Yoyo's soap opera life update

Get a cup of coffee and use the bathroom; this is going to be a long one.

It has been a while since I posted any updates on my own rather strange situation, so I am doing this now; feel free to move on to the next item if you want to, because I am not really seeking any specific support or advice with this one, just showing another way that "married but gay" can turn out.

To recap, about a year ago I joined this site, with a serious desire to make some changes in my life. A (non-sexual) interaction with another younger (gay) man awakened an awareness in me that I could be very much attracted to him at an emotional as well as potentially a physical level. I had never felt this way before. After several months of receiving mixed-message feedback from him, I told him about my feelings for him. At this point he told me that these feelings were not mutual with him, and that ended that. However, this process caused me to reexamine my life and reinterpret things that had happened over a long period of time in the light that this shined on my sexuality.

The biggest revelation to me was that there was no other word to describe my occasional confused feelings over many decades as anything but homosexual. At this point I had been married to my wife for 24 years. For various reasons, including some significant medical/physical ones on her part, we had not had sex together for nearly 15 years. My feelings about this were a melange of emotional, logical, denial, confusion, and a host of other non-grammatically consistent collections of words all stirred together. I had feelings of desire and rejection strangely mixed with feelings of disinterest, which was very confusing. I did not feel comfortable discussing any of this with my wife. I decided that I really needed to meet and interact with other gay men to get a better understanding of what I was feeling and to explore what it felt like to me to interact with them on a casual basis, under the assumption that I was, to some extent, also gay.

I started going to the local LGBT center on their “gay movie night” events once a month. I joined a gay social group there that did potluck dinners at members’ homes more or less once every month. I bought a couple of “gay T-shirts” and started wearing them at these events. I wore one of them to the local Pride parade last year. I wear a rainbow Pride dog tag around my neck on a chain behind an actual dog tag (in case of a cycling accident on the road). I did not hide any of this from my wife, telling her that I was supporting the gay right to marry movement, and she agreed that supporting that political agenda was the right thing to do. The clock ticked, the pages turned on the calendar, and this became part of our “routine”. Me going to these various events, us not really talking much about it.

Then, a couple of months ago, a young friend of mine whom I spend a fair amount of time with, both him and his girlfriend, asked me The Question. He said his girl friend asked him if I am gay. He said that he was cool with it either way, or if I didn’t want to say he would tell her it was none of her business. We were on a bike ride together at the time, not the best setting for answering questions subtly or thoughfully. I told him that I didn’t know exactly how to answer the question. That I had never really explored that side of my sexuality, but I had grown up under the assumption that, like everyone else I knew, I would eventually find someone I wanted to marry and have a family with, and that is what I had done. But that at various times I had felt an attraction to certain men, even though I had never dated or had any kind of sexually oriented relationship or sex with another man. I had previously told him about our inability to have sexual relations due to gynecological problems my wife had been experiencing for a number of years, and an unsuccessful hysterectomy and surgery which failed to correct the problem of her bladder collapsing into her cervix which caused her pain during attempted intercourse, which had been “the reason” we had not been having sex. I did not label myself as “gay” in this discussion, and he has not interpreted it that way as far as I know; he is not aware of my participation in the various gay group activities at this time other than that I went to the Pride parade, which many other people did too.

Following this discussion, I decided it was time to sit down with my wife and talk. I told her about my conversation with him, and basically asked her “Do you think I am gay?” “Am I sending off vibes that I am gay?” She knew that sometimes, if I see a particularly well-built man, I will make a comment about him being in really good shape, and she usually agrees with me. “Does this mean I am gay?” I told her that when I see someone who looks like that, what I usually feel is that I wish that *I* looked like that. Now that I think about it, what this says indirectly is that I find men who look like that to be attractive to me, or in other words, that I am attracted to them, so I guess that could have answered the question I asked her to answer, for her. We continued to talk about this for a while, not arguing or fighting, just talking about it. Nothing really changed for me other than I felt less awkward about attending the various “gay” events, having at least gotten the topic and question out on the table. I noticed that sometimes if I told her I was going to do some sporting activity with X, such as play racquetball or wrestle, she would ask me if the guy was gay; if I knew the answer I would tell her, but most of the guys I play with are straight, not that it matters to me one way or the other.

