A fake gay

A descriptor I apply to myself all too often

I can’t shake the feeling, despite my coming out in 2020 and identifying as a gay man, that I am a “fake gay.”

I think that a lot of that has to do with the fact that, post coming-out, I didn’t choose to blow up my life, break up my family, and go live life as a single gay man at mid-life (or, if we’re being honest, a little past mid-life.) I didn’t download Grindr immediately and start hooking up. Instead, I recommitted myself to my spouse (who, at the same time, came out as non-binary) and continued on, business as usual.

A fake gay. What does that even mean? I had a friend tell me once that if you are a man and other naked men get you excited, then you’re a gay man. There’s no such thing as a fake gay. Yet, I still feel like one. I feel like so many people do not take it seriously. Like I get a little pat on the head when I try to talk about it, with people not realizing how important that part of my identity is. Sometimes I feel like the answer I get from the universe at large when I even brush up against how I don’t feel like an authentic gay man is “go buy something rainbow.” And while I am definitely a rainbow gay, I don’t think that’s the answer.

I also don’t think the answer to the question is joining hook-up culture in any way. I am really not wired that way. I look back at my years in college and I didn’t even really date, let alone have random sex with people. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I was massively depressed and anxious in college. One only has to look back at the copious amount of journaling I did (for better or for worse!) to realize this. I wasn’t able to recognize just how bad it was at the time, and I put on a pretty good mask to hide it, but my college years were lost to depression and anxiety, probably due in no small part to realizing that I was gay and would do anything possible to avoid that outcome. As I think I have said here in before, I saw no path forward where being an out gay man and happy were both attainable. So many would look at my eventual marriage as a sham, a way to avoid the reality of my situation. But the thing is, I did what I did because that was the best I could do with the information I had at the time. When I met my spouse, I fell hopelessly in love with them. We spent so much time together and everything just felt so good and right. How can you argue with that? Should I have come out at 23? Probably. I was certainly on a track toward doing so, save the previously mentioned unreconcilable choices.

Trying to feel authentic as a gay man is the source of a lot of my stress and strife as I traverse my 50s. I feel the clock running out a bit more than I did even 10 years ago. Doing that while respecting the people in my life is not an easy balancing act. The trouble is that I have spent basically my entire life living to please others and live up to their expectations. Coming out was one of the first times that I did not live up to expectations (although I’m sure it confirmed many people’s suspicions so even in that respect, I lived up to people’s expectations lol.) Another example of doing something just because everyone thought I should do it was going to grad school. Not once did I consider what I wanted when I applied to graduate school after graduating with my pharmacy degree. I was told by so many people that’s what I should do that I just did it, as if on auto-pilot. When I crashed and burned not quite two years later, I did the brave thing and put myself first and changed tracks.

Putting myself first always feels supremely selfish, but that’s not surprising as a chronic people pleaser. It feels supremely unsafe and I feel sometimes like I live in a permanent state of fight or flight or freeze. It was a totally alien feeling when I quit graduate school, and while I recognize it more now than I did then, I still can’t shake that selfish feeling that I get whenever I try to do something for just me.

Honoring myself as a gay man feels like a very solitary act. I can’t force people to accept it or even recognize it. There have been many people that I know and came out to that have not mentioned it in the 5 years that I have been out. It’s not like I really want them to mention it, so it gets really complicated really fast because not even I know what I really want out of them. Maybe it’s just gentle acknowledgement in some way so that I don’t feel like I made all this up.

Ultimately, it’s up to me whether or not the “fake” moniker applies or not. Other people can’t do my work and I know this. It’s a lonely road sometimes, but it’s the one I must walk. I feel like I may need to go write something about music to balance out this post that I feel reveals too much, causing me great discomfort, but I’m going to hit publish now before I change my mind and delete the whole thing.