They say that the mind is a terrible thing to waste. If what they say is true, a wasteland is where I am and who I am is a wanderer.
Let me give you a brief background as to why I feel this way: It begins with a little book. Books, by the way, are dangerous. Sometimes they can uncover ugly truths, and inevitably they can make you think about the world which we seek to find a home in, and most egregiously, reflect on the self. One evil consequence of letting a book influence the mind is that a question arises, which asks: Who am I? You groan and you either shrug it off or pursue to answer the question to a comfortable conclusion. Well, as I've mentioned before, it begins with a little book, and it is by Alan Downs, called The Velvet Rage. This vile book has forced me to wander no more in ignorance and to seek sanctuary in authenticity.
My prior blog, hyphenated non-IDentity, had me exploring what it means to be a gay Asian man living in the United States. And I sought one validation after another. Sure, it helped me cope with coming out and accepting myself as a gay man. But it didn't save me from the constant leitmotif of feeling flawed. If I had broken free from the mask of heterosexuality, I had put on some other ill fitting mask, covering myself from being the real me. Then again, I don't know who the real me is. But I feel that Alan Downs is correct in saying that we are motivated by shame: "The inevitable by-product of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, a shame gay men may strive to obscure with a façade of beauty, creativity, or material success." I feel like a façade. I haven't fully accepted myself.
So here then is the premise of this blog. This is for me to chronicle my journey of finding my authenticity in this seemingly superficial city I call home. I want to enrich my life with real people. I want to embrace the truth without shying away from it. I may ruminate about the past and I may whine about the present, hell, I may contradict myself time and time again, but this is for me and only me. This is to help me accept myself, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I'm excited. I feel like I found a new voice. So here I go...
I wonder where the seemly universal gay shame theme comes from. It's possible to be born into a life in which there's no reason to ever learn shame, yet most homosexuals don't get those lives: they end up being born to preachers or traditionalists instead. Maybe shame is inborn, and it causes gayness, rather than the other way around. (Heh.)
ReplyDeleteHyper obsession with visual beauty seems par for the course in an all-male community; men are many times more visually oriented than women... which is probably why you end up with your 300-pound hairy-legged lesbians.
I'm not ashamed of homosexuality, even when I engage in it myself. I don't find it shameful in others. The vast majority of the people I've encountered in my life are equally unphased by it... so where is the shame coming from?
Well, shit happens to you when you're gay. People say stuff. You overhear things. You look at media that is only just now starting to include you. But most of it is just indifference; straights don't care who you fuck anymore than you care who they fuck. It's not that they all hate you, they're just not CONCERNED about your sexuality like you are.
So you (not you personally, but the gay community) seem to interpret that as total ostracization. But perhaps it's more true that you're perhaps you're doing to yourselves, rather than it being done to you?
Screw using shame as an identifying factor. You want to identify yourself, choose something cooler, I say.