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My emotional self. I hate it. It gets in the way, it’s messy, painful, and mostly it’s a foreign language that I’ve never learned to speak. And yet, it is there. In all its glory it will come out when I least want it to, in ways I abhor, affecting relationships from family to business to friends.
I can’t avoid emotions any more than you can. Oh I try. I bury them in food, or obsessive video watching (How did I spend three hours watching videos about orchids?!?!?) there are other unhealthy ways, but emotions creep back into my life.
The hard emotions are primal, and based on experiences from a world that no longer exists. I have fears and hurts from the 80s and 90s about being gay and being unlovable, because I grew up in a time when gay was a death sentence of AIDS, and I haven’t let that fully go. It was dangerous, insulting even, to hit on a straight man, like I was attacking his masculinity and certainly his sense of self. It was never a compliment, so I learned to associate fear and danger with feelings of lust and love. This is not an empowering combination.
As a young man with no gay role models, and no opportunity to learn dating, I felt that my “pervert” lifestyle meant I wasn’t allowed a relationship. As a consequence I’ve played supporting roles to straights my whole life. There is a movie, The Dresser, in which the gay assistant to a lead actor, with whom he is in love, is forever unloved and unvalued – I still remember the pain of watching that movie and identifying so strongly with that character. It’s a mindset that is no longer working for me, but I haven’t been able to shake it yet.
My young friends have no idea of what I speak. The fear and bigotry by straight men that was omnipresent in my life, it’s not a thing in their world view. I understand it to be equivalent to my lack of understanding of life before electricity. I can conceive of it, I can even approximate it with a trip to a rustic mountain cabin, but I have no deep understanding of it. I share with them the fears and hurts I carry, but they have no frame of reference.
I’ve learned a great deal from my younger friends – not just how technology works but how society has changed. Changing times demand we keep up.
Now I have to start living in their reality, not my history.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
the strange part of this story is that our former State Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager knew that this illegal was voting over 25 years as she was a personal friend. Stranger yet is that Peg was officially notified that her friend illegally voted when she was appointed to head the Wisconsin elections commission which oversees voter fraud. Peg didnt enforce it, she personally called the Fond du Lac District attorney to stop him from pressing charges. my ex was found out to be an illegal. Over 25 yrs she voted. The Wisconsin accountability board recommended 8 felony charges against her.… Read more »