GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Are You a “Born-Again Gay”?

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One of my favorite “homo-con” bloggers is Chad at Cake Or Death? Since I began reading blogs via FeedReader (again, I highly recommend doing that!), I’ve neglected sites that don’t have RSS or XML feeds. Most Blogger.com sites don’t.

Anyway, I drifted by Chad’s joint this morning and caught a great posting he did last Friday called “Food for Thought“.

My roommate likes to talk…. A lot. He’s a Louisiana Southerner and it’s in his blood.

…tonight, he spewed forth probably the most prophetic thing I’ve ever heard him utter. It was in regards to a former roommate of ours who is gay. I’ve gotten permission from him to hijack it and blog about it – the reason being is that I feel that it pertains to the majority of the gay population and their obsessiveness with being and attaining all things “gay”.

She wasn’t born the day she was born. She was born the day she figured out she was a lesbian.

So my question this morning… are you a “Born-Again Gay”, or like me are you an American who happens to be gay (among other countless genetic traits)?

[Related Story – The Party Crasher asks a similar question in a bizarre case of “great minds thinking alike.”]

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Comments

  2. I sincerely don’t understand this.

    If you don’t want to have homosex, don’t.

    If you do want to have homosex, what’s the big deal.

    Just like

    If you want to engage (or not) in heterosex, what’s the big deal?

    Just make sure that you take the appropriate protections for STDs and the like. But, what’s the big deal?

  4. Born once. Constantly evolving and transmuting.

    Haven’t been involved much in the “subculture”, due to the extreme leftist politics, and the interpersonal politics that make senior management in a Fortune 500 company seem like the county library, by comparison.

  5. Frank Herbert in Dune has some character warn another a couple of times that people will die before they let their identity be challenged. All kinds of self-destructive crap comes out of this ego-defense. I remember a black teacher remarking once that kids in our school were so busy being black that it was no wonder they had no time for study, and that this was one of the very few bad effects of integrating schools.

    Disabled people often see themselves as defined by their disability, and for most people while they are growing up, being gay is the worst and only unforgivable disability. Once they grow away from their toxic childhood environments, and the “disablity” turns out not to be a disability at all, they may get more perspective.

  6. Maybe perspective comes some night, when you’re sitting in a coffee shop after the campus LGBT Association Social meeting, with six guys and a token dyke, and two of the guys are flaming it up, and the new guy is getting picked on because his clothes are from Old Navy and A&F, and someone else announces that he’s dropping out of school to wait tables, and then the queens start dishing on someone who isn’t there to defend himself, and then the queens notice that people nearby are getting uncomfortable, so they talk even louder, and the innuendo gets even more explicit, … and you stand up to go to the bathroom and never come back.

    That’s pretty much why my nickname, on and off-line, in college was ‘Ponyboy.’ Because I was an outsider, although many people assumed it was a reference to something else.

  7. It’s an interesting question to ask what would a homosexual look like if you removed the same-sex attraction and the activities and behaviors that go along with it. I think, however, that it leaves us assuming far too much. After all, what is a “homosexual” behavior or activity beyond the one or two (three or four if you happen to be particularly talented) bedroom activities typically associated with a homosexual?

    Perhaps the answers to this questions differs for different individuals so that a career in psychology, for example, would constitute a “homosexual activity” for the individual for whom the fact of his own orientation colors his professional opinions, versus the man who is so detached from his own orientation that he is able to consistently offer staid, academic justifications for his positions completely independent of his own experience. I think the latter example is an extreme unlikely to be encountered in the real world. I doubt it could be said of any of us that our own sexual orientation does not color, at least minimally, our outlook. Certainly this is true based on categories such as gender and race, yet we would never think to ask what a black man would be if we if we removed his race and those personal qualities related to his race that contributed to his outlook.

    Now it may be that some will object that neither race nor gender are appropriate parallels to homosexuality. Some will obviously say that both race and gender present certain immutable characteristics that homosexuality does not. Perhaps religious faith would be closer and yet I can envision principled objections to even this.

    So, I guess, for me, it is easy enough to simply ask “who are you if you’re not gay” but that the honest answer to such a question involves answering all the other divisive, unanswered questions about what homosexuality is.

  8. It kind of depends where your comfort zone is. There are times when being gay is just not an issue or intergrated in what I do. Grocerie shopping, getting my car fixed, going to church (even though my female friends relentlessly try to hook me up, because EVERYONE has a gay friend looking for someone).

    And there are times when it is; volunteering, going to the doctor (every gay man should have a gay/lesbian doctor-the service is so much better.) voting.

