I remember my mom telling would-be medication prescribers “he’s very turned off to the whole sex thing.” Good. You believed that. I got you right where I want you. 

This is a game that I think I’ve been very good at playing in my relationships with friends my own age. Sexual desires were absolutely an amputated part of my identity. This may be true for most people who feel sexual attraction, but it seems that this would be especially jarring that this would be true for someone like myself who runs at the mouth about every part of me to anyone who will listen; interests, hobbies, my latest art work, or maybe a dance move I picked up…

As you might tell by now, I am not exactly a very secretive or mysterious person.  Its a very female trait to conceal or mask sexual desire with naïveté that may or may not exist, but for a queer person, the idea of not owning your literal sexuality with a full-throated roar is almost foreign in a post-Stonewall world. In fact not doing exactly that seems to revoke membership into a community that in actuality, doesn’t seem to actually exist. More on that later.

I suppose if my life story were a gay drama written by people who have probably never meaningfully interacted with an actual gay person I would probably have some deep seated religious self-hating shame when it came to attraction to men. In reality, the lesson I learned too very early was that sexual attraction was conflated with being rebellious. And being rebellious is bad. I didn’t want to be bad. 

Bad is not sexy at all.

With all seriousness, I was so used to vying for, and clinging to, adult approval and affection that I developed a—usually silent, thank fuck— superiority conflict to other teenagers who expressed any level of vulgarity in terms of language or sexual expression. Anyone who has ever been a teenager will tell you that most adults have a thinly veiled, if not out-right advertised disdain for most teenagers and young people. The narrative I always got about teenagers was not just how they were all dumb and horny, but that idiocy manifested in a way that I could never, or should never, relate to. Because I grew up as a “Special needs child”, I always existed somewhat away from anyone else my own age.  I existed in the same spaces as them, took instruction from the same teachers as them, but I never existed as part of them. I’m lead to believe this weird unspoken alienation was a bit more real than just being a typical “weird kid” that likes different things or was a part of a different social group, in fact I didn’t have much of a social group to cling to. I’ll admit that still sounds pretty typical of any “I was an outsider in high school” story, but the fact that I was “developmentally delayed by three to four years” as said some child psychologists, certainly adds a starker degree of contrast between myself and literally everyone around me.

This fact of myself caused me to act and react to people, places and situations in a way that visibly signaled to someone that there was something off about me in a way that invited almost maternal and pitiable reactions from my peers, and more predatory and malicious actions from my instructors and caretakers. Think of how someone’s brain might “click” to speak a different way to a child than to another adult. Thats what kids sometimes a few years younger than myself had learned to do with me.

Indeed, if I were a 10 year old, I would behave and have interests closer to that of someone who is 6. That is a massive difference in psychology at such a young age, and it resulted in me being far more friendly with 2nd and 3rd graders when I was in 5th grade.

And so any acknowledgement of sexual desires were delayed as mental puberty developed well after physical puberty, essentially making me go through the two halves of the process at different times.

I don’t think most people can even begin to imagine what shape it would take on someone’s psyche to grow up like that. It is true that once upon a time, the act of sex was actually deeply appalling to me, but as we know from previous entries in this series, I was not a completely sexless little boy. 

Unfortunately my earliest understandings of sex were usually in the context of the idea that teenagers would have sex, which sometimes resulted in children having children. Surely I understood it was an “adult” activity, but the idea that people only a few years older than I could enact something I could barely conceive of was viscerally horrifying as it was vaguely intriguing, but it set the stage for a debilitating inferiority complex that in the years to come would fester upon awareness of the hypersexuality of most gay spaces.

For years there was constant pull of sexual desire and the push of disgust and anguish tearing me in both directions, effectively splitting myself in two, where even now the two halves can’t be conjoined. 

In front of adults, either in the form of family members or schoolteachers, I went out of my way to be seen as, well, not like other teenagers. I wasn’t even trying to separate myself from other gay men, and certainly not from other girls. The entire human race felt like a different species to me altogether, which was a pathology that was encouraged constantly by the bizarre and inappropriate musings of my mother.

When she began to leave me home alone without a babysitter she would be in front of the vanity, putting on her blush for a night shift and ask me, “If you were a typical kid, what do you think I would say to you right now?”

