HAPPY AMERICAN RAMADAN… ER… PRIDE!
Enjoy a guest post: The Confessions of an Aging Homosexual
On the Homosexual Condition
Many haunted moons have passed since I was young, and so, perhaps, I qualify to offer a perspective on the gay experience, the gay life, and the gay potential for stability and happiness.
A little bit about myself without exposing too much: I am a man in my 40s, what you’d call gay, and I’ve been happily partnered with another man for many years now. We have friends, jobs, and supporting families, and here and there we even go to a rather standard church.
So happy pride indeed, no? Well maybe. Life is always a game of probability. What if I told you I was highly neurotic, or a diabetic, and yet was living happily in an ivy-covered home where a sweet dog lies by the hearth? Would that make neurosis or diabetes existential states to be celebrated in parades? Do we need to re-write school curricula to introduce more “diabetic representation?” Should we attack the sucro-normative variety for systemic diabetes-phobia?
Homosexuality, I believe, is something like that. Not a man-killer, but definitely a life changer. And without careful management, just like diabetes or neurotic tendencies, it can become lethal indeed.
Am I talking out of my ass (hehe)? It’s difficult to be precise about these things, but let me share some personal experiences. I have many friends, some gay, and some not, and I have to say that the rates of instability are much higher among my perfectly lovely, intelligent, and good gay friends. By instability, I mean a state of being lost, of floating through life for the sake of entertainment, of being lonely, or even of being self-destructive and unhappy.
A few examples: I have many gay friends who are single. Given the legalization of gay marriage you’d expect perhaps a different trend, but no. Finding a match, especially a permanent one, is not easy. I’ll get into the probable causes later. Now, it’s perfectly possible to be happy while being single, but still, it’s a form of instability and for most an undesired state.
I also have several gay friends, and many more acquaintances, who are in long-term relationships and even married. But at a closer inspection, all sorts of strange things often reveal themselves: special licenses to voyage to exotic circuit parties in LA, Brussels, or Rio and engage there in mass orgies; all kinds of “open” relationships where the occasional orgy on a gay cruise is permitted and even encouraged; the admission of “boyfriends” into a marriage, thus reliving a kind of youthful dating within an established marriage; the use of party drugs of many kinds, and more.
I know of at least two cases where there is a marriage, and even a baby (through surrogacy), and yet orgies and party drugs happen as a second life away from the family.
And then I also know a few cases that are, unfortunately, quite seriously lost. Things involving individuals unable to hold on to a job, let alone a romantic relationship.
Is my sampling representative? Who knows. I think so. And I think every gay person would profess a similar experience. But even the woke CDC admits that homosexuals are at a greater risk for mental health issues.
Dysfunction and Its Causes
When pressed about these things, gay activists always claim that any discrepancy between the mental well-being and lifestyle choices of homosexuals and heterosexuals is the result of “discrimination.” But I don’t think so.
First of all, choices as depicted in the image below, reflecting what seems to me an existence of narcissism and instability, are not the result of discrimination. If anything, the image demonstrates a complete lack of societal discrimination. Just try that in Saudi Arabia.
The San Franciso Fulsom Street Festival and the Chicago International Men of Leather bacchanalia.
Second, discrimination against homosexuals is hardly a thing anymore. In fact, the opposite is true – try to say something negative and Ashley from HR will make sure to fire you and destroy your career.
The next argument promoted by LGBTQIA+#$ groups is something like, “OK, maybe there isn’t much direct discrimination, but there is ‘systemic homophobia.'” Meaning, presumably our world is suffused by harmful homophobia through every facet that relates to the traditional family – fairy tales involving a prince and a princess, classical masterpieces celebrating the love between a man and a woman, the nuclear family of mother, father, children, and a dog, etc. That, according to activists, generates, especially among gay youths, feelings of isolation that lead to the dysfunction I described above.
Well, let’s analyze it a bit. First of all, the sense of being different is built into the existential condition of homosexuality. There aren’t that many of us! So beyond the expectation of tolerance, the fabrication of a fantasy world in which Lizzy Bennett is a lesbian, or the Iliad is a gay orgy is just a form of bizarre narcissism. It would be like fabricating a world where every third person has diabetes, just in order to be “inclusive” towards diabetic youths. This is very silly and like every delusion about the world, should not be encouraged.
