An Actual Conversation, with Extension

Posted on August 13, 2002 in Attitudes IRC/Chat

to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle that any human can fight and never stop fighting.
– e.e. cummings

Some of the best moments I have had online have been with my friend snaily^ who has quit her job as an editor and is now back in school studying to be a social worker at the University of Georgia. Snaily^ seems well-suited to her calling. She spends a lot of time online helping people who struggle with mental illness through her IRC channel and her site peersupport.org.

Her’s, like those of many of my friends, has been a life of trials stemming from her bipolar disorder and the incredibly stupid ways that some people in her life have sought to “handle her”. She likes helping people out of the darkness and often comes to me with tales of some unhappy person who she has directed away from suicide. Snaily^ understands the darkness. When one is down, one often sees a single, hideous option, usually suicide. She informs and teaches that there are other ways.

From my succinct description, you might think that she’s aloof and a bit clinical. Blame this on me, not her. I’m struggling this afternoon to knock chips off this block so that you can see the statue. IRC makes it hard to get the sense of the whole person. I have no idea what this dear friend looks like, though I have gleaned a few facts such as she is in her early forties and was born in San Francisco. You can’t assemble the physical description of a person from these things, but you can get to know the heart. Snaily^ has a good one. Now I fear that I have done her another injustice by making her sound like a Care Bear or a Telly-Tubbie. This combination of ignorance and the pressures of space conspire to make her sound shallow. And my consequent denial — that she is not — seems only to return us to that as a possible answer.

I find it easy, for the most part, to be my silly self with her. Sometimes I say outrageous things. Her great gift is her ability to check things through. She comes to my friend meaghan’s channel #peanut_gallery at Dalnet. Last night I said, off-handedly, “You know, I think I would have liked to have been a Dyke.” I could feel her cringe when she said “Please, don’t tell me that you feel like a lesbian in a man’s body.” No, that wasn’t it, I admitted. I was perfectly happy being a man. She pressed no further. But what did I mean by this comment? A riposte from snaily^ is often worth further investigation. As I went to bed at my usual two thirty in the morning, I noted the exchange in one of my notebooks and left it hanging to be resolved by sleep and a fresh start in the morning.

I am satisfied being a man. If I were a dyke, I would probably want to be a man. I’m not terrifically sexual by most standards. Aside from a year or two in my life when I suffered from acute testosterone poisoning, I’ve usually been the more reluctant of the partners. Most of the lesbians I know are intensely sexual. Am I stating that I wish I had more of a drive? I look at the pictures of friends who are gay and I think “she’s pretty, like I would like to be if I were a woman.” I’ve said before that I fall in love all the time. The one person I don’t care for much is my own person. Dykes have courage to be themselves in a world that often punishes them for their honesty. I don’t envy their victimhood. I feel that I share it. When Red Water Lily, for example, writes about the suspicions her parents enacted on her throughout her adolescence, I see my own upbringing, though it did not make me gay. Reports such as hers convince me that the fact of being gay isn’t just a Rube Goldberg product of the way you were raised. I suffered intrusions into my sexual life and cruel jokes about my glands by my family, yet I sought out and married a woman. How anyone would choose to suffer what gays and lesbians suffer makes no sense to me. Perhaps some do. I have gone through many of the life crises that some say make a person gay and I have tested as “gay” on some psychological tests. But I lack the key, defining characteristic that marks a man as a homosexual: I am not attracted to men.

There have been exceptions, but they are rare and the men in question were in some way unusual. (E.g. The Lady Chablis) These men employed perfumes and practiced moves to entice the likes of me. Their mood and their manner said “woman”. And yet I did not want to be like any of them. If I had to be a woman, I had to be a dyke. That was my style of feminity.

I’m not about to start hanging out in lesbian bars, passing. But there are other strange little coincidences in my life that make this self-definition interesting. I married a bisexual, one who had spent some time hunting for a life partner of either gender before we mutually settled on each other. She sometimes talks about the time she rode bare-breasted with Dykes on Bykes on Gay Freedom Day. (Fortunately, not in the presence of certain of my family.) We’re not swingers. We don’t hunt for threesomes or hang out with hedonists. We’re quiet buzhies who reside in a condo at the fringe of Southern California’s urban sprawl. She works. I stay home. Yet another indication of my strange self identity. The one way in which I am not like the classic dyke stereotype is that I’m not aggressive or strong. I enjoy being something of a weakling, a cipher who gets overlooked. That makes me more of a male femme. It’s hard to hide when you are six feet four inches tall. Put me in a room and I will always seek out a chair. I want to bring myself down, at least to the level of the other people in the room. Lower if I can. I like women. But I suffer from the classic woman’s problem when it comes to meeting people: I wait for them to make the first move, except, sometimes, on IRC.

The company of gay men doesn’t threaten me. It bores me because they are so much like other men. All their talk of cocks and the various painful pleasures in which they engage bores me. I hear the same thing from heterosexual men, except tits and clits figure into their obsessions. I do meet the occasional “regular guy” who is worth just talking to. I get no sexual feelings about them — I just enjoy listening to their tales of the wild lives they lead. These guys talk about bikes and hikes and mountaineering. You don’t hear them describe the intimate details of their girls’ bodies, only the “real men’s” stuff, the kind of thing that’s done with the muscles in your hips, shoulders, arms, and legs. The penis is never involved.

And yet I am a stranger to their world. I don’t participate in it much. I don’t care much for boozing. I’m not supposed to do it because I take prozac, but I use that fact more as an excuse that these others will accept and that will allow them to go on drinking if they please. I desire to be no policeman over another person’s life. I just never really liked being drunk. There was never any danger of me becoming an alcoholic.

My teetotaling and my passive interest in women caused my parents, especially my mother, to fear for me. The rumor went about my high school that I was gay. I had one experience of the sort, but I didn’t care to repeat it. He talked. I ignored the talk and just went on being me, choosing to spend my time with the girls and similarly asexual men simply because I didn’t have to discuss sex.

My diffferent path mystified my nearest relations. My mother checked my arms for needle tracks and read letters that I received. My father thought I was turning out to be a carbon copy — with genitalia added — of her. My brother told me that I didn’t feel like a brother to him, but like some kind of tight-assed preacher. I didn’t get drunk, you see. I didn’t like to crack a Coors or a Rainier and just hang out watching Crocodile Dundee. That’s not my idea of being male. If my family prefers to harbor dark ideas about my “secretiveness”, so let it be. If they dread that the therapists I talk to point the fell finger of blame in their direction, then perhaps they deserve their self doubts. I honestly can’t say what of my personality derives my early life (with its beatings and verbal abuse), what breeds from pure self invention, and what comes from low serotonin levels. I’ve spent a life working things out and I’m not through answering the questions that interest me. “Why don’t you party like the rest of us?” — the question my brother asks — doesn’t interest me. “Why are you rude and impertinent at times?” also bores me. But this question, at the heart of snaily^’s lament, interests me: Why do I identify so with lesbians?

The cop out answer is “I don’t know.” The honest one is the same.