The Trauma We Share

I’ve been lucky in life. I was born into really quite substantial privilege. I’m white, cis, relatively wealthy, able bodied, from a liberal, non-religious background in a nice part of the USA. This means that my one area of social disadvantage (being gay) was also relatively easy. This comes with some level of guilt.

I haven’t had to break away from years of brainwashing of religious ideology. I love church. But I go there for the stories and ritual and the cherrypicking from the Bible and then go home to engage in debauchery. As a result of my secular background, my parents aren’t overly attached to heterosexuality, marriage, legitimate children, monogamy or any sort of religious determinism. My homosexuality was almost a statistical inevitability in their eyes as they had a bunch of kids. They’re practical that way.

I do have to worry about hate crime, but being a gender-conforming cis man, a Top, and living in a relatively safe, liberal state anyway, I do not need to worry as much as a gay man a few states South, or across the world. I feel pretty safe hitting on heterosexual dudebros for laughs just because I’m usually in such a diverse, queer friendly environment. A lot of gay men live somewhere they can’t even hit on each other in public.

I’ve been unlucky in love but also really lucky. I’ve had very affirming queer relationships and to top it all, I’ve had a long-term, amazing relationship for nearly all of my life with my life partner and co-parent. Every aspect of our relationship is wonderful and she has shown me what it looks like when someone truly accepts you for who you are. She is not only a great partner, she’s a great metamour both generally, and specifically to my queer partners. She understands how our heterosexual privilege adds an additional layer to our couple’s privilege. She knows when to decenter our heteronormative relationship to make space to center queerness and queer people. She is a treasure. I’m blessed.

I’ve had relationships with other men which were totally accepted by everyone close to us. I still have relationships with their family and they have with mine. I’ve been on “proper dates” with men, vacations, all the “normal” stuff. These are all experiences that aren’t universal for gay men. We aren’t all lucky and we shouldn’t have to be. My life should be pretty much what everyone has.

That’s not the reality though. And it isn’t for a lot of people that wind up in my dating pool. They’ve experienced unspeakable and unrelenting trauma just for being queer. They’ve had to escape religion, family, and leave good people behind because it was just safer and impossible to do anything else. They’ve been scarred by men with similar trauma but more power who take out their internalized homophobia, hate and pain on their partners. I’ve experienced some of that, but not to the extreme of many other gay men. I was left with hurt feelings, not a broken body.

I don’t go around looking for traumatized men as dating partners but most gay men have some history of trauma directly related to their sexuality. If I omitted everyone who has had those experiences, I’d be left just dating guys like me: cis, white men from WASP type progressive backgrounds where a gay son is a trophy that all the best moms’ have. Those guys are potential matches for me but they come with a subset of problems of their own — namely, they’re often racist, transphobic and these days, politically conservative to boot.

The truth is that when I dated women more frequently, I would discount someone based on a traumatic past I could foresee would become a “relationship issue”. Over time, I would say that I became more understanding about why women experience so much trauma and how that influences their conduct within intimate relationships. I would make allowances but I’d definitely look for signs that someone was not impeded by their trauma in ways that would make them likely to violate my boundaries. I’d simply decide that we weren’t compatible regardless of the source of the misalignment.

I’m different with queer people. Some of that might because I’m less attracted to cis women than people who are masc-presenting and identifying so the lust makes objectivity harder to achieve (pun intended!). The part of me that likes to believe I’m above such frivolity says I feel a mix of empathy, guilt and saviorism which means that I tend to blur my boundaries.

I’ll firstly ignore signs of incompatibility and then continue to shift my boundaries when I suspect traumatic experiences around a queer identity are a motivator for someone’s actions or perspective. I find it harder to walk away, I find it harder to let go, and I find it harder to hold them accountable for their actions when they transgress my boundaries and make their trauma my problem.

Maybe I see misogyny as inherently less traumatic than homophobia. I can’t answer that, but I know I have different standards when it comes to this.

Right now, I can’t promise myself that I’ll be totally different in the future. I do all the practical things one can do so more queer people live a life of acceptance like I have. I’m vocal about cis gay men as a problematic group. I try to call out homophobia and amplify the voices of marginalized gay men. I put all the resources I can into these (and other) causes. I just don’t know I’ll make the optimum choices around this any time soon. It’s our shared trauma, maybe I’m meant to carry my load.

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Previously Published on medium

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