Stories Beget Stories

I've been thinking all day about the random snippets of stories that arose in the LC meeting last night. I've been thinking about how impossible it is to convey the story in the same way that we experience it, how we each live a different story and even when two are present at the same event, two stories often emerge in the recounting of the event.

I can't plug in a flash drive and download my experience into your experience. However many ways we're alike, that will always make us all "other." Language, culture, genetics . . . these might bind some of us, but push far enough, and you're going to find someone not "me" in the other person's skin.

I keep searching for ways to tell my coming out story so that it makes sense for those who are not gay. I can understand that. Try as I might, I don't quite understand what it means to be heterosexual. The problem in not fully understanding comes when we use that lack of understanding to prohibit one another just because we lack that understanding.

I think I mentioned the friend who took me seriously when I asked him when he first realized he was straight. Of course, he didn't have the same experience of "coming out" as straight as GLBT folk have, but as I talked about how, post-coming out, I could look back and make more sense of different events in my life, that triggered something for him. Of course he wouldn't have said "oh, I realized I was straight when . . . " but he did say, "you know, I think I must have been straight as a preschooler, too, because I remember thinking this one girl was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen and I couldn't stop looking at her."

I am so thankful for his taking my life and my story seriously enough to think about his own. How does someone know if one is gay or straight? Maybe we don't know how we know, but once we are able to name it, several things in life begins to line up and make sense. We begin so see patterns in our life that has to do with our attractions, which goes beyond body and sexual organs. I have great rapport with women, generally, I'm attracted to their company. In the same way, straight men are attracted to other men in the sense they often seek out spaces without women---sports bar, poker games, hunting trips. These attractions aren't sexual, but neither are they complementary. Straight men and women often speak of feeling like the opposite sex completes them, even as they also desire interaction with their own sex.

Gay men speak of seeking that sort of completeness with another man. Lesbians speak of finding a connection beyond physical with another woman. It doesn't "make sense" in the same way that you can say a man and a woman being completed by each other "makes sense." But if the world made sense, there wouldn't be a duckbill platypus, either.

Another way to describe what happens. I presume (and have observed) that there is am attraction between men and women that is just something that happens, isn't planned, isn't thought out. In the vast majority of cases, this is not acted upon in any physical way, it just is, and it may not even be acknowledged most of the time. At some point, this attraction can cross a line into lust or even obsession, but for the most part, it's just attraction.

So often, homosexual desire is dismissed with "that's not love, that's lust." Well, in some cases it may be lust, but for the most part, it's just attraction. In the course of a day, I'll see any number of men I find attractive, but I don't lust after them, I don't become obsessed with them, I certainly don't have sex with them. More often than not, it's a passing thought, "oh, he's handsome." I don't ever have that sort of passing thought about women, although I assume (and have observed) that straight men do. It's just attraction. It's how were wired. It's only as interesting or disturbing as you want to make it.

I've long since drifted into rambling, so I'll give it up for tonight. I guess what I'm saying is that "understanding" may be overrated and looking for similarities is useful only to a point. We share many things, but ultimately we're all different. I believe this is part of God's plan, maybe in part so that we can better relate to God, who is Really Different from us. And I guess I'm trying to say that while we're hardwired for attraction, our attractions are different. (Gentlemen prefer blondes---except for the ones who prefer brunettes. Or balding.) It seems really far fetched to say that attraction is neutral or even a gift from God, except when we don't understand the attraction or don't have the same attraction.

That's all. For tonight.