Coming Out Again: I Will Feel no Shame in my Desire

I came out as a gay male fairly early, having been 15 years old when I came out to my friends, and 17 years old when I came out to my family. I came out again at 24 as queer, having discovered that the identity of gay was reductive, defining me solely by who I slept with. Queer resonated with me in a way that gay couldn’t. For clarity, I came out as queer because gay male “culture” doesn’t make room for me under its all-encompassing rainbow banner. My identity as queer allows me a means of combining a fluctuating gender identity, punk rock, and an attraction to simularily sexed bodies.
Coming out is a constant process. By simply opening my closet door, I am not ensuring that it will always stay open. I will have to constantly revisit this closet, whether that is for clarification of my identity to someone who doesn’t know or understand. Also, I will come out in various contexts. Sometimes I will be “out” for all to see, while at other times I will intentionally revisit the closet for safety –as was the case when I was walking down the street with a lover and three hetero hyper-machismo males were threatening us. I am learning to befriend the closet, to know it better. That is, to know not only the ways in which my life will always be lived in a world that has a closet, but also to know what other parts of my identity are closeted, and how to unleash them.
I want to come out of the closet to further elaborate what bodies I desire. I believe that the desiring of certain bodies is constructed. To be clear, I am not sold on the idea of gender or sexuality as being so malleable and fluid, as to be changed at will. I do not believe that we exist prior to a gendered subjectivity, nor do I believe that our sexuality is something that we have complete control over. However, I do believe that how we articulate our sexuality, and sometimes who we express ourselves with sexually, to be shaped in large part by societal norms, values, and expectations. I would like to come out as a chubby chaser and a bear hunter.
I love fur, and additional padding. I am not simply looking for a good heart inside this furry, chubby body to demonstrate that I am not shallow, that it is what is on the inside and not the outside that counts. What I mean to suggest is that I am attracted to the body, the mind, and the heart. In my book all body types matter –I’m referencing Judith Butler here.
I love the energy in bear bars, though, to be honest I am a little turned off by the hyper-masculine machismo that one often will find at Eagle bars across the country. I am very much so attracted to the bodies and the queered masculinities in these spaces. This is to draw a line of differentiation between machismo and masculinity. Machismo as domineering, existing in such a fashion as to exclude femmes of all persuasions –femmes of all body types, sexes and genders. Masculinity, in stark contrast, has nothing to prove. It is gentle, kind, and welcoming in a way that allows room for many gender expressions to exist. It allows masculinity and femininity to belong to no one and to belong to everyone. It is a masculinity that nurtures. It is masculinity we can envision as needing to be saved from the patriarchy.
This second coming out is necessary to me because being seeped in a culture that is body-negative, one learns not only that fat and fur are undesirable to have as your attributes, but that fat and/or hairy bodies should be undesirable sexually too. Chub chasers and bear hunters become perverse fetishists in this context as they are non-normative in their desire, and the people they are attracted to are viewed as occupying the bodies they do out of laziness, bad decisions, or spite. To elaborate, I mean to say that if you are fat and/or furry it could be interpreted as lazy because you are not “maintaining” yourself to a societal standard of what a “healthy” body looks like. By bad decisions I mean that your personal health is negatively affected because of your diet, and the feelings of disgust toward your body by body-negative persons, is then somehow deserved because you had the option of being “healthy” and “attractive” and tragically chose to be neither. And last, by “spite” I mean to suggest that queer fat guys and bears exist as a means of resistance, not only to the predominant heteronormative culture which finds queer love disgusting, but also by the homonormative mainstream gay community that revels in the stereotypes of gay men as fashionable, and fit –fuck you queer eye for the straight guy.
My sexuality has largely been constructed by the acceptance of my peers. And a second coming out as a chub chaser and a bear hunter is a means of feeling no shame in my desire inside the bedroom, or outside. I am not writing this for a pat on the back for having an attraction to the desexualized, and by wanting to love the fetishized. My purpose is simply to articulate that it has been a process to resolve the conflicts of who I desire and who I am told to desire.