Second, homosexuality is primarily a sexual inclination. It is probably good, at a rather mature age, to be aware of the various permutations of the sexual human condition – some people find themselves capable to ejaculate only when asphyxiated, others cannot do without dirty talk, some push it into S&M, others are infatuated only with obese women, by blonde women, by nothing but multi-racial sex, etc. Whatever the cause, these things exist and in many cases, a person can do very little to erase this from his psyche. However, the introduction of these things as a celebratory feature is once again delusional and bizarre, and almost never age-appropriate.
In addition, and bear in mind that pretty much all social “science” is a non-replicable joke, it’s very unclear to me whether “celebrating” something takes the sting from it. Say, you celebrate a person’s tendency to achieve an orgasm through asphyxiation; would that spare the person the instability and constant mismatch with the rest of society?
Again, at best we should expect simple tenderness and tolerance. Nothing more.
But in any case, even if all of my refutations of conventional LGTBQIA+activist propaganda are untrue, we are still deluding ourselves. Imagining that homosexual existential dysfunction is the result of nothing but childhood and adolescence experiences is specious Freudianism. Let me explain.
Inherent Instability
Regardless of childhood experiences, instability is INHERENT to being gay. Here are just a few explanations. Consider the fact of gay sex. It involves the rectum. It is by nature weird, unnatural, or at best – difficult. I am not talking about spiritual voodoo or notions of piety here. Just mechanics. It just doesn’t go as easily as heteronormative sex. It may also involve rather disgusting features such as fecal residue. So OK, you can shower before or use some kind of cleansing device, but that already introduces weird mechanics into the whole process. And also, it can be painful. Why do you think people use things like “poppers?”
Let me re-emphasize: The central and defining act by which one is determined a homosexual is by nature difficult and is by nature a mismatch with the world.
And then consider male homosexual relationships. They involve two men. Is it a big surprise they tend to be unstable? Men are pigs. Lacking the domesticating element of a woman, you are left with two stallions ready to hump any passing creature with a penis. It becomes very easy to ask the question “why not?” and in lieu of a domesticating wife, to then simply go on and do it.
Also, many things, in general, should align for a relationship to work. But since there are not very many homosexual men out there, alignment becomes simply more challenging statistically. And if low body count alone is not enough, homosexual men have all sorts of additional sexual permutations to consider (being a top, a bottom, blah, blah), which means that chances for a perfect match from heaven are unfortunately low. It is what it is!
There is also, typically, the lack of the domesticating effect of having children. Why not have an “open” relationship if it’s only Adam and Steve and there is no family for which to sacrifice one’s urges? These “arrangements” are not uncommon even among heterosexuals without children. In both cases the status of marriage becomes a rather empty construct – man and man, man and woman, somehow becoming everything to one another without a family, a hearth, a household. These things are unstable by nature.
Before you jump and cry that all these things also happen to sex-obsessed and dysfunctional heterosexuals, I will submit that you are correct. But again, life is a game of probability. Everything is on a bell curve. There are, of course, very unstable heterosexuals, but by comparison, there are a lot more potholes of instability for the gay man to avoid. And so while existential instability is the lot of many people in general, gay people are more prone to it due to their very existential condition, as described above.
And so we come to my final advice to you, your gay friends, or gay family members. Take it as a bit of sage wisdom from the mind of an aging queer. You or your loved ones can indeed be very happy as gay men. But just like being a happy diabetic, that requires constant management, supreme self-control, and then probably some intelligence to enable both. The worst advice to give a gay man would be to explode on the world in a never-ending orgy of “pride.” Too much of it, and such a man will end up in a hospice, a padded cell, or the mental equivalent of the two.
Instead, practice self-control and even a sense of irony. It’s okay to be a bit melancholy if you must. Resentment towards others or an imagined “patriarchy” will never change your own existential challenges. Your mismatch is your own. Instead, find inspiration in your state as a liminal being, a twilight will-o’-wisp observing the world a bit from the outside, not completely in it. Laugh about it, it is what it is.
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