Lunch with my boss

He was a married man with 3 kids and still deeply in love with his wife, making him one of the more fortunate men in this world. It's rare that we have lunch together, just the two of us. Mostly there'd be other business people at the table. This time, however, we had no constraints on the topics we could cover, and somehow, through his mention of paedophilia among the clergy in Australia -- no, I'm not about to deal with that topic -- we drifted into homosexuality.

In the first place, when he mentioned paedophilia, what he had in mind was little-girls paedophilia, but I didn't know that, so when I took up the thread and spoke about the distinction between homosexuality and paedophilia, his reaction was, "Huh? Where have you gone off to?"

My mistake. I had to backtrack, and found to my pleasant surprise that for once, here was someone who could speak of paedophilia without an automatic association with homosexuality. Paedophilia didn't last long however.

"But now that we're on this topic," he said, "can I ask you a question?"

"Sure," I said, with a very good idea what kind of question was coming. No, no no, not whether I was gay. He knew that. I had made it clear previously.

"What makes you think you're gay?"

I knew it! The question.

I shan't recount the entire conversation here. It was two hours long, for God's sake. I intend to write about what I learnt. In the two hours, he moved from a vague awareness of homosexuality mixed with some muddled stereotypes to a better appreciation of what it means to be gay. For me, I thought it was most instructive to see the route he took. It made me more aware of the issues on a non-homophobic heterosexual's mind when he starts to think about gayness. It should help me get more directly to the point when I next have to talk about it to another heterosexual person.

His grappling with the subject went through 3 phases during the conversation. Behaviour, sex and love. I think we successfully navigated through them. I think we broke stereotypes of limp wrists and sex maniacs to end with a clear picture of how equal to theirs, our masculinity, our flirty eyes, our heartbreaks and our love can be.

1. Homosexuality is Behaviour

In the first part of our conversation, I realised that in his mind, he had a strong association between homosexuality and behaviour. It dawned on me only gradually. His opening question, "What makes you think you're gay?" came out of 2 related ideas (which I later figured out). One was that I might have over-labelled myself just because I have had sex with men. The second idea was that I did not give myself a chance to explore relationships with women.

If you think hard about it, you'd see that somewhere in the background behind these two vague ideas was the notion of choice, or changeability.

I don't waddle in such murky ideas. I go speedily to cleaning them up. And it's not difficult at all. You can point out the emerging facts: that homosexuality has been linked to genetic markers and to hormonal differences; that epidemiological studies have shown that homosexuality tends to run in families; that a virtual unanimity of gay and lesbian people report that they never chose to be gay, and that for all the decades of trying, there is no convincing data that anyone has successfully switched from homosexual to heterosexual. Increasingly, it is possible to see differences between children who later turn out to be gay, and those who turn out to be straight. All these go to show how deep-rooted sexual orientation is. We don't think we are gay. We discover we are gay.

Of course at this stage of knowledge, we can't detail the exact biological mechanisms that make us different. We can only point to the strong correlations as observed by scientific studies and some tentative explanations. But it is one thing to admit that no one knows the detailed explanation, it's quite another to say that therefore it is certainly a matter of choice. We know it is not choice. We just don't know why it is not choice.

I didn't have to get too far into the above argument with him. He was a thinking person with a scientific bent. Accepting what I said about genetic markers, running in families, and early onset even before one knows what it means to be gay, he was well equipped to interpret for himself that it was not a question of acquired behaviour.

Quite remarkably, he then answered his own doubts, by recalling some half-forgotten observation and asking me a rhetorical question. "Do you know, there are some men, they're big and strong, really macho, with hairy chests and all... and they're gay. Do you agree?"

"Yes, I do," I said. "And I don't know whether you've met any, but there are some effeminate men, but they're straight."

"That's right! They're straight."

"Yup."

"So you agree with me?" he asked again.

"Yes, I do. That's my point. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with behaviour. They're quite separate things."

He thought about it and agreed, "Yes, quite separate things."

But, if it's not essentially a form of behaviour, a "lifestyle" as so often called, then what is it, he wanted to know. What is it that defined us as gay? "To be homosexual means we have an erotic attraction towards other men," I said, carefully.

"Towards others of the same sex," he corrected me.

And with that we moved on to phase 2.

2. Homosexuality is Sex

The only major behavioural difference between the typical homosexual person and the typical heterosexual one is in sex. Sexual attraction to the same sex may sound terribly simple and easy to understand, to us who are homosexual, but I discovered that it was quite difficult for him to grasp. It took at least half an hour to shake off a lifetime of instincts -- well, actually, when I put it like that, maybe it was very easy for him after all! Half an hour to shake off a lifetime!

After going around in circles for a few minutes, mostly because I was speaking at an abstract level, I realised it would be more effective if I took each of those heterosexual instincts and disabused him of it. Let me recount the 'legs' episode.

"You walk into a restaurant," I said, "and your attention tends to go to the waitresses. Not all the waitresses, just the nice-looking ones. It's automatic. Your eyes home in on the visually appealing. 'Hmm, she's got nice legs', or 'Hmm, sweet face'."

