I’m over cis-het men

I’m over cis-het men. Or maybe I should say, I’m done with cis-het men. 

That doesn’t mean I’ll avoid them or their friendship completely or indiscriminately, of course. And it doesn’t mean I’ll stop interacting with the two or three cis-het men who are currently showing up in my life as good friends. But it does mean that I won’t initiate any more deep friendships with them or invest in any close friendships with them anymore. 

Partly, it’s a rational decision. But partly, and most importantly, it’s a deep shift within me at an emotional level — one of those decisions that I feel within me as a “point of no return” in my life, when I know I’m just moving on to another phase because I’m ready to. 

This has been coming on for a while now, I know. I’ve felt and written about my frustration in relationships with cis-het men several times in the past couple years, especially in the past year. But I’ve come to a breaking point now — a “point of no return”. 

I’m not sure why this has happened now. Maybe because there’s been one disappointment too many. Maybe because I am discovering, first hand, the depth and beauty and comfort and ease that comes from close platonic friendships with other gay men (even if it’s just two of them for now and they’re not even nearby geographically). Maybe because I’m feeling more comfortable and confident than ever in my open, explicit identity as a queer man, ready and desirous to show myself in the world as an openly queer man (e.g. even in my way of dressing/presenting) rather than trying to “go stealth” or “look straight”. 

I will forever be cut off from real intimacy or closeness with cis-het men. Partly because, as an AFAB person, I was socialized differently so their physical bantering with each other (which is very homoerotic, even if they will never admit to it) feels uncomfortable to me (maybe to that “girl” that is still partly within me). And partly because, as an openly queer man, as “the gay guy in the group”, I am perceived as a “threat” to straight guys or, at least, as someone whose physical closeness makes them uncomfortable. 

When I lived in the world “as a girl/woman”, I had an interest in interacting with cis-het men, partly because of feeling a level of sexual interest in them and/or of being an object of their sexual attraction towards me, and partly because it was the only way in which I could, albeit implicitly, get some affirmation of my masculine gender identity, of being “a guy among other guys”. The latter aspect of gender validation was important for me also in these past four or five years as I came more explicitly into my nonbinary transmasculine self and out to the world as a (trans)man. Interactions and even close platonic friendships with cis-het guys served me, were pleasant and fun and rewarding for me in several ways for many years — be it for gender validation, for sexual fulfillment, or for fun times. And those aspects were often sufficient for me to put up with the frustrations that came in relationships with cis-het men — be it their lack of communication or of commitment or of expressing how they feel, or my incapacity to feel fully integrated in “guy groups”.

But now, none of those reasons are sufficient anymore to put up with the frustrations. As a “man” myself now, I am no longer a sexual object of interest to straight guys (regardless of whether I might like them or be available to them in that way or not). And as an openly queer man, I’ll always be somewhat of an outsider with/to them, if not a straight out threat. Either way, I lose. Either way, I don’t get my emotional or relational needs met with them. 

So, I’m done with them.