for me with this gay men’s chorus: there’s a huge onion with many, many layers. There are some outer layers, like my lack of knowledge of the “gay men’s world”, which are environments I’ve rarely been in; my being AFAB; my asexuality — all valid reasons for my feeling like an outsider. But there’s some deeper stuff going on here that I can see quite clearly but I’m trying to keep at bay. It’s a Pandora’s vase that I’m scared of opening… but maybe it’s been opened already — it was opened the moment I joined this chorus?