Internalized homophobia

I'm posting this with the hope that it will spark a conversation, it is unfinished:

I moved to Olympia Washington when I was 21, to flee New Orleans and to lick my wounds after a rough break up. My reasons for moving to Olympia had been to become the riot grrrl I had always known I was and to meet other weirdo queer punk rocker kids like myself (of course, it helped that my best friend was offering me a place to live for free, until I got on my feet). It was in Olympia that I learned more about my own sexuality. More specifically, that my body was something that could harbor a sexual energy, to attract others (or charm) by embodying sexuality. Prior to this, everyone I had sex with I was either already, or soon afterwards, in a monogamous relationship with. While I couldn’t procreate, I could at least maintain some level of respectable sexuality by only sleeping with someone I “loved”. I was an out gay male, but I wouldn’t say I was proud. I wasn’t visible with a “fuck you”, I was visible because I needed a community to find me and it was the only way I knew how.

It was in Olympia that I learned how to fuck. This isn’t to say I had a positive conception of sexuality though. I learned about “queer” around this time, it resonated with me and I felt –and still feel- it is a more accurate description of my own identity. I didn’t identity with the larger, capital G-A-Y community for a lot of reasons. After having moved to the city expecting to find others “like me” I had failed. In retrospect, I perhaps just didn’t know where to look. I had been successful in finding the punk rock dyke community at shows, but did not find a similar community of gay/queer men in New Orleans.

While I didn’t realize it at the time, I still had not reconciled a lot of what I had learned about homosexuality (that being that it is wrong) therefore, my identification as queer came before my rejection of my own internalized homophobia. That being stated, I learned how to fuck as a queer male before I learned to have a positive self-image, a positive sexuality, and to love myself as a gay man.

I slept with people, a lot of them. I maintained close friendships with queer women and straight people while distancing myself from most gay/queer men. Aside from a small number of gay male friends, most of my interactions occurred in the gay bar and almost always, my intention was for these conversations to head directly from the bar, after last call of course, to the bedroom. I slept with people because it was an easy way to feel intimacy, to feel a connection, without having to establish a relationship with other people or myself. I never let anyone I had sex with get to close to me. Most of them I never talked to again, and almost as often, never remembered their name. By having sex with a person, I was marking my relationship with them as temporary. If asked, I explained my distance from gay men as an avoidance of drama, and competitiveness, I didn’t have patience for either, I said. I always used a condom for penetrative sex but even so, I believe it’s miraculous I didn’t contract any STI’s.

I rarely, if ever, talked about my sex life. For me, sex was something to have as often as possible, but only behind closed doors. It wasn’t beautiful, or something to be ascribed with meaning, it was a need to be met, impersonal. Sex wasn’t a connector, it was a divider. I was taught this by my interactions with the broader society.

Sex is gross and should be private; this is what I believed in the back of my mind. If you must have sex, you should do so for reproduction, for a purpose. You should abstain until marriage if you’re a girl, but wrack up experience if you’re a boy training to be a man. Of course, its ok in larger US society to have sex and not conceive a child, but you should do so with one person and you should be in love with them. It is because of this that I agree with Judith Butler referring to public displays of affection, being visibly married, and having children, as socially acceptable acts of public sex. There is no secret when a married couple walks down the street, hand in hand, who they are sleeping with. Likewise there are no secrets as to how babies come to be. The problem I have isn’t with public sex. My problem is with how my sexuality is rendered invisible, undesirable and unnecessary by suggesting the desirability and naturalness of heteronormative sexuality. Sexuality is still read as being dirty by the general public, the difference is that sexuality is read as occurring when someone embodies a sexuality that is not heteronormative. All heteronormative sexuality is read as neutral and NOT sexual. If you are polyamorous, or into bdsm, queer sex, or sex just for the purpose of you are marked as being sexual but if you are married with children and financially independent, you are not sexual. It is because of this that I still feel uncomfortable holding hands with someone of the same sex in public.

My sexual promiscuity was not empowering. By sleeping with gay men and not befriending them, I was separating my mind from my body and myself from a community that could have been supportive to me. I denied any meaning that could be construed from physical touch, my body felt alien to me, and (unsurprisingly) I was incredibly depressed. While this experience is personal, I don’t doubt for a second that other people share similar experiences. I don’t doubt that the increased rates of STI infections (especially hiv seroprevelance rates), and chemical dependency within the gay male community, are a direct result of a learned homonegativity. I also don’t doubt that “condom fatigue” in the gay male community is related to this learned homonegativity.

Stuffing safer sex kits at Pride Alive, I hear gay/queer men loudly talking about their sexuality. We are talking about our sexualities for all in the room to hear because most of us don’t feel that we can openly talk about it in many other places. We are proclaiming our sexualities, identifying with them, sharing them, defining them as knowable, positive, beautiful, loveable and necessary. We can form a community because of our sexualities, and regardless of whether or not we are “just like” straight people, our experiences as gay/queer men are not like those of straight people because of our sexualities. This is a safer space for many of us. Safer because physical and verbal violence are far less likely to occur here, and safer because alcohol and other chemicals are not necessary to make this a space where we can comfortably discuss sex as a community. Unfortunately, this space is only able to secure the amount of funding it does by talking about gay/queer male sexualities in confined environments. We can discuss our sexualities amongst each other and believe they are beautiful, but if we talk about them publicly we are risking physical and verbal assault, and the possibility of losing safer spaces to empower ourselves through naming our sexualities if funding is cut for being too sexual (i.e. too obscene).