(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Yes, We All Are LGBTQ & I Don't Mean That Metaphorically! [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-11 As a teenager, despite dire warnings from my parents and church, I was a musician who loved secular rock and roll music. I also loved Christian rock. I was a minor when I lucked into a job as a venue roadie for major concert tours. Imagine my joy mixed with puzzlement and consternation when I was onstage kneeling on the floor taping down mic cables and Sir Elton John himself came up behind me, put his hand gently on my butt and said, “Child, I don’t want you anywhere in my sightline during the show.” The grinning maestro explained I was a “cute morsel” and “too distracting” for a performer to be seeing while twirling around on a rocket piano. I took it as a compliment but was also scared, having been programmed by my religion that homosexuality was evil. I told him I was religious, I only like girls. He replied, “Honey, if you’re not bisexual, you’re missing half the fun.” Sir Elton’s comment echoes in my mind to this day, because I’ve realized I am able to see the physical attractiveness and sexual power of men and women, and at times have felt attracted, although not in the same way, to both. When at age nine my testosterone boost took place, every girl was a magnet, a creature I desired with physical hunger so strong it frightened me. It was pure animal desire, driven by hormones and pheromones. Even the sight of a woman in a catalogue wearing lingerie was enough to torment me for days. The whole time I was worried about what Jesus said, “He who looks on a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery.” Our church warned us of all sins Jesus and the Bible warned about, but sexual desire seemed to be near the top of their scare list. I’ve never felt any animal hunger for males like I always feel for females, so early on assumed I was 100% heterosexual. But I noticed as I got into my 20s that although I hungrily craved women’s bodies, I had a much easier time being emotionally secure and bonded with men. The pariah comedian Louis C.K. and other comedians often explore in their comedy an attraction to the same sex that did include sexual feelings. Louis well describes his conflicting emotions about fantasizing about having sex with men. What troubled me is I found men to be far easier to get along with, chill with, communicate with, trust…and sometimes that translated into physical affection, such as long hugs. On the athletic field, we slapped each other on the butts. In the shower, we discussed each other’s genitals. I found myself seeing other guys the way girls see them, recognizing Nature’s art in the sculpting of their face, the raw power of the young, supremely fit male body. Was this gay-adjacent? For someone raised in the most fear-based Christian church ever, it sure as hell seemed like it and I was very afraid. Incidents keep happening that made me more worried. Several times when getting sports massage from male masseuses, I became aroused. Did this mean I was gay or bi? One masseuse noticed this and offered a happy ending. I declined, but am rather sure that if I had consented, the ending would indeed have been “happy,” lol. To further blur the lines I’d been told not to cross, I was waiting for a major concert event venue to open so I could go work backstage. I was in Piedmont Park in Atlanta, sitting on a bench. A beautiful, statuesque woman came up, sat down, told me I was cute, asked if I wanted to go to her condo. Despite my Christian programming, I did what most teenaged boys would do. I went. Back at the condo, I felt “blessed” that a beautiful adult woman wanted me. We got into a hot and heavy make-out session. All circuits were go, spaceship ready for launch. But then…my hand felt something that was not supposed to be there. Shocked, I jumped off the couch and stood there shaking with fear. The beautiful adult lady, who turned out to be a man in women’s clothes who presented as female, laughed at me in a kind manner, attempting to coax me back into the lustful petting we’d been doing. But I was terrified. Not just because I was a little kid in a condo with a large, fit adult male stranger who wanted me sexually but had baited me by presenting as female, but because I had been fully aroused by him when I thought he was a woman. A few years later, during a phase in which I was kicked out of my church for sinful behavior, my girlfriend convinced me to try a threesome, but not with her and another woman, which would have been my preference, but with her, me, and some other guy. He came over to our apartment and seemed nice and handsome, but I could tell she had said the same thing to him as to me, and he had only consented to have me in the room so he could have sex with her. Along with that, I had zero desire, but instead had physical and spiritual revulsion, at the idea of taking off my clothes and lying next to or, God forbid, sexually caressing another man. The evening ended with all of us being extremely uncomfortable and embarrassed. And when I realized my girlfriend wanted to be “serviced” by two men, and to watch two men have sex, I cast her out of my life. I also recall another girlfriend who presented as rabidly heterosexual, but came home from a bikini wax appointment to confess the bikini wax girl had turned her on and they had sex. She claimed it was her “first time” with a female, and would never do it again. What was funny is she started getting a lot more bikini waxes, even when she didn’t need them, because it was winter and nobody sane was wearing bikinis. Pretty soon, she admitted to me she had fallen in love with the bikini wax girl. She got rid of me! In recent years with the rise of transgenderism and LGBTQ rights, I notice many transgender people are sexually attractive and have lovely personalities. For me, sexual desire is now not so animalistic, but must have an emotional compatibility component. For example, no matter how physically attractive a woman is, if I have nothing in common with her and she is only interesting to me because of her body and face, I don’t want sex with her because it would be shallow, meaningless, boring. Sex without “love” is totally unsatisfying if not impossible, at least for me. The conflicted feelings I have about what is probably a latent, suppressed bisexuality or homosexuality that exists in most if not all humans partly explains the virulent hate spewed by Republicans and religious zealots against LGBTQ. They most fear what they most desire, especially forbidden desires, desires you’re “not supposed” to have. Desire unrequited turns to hate. They hate the fact that they have feelings for men and women. That they see the beauty of both genders. That they respond with arousal or even heartfelt near-love or romantic affection to the touch of someone of the same sex. Especially if they are programmed like I was by the Bible, which makes clear in both the Old and New Testament that God sees homosexuality as an abomination, any feeling that tiptoes towards that “sin” creates terrible self-hatred, can lead to hatred of those who are the object of the sinful feelings. Of course, many LGBTQ haters are just close-minded, bizarre, anti-body, anti-sensual people who are afraid of any type of “others.” They hate LGBTQ for some of the same reasons they hate immigrants, people of different races, cultures, religions, people who think differently than them. But I’m pretty sure that as we’ve seen repeatedly, such as the case of megachurch LGBTQ-hating pastor Ted Haggard who was revealed to be a meth-head bisexual with a boy toy on the side, many of these LGBTQ haters are closet cases. If they could only be honest with themselves, they might be trans, gay, bi, whatever. They’d lose the hate, and have more fun. One thing for sure—when you see politicians, conservative media pundits, and their followers whose main outrage, given all the other problems of the world, is that LGBTQ people exist, you are seeing a complex pathology that starts with the fact that almost all of us are potentially bisexual. Folks just can’t handle their feelings, so they lash out, hoping to purge the troubling objects of desire from their world, so they don’t have to feel guilty about their own deeply-repressed longings and tendencies. As with the stupidity of racism, given that all of us came from the same African parental line, it’s stupid to hate people because their sexuality is different from or more expansive than ours. But stupid is as stupid does, and one thing you can always say about the MAGA/GOP and other LGBTQ-phobes around the world, such as Vladdy Putin, is that they are walling themselves off from their true selves while also seeking to deny others the right to be their true selves. And in this, they are interpersonal fascists. Unacceptable, dangerous, missing out on romance, hot sex, personal authenticity. And just plain dumb. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/6/11/2174681/-Yes-We-All-Are-LGBTQ-I-Don-t-Mean-That-Metaphorically Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/