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walkitoutI might as well start with the worst of it. My default position on identity is that gender is stupid and we should get rid of it as a category. Everyone should be “they”, and the only time anyone ought to get into what kind of chromosomes someone might or might not have is if there is active planning to biologically reproduce going on. My default position on orientation is that there’s a broad range of who is appealing to any given person, and it’s terrible to misrepresent your level of sexual attraction to someone. I mean, that is just a horrifying lie, and people need to never do that. It’s fine to not bring up sexual attraction — definitely preferable in a work context, for example! — but presenting as attracted when one is not is just wrong wrong wronger than wrong. Bad lie. Presenting at not at all attracted when one is has all kinds of problems, but I’m inclined to treat it as a less severe infraction (may yet change my mind on this one).
Obviously, this was not how I was raised (see numerous earlier posts on the topic of my evil parents, praying for a genocidal deity to kill everyone but their tiny group of fellow worshippers). However, even when I was fairly young, and well before leaving the cult I was raised in, I had a nascent version of this default position, which — yes, I’m sorry — I sometimes made the mistake of saying in some flavor of out loud voice. “Everyone is bi, right?” No, no they really are not. I get that. It’s a part of reality I continue to argue with, however.
Unpacking same-sex sibling incest is a whole other discussion, but probably has some degree of relevance when the perpetrator grows up to be fully commit to the cult, and to present to the whole world as straight. I definitely do not suffer from any delusions that straight-identified people actually behave in any way that resembles their advertising. Also an early, painful example of how the lying that goes in support of a drastic mismatch between what one is doing and feeling sexually and how one is presenting in terms of sexual identity is usually just one component of the absolute shitstorm of lying the person is engaging in more generally.
All that said, in general, my experience of people who are not currently participating in a cult of some sort is that most people are doing their best to accurately present themselves to their loved ones. Whenever I run into an egregious example to the contrary, I am legit startled, and very appalled. Florida Man basically _never_ tells the truth, and yet _even knowing that_, I was startled to learn that he falls fully within the MSM category. There are all kinds of problems with people who tell important lies to the people who love them, many of which can be summarized as, people believe them and then make terrible decisions based on that fundamental misunderstanding of reality.
There are a range of people out there identifying as bi. It’s a complex category, used for many purposes by many people. Plenty of pretty rigid people went from straight to gay to, much more quietly, bi. Other people went from straight to bi as a Let Them Down Slowly strategy of getting to gay. I _thought_ that this was something that as a society we were largely done with. I mean, it is 2021. I’ve been married since 2004, and when I got married, it was already Partner A and Partner B. Sure, I live down the street from a Missouri Synod Lutheran church — they don’t approve of gay marriage, but they also don’t approve of divorce and have a zero-exception anti-choice stance. It’s a whole grab bag of bonkers down there. I figured they were just weirdos.
However, after spending a day and a half rambling around the google and trying to understand why the heck the son of a gay man would be closeted to his entire family, I have come to some tentative conclusions.
First, it’s apparently really, really, really hard to get over being Catholic. I’m married to someone who got quite completely over it, in much the same way that I am quite completely not JW any more (altho I _am_ still prepared to throw down over really bad interpretation of of the Bible, which is a related character flaw, so maybe I’m not as over it as I think I am). We each hit a point in our development — and at a very similar age — where we considered what we had been raised to believe and dismantled it utterly. We each discovered under that early programming a nascent set of ideas about How the World Actually Works, and have been happily adjusting it to new learnings about reality as we go through life, first separately, and eventually together. Just because we found each other doesn’t mean that anyone else out there is like us. Small sample. Not representative. A pity, really.
Second, within liberal society, it’s really Not OK to present as being pro-one orientation or anti-other orientations. (See my recognition that being extremely pro-bi is actually pretty offensive!) That’ll attract accusations of homophobia and similar. But just because someone doesn’t _present_ as being pro-one orientation or anti-other orientations does not mean really anything about what is going on internally. So, I’m increasingly suspicious that there is a lot more internal family pressure to Not Be Gay than I had fully appreciated. My kids both have autism diagnoses, and they got it from their father and me. I’m very unevenly aware of subtext, and prone to complete obliviousness to pressure to do or be something I don’t want to do or be.
Third, a family with a lot of alcoholism in it (in recovery, in denial or other) has Mad Skillz with Denial, and when Denial starts to creak under the strain, Minimizing is right there to back it up.
I’ll be adding more to this later, just in case you are not already offended enough.
Back!
