Queer by Seth King

Author:Seth King [King, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

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One day several years ago I logged on and saw his honeymoon album. He’d married a girl, just as I always knew he would. In the pictures they were getting manis and pedis together, like girlfriends out on the town. He became a famous athlete on ESPN, but in his eyes I only see sadness and regret and nothingness.

Bisexuality is very real. I’d like to emphasize that. Many people date many different genders and then still settle happily into a hetero relationship. This was not the case with him. I got the sense that there was zero interest in females, period. Like many closeted men, he just hated the idea of homosexuality so much, he lived his life pretending.

And this can work for a lifetime! I did the same thing for years. Sleeping with women was easy. They didn’t turn me on like men did, sure, but sex was sex, and it was better than blowing up my whole life by coming out as gay. Let me make this clear: gay men still have sex with women all the time. Say that someone put a steak in front of you, and then a bowl of porridge. Then they explained that eating the steak would ruin your life as you knew it.

You’d be happy to reach for the porridge and pretend to enjoy it, too.

He was the same. Girls – and grown women – went wild for him, and he simply did not care. And in the later months of our friendship, when he started trying to show interest in girls from the popular crowd, there was a blankness on his face. Once, when we were standing in my sister’s room and looking at her tabloid trash magazines, he let it slip that David Beckham was “his type” of man, but he usually didn’t admit those things. He lived in silence, and I knew that because of his parents, he always would.

We all choose who we’re going to be, every one of us. He chose, just like anyone else did. His motivations were just led by fear.

I don’t know what I’d be like today if I’d been born into an environment that let me be who I was born to be. I’ll suppose I’ll never know. It’s impossible to convey how damaging and corrosive it is to be raised being told that you are damaged and flawed. I envy people like how he was, people who are able to go through life without a thought on their mind, carefree and easy. It will never be easy to be inside my head. I am burdened by trauma, but I’d like to think it also bred a strength in me, a spirit that hasn’t been broken yet, despite it all. Somehow.

It’s strange, the things we hold onto. I don’t remember the big, sweeping moments with him. I remember the little things. I remember his grey marl sweatshirts that zipped up the front, I remember the way he used a little too much gel and made his hair too scrunchy.

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