    I have straight friends that wish I were GAYER as I generally don’t send off gaydar alarms. I tell them that it comes form me being comfortable being me.

    If we weren’t so pesecuted, if people did not go out of their way to do us harm, if we were just left alone, we all would probably be just as gay as each of us wanted to be. I have friends that are black. I can tell you that some of them are culturally more “black” than others. They have that choice.

    PS Ponyboy: don’t you wish 🙂

  11. #9

    Mine is from Stein Mart with some from Wally World. I’ve never really cared for lables. I’d be hard pressed to spend more than $25 (if that) on a pair of pants, unless of course it’s for a suit or something. Add to that the fact that It’s been years since I had to wear a suit. I only dressed up to go to the bars twice. After that, I started wearing what I wanted.

    Nah. Don’t have time for label queens, size queens, gym rats etc. I’m just a plain ol’ guy and that’s what I have for a partner.

  12. The “born-again” aspect might be more of a “able to truly start living once you figured or accepted (even more important) who you truly are” approach. If you are living a falsehood, then are you really living (as opposed to just breathing and consuming carbohydrates) ?

    While I perfectly understand the sentiment (as a ‘born-again TG’), the label may turn some people off due to its wide-spread use / overuse in religion.

  13. #9 — Same here. I’m currently wearing a T-Shirt I bought off the clearance rack at American Eagle and a pair of dockers from Kohl’s. In college, I typically wore jeans and a sweatshirt, hockey jersey or hawaiian shirt. I knew a guy, though, who dressed in jeans and oxfords freshling year, came out of the closet sophomore year, and from then on bought everything he owned from International Male. A friend once encountered him between classes wearing matching lavender pants and shirt. From then on, he was known (among my straight friends [who became his former friends because he only hung out with LGBTs after that]) as ‘Lavender Luau.’

  15. I don’t think that this is an either/or question. Sexual identity is not a neutral characteristic such as hair color. It’s a difference located primarily in our centers of intellect and emotion. As such, it “colors” how you perceive the world about you and your actions in it. Even the most trivial of things can be affected by it.

    Look at something as simple as casual male and female interactions. Say a gay guy and a straight guy are both assigned to work on a project together with another person, who is female. When a heterosexual guy meets a girl, he perceives the event in an almost a completely different way than that of a gay man. The straight guy will evaluate every female he meets as a potential mate on some level. The gay guy will not, which influences not only his actions but the response of others around him. Straight guy might be tempted to preen a bit, to compete for attention from the female, especially if other men are in the room. As such he may portray a more dominating, take-charge kind of demeanor. The gay guy on the other hand, has nothing to prove to the woman so he immediately acts and is treated as an “ally” or friend and collaborator.

    Does this situation sound familiar to anyone? Keep in mind that we are still talking about a very simple, everyday occurrence, but it still is greatly influenced by your particular sexual identity, whatever that may be. Gay straight, etc.

    So you see, being gay is not just a matter of “being the same as everybody else except for what I do in the bedroom”. We really are different from straight people. Just as they are different from us.

  17. “We really are different from straight people. Just as they are different from us.”

    True to a large extent, but there are degrees. There are straight women who will never elicit this preening, strutting response from the straight guys. Even straight guys are not scent-activated sexual automatons – there are plenty of women they would not do with someone else’s dick. Here the difference vanishes. And BTW this is how we get the bitter kind of man-hater who thinks all men are misogynists.

  18. As one who increasingly identifies as gay, but who has serious reservations about much of what passes for gay subculture, I am most definitely not a “born-again” gay man. I imagine that many people become “born-again” gays simply because it’s hard to come out without some sort of supportive community, and for most gays and lesbians, I imagine it is easier to try to fit into that community and to become “born-again” in that sense than it is to try to find a more independent path on your own. In fact, the literature that exists about coming out always seems to direct us to look to that community for support. But I want to say, look, I’m smart enough and old enough to think for myself, so why do I need to accept your vision of the world?

    This discussion reminds me a bit of my reaction to Paul Monette’s book On Becoming a Man, which I read a few years back, and which I even blogged about two years ago on my ill-fated first attempt at writing a blog. You can find the relevant entry
    here.
    I may yet try my hand at blogging again, but I need to find more time for it first.

  20. I AM A BORN AGAIN GAY THAT NEVER THOUGHT THEY BELIEVED IN GOD, UNTIL IT HAPPENED. I AM ONLY THIRTY DAYS OLD IN THIS LIFE AND WAS 54 IN THE LAST. I FEEL LIKE 42.
    I SEEK A TOP FOR PERMANENT COMPANSIONSHIP.
    AM I ALONE IN THIS WORLD?