Only his tone was condescending. He basically asked me why I'd come out at all, insinuating that if I hadn't I could've had it all, just like him. By 'all' I'm guessing he meant the privilege of marriage; for its financial conveniences, companionship, an evasion of the stigma coming out potentially entails, added to the sexual freedom of extra-marital liaisons.
Um, get fucked. I was insulted that he suggested my own coming out process was some frivolous gesture, easily avoidable, that I could've navigated life thus far with the same freedoms but without the hassle. He clearly missed (and is perhaps still missing) the incentive behind the assertion of identity, the alignment such a declaration necessitates across the board, like some existential correction. To posit your own desire as the reference point for the arrangement of your social reality; now that is a Nietzschean, satanic fidelity to Self which I proudly reinforce on a daily basis by identifying as a gay man, because that identity, without perfectly representing me as a person, is the best equipped to get me what I want. Sexually.
But then sex is one way I reach out of myself and engage reality with indescribable urgency, which I'm sure we can all recognise and agree on. Sexual orientation is an albeit limited attempt to describe these existential manoeuvres that evade definitive empirical framing. Sexuality isn't merely reproductive drive, nor is it purely Oedipal longings and convoluted childhood traumas seeking expression. I'm sure it's a heady mix of both, not forgetting more religious flavoured ecstasies that count as sexual experience. What's that about?Who knows. And who fucking cares so long as you're getting off regularly.
Sex is important.
But that herds me back to a point I tried making with this guy, that people will assume identities with perceived benefits. The benefit of identifying as a gay man is for someone who enjoys sex with men, as a man, to pursue such encounters openly and at a frequency of his choosing. The benefit of identifying as bisexual is, for someone who enjoys sex with both men and women, the open privilege of the same.
If you're so pan-fucking-sexual that disclosure is unnecessary, having evolved beyond need of labels, then that's fine. But don't criticise 'coming out' as a gay culture cliche. Especially if you're just going to go and get fucking married, which is a straight culture cliche (even that's changing).
This guy was white, and with his hetero-marriage combined occupies a primary position in society's myopic rank. The stakes would be higher for this guy, and I can understand his reluctance to part with privileged personhood by coming out, even while I judge his cowardice and righteousness.
Also, his spiel was an active non-affiliation, a negative assertion of identity, a rejection of assumptions attached to the very word gay. He wouldn't think this way if he didn't feel a harrowing proximity or stickiness about that 'world', maybe even a jealous recklessness and secret desire to cast off his white-straight privilege, the maintenance of which I'd imagine cumbersome for someone feeling inadequately represented therein.
I don't know. Maybe sexual identity and actual sexual practice never meet in the way we'd like.
For me, I'd rather say 'I'm this' than 'I'm not that'. Negative identification asserts itself by collapsing potential and clinging to the remainder, while positive identification selects its objects directly. There's something pathetic about the former which I cannot abide. Fuck that guy.
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