I’ve never fit in. I’ve always been the one white sock in a drawer of colored ones. The one who lost its mate so long ago, it’s forgotten that it ever had one in the first place.
I’ve known i was gay since I was about 16. Sadly for me, though, I didn’t come to terms with who I was until I was 35 years old. That meant many, many years of trying to love the wrong people and trying to make relationships work that were ultimately doomed. In the end it meant many, many years of loneliness.
I thought that one of the benefits of coming to terms with my sexuality would mean an end to all those years of eating meals by myself, but instead I’ve discovered that I don’t really fit in this world either. I have no idea why, but my gay friends have told me that they speculate behind my back that I’m really straight and lying about being gay.
Don’t get me wrong though. I have no shame or regret and I’ve felt much more myself—much more content—these past few years than I did in the time before, and I love that I’m finally able to fully love myself regardless if anyone else is able to.
There is no one way to be gay. For instance, I have no fashion sense. Lots of my gay friends are masculine. I have a gay friend that is crazy about sports. I don’t fit into most gay circles and neither do most of my friends. But the point is so what. Gay people are just as diverse, if not more diverse, than straight people. If you were straight, you wouldn’t expect to fit in with all straight people. So as gay people, we shouldn’t expect to fit in with all gay people. If someone tells you can’t be gay because you are not this or that then they are wrong. Now I truly believe there is something for everyone in the gay community so stop trying to fit in and find people that are a natural fit for you.
I missed out on the fashion sense gene too. I’m an absolute mucket at picking a color scheme for a room (beige, anyone?) and I couldn’t arrange flowers if my life depended on it. On the other hand, I’m not too shabby at gardening; I can refinish a floor (or put in a new one), install a garbage disposal, run new electrical circuits, build furniture, lay a new patio, paint a house, repair gutters and any number of things that aren’t stereotypically “gay.”
We are who we are, and what we are, as Philip said above, is diverse. One of the really positive things about coming out is that it’s a process of self-acceptance. Not only acceptance of your sexual orientation, but who you are as a person, your likes and dislikes, your strengths, talents, and things that you’re not terribly good at or interested in.
We fit in ways that are comfortable for us, not necessarily in ways that are expected of us.
Side note: I want to send a bit “Hello” to Hutchinson, KS. I had my first red beer there back when I used to go skydiving down the road in Yoder.
OK so bouncing off what Jeffrey said…coming out is a process that includes not just self acceptance but increasing self awareness. The way I look at it - from 12 years old on, I spent sixteen years fighting my sexuality and pretending to be someone I was not - years my straight peers spent learning about their sexuality and figuring out who they were - so it makes sense that at 28 years old I couldn’t go right from self-hatred and self-denial to total self-acceptance and self-awareness overnight. I then spent even more years being very closeted, only coming out to a few - so it makes sense that my journey of self-accpetance and self-awareness made very little progress while I was so closeted. Then I came out enough to start interacting openly and honestly with others often enough that I wasn’t in what I call survival mode - by which, I mean that I could actually relate to other men in other ways than just sexual. That’s when it got interesting because I started finding out all sorts of things about myself that had eluded me while I was deeply in the closet and in survival mode. Here is one of the secrets to all this - some things you can only find out about yourself through open and honest interaction with others. If you are very closeted then the opportunity to be interact with others is very limited. But if you can break out of your self-imposed isolation enough then the opportunities to interact open and honestly with others increase. If you are so closeted that you are still seeing things from a straight perspective (possibly why your gay friends gave you the feedback they did) then you need to get out more. Hope this makes sense.