Then suddenly, about 3 weeks ago, she starts talking to me about having sex again, and tells me that she is “very horny”, and has been so for a long time, and that maybe we can have sex if we are careful about it and don’t do it for too long. This situation somewhat “blows my mind”. I am reaching the conclusion that I am gay or at least bisexual all my life, at the same time she wants me to start having hetero sex again. It is almost like Scarlett O’Hara realizing she is in love with Rhett Butler, and telling him, just as he is walking out the door and saying “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Laughable, but not funny to us.

So, without posting any pictures or video, we try to “do the deed” a couple of times over the next few weeks and Mr Happy stills works OK for her, but the first time it doesn’t work for me, I just laugh it off and tell her that I just wasn’t in the right mood tonight, I guess, or it’s just because I am 68 years old and somewhat queer, so don’t worry about it. At this point she starts crying, and I ask her why she is crying, because it is no big deal and I enjoyed doing it and making her happy. She says she is crying because she can’t make me happy because she isn’t a man. Oh crap, what should I say? I tell her that I don’t want her to be a man, I just want her to be herself, the person I love and married, and who gave me our beautiful daughter, which no man could ever do. That I love her for trying to make me happy and that I enjoyed making love with her whether or not the bell rang this particular time. That we have to remember that, at our age, it isn’t going to happen every time, but it doesn’t matter that much as long as we enjoy what we are doing and it doesn’t hurt her.

SO, that is where this story temporarily ends again, me for all intents and purposes OUT to my wife, but without the label stuck to my forehead for everyone else to see. I assume the guys in the gay groups think of me as gay, since, there I am with them. If they ask, I tell them that I don’t generally think of myself as 100% gay, that I am still married to my wife and plan to stay that way for the rest of my life, but I am to some unquantified extent homosexual. The rest of the people I meet and know don’t really need to know about my sexuality, so they probably continue to think of me as a married straight guy, I think, but who really knows (or cares) what they are thinking; my interactions with them are all non-sexual anyway.

I enjoy rubbing bare chests and getting tangled up with the guys I wrestle, gay or straight, and enjoy watching the muscles ripple on the shirtless college kids I play racquetball with, but that isn’t a contact sport, so it is eye candy only. My wife seems to be happy with what we are doing right now, and is going to try another surgery to put her bladder back where it actually belongs some time next year. My life may not be perfect, or exactly what it authentically should have turned out to be if the world had been a different place back when I went through puberty, but it’s not bad, and not intolerable, just a bit queer. Like me.

 

The message I am trying to get across is that there is more than one way to deal with the derailed lives that many of us experienced when we were unfortunate enough to have grown up in the homophobic post-war 1950s and '60s. Today, kids have much more knowledge about sexuality in general, know it sooner, and see many more examples to observe to help understand and categorize themselves, as well as support groups to help them fit in where they feel like they belong. This site is mostly about helping them figure it out while they still have much of their life to live.

Those of us who are older don't have the same options or the time left to live them out if we did. It is pointless to go on a slash and burn campaign, wrecking things and lives left and right, to achieve a sociological Purity Of Essence and public authenticity for an olde pharte like me; almost nobody cares anyway. For someone who grew up in the 1980s or '90s, a better choice might be divorce and a long-term same-sex relationship for themselves and a new heterosexual relationship for their wife; it is up to them to make that decision; our role here is to inform them of their choices and the possible consequences which we have experienced, by displaying our lives as examples.

My closet door is now open to the people who really matter to me. It is pulled almost shut, but not locked, to the people who don't. I don't really care that much who knows, but I am not going to take a full-page color ad out in the local newspaper with a rainbow flag wrapped around my ass; anyone who wants to know can probably figure it out pretty easily, or they can ask me and I will tell them as best I can. My decision is to continue doing what I am currently doing as long as it works for me and my wife, enjoy what is left of my life, and do what little I can to help younger people enjoy a more accepting world than I found, and find their place in it. No regrets, just a recognition of the realities of my situation. Your mileage may vary, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, objects in mirror may be larger than they appear, etc.

 

The greatest stride you can make is to no longer need to be accepted by others, because you have accepted yourself and are at peace with it.