Phil Fox Rose

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June 09, 2006

Coming Out As Straight

Coming Out as Straight
By Phil Fox Rose
June 9, 2006

I have not written anything on gender in a couple of years. The main reason for this is that I've had a strong sense that my understanding of it as it relates to me was in flux. Though as a nonfiction writer one must be willing to commit to paper your thoughts of the moment, with full awareness that they will change and probably embarrass you down the road, there are times when you feel your current thought-state is so obviously immature that it would be imprudent to proceed. Such has been the last two years.

Recently, though, things snapped into focus and I've been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the already-published work being my latest words on the subject. So, the point of this is: I'm a straight man. There, I said it. I'm not a lesbian in a man's body; I'm not a post-gender-non-gender something-or-other. I'm a guy. Of course, I'll always be queer in the sense of rejecting society's rules on this subject, and I still don't get most "regular guys". But that doesn't make me a girl. The personal statements that follow are not meant as a challenge to anyone else's choices involving gender identity. If anything is a personal matter, for God's sake, gender identity is it. That said, I'm not going to bar any holds in describing how my thoughts have changed, and some may not like a few of the conclusions I've arrived at. Hope it's helpful to someone.

So let's look back at some of the assertions I've made in the past. It's worth note that I've never said I thought I was born with the wrong body parts. I've never felt that I wasn't a man. But I have insisted, with some force, that a man need not be tied to the gender characteristics our society tags him with. This post-gender type of talk is interesting and provocative and some of the rules our society perpetuates about gender roles deserve to be challenged and discarded. But not all of them.

I stick to my statement in the Mermaids piece that my growing-up experience, especially involving dating and sex, is more like a typical girl's than a typical boy's, but I'm not saying this is because it is the nature of being a woman to have the experiences I had. Just that it's more common. This is where I have gotten tripped up. Much of my reasoning for identifying with the woman's experience has been about fear. It's all well and good that I'm a nice and empathetic person, but that's got nothing to do with the fact that I often have the ability, even the impulse, to take charge and make decisions, from where to eat dinner to what my career path should be to what I want sexually, but that I have held back out of timidity/politeness/fear/shame/etc. It's really neither empathetic nor nice to hold back in these situations when I know a date or coworker or society, or my inner self, wants me to take the lead. I've spent much of my life admiring and being jealous of any man who is confidently himself, who is unafraid to take charge, who projects clarity and strength - spiritual and physical strength - and yet I have explained away and justified my own failure to live by these same principles. I have simultaneously been jealous and contemptuous of such men.

This has required some pretty fancy mental footwork. When one is acting against one's own interests but can't help it - such as wanting to be bold but freezing - there is a profound sense of detachment, watching things unfold and feeling powerless to do anything about it - even though you have total power in the sense that you could just do things differently. I know well that feeling of watching myself being timid, knowing what I want to do instead, and feeling like I have no control over the timid me, as if it's another person. So, there has been a lot of denial involved in maintaining the idea that this passive/polite/gentle/etc. me is superior. My jealousy of men who were confident and unafraid, I perverted into blaming society for valuing those traits, even while I was placing value in them myself by being jealous. And if a specific woman I was attracted to found such a man attractive, my jealousy was consuming. Nearly every time I acted deferentially or timidly, I knew what the other option was, what the choice was that would actually express my desire, my preference. It wasn't like I had no opinion. I was just too afraid to put myself out there and take the chance of being wrong or rejected.

And so we arrive at the bottom line. The spiritual work I've been doing recently has led me to a very clear realization: that much of what I've assigned in the past to feminine tendencies is really the result of lifelong fear-based character defects. So, then, I've been not a feminine man but a fearful man. Timidity didn't make me more female, just less emotionally healthy. I've accepted a victim role, let it define me, and then tried to create a life within it. All the while, being angry, resentful and hurt, but thinking the problem was society. And I've confused traits that really are admirable with others that aren't, such as humility with timidity, empathy with passivity. Fear, especially fear of making "wrong" decisions, has haunted me in many areas of my life. A friend perfectly described my previous mode of living as "learned helplessness."

