Is being Gay my whole personality? Or Not? Also, a lot of biographical info on me.
Discussing a question of whether we are different. Please breath in and out if you are getting upset.
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I came out in 1975 at the age of 25 and graduated in 1978 with my masters degree in Chem. Eng. and started a career in semiconductor processing, making microchips, ending in 2017.
When I was in high school in 1967 to 1970 (9th to 12th grade) I wasn’t dating and just poured myself into reading and study. On the Iowa Test combined test scores, I was usually in the top 1%. Our high school had an annual Christmas celebration where each student was given away as a gift. For example, the teacher whose last name was Bernard was given away as a St. Bernard. I was given away as the “Walking Encyclopedia.”
When I was in college having read several histories of Western Civilization, I went to the book store and purchased the “History of Eastern Civilizations.” I figured there much be such a book.
I wasn’t socialized much, since I was isolated. I chose chemical engineering over chemistry as a major since I wanted to have a career which didn’t rely on me able to do office politics and would provide financial security so I could be completely independent. Though I got A’s in art and teachers would save my drawings as examples, I didn’t think that was a career. Being Gay, was being alone, and I was going to make sure that I could be alone and financially secure and not dependent on others or office politics which I assumed would not be good at.
After I came out my interest in ancient history just stopped. In college I had been a double major in chemical engineering and ancient history. I graduated with 5 ½ years’ worth of credits. To graduate I needed 192 credits and I had 254 in just four years. I had been seriously interested in ancient history and continued reading and buying academic level books after I graduated.
But after coming out my interest in ancient history stopped. Some of it was that I was suddenly putting a lot of energy into learning Gay life and also doing Gay studies, but I also think that studying the ancient world had been a way of escaping the present world. I actually owned the volumes of Theodore Mommsen’s Provinces of the Roman Empire and was going to read it. Never did.
I found that the famous author Andre’ Gide, in his novel, “The Counterfeiter,” had his protagonist starting to read about the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire just when he was beginning to move to coming out. I was doing exactly the same.
My interest in science fiction dropped off quickly. I no longer needed to live in alien worlds to escape, I was suddenly living on planet earth, and not needing to live in alien worlds.
Suddenly, being actively Gay was changing who I was a great deal. Science fiction and ancient history was a big part of who I was. I didn’t realize it until about a few years later that I had stopped reading ancient history and science fiction.
I had stopped reading obscure and esoteric literature of the Decadent writers of the early 20th century. I didn’t finish reading “The Castle of Argol,” a surrealistic demonic Gothic horror with Hegelian ideas. I had bought but never read “Caliph Vathek.” From what I was reading, I was having dreams that were like being in electrical storms. I think my subconscious was beating on the door telling me to come out of the closet.
Though I lost old worlds I gained new worlds. I was meeting people from all sorts of social strata, races, political views, groups, etc. Since you are just 3% of the population, need to have a safe space to meet each other, you go to a bar and there will be a much wider range of people than you grew up with, that lived in your neighborhood, worked at your place of employment. You are socializing and dating and fucking with a much wider range of people than you would if you were straight.
I was able to go into semiconductor processing by going back to school after working a couple years and get my Masters Degree at U.C. Berkeley in Chem. Eng. I wasn’t married and I didn’t have children and so I had the flexibility to do so.
Of course, straight guys can go back to school and get a masters or do some of these things which I will mention in this essay. Usually though, they have gotten kids and have expenses and need to go to classes in the evenings and it will be majors that are the type that given in evening classes at a local university.
My biography needs to be looked at in aggregate. Sometimes it is just a matter that the likelihood that a straight guy would be able to do something is less likely. Some of my fellow graduates had in two or three years after graduation one or two children and a wife who would have needed to approve of radical life changes. It not impossible that the straight guy might choose to go back to school with a wife and a child, but it is less likely. Not all straight guys get married when they graduate form school so some might be able. Again, sometimes the difference between being Gay and straight is just probabilities. However, probabilities accumulate.
When I came out in 1975, I decided to not be closeted ever. During the 1980s I was on the cover of the San Jose Mercury News Sunday Magazine as the cover photo for an article on Gays in Silicon Valley. Being Gay taught me courage.
Living in San Francisco I was able to date people from all sorts of racial, class, cultural backgrounds. I learned a lot of things from being in contact with so many different types of people. This is because Gay culture is more fluid and doesn’t have social barriers to dating people from different backgrounds and is more sexually active so you would meet more people from different backgrounds.
