The truth is: I envy gay and bi men who can pass as straight. It’s not that I want to be straight. I’m comfortable in my skin as a proud gay man. I came out at sixteen in a conservative city at a time when homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness. Over the years I’ve marched on Washington when Reagan refused to say the word AIDS, walked in more pride parades than I can count, and helped train volunteers to call voters on behalf of marriage equality.
The unavoidable fact is that I’m not able to hide whatever traits may be considered unmacho if I tried. It’s simply who I am, and I wouldn’t even know how to be some other me. That’s perhaps why I envy men who would never be thought of as anything but straight. Their identity isn’t defined for them almost before they speak. Assumptions aren’t instantly made about what they are like that may have nothing to do with the truth of their lives. They are a tabula rasa, a blank slate; their very being doesn’t immediately conjure a spate of word associations, whether positive (“sensitive,” “artistic”) or pejorative (everything from “flamboyant” to “fag”). [...]
In David M. Halperin’s enlightening essay, “Sex Before Sexuality,” published in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, he writes that it never occurred to premodern cultures to define people on the basis of their “intrinsic” sexuality, any more than we would make dietary preference a fundamental aspect of personality. “Despite an awareness of the range of possible variations in human sexual behavior,” these cultures “refuse[d] to individuate human beings at the level of sexual preference and assume[d], instead, that we all share the same fundamental set of sexual appetites, the same ‘sexuality.’ For most of the world’s inhabitants, in other words, ‘sexuality’ [was] no more a fact of life than ‘dieticity.’” He concludes that “’sexuality’ seems to be a uniquely modern, Western, even bourgeois production.” Once the notion took root, it not only differentiated us; it began to divide us.
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