I thought I was done but I am not. Some new things have come up. Now don’t get me wrong. I am happy right now about a lot of things in my life. My job. My family. My mental and physical health as well as a recent raise. What I’m not happy about is more and more what unravels in this gay community and my future in it. I just don’t know what to do.
If there was Department of Gayness or The Ministry of Gays where you got a gay card or license issued to you once you came out, I would be considering turning it back in. Well, I guess I really couldn’t because the other option would be to live straight and I’m not that. Okay, then, maybe exchange it for a bi-sexual card so at least I had options.
I watch on Social Media…and maybe that is my problem…I look at too much Social Media…how so much of the community is wrapped up in the same old shit that is about them buying a product…they sold down a river of their own consumerism…whether it is throwing money at drag queens, down watering holes for alcohol, travel to gay mecca destinations, gay resorts. It’s all the same thing on repeat. Bars, clubs, resorts, drag queens–repeat.
Or, you see people you know just so narccisistically posing and posturing constantly to create content for validation and followers, and I don’t want to slut shame but the aspirations are set so low relationally in our community. I think of Lady Ga Ga’s song “The Shallow.” The gays are swimming in the shallows so much of the time! The realistic places to think of to go to for relationship building grows smaller and smaller by more experiences I have and the more I see out there. I’ve been on hiatus ever since the latter half of Covid.
It was after 2 rounds in a very well promoted gay sports league that I began the hiatus where I experienced bullying from one of it’s board members on the first sports team, the severe personality flip of my close friend playing along side me forcing me to set boundaries and cutting that off, and false accusations from another board member on another team I joined way after that league was finished. After years of trying a mix of the bars and avenues outside them, it all just was coming up with heartbreak after heartbreak. So, I turned in my card so to speak in the gay social arena
While young teens may face their rights taken from them, while I and others fight for GSA groups to be allowed in schools to support them (administrators are just scared to allow it in this climate it), adult gays are by and large busy stuffing cash down the bras of drag queens and prancing about in jock straps at clubs or gay campgrounds content that a portion of funds are sent off to a charity rather than realizing these victimizations are going on that are literally at the forefront of taking the rights away of future gays. They are busy visiting fields of faieres, cosplay and not engaging the reality on the front lines. Busy defending all kinds of fluid sexual relationships but holding little indepth relationships of their own. They will defend them as indepth though because users need users and others on their way down need others to hold onto who are falling with them and can relate to the abuse of things like alcohol, sex and drugs for a mask (See the wildly popular book Velvet Rage)
You would think that is enough despair all of it’s own but it doesn’t end there. Recently, Joe Kort, aa nationally known relational and sexual therapist here in Michigan, did a very serious Tik Tok video about Don Savage’s term for tolyarmoury. I spit a peanut out of my mouth belly laughing when I heard the definition of this term. The term refers to a type of relationship where the silence of one partner when the other is cheating on them and that person is “tolerating” it equates to this tolyarmorous relationship. Dear Lord…. Polyamorous requires communication to truly work, a lot of hard work, and we would create a term for something that toxic on par with a term Polyarmorus? No, it should be called Toly-toxic if anything. It’s a broken relationship or a relationship in survival mode. Tolerating is sort of pushing the envelope and is so absurb to use that I find it quite humorous.
It is true that there are probably a lot of relationships like that out there–tolyamorous– but I don’t think we should go about justifying it in a way that is a potentially healthy relationship just because it may be common. Tatics for survival need not a resounding stamp approval. We can move from survival to thriving and should show people the way. It is a dangerous place for any couple to be in because sex is hard wired to our emotions. I know gays like to think that sex can just be “transactional”. I’ve heard that term being used a lot in the gay community. But how many have had great sex with someone and wanted it again? Kept thinking about that person? Sex wasn’t designed to be “transactional” and while we move it in that space, I don’t believe it will be contained for too long in that space. Sex devoid of emotion will come out in other ways.
50% of gay men are in open relationships–probably more–and yet gay men have the highest degree of loneliness in the world. The Surgeon General has classified us under a loneliness epidemic. How does that make sense? How does that equate to healthy relationship building or treating our sexual lives correctly (a big componant of relationships)? Being a headliner for a loneliness epidemic isn’t because we are doing well with our relationships. So, I think we need to stop declaring ourselves experts on how to do relationships. If all these open relationships and “tolyamory” are justifable, then why aren’t we as gay men less lonely than our straight counterparts who have high divorce rates? In all honesty, we aren’t doing much better it appears as we like to believe.
I keep hearing about gay relationships crumbling. I had always hoped there were pockets of these gay meccas out there where it was bliss. An emerald city of gay romance. Gay couples, with children even out for the long haul making it work. Living the dream of their best gay lives. Then today I saw a single man’s Tik Tok of what it was like to live out Palm Springs as a single man.Palm Springs. You hear about it all the time. The place to go in the latter years of your life. However, he and other prior Palm Springs residents chimed in on it being largely wealthy real estate agents who were already coupled and cheating on their partners. This content creator said hee wasn’t complaining (though I think he was a tad bit). On the contrary, he said he was “diving into the debrauchary” and began gaing tips on how to properly cheat and know when the guy was cheating or in a open relationship. He also noted everyone was too busy with their realtor jobs or spent only part of the year there. The comment section was nothing but agreements.
Last, I saw yet another advertisement for a gay persons birthday as an event being held at club. Advertised on social media just like any other event as if some drag queen star or dancers were in town to perform. Now, in a gay community with a loneliness epidemic, how well do you think that goes over with flyers of one man and their one night only birthday event? Where most gay men don’t have 2 gay friends to rub together, so to speak. I can’t help but laugh. I don’t see this in the gay community. The narcissim of this is outstanding that you think you are so popular and so important that your birthday should become a night time event that takes over a club and promoted for the community to attend. Sometimes I know the people who do this and just roll my eyes but others I don’t. I look them up and wonder about their lives as I scan their social media. They live a life I can’t imagine. A sort of “Look At Me, I’m Sandra Dee”. Popular. Got their peeps, usually (not always) good looking or holding some kind of talent. It’s a type of gay life I’ve dipped my feet into so I sort of know how it feels but not fully. I sort of envy having a crew and the type of good times that are holds no bar just gay, but I don’t envy the shallowness. I know what that shallowness feels like. It’s for that reason I don’t go down that path.
So to conclude, I don’t know where the hope really is for me in this “gay life”. I don’t see much of a future in it for me but where do I go? I have some connections that are worth keeeping and hopefully find more. Hopefully, I don’t grow old alone in a “transactional” gay community that lives exclusively, blindly playing in the shallows. I don’t want to be led there because I fear my soul would die.
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