|
|
|
timmy
|
 |
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13819
|
|
|
I was walking today, and thinking. It was a good walk and a bad think.
The walk was http://tinyurl.com/25de32u and it took about two hours in damp autumn air. It gave me thinking time.
The think was about http://tinyurl.com/3youqne
I got to thinking that I know, maybe, some of what went through his mind. However hard he tried, however calm he was, however much logic he used, however much he believed in himself and what he was doing, every day he heard some narrow minded bigoted asswipe tell him he was abnormal, or an abomination, or a fag.
Every day he banged his head against a brick wall of ignorance or prejudice or plain stupidity until, one day, he had had enough.
As I walked I thought about him more and more and absorbed all this shit.
I never knew him. I just knew of him.
And got got to me, at the top of a windy hill, walking for the good of my health, for I sure as hell wasn't enjoying it, even in the fresh air, even with the view of the waves, the green fields, the birds wheeling above. Even with all that, the berries in the autumn hedgerows, even then I felt tears on my cheeks for all the harm people do.
And I could see with clarity why he thought it was pointless to carry on.
I'm not comparing what I do to what he does. We're different people, doing different things, but I shared hopelessness today.
I could have walked to the edge of the coast path and carried on walking off the cliffs.
As I walked I found I was talking out loud. I do that when I hurt. Getting my words blown away on the wind makes me believe that they're being carried somewhere I want them to go.
I know clearly what I was saying.
I don't want to be gay any more. It's a burden I don't want or need. I don't want to be told I'm abnormal. WHen I was a kid I was normal. Then at 13 I was a pervert. I don't want to feel like that any more. I want to find vaginas appealing, not penises. I want to find the gentleness of a woman's hug better than the firmness of a man's. I want to look at a man and a woman walking together as a couple and feel that they are the normal natural ones, not think of two men as a couple as natural, as normal. I want to look at heterosexual porn and get excited by it.
I've had enough of being gay. It isn't fun. It sucks. It gets better, of course it gets better, but sometimes, just sometimes, it's too hard to bear.
I'm not obsessed any more, but I still wish, hopelessly, that John, now chief probation officer of a reasonably close English county, wish that he would just meet me and be nice to me. I don't want him to run off hand in hand with me, I just want him to acknowledge that I exist, that I'm not a threat to him and to be kind to me. I love him still, you see, even if I have no idea who he is any more, even if I never had any real idea who he was when we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
I know he's not a boy any more, I know he's a flabby and ordinary almost 59 year old worn out man. And I know I'm nothing to him. And, dammit, I know I have a wife, a beautiful one, who deserves more than this.
I try to be so strong, too. I try to smile when I'm low. She doesn't want a gay husband, so we almost never speak of my being gay, but I know it gets to her, and it gets to me, too.
"No, I don't want not to be gay, it's part of who I am!"
Of course we say that. There isn't a pill that changes us. We are as we are. And, since change is mythical, of course we say we don't want to change. If we said we wanted to change, knowing it to be impossible then we'd tear ourselves apart.
Well, I never wanted to be gay when I was thirteen, and I don't want to be gay now. The joke's over. Enough is enough. If I knew what being not gay was I'd be it in the blink of an eye.
But I can't find women attractive.
There aren't many men I fid attractive either.
The whole sexual orientation thing is a sick joke. My right hand and a bit of indecent porn's far better than anything else anyway.
So I think I understand the guy in NYC who killed himself.
If you're getting this far and thinking "Does he have a message for us in all this?" The answer is that I do not. Why would I have? How could I have? WHat message could there possibly be?
I'm not lying when I say it gets better.
It's just that sometimes it doesn't.
And then I scream John's name and ask him into the wind why he will not meet me and talk.
And I know I am unimportant to him and that is why.
I know it's stupid.
I used to cry when I screamed his name. Now I just scream it with dry and empty eyes.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Mon, 01 November 2010 00:15 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
|
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Mon, 01 November 2010 09:42 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: acam on Mon, 01 November 2010 12:58 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Mon, 01 November 2010 14:23 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
|
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Mon, 01 November 2010 17:28 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: kiwi on Mon, 01 November 2010 18:46 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Mon, 01 November 2010 18:57 |
|
 |
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
|
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Mon, 01 November 2010 23:14 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: Benji on Tue, 02 November 2010 07:14 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: acam on Tue, 02 November 2010 12:38 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
|
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Thu, 04 November 2010 17:15 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: ray2x on Fri, 05 November 2010 03:53 |
|
 |
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
|
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Fri, 05 November 2010 08:58 |
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: timmy on Fri, 05 November 2010 09:24 |
|
 |
He that keepeth watch upon the hill....
|
|
|
Re: Does it all sometimes get to you?
By: acam on Fri, 05 November 2010 23:32 |
Goto Forum:
[  ] |
A Place of Safety
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