I pretend to think about it, and then I chirp, “don’t get a girl pregnant, (my name)!” 

I suppose this was some weird form of bonding, where she was delighted to be assuaged that out of all of the numerous, really quite a lot of things to worry about, that some torrid underaged teen affair was not one of them. And with this, I accepted the odd form of validation.

I would wake up after having dreams at night that there was a secret room in my same high school, that giggly and smirking teenagers would go into and have sex in. My confused feelings of lust and disgust were probably identical to the internalized hatred present in most closeted gay males, like the ones you would see drama play out in most of the contemptible films that make up the corner of gay cinema. 

This was also probably my first cue that I was never meant to be a gay man either. These dreams weren’t particularly pornographic either. It was just beds set up, with heterosexual pairings doing their own version of nondescript sexual activity in a room almost completely cloaked in darkness.  I never identified with gay sex, even if I knew how the mechanics of that worked probably more so than heterosexual mechanics.

Still, this early conception of sex instilled in me the idea that sex was inherently rebellious, secretive, and heavy. To this day, there is an odd bout of depression that pours into me when faced with often gratuitous depictions of underaged kids having sex in every teen drama. Euphoria is the best example of this. From the frenetic energy, the loud music, and similarly rebellious nature was simply heavy. Not as heavy, however, as it would be when gay men did it.

Now as an adult with the much coveted fully formed frontal lobe, which meant more to me than probably most, and full understandings of the basic mechanics of sex, I often remind myself of what I wanted back in high school. If given the opportunity I would have loved to have that one best friend, that best friend becoming my romantic and sexual partner. Most heavy of all, I hoped we would be each other’s first experience. The relationship would last well outside of high school and we could examine the beautiful evolution of our bodies, and the individual personal growth journeys that just come from surpassing the milestones of your life that seem to stop approaching by the time you’re 25. Going through all of that with someone, with a rock of a person to depend on sounded better than any fairytale I could write, or any wedding I could plan.

It wouldn’t be until adulthood did I realize that in truth, that doesn’t happen for most people, and if you are queer, that chance is next to impossible, at least in high school. In reality I had a hard time holding onto any friends, and even today keeping them often requires putting in a significant amount of energy than I had returned to me. 

Perhaps the sexual journey would feel less daunting and, in a bizarre way, less self-sacrificial if I had that rock there to go through it with. It was packing in my desire to stay innocent, my desire to behave the complete opposite in the safe harbor that was a completely enveloping relationship, and my desire for a strong male figure to guide me and perhaps help make up for any trauma that I developed, sexual or otherwise. (Do not attempt this by the way that is not how it works, and it is not fair to your partner.)

Quite like a fairytale, I was taking on all of this alone, like a wounded child on an odyssey across rocky terrain trying to find stable and soft ground to rest one foot on. The rocky ground in metaphorical terms came in the form of the sharp pains that I began to develop every time I saw another gay movie in which the gay characters would have sex, under the cloak of taboo and secrecy; rebellious, fervent and exciting.  This was becoming something I wanted for myself. This developing realization was a wave crashed against my shame of feelings of potential betrayal towards any adult that had expressed approval of my enunciated innocence. It was so against everything I wanted people to see of me. Can acting out on lust coexist with “good behavior”, “kindness” or “being moral”? All I understood sex was as something that inspired derision or disappointment from the adults I wanted to be loved by. 

Believe it or not, I firmly believe internalized homophobia had such a little part to play in this. In my naïveté I viewed gay sex as something that simply must be the result of an intense friendship and camaraderie between two men. It seemed to be a shorthand for the type of “grow-up-together” friendship I wanted more than breathing. I’m still quite envious of the type of connection that two men could have together, even those that are completely platonic and heterosexual. Even though I entered the world as a boy, I cannot truly say that I know what that world is like. Boys and men are still a mystery to me, emblematic of an entire world I still know nothing about.

If the trauma associated with linking sex to something inherently bad wasn’t enough, the idea that in adulthood, I would not come across any gay man that hasn’t engaged in sex in a way that didn’t seem sensational and without any emotional attachment would prove devastating.