I will never forget that line, “This is just a phase you are going through.” Goodness, I have come to love that line! You know why? Because it normalizes sexuality: It says way more about the speaker, who may in fact be deflecting their own same-sex sexual experiences they have long buried.
Certainly, you must understand what I am saying! The first few times I was coming out to others, I confided my experiences of falling in love with a man to the adults around me.
I did not always have the most forward-thinking adults –or peers, for that matter– in my circles when I was younger. Falling in love, or even being comfortable with my lusts, was exhilarating and confusing in my teens and twenties.
I would laugh to myself when I heard the response, “Oh, well, you are just experimenting!” “Experimenting!?,” I would cry out within my inner thoughts! What? I related that statement to my old Batman Mobile Bat Lab toy van: I remember thinking if this is ‘experimenting’, heck, I want to take my Bat Lab on the road for the rest of my life! …Man, I would have driven that one around anywhere, doing many dastardly experiments! Again, obviously a response that told me more about the speaker, who may have thought they had done enough experiments along their own way until they settled on their own results: Good, safe, normative heterosexuality.
No thanks. I have concluded a couple of things to help me be more at ease with my diverse sexuality: For one, I am not going to put limits to my psycho-sexual self by quantifying my identity as a finite series of experiences, or carefully devised ‘experimentations’ so I can replicate the same results.
For the other, I am proud of the phases I let myself go through! Every time I date and form friendships, I learn even more about myself, sexuality and diversity. I have had girlfriends and boyfriends, and I have no care to define where I fall along some pre-described scale of more-or-less heterosexuality or homosexuality.
I may never settle down to have babies with a woman, but it is not because I have ‘not yet met the right woman’ (does that expression also sound familiar?). I have met plenty of ‘right’ women…and I have met many ‘right’ men. Some have been ‘right away’, and we both knew when the time was right to move on.
Some have been good people; and with some, I was left feeling disrespected. One of my in-laws calls those not-so-nice experiences “test runs”! You know, like trying out a good car: It was pretty, and I thought I would like it, but it was not quite what I needed.
I grew up with some elderly people around me who called these dating experiences “trying her/him on for size”! I have come to love such expressions and responses to the dating world. Our relationships form us; they have certainly formed me! My relationship life has been a colourful rainbow of experiences. I have taken them on as good learning to seek out healthy relationships, and to not settle for unhealthy ones.
Now I focus on who I want to be in my relationship; what kind of partner do I want to be for the other. When times are difficult, I take them on with bravery, honesty, humility and many open-ended questions. I make plenty of unplanned mistakes along the way, yet I still take my good friend Cindy’s advice and I “live life on purpose.” I do not take on my relationship because we accidentally happened upon each other.
I welcome the virtues and challenges of our relationship with purpose. I do so because I want to grow to be an older man who loves another man deeply, with kind words…and as a mentor to a newer generation of others coming out who do not hear me say, “Oh, you are going through a phase, and you are experimenting”. In fact, with Aunty Mame’s classic song playing in my background, I am aiming to model how to be ‘soaking up life right down to our toes’.
The greatest gift I give to myself –and to my friends– for maturing and fully living life is to be fearless about experiencing relationships. Clearly, when a man loves a man, make it OK to take on the other…and do it with purpose. If he too is brave enough to take me on with purpose, we will grow individually and collectively for the better. (By Michael Best to DOSmagazine)
