And What's More ...

... I'm now blogging from work in Jersey. I was supposed to come and find paperwork waiting for me to update in my e-mail Inbox but it's not here. And after the time and brainspace I spent to get down here, I don't even really care about the job or the missing paperwork at this moment.

Rather, I've been thinking about my yesterday--my day off and the time I spent with my Westchester friends. The night ended on a sour note due largely to the reaction I usually have to the behavior of the Grim Jester. He's an Alpha Male and a bully. I've said all that already. I've tried to adjust to that. But last night, in an innoculous and stupid boardgame, Jester got aggressive and just so ... creepy ... about winning. It seemed, all over again, that Jester just views me as an insignificant cog in the machine created to trump up his own importance and domination. And that nothing is more important than his ascendence, his dominance, his opinion, his way. All the way up to the part where he began to lose the game, we were having a great time. We were all enjoying the sport of dice rolling, strategizing, pretending to be world dominators. We were seeing the many layers of the game design and having fun projecting our thoughts onto the gameplay. "I own all of Africa now! Motherland, I've come home!" we could joke.

But then Jester stood to lose to his longtime friend and suddenly none of us (me and the other player) mattered any more. It was between him and his rival only. We became only a means to his end, and when we dared to play our own turns as we saw fit, he grew sarcastic, angry, threatened to leave early--just very very childish in a very bullying and intolerant way. Such an ugly, ugly way to be.

And why does it keep taking me by surprise, every time he does it?

Well because I want more from him. I want him to be what I want. Which, for the length of my drive to work today, I realized what that is.

I want him to be the guy that I come out of the closet with.

Jester makes me think of the reasons why I think I am finally, unavoidably, irreverisbly gay. He's the guy that, when I like him--I REALLY like him. He's the guy who makes me think of him both in fond emotional ways and in gritty physical ways. And he's the guy that I want the most from in all my social circles. I want his attention, I want his protection, I want his approval, I want his acceptance, I want his affection, I want his trust, I want his strength, and I want his dependence.

I've harbored this knowledge for some time now, and I'm talking years. I've lit up like a Christmas tree when in drips and drabs he's given me bits of all those things I want in the preceding paragraph. And now I'm putting it in writing.

I want the guy. Just like any leading lady wants the leading man. Yeah, I'm gay. And I'm not just gay--I'm the bottom gay. The wife. The one who gets slapped, who does the crying, who pouts, who has mood swings. The feminine one. The emotional one.

I just am.

And I'm trying to learn to accept this because it hasn't changed in 30 years. I've always been this way. I've never been the jock--I've been the guy to hang out with the cheerleaders. And even though I've been trying to reframe and review what's been my motivators, my drives, my epistemological origins to being what I have been--I just still am this.

This is what I am.

And I need to stop hating it and hating myself for it.

And no, I do not ever have to do anything about it. And I'm not inclined to. I neither have to act on it or scrub it out of my soul. I don't have to seduce Jester (and face it, he'd be an extremely troublesome boyfriend. Just ask his dearly departed girlfriend who he could never do right by until her death last year. Or just ask his friends, among whom you can count on one hand. I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just weighing the evidence. I'm trying to keep myself in check and keep myself from believing a lie about the man, or believeing a lie about my future with the man. For all I know, and there is real evidence to support that the man could be in his own self-loathing closet of homosexuality--God knows he protests against homosexuals enough, and often. But as a person, either straight or gay, he's a miserable human being most of the time. So who cares that he looks like Jason Statham?).

No, all I have to do is just BE. Just be myself--and be honest with it. And while doing so, leave it up to God to judge me. I just have to stop fearing Him and what He might think about me. In fact, start trusting that He knew all this about me for the past 44 years of my life, and STILL loves me. Because really ... everything I could have tried to do about it, I've done. You couldn't ask more of a man than what I've done to be straight, love straight, act straight, stay straight and scare straight. I've faced the condemnation of Hellfire & Brimstone itself. And still, this is what I am at the end.

I'm gay.

And that's all I want to say about that, really, for the rest of my life.

Let's see how that works out.