NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

What yesterday’s walk was all about was my limitations as a human being. I have always had a tendency to live in my head; I have even told my wife in my tenderer moments that I think that the only time I really left it was when I married her. What happens when you live in your head is that you are suddenly brought up short when you have to look at your head-view from another person’s perspective. The Bringing Up Short is a well-known function of spouses [spice?] in fact, but it can be particularly shocking to the head-locked.

So let’s talk about what exists in my head: the conviction that I am to a large degree gay. I think I have asked elsewhere – perhaps on a post on someone else’s blog – how the demand that bisexuals now come out as gay is any different from the earlier demand that they marry and “settle down”. Well, I’ve done both, and it turns out that my decision, really apart from any community pressure, to not allow myself the security blanket of the word “bi”, but to stick to the hard word “gay”, is one of the things that is torturing my wife. This is not a pretty picture.

I have talked a lot about honesty, and I have known for a long time that Truth was my ultimate value. But where has that gotten me? Where is the line [see below] between honesty and stupidity? And what good, as Paul Simon has asked, is honesty without tenderness? In 1993 I worked three jobs at once, and that was probably the beginning, if not the root, of my eventual collapse. I took on one of the jobs precisely because my schedule did NOT allow me to go out of town for it, and I hired an extremely capable guy who had reasons for going out west to take my place; so far, so good. Then one of the other jobs was put on hold for a year, and I was left with a legal commitment and no way out of spending almost three months away from home. It has always been torture to me to be away from my family for long stretches; it is partly the loss of comfort, the loss of constant reminders of love, the loss of human contact, but it was also the undeniable fact that away from the alternative, my repressed half rose up in full force. I came as close to committing adultery at the end of those eleven weeks as I ever have, if adultery can include sex with someone of the same sex, which is the issue in a legal case up in New Hampshire these days. And what saved me [saved my marriage, that is] was not my strength — not much of that left; I would probably have done anything for ANY man who was physically tender to me — was that the guy I was mad for was completely straight. And for all my inner weeping, the thought of making a move that resulted in getting beaten up in the parking lot probably did more to keep me “honest” than any high moral fibre content.

Who’s honest now? How is it honest that I have spent the last year or so creating fictional e-mail accounts where various websites that require registration can send me codes without accessing my “real account”? How is it honest that I have lived with my wife as if I were not spending hours on the internet in pursuit of the perfect guy? [Actually, it turns out that there is a rainbow coalition of Perfect Guys; it’s one of the things that makes me think that I am, in my birth father’s lovely words, “as queer as a three-dollar bill”.]

But the real line got crossed when I started talking to Piggo. Now I have no reason to believe that he is not an “honest man”, but I cannot help the fear that, having put my “access codes and wiring diagrams” out there on the web, I am a sitting duck for anyone who decided to use that to get at me one way or the other. In short, I did two stupid things: [a] I panicked [WHAT IF?] and was really mean to him; and [b] I responded to him in spades. There has been much talk at other sites of the Second Adolescence of those who come out and I guess I am no exception [Chris at “Out at 48” seems to have found an end to all that in a new love, though, and that news really made my day.] No exception, with the possible wrinkle that I have admitted to being stuck at about age 10, and that would line up perfectly with my sub-teen, boy-band crush on this guy. I would say that I was in love with him if I could manage to say that anything about it was real – outside the locus of choice [Headville], that is. Where’s honesty there? I might start by admitting that I drove him away with my over-reaction to everything he wrote — and I could consider admitting that we might both be better off. But I can’t; I COULD of course, but I don’t really WANT to. I still want to talk to, to meet, someone so funny, so much attuned to the part of me that has suffered so much from isolation for so long. So it seems that some things trump honesty, and that I have been pursuing them for a very long time.

I felt that I was being given an ultimatum: everything can continue as is if you stop all this — that is of course NOT what my wife meant, but what I heard in her seeming inability to even consider my talking to people about what it means to be married AND gay. So much of what is around on the web is what it means to be married OR gay — make your choice, “straighten up” and come out and get on with it — and its mirror image seems to be the ultimatum to be strictly married and NOT gay. I just don’t see my way out of this at this point. The thing that has kept me from despair for so long is my life with my family; if it really came to a choice between them and my “self”, I hope I know what I would have to choose. I just want to live in a world where I can walk with those two things each held in one hand — to live “in grace AND truth”.

Pray for me.
I know I can’t find a way out on my own.