Being an activist for Gay liberation in San Francisco, I met a lot of people with very different points of view, and radical points of view. I didn’t necessarily adopt their viewpoints, but I realize that I didn’t really do critical thinking, but just adopted ideas from the newspaper Sunday supplement, national magazines, and books without questioning.
For example, a Trotskyist, told me, “Ed, the liberal idea against prejudice is that people are all basically the same, and so should be treated the same. The radical idea is that people can be different and still should be treated fairly.”
I had never really thought about what was the basis of my being against prejudice other than feelings. I don’t want to discuss this specific issue, but I give this as an example of how I was driven to think more critically.
It prepared me to be able to ask critical questions and to see things later in my research.
I also integrated the Gay bars which had discriminated against Asians. The entire Gay and Lesbian Democratic establishment worked to undermine and sabotage my efforts. I learned a lot about how politics and racism really works in society. Afterwards I always had a skeptical eye on the Democrats and liberals.
I also have had two houses restored.
I meet my first and second lover in the Gay bars. They came from very different social backgrounds than me. I doubt that I would have ever met and dated from such different backgrounds if I was straight. In straight life you have family and relatives and people in your social strata working to get you together with someone. You would not be having sex with as many different people as a Gay person who is meeting many more people and a wider range of people.
The chances of me having an African American Muslim side boyfriend would be zero. The chance of me having a side anything as a straight person would be very low.
As a Gay person you will be living one life in the general world, but to meet people, to get support, to have a social life with others like yourself you will also be living in the Gay community to some extent. Gays exist in two worlds, which is a factor of difference.
I can do cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and ironing, without fear or thought of whether it is woman’s work or man’s work. If I don’t do it, who will? More broadly, my life choices are affected by whether it is masculine or feminine to do something. I don’t even think of it. I do what I want to do.
In 1992 I started researching the neo-Confederate movement becoming a subject expert contacted by media and helped bring both the movement and monuments down. I learned skills and became a cultural geographer, mostly dealing with nationalism and historical memory. Eventually I was a co-editor of academic university press books and articles published in academic peer-reviewed journals. There was some element of danger in researching this group being that they were homophobic and racists.
Not having Children has given me time to do this. Nor did I have to worry about the safety of a wife and children or a wife’s concern over safety.
Now I just spend half my time on investigating local history which is going to have local and national impact. I have a chapter for an anthology which has been sent out and I have agreed to produce a university press biography.
Locally I am a respected historical researcher with amazing finds. What made this possible was that I have time because I didn't have kids since I am homosexual. I had the economic wherewithal to do research and not be bogged down with students. My fellow colleagues in history struggle to do research since they have students and their children to deal with.
Of course a straight man might avoid having children. How, that might work over decades and still have sexual life might be challenging.
Being Gay gave me time to do so many things and learn being an activist, to do research, a university press published author, peer reviewed academic journals, fixing houses, reading. Keep up with the scientific press.
So is being Gay my whole personality, or not?
So, in one sense being Gay is now limited to just writing my Gay newsletter, and watching some Gay movies. It is maybe half of my time; the other half goes into my historical research.
But in another sense much of who I am, much of my reputation as an investigative historian shaking up history, is due to my being Gay and having time to do the things I did, and because I had social contact and sex with people from many different backgrounds giving me a broader view of life. So, in another sense, being Gay is most of me, even when I read Quanta magazine to learn about developments in mathematics and quantum mechanics and biology and cosmology it relates to me being Gay, because I have had time to keep up with science since the 1970s.
Because I didn't have children as a Gay person, because pregnancy isn't a thing for Gays and I wasn't existing in a matrix of heterosexual customs and social forms pushing me to have children, I was able to live a Gay life and meet people from a very wide range of people.
So how much myself is Gay is really not a question that can be answered. The circumstances of being Gay is so intertwoven with other parts my life it is really not possible to seperate it into parts, components, fractions or percentages.
So no, being Gay doesn't mean you have to put color in your hair, but in being Gay you will have different life trajectories. Hopefully you aren't wasting the opportunity of being Gay.
It really isn’t something worth devoting much time to wondering how much my identity is Gay since it won’t benefit me in anyway. I do the review of the question here since it seems to be a hobgoblin for many Gays.
Also, your being Gay doesn’t have to be like how I am being Gay. Maybe you were part of developing the forms of music at circuit parties by attending circuit parties and that is doing something also. But it was made possible because you weren’t part of the usual life cycles of being straight.