Gender comes into play, though, because there does seem to be a correlation between being male and taking the lead. David Deida says male energy tends to be direct and forward-moving, to a fault, while female energy tends to be lateral and stationary, to a fault, and that combined they make a great team. He says very emphatically that we both have both energies in us, but that we shouldn't deny our true nature, whatever that is. With my indecisiveness, there is a lot going on and I can't put it all into words. It's more than just fear of making the "wrong" decision. It's fear of being responsible. It's fear of being impolite. It's fear of being seen as one of those people who just takes what they want. It's fear.

The most remarkable thing about this kind of spiritual epiphany is that the moment one sees and accepts the new understanding of things, reality is already profoundly changed. Marianne Williamson says this kind of perception shift is a miracle. Because what a moment ago really was impossible is now entirely possible. Reality has changed. Of course, I still have work to do, but I feel that the big shift has already occurred, and as I take each next step along this new path, I invoke the tried and true principle of do-something-you're-afraid-of-and-you-don't-die-and-next-time-it's-easier.

There has been a related thought process that's a bit more practical and self-seeking. The gender box I'd put myself in was not giving me a happy life, because while it may have made me a safer man to be around, or even "one of the girls", it also kept me from being seen sexually. Whether any potential relationships that already went this route can be rescued remains to be seen.

THE WHOLE LESBIAN IN A MAN'S BODY THING
There's another concept I've always been trying to capture with the whole "lesbian in a man's body" thing. First of all, I always meant it to be taken lightly. I come from the glam rock gender-bending tradition of messing with people's expectations and perceptions of gender for fun and/or to get them to be more open-minded. In this sense, it's just a playful challenge. On a more literal level, though, I was trying to find a way to label the fact that I am attracted to women both as friends and lovers. Straight men are Supposed To be attracted to women as lovers but men as friends, and gay men to either men as friends and lovers or men as lovers and women as friends. So, who is "supposed to" be attracted to women as both friends and partners? Lesbians.

I also identify with social dynamics in the lesbian experience. Most notably the complications that come from this fact of being attracted to the same sex for both friendship and sex. When I meet a woman who excites me, it is often on both levels. This leads to confusion about how to act. If I befriend them, am I ruining the chance that something else could happen? (I hear you all saying "Yes!") If I make my sexual interest known up front do I foreclose the possibility of friendship? And if I take the friendship route, as I nearly always do, how do I deal with the fact that I'm still sexually attracted to them. I've been terribly disappointed, however, to find that the lesbian community has little in the way of answers here. It seems to be a pretty messy world of exes and hidden crushes and awkward situations of people living with their frustrations. The lesbian community also seems to have no answer for what to do when, often, genderblurred sexual partnerships quickly depolarize and settle into sexless friendships.

Another reason I feel comfortable identifying with the lesbian/female experience is that I don't have a very clear line between sexual attraction and love. I might lust after someone I don't love, but if I actually do experience intimacy with someone, it seems to kick into love pretty much immediately. This makes me "like a woman" in the view of societal norms. Men are supposed to be able to have sex as sport or conquest without becoming emotionally involved. I don't know if this is good or bad, but it's my experience that I can't do it. I do think it can be bad to confuse sex with love - it can turn one-night stands that should have remained one-night stands into multi-year relationships. On the other hand, since sex is such an intimate act of joining with the other person, maybe it's totally reasonable that having sex with someone would fuel a love connection. Like I said, I'm not sure what's right or wrong here. But I seem to "act like a girl" on this issue.

At the same time, while I was self-identifying as a lesbian, I felt a dissonance between what I meant and felt and nearly every other guy I encountered who did the same. These weak, clingy, smarmy, sensitive, feminist (usually fundamentally misogynistic and passive aggressive) guys were more repulsive to me that jocks. I tried to mitigate this by saying that I was a pro-sex feminist lipstick lesbian or some other such construct. The point was that I detested "sensitive" guys, and yet, what was I?

So now I'm just trying being a guy. Let's see how that goes. I welcome feedback.

(c) 2006 Phil Fox Rose