Saturday 22 December 2012

Dear God, please don’t let me be anything other than straight


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"For twenty-one years, I have been paralyzed by the fear of what this society will do with me if they ever were to know of the thoughts that I continually push away. For more than two decades, I have made a choice to be straight. After all, it’s as easy as making a choice, isn’t it? This culture has made sure that I know that. Anyone who is anything other than straight was just someone deceived by the devil. He is unnatural. He is confused. He is mistaken. He is weak. He can control it if he desires to control it. Such a compelling and ongoing argument has been made that I have always trusted it.

I believed that if I hid it long enough, and ran from it long enough, and refused to acknowledge it for long enough, I could indeed succeed at living up to their decrees. I believed that I could force myself to never be anything else.

Teeter-tottering on that belief, I got married. To a woman. Our marriage was laced with sexual anxiety and dysfunction. I loathed having sex with her not because I wasn’t attracted to her, but because my sexuality continually screamed to me that I was a deceitful sell-out who lacked integrity. We eventually got divorced.

I got married again. Quickly. To another woman. Surely, surely if I married someone fantastically beautiful and to whom I was very attracted, I would never have to acknowledge the truth whose screams were silenced inside of me all those years. I would never have to grant further thought to the feelings of self-betrayal that plagued me for so long. It was my choice, damn it, and I was choosing to be what I had to be.

She finally left. The last words that she chose to use before she drove away were, “I don’t care what you say, I know that you’re gay.”
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Source: Anything Other than Straight