"Yeah, so?"

"Well, we don't do that."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"We look at the guys."

"But the girls -- well, OK, not all the girls, I mean, some look like sagging bags -- but some girls have nice legs," he smiled as he said this, "you can't help but notice them."

"Right, I know, you go 'oooh', and a little 'ping' goes off in your brain," I said.

"It's not that I want to jump into bed with them immediately," he added urgently and a bit defensively.

"Of course not, but my point is that for a pure homosexual like me, there's never any 'ping' with girls' legs. Not even if she is completely naked in front of me."

Pause.

I had the feeling we were a bit stuck here, so I changed tack.

"Turn it around. Do you feel any impulse looking at guy's legs?" I asked.

"But men's legs are not attractive."

"Exactly," I said. "Your reaction to them is flat. There's absolutely no turn-on."

"None."

"That's what we feel with girls' legs. Flat. Boring."

"But how can men's legs be attractive?" he was still a little dumbfounded.

"Ask your wife."

Pause again.

"When we walk into a restaurant," I restarted, "our eyes go to the waiters. The nicer-looking ones catch our attention. If they're really nice, or they smile sweetly, the 'ping' hits."

It slowly sank in.

To summarise, what I found I had to do was to cut out this basic assumption that the instinctive feeling they, as men, have towards female attractiveness somehow applied to all men. If they continue to assume that we have the same instincts, then it's very easy to conclude that we are repressing these 'natural' feelings, and perverting them by looking at men. It is important to stress that we do not have, never ever had, such instincts. Not towards females at least. We have to stress that we are responding as naturally to our men-focussed instincts as they are reacting to their women-focussed ones. No repression of our natural instincts is involved.

The world is not divided into just men and women. Just because he as a man feels like this, does not mean all other men feel like this.

Having succeeded at this, I realised that I still had to disabuse him of another sex-related notion: that gay men find all other men attractive.

"Come on," I said, "wouldn't it be ridiculous if someone suggested that straight men like you found all, absolutely all, women sexually appealing, sagging bags notwithstanding?"

"No, in fact most women won't turn me on."

"Right, and most men won't turn me on."

"So how do you relate to them?" he asked.

"Why can't we be just friends?"

"What if he's gay?"

"So? We can be no more than friends. Just because someone is gay doesn't mean there must be any sexual attraction. Take a straight man and a straight woman, they're both heterosexual, does that by definition mean they must both be lusting after each other?"

"So gay men can be just friends with each other?" He wasn't really asking, just reinforcing something he had just learnt.

It's funny when you think about it. This sex thing has two, kind of contradictory, faces. One, which I covered earlier, is that we've repressed our natural (heterosexual) side, and the other, that we're sex fiends going after all other men!

3. Homosexuality is Love

He opened this topic by saying that there was still something special about a man and a woman. The love that they share can be so total and so rich, nothing in the world compares.

By now, I knew exactly where he was coming from and what I had to do. It was getting easy.

Heterosexuals have the idea that love is a male-female thing. That's the only experience they have. Furthermore, that's the only kind the media portrays. So it's unsurprising that they think that the apposing of a man and a woman is crucial to the blossoming of love.

It is not. Gay men fall madly in love too. So do lesbian women. And our relationships can mature to a lifetime of devotion. With an hour and a half of practice, I had a good idea how to convince him. I said, "Let me prove this to you. How? Let me tell you what love feels like, and you can judge whether it has the same quality as the love between you and your wife."

When you love someone, he's always there close to the forefront of your mind. You spontaneously think about him every now and then and you wonder how he is. The smallest things remind you of his quirks, and you know intimately what he likes. You see something you know he would love and you can't walk away without being very tempted to buy it for him. It could be a compact disc, or a joke book, or a kind of ginger tea. And when his face lights up on seeing it, it's all worth it. That's all it takes.

But when he's in trouble or hurt, you can't believe how much hurt you yourself feel. It pains you that he's in pain. You get angry when someone has slighted him, even when he doesn't seem that angry himself. You find yourself completely distracted when he's in a fix and you can't even concentrate on your own needs and your own tasks. You want to protect him, but sometimes it is not possible, and you're beside yourself with worry for him.

But he's also your comfort, security and joy. He's your best friend, and you do want to tell him everything about yourself, each day that passes. In real life, however, you don't, just as he doesn't tell you everything about himself. But even so, there's an understanding, that whatever it is that hasn't been told, you would understand. Unconditionally. In the final analysis, he'd be there for you and you'd be there for him.

You would put his interests above your own. Instinctively. You would give up the familiar, think nothing of it, move to the ends of the earth, if he needs you to. It's amazing how all the little things that we would have used to define ourselves, our likes and dislikes, our sentimental attachments, our loyalties, our religion even, somehow don't seem that essential anymore. He is at the centre of your life. Amazing. Not even you yourself. And talking about life, it's hard to imagine that there was once a time when he wasn't in it. Now, years on, it's hard to imagine what life would be without him.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

None

Addenda

None