I spent a fair amount of time thinking about the particulars of this situation, and the timeline is pretty good for the way things turned out. A boy born in the mid 70s and came of age in the late 80s / early 90s is someone who was learning about sexual attraction at a time when society was being really openly awful to gay men, and there was a pandemic connected to being a gay man and there were hate crimes aimed at gay men. That’s hard, and maybe it seemed easier to Just Not Be Gay. Certainly, that approach to things aligns well with how this family group tends to approach difficult problems, and it would also go a long way to explaining the mental health crises and personality disorder issues. Thinking about it this way reinforced my urge to reach out and shake everyone and say, hey, this is why therapy isn’t helping Florida Man! I bet he isn’t telling the therapists about this, either!
But then I got to wondering. When I quit being a JW, I did a lot of reading about other people who quit being JWs, and I realized that there really was a pretty big struggle involved. The disfellowshipping / disassociation process (shunning or excommunicating for people who are not part of the cult) is pretty psychologically traumatic, even if you know exactly what you are going to experience. I underestimated initially how hard it is to stop being Catholic, because it is not such an overtly hostile process. But I could see, over time, how people struggled with it. I knew from other reading I was also doing about sexuality and identity and so forth that lots of people have been doing lots of things for a really long time and often having to keep quite a lot of it secret to avoid getting killed, tortured, what have you. Stonewall happened the year I was born; I grew up watching eventually … oh, so eventually … activists convince people to quit it with the secrets so that allies could be found among the mainstream to help create a better world for everyone.
It was and is so wonderful to have effective treatment for AIDS, and for that treatment to be available as PReP, and for it to now be possible to use PReP intermittently and thoughtfully. Condoms were a lifesaver, but have so many issues. The Public Health community, and activists of a variety of types continue to try to bring more MSM into the community of people who identify openly to themselves, their partners, their family and friends, etc., as gay or bi or whatever. However, the size of the population of MSM who identify as “straight” does not appear to be small. And while a lot of efforts to figure out who is in this group come at it from a racial angle, there are a lot of reasons to believe this group contains far more white men than POC.
Sure, I can figure out an angle to explain why this particular gay son of a gay man in a family that includes other out gay and bi people might continue to be closeted. But increasingly, I feel like the satisfying answer to my question lies more in social trends than it does in diagnoses.
I think the real reason that MSM present themselves to women as intimate partners without being fully honest about the existence, nature or degree of their sexual relationship(s) with men has far more to do with the content of their character, and their degree of small c conservatism than anything else. People who find it easy to lie in general, are gonna fall back on that in specific. And people who see benefits in the status quo, are not going to give it up easily.
Obviously, our society is currently engaged in the larger project — long overdue — of dismantling forms of privilege such as that enjoyed by straight cis white men. While we are busy with this project, perhaps we could spare a moment to consider how we feel, and what we should do about the many, many, many people out there who are dishonestly enjoying that privilege. I’m envisioning something along the lines of a procedural cop show in which the various perpetrators are offered one last chance to cut a deal . . .
Obviously, this was not how I was raised (see numerous earlier posts on the topic of my evil parents, praying for a genocidal deity to kill everyone but their tiny group of fellow worshippers). However, even when I was fairly young, and well before leaving the cult I was raised in, I had a nascent version of this default position, which — yes, I’m sorry — I sometimes made the mistake of saying in some flavor of out loud voice. “Everyone is bi, right?” No, no they really are not. I get that. It’s a part of reality I continue to argue with, however.
Unpacking same-sex sibling incest is a whole other discussion, but probably has some degree of relevance when the perpetrator grows up to be fully commit to the cult, and to present to the whole world as straight. I definitely do not suffer from any delusions that straight-identified people actually behave in any way that resembles their advertising. Also an early, painful example of how the lying that goes in support of a drastic mismatch between what one is doing and feeling sexually and how one is presenting in terms of sexual identity is usually just one component of the absolute shitstorm of lying the person is engaging in more generally.
All that said, in general, my experience of people who are not currently participating in a cult of some sort is that most people are doing their best to accurately present themselves to their loved ones. Whenever I run into an egregious example to the contrary, I am legit startled, and very appalled. Florida Man basically _never_ tells the truth, and yet _even knowing that_, I was startled to learn that he falls fully within the MSM category. There are all kinds of problems with people who tell important lies to the people who love them, many of which can be summarized as, people believe them and then make terrible decisions based on that fundamental misunderstanding of reality.
There are a range of people out there identifying as bi. It’s a complex category, used for many purposes by many people. Plenty of pretty rigid people went from straight to gay to, much more quietly, bi. Other people went from straight to bi as a Let Them Down Slowly strategy of getting to gay. I _thought_ that this was something that as a society we were largely done with. I mean, it is 2021. I’ve been married since 2004, and when I got married, it was already Partner A and Partner B. Sure, I live down the street from a Missouri Synod Lutheran church — they don’t approve of gay marriage, but they also don’t approve of divorce and have a zero-exception anti-choice stance. It’s a whole grab bag of bonkers down there. I figured they were just weirdos.