Maybe it will be that you will have more time to appreciate sunsets, it doesn’t have to be utilitarian or relentlessly accomplishment oriented like me.
Not every impact on me because I was Gay will be applicable to all Gays. There will be impacts because a person is Gay for others that doesn’t apply to me.
So, what part of me is being Gay? It depends on how you look at it. If you look at my life trajectories most of it, if you simply look at the time I allocate to activities now it is some, but not everything. If you look at the way I dress, not much Gay at all if any.
As far as I can tell, I wasn’t anything innately because I was Gay, but circumstances of being Gay led to it having a major impact in my life.
Of course, how I am being Gay will not be how you will be Gay, and the circumstances of being Gay will result in many different life trajectories for many different people. However, that fact that you are Gay will have mean you will have a trajectory in life which to a large extent will be because you are Gay.
I think that when we are fearful of being Gay. Or we are concerned with the question of whether being “Gay is my whole personality,” we are thinking of the question wrongly and we are missing out. Further there is a tendency with this type of fear to want to assimilate as much as possible be be as little different as possible.
With this fear we aren’t thinking of what opportunities and paths we can choose because we are Gay. We aren’t cultivating our lives and developing them for our own benefit. We aren’t considering what we might do, might choose, because of that fear.
I understand the fear of the statement “Being Gay isn’t my whole personality,” it is the fear of losing yourself. It like some horror where the person discovers they are an alien or they are going to become one or transform into a vampire or zombie or they are subject to mind control of some monster. Closeted H.P. Lovecraft has this fear in his novella, “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx
Some Gays are afraid that if they aren’t zealously policing themselves whey will become fems or lose their masculinity and that if some other Gay person isn’t living up to certain standards of masculinity it aggravates these fears. It must be really tiring.
I say to these Gays, relax, live your life. No one is going to force you to wear nail polish, or not to either.
Gays will be quite to pick up on Gays who adopted exaggerated masculinities due to fears, and they will make comments, but live with it. Or choose to live your life without fears.
After having society trying to press you to be something that is not who you are, of course Gays are going to be really hostile to any social force which wants to push you, make you conform to be this or that. After fighting for your identity, you are going to guard it zealously. You will resent being pushed into being something, particularly stereotypes.
When I first came out, a fellow student, a woman, asked me what I thought of her new perfume, this wasn’t the type of question she would have asked before. I said, “It was wonderful, it reminds me of my grandmother.” No such questions were ever asked again of me by her.
Over the years I have heard the statement, “You don’t seem Gay.” My response is, “The Supreme Gay Council is threatening to decertify me.”
There are Gays who when they come out, they do put color in their hair and do all sorts of things which they imagine to be “Gay.” I don’t begrudge them this. They have lived compressed in the closet and they need to feel their freedom and express this. We should just let them do it.
Others want to work to strengthen their sense of being Gay and in particular not feel bad and have a sense of self-worth as a Gay person. If they need to wear a rainbow, that is fine. In some cases to have group cohesion and a sense of solidarity they will adopt behaviors or dress or something to have the sense of a supportive group. Fraternities, religious groups, nations, clubs, all have their traditions and special things they do to affirm their identity. Is it really a problem beyond someone worry what the straight people will think?
It does annoy me when what is adopted as group practice seems to derive from stereotypes, some anti-Gay, and I am not a believer in the coopting talk and narratives which I think is a cover, but maybe that is how some Gays have to persist. I have enough confidence and strength in being Gay that I am not going to fracture and get upset.
Gays come out of all sorts of situations and have all sorts of cultural and social ideas on how to process an event or development or situation in their lives.
None of their behaviors are contagious and don’t worry what the straight people might think. Those that think, don’t use stereotypes and those that conceptualize based on one or two people or stereotypes don’t think anyways.
It would help the Gay community out is we weren’t so quick to judge other Gays.
Also, there are some Gays who do think there is some metric for being Gay and that is annoying. Don’t reject things because you feel it is being pushed on you. Further, don’t react to these pushes to be or do something in opposition, to do or be something that actually wouldn’t have been your choice otherwise.
I discuss all this since I wish to point out that as Gays, we will have different life trajectories given the circumstances of being Gay. This means different opportunities which we won’t be able to pursue if we refuse to acknowledge difference resulting from circumstances and we will have different needs which we won’t be able to fulfil if we don’t recognize their existence.
I want to release us from the prison of fear of being different.
This essay is part of me developing my thoughts for a book on being Gay.
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