However, after spending a day and a half rambling around the google and trying to understand why the heck the son of a gay man would be closeted to his entire family, I have come to some tentative conclusions.
First, it’s apparently really, really, really hard to get over being Catholic. I’m married to someone who got quite completely over it, in much the same way that I am quite completely not JW any more (altho I _am_ still prepared to throw down over really bad interpretation of of the Bible, which is a related character flaw, so maybe I’m not as over it as I think I am). We each hit a point in our development — and at a very similar age — where we considered what we had been raised to believe and dismantled it utterly. We each discovered under that early programming a nascent set of ideas about How the World Actually Works, and have been happily adjusting it to new learnings about reality as we go through life, first separately, and eventually together. Just because we found each other doesn’t mean that anyone else out there is like us. Small sample. Not representative. A pity, really.
Second, within liberal society, it’s really Not OK to present as being pro-one orientation or anti-other orientations. (See my recognition that being extremely pro-bi is actually pretty offensive!) That’ll attract accusations of homophobia and similar. But just because someone doesn’t _present_ as being pro-one orientation or anti-other orientations does not mean really anything about what is going on internally. So, I’m increasingly suspicious that there is a lot more internal family pressure to Not Be Gay than I had fully appreciated. My kids both have autism diagnoses, and they got it from their father and me. I’m very unevenly aware of subtext, and prone to complete obliviousness to pressure to do or be something I don’t want to do or be.
Third, a family with a lot of alcoholism in it (in recovery, in denial or other) has Mad Skillz with Denial, and when Denial starts to creak under the strain, Minimizing is right there to back it up.
I’ll be adding more to this later, just in case you are not already offended enough.
Back!
I spent a fair amount of time thinking about the particulars of this situation, and the timeline is pretty good for the way things turned out. A boy born in the mid 70s and came of age in the late 80s / early 90s is someone who was learning about sexual attraction at a time when society was being really openly awful to gay men, and there was a pandemic connected to being a gay man and there were hate crimes aimed at gay men. That’s hard, and maybe it seemed easier to Just Not Be Gay. Certainly, that approach to things aligns well with how this family group tends to approach difficult problems, and it would also go a long way to explaining the mental health crises and personality disorder issues. Thinking about it this way reinforced my urge to reach out and shake everyone and say, hey, this is why therapy isn’t helping Florida Man! I bet he isn’t telling the therapists about this, either!
But then I got to wondering. When I quit being a JW, I did a lot of reading about other people who quit being JWs, and I realized that there really was a pretty big struggle involved. The disfellowshipping / disassociation process (shunning or excommunicating for people who are not part of the cult) is pretty psychologically traumatic, even if you know exactly what you are going to experience. I underestimated initially how hard it is to stop being Catholic, because it is not such an overtly hostile process. But I could see, over time, how people struggled with it. I knew from other reading I was also doing about sexuality and identity and so forth that lots of people have been doing lots of things for a really long time and often having to keep quite a lot of it secret to avoid getting killed, tortured, what have you. Stonewall happened the year I was born; I grew up watching eventually … oh, so eventually … activists convince people to quit it with the secrets so that allies could be found among the mainstream to help create a better world for everyone.
It was and is so wonderful to have effective treatment for AIDS, and for that treatment to be available as PReP, and for it to now be possible to use PReP intermittently and thoughtfully. Condoms were a lifesaver, but have so many issues. The Public Health community, and activists of a variety of types continue to try to bring more MSM into the community of people who identify openly to themselves, their partners, their family and friends, etc., as gay or bi or whatever. However, the size of the population of MSM who identify as “straight” does not appear to be small. And while a lot of efforts to figure out who is in this group come at it from a racial angle, there are a lot of reasons to believe this group contains far more white men than POC.
Sure, I can figure out an angle to explain why this particular gay son of a gay man in a family that includes other out gay and bi people might continue to be closeted. But increasingly, I feel like the satisfying answer to my question lies more in social trends than it does in diagnoses.
I think the real reason that MSM present themselves to women as intimate partners without being fully honest about the existence, nature or degree of their sexual relationship(s) with men has far more to do with the content of their character, and their degree of small c conservatism than anything else. People who find it easy to lie in general, are gonna fall back on that in specific. And people who see benefits in the status quo, are not going to give it up easily.
Obviously, our society is currently engaged in the larger project — long overdue — of dismantling forms of privilege such as that enjoyed by straight cis white men. While we are busy with this project, perhaps we could spare a moment to consider how we feel, and what we should do about the many, many, many people out there who are dishonestly enjoying that privilege. I’m envisioning something along the lines of a procedural cop show in which the various perpetrators are offered one last chance to cut a deal . . .