Gay Myth #2 - 'Gay Lifestyle' (Part II)

After reading my last blog entry, where I depicted a fictional 'gay lifestyle' jam-packed with the juicy encounters of a rather promiscuous drama queen, a friend of mine shared a fitting analogy with me comparing the 'gay lifestyle' to the 'straight lifestyle'. He said, "to generalize gays like that means that we should use Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras to show what the heterosexual lifestyle is. I mean, we all know that women flash their breasts all the time to attract mates, right? And wet t-shirt contests are regular events at the Community Pool". Right? Exactly.

Clearly these elements exist in the 'straight world', and are even celebrated to a degree by society with lusty wistfulness as a right of passage for our virile youth, and a fleeting carnal excursion for heteroveterans who can get away with it. As such, it would never be suggested that this is representative of the 'straight lifestyle' at large - except perhaps by puritanical extremists. It is simply seen for what it is... an outlandish diversion from the confines of the cultural shackles we as a society place upon ourselves.

Yet for gays... images of flamboyancy and promiscuity are often taken out of context from festivals, parades, and yes... Gay Mardi Gras, to label us as if this is how we live our lives on a daily basis. This imagery is held up as evidence of our debauchery - a beacon of our perversion - and serves as fodder for moral judgment and discrimination. It's a caricature to which we are all compared, yet is as foreign and uncomfortable to many gays as Mardi Gras (or Spring Break, or... name your sextravaganza...) is to straights.

So back to the basic question... what is the 'gay lifestyle'? As promised in my last blog entry, I will now share the sordid details of my lifestyle... a 'gay in the life', so to speak.

I have a good job at a very large U.S. corporation, as does the love of my life and partner of 15 years, David. As dual-income white collar workers with no kids (the protypical DINKS), we are blessed with a lifestyle that allows us to travel to exotic places a couple times a year, and to dine out at fine restaurants on a regular basis (almost every Friday / Saturday night). We live in a two-story home in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, on a beautiful wooded property that is host to an abundance of wildlife. We love to barbecue on the weekends when the weather is nice, and we enjoy spending time with friends and family. Given our penchant for fine dining, we have really focused in recent years on trying to eat healthier when we go out, and to spend more time exercising so we can stay in shape.

We are good friends with another gay couple in the NW suburbs, and make a point to go into the city on a semi-regular basis - maybe once every other month - more frequently in the summer. On these nights, we often have dinner at a nice downtown restaurant and then hit the bars in Boystown afterwards. David doesn't drink, so he has the honor of being designated driver for the four of us - a duty that requires supreme patience and will ultimately earn him sainthood, I'm sure. Depending on our mood, we sometimes skip Boystown altogether. Other times, we might not get home until four in the morning - with a stop at White Castle or for fried egg cheeseburgers and greasy hashbrowns at the 24 Hour Diner on Irving Park. It kind of depends on how the night rolls.

We've traveled with these same friends on a couple of occasions - once to the Riviera Maya, where we enjoyed scuba diving and lots of beach action - and once on a gay cruise, where we also enjoyed scuba diving, lots of beach action, and quality time with a few thousand of our closest gay and lesbian friends. At first, we were worried that going on a gay cruise would be akin to being stuck for 7 days in a gay techno bar - imagine non-stop techno beats and mobs of shirtless guys gyrating in a mass of sexual energy - fun for a night out, but a whole week's worth? In actuality, it turned out to be a lot of fun, with enough variety to please just about everyone on board the ship. There were gays of all descriptions, from young hunky singles looking for action to long-term couples looking for sun and relaxation. To be frank... while we leaned more toward the latter description, I personally had a lot of fun joining some of the more outrageous events (like the underwear party) that I never would consider doing in Chicago. It was a harmless diversion that was SOOO out of character for me!

We are also very good friends with a gay couple from Sacramento. David had known them long before he and I met, and once David and I got together, we instantly became dear friends as couples. We've traveled all over the world together, including Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Italy, Thailand, and China. We'll be heading back to Hawaii (Kauaii) in just a couple weeks as a matter of fact - and we hope to plan trips to Peru and South Africa in the next couple years. A typical vacation for us includes frenetic sight seeing, shopping, and an inordinant amount of picture-taking by day, fine dining by night, and as much bridge (yes... the card game) as we can possibly squeeze in. We usually try to work in one trip to a local gay bar, just to see what it's like, but that's about it. We've been doing this for 15 years, and I fully expect we'll continue to do it for many, many more.

I have also kept in very close touch with a few good friends from high school, and have upheld an annual tradition of camping and stream-fishing with one of my friends for almost 25 years. Our trips started in high school with about a half-dozen or so teenagers braving the wilderness in the cool pines of Eastern Arizona, but over the years it's dwindled to just the two of us. In recent years my brother-in-law has gone too. My friend is straight - as is of course, my brother in law - and no... I hate to disappoint, but there is no Brokeback Mountain action. We really camp and fish all week, and I love every minute of it.

As for the rest of my 'gay lifestyle', there's not much more to tell. I work too hard and travel a lot for my job. I try to run as often as I can (today was about 7 miles), and I love to play basketball (all 5'7" of me). I'm a huge Phoenix Suns fan, but just couldn't bear to watch this season. And I'm glad I didn't!

So there you have it. For those of you who have never had the 'inside scoop' on a real gay lifestyle, well now you have. I just described one gay lifestyle... mine. If you would like to hear another, you'll have to ask another gay person or couple and I'm sure it will be very different. That's the point of this blog. We are not caricatures or stereotypes, we are real people with real lives.

When I started part one of this blog, I mentioned that the problem with the notion of a 'gay lifestyle' is three-fold:

1. It is based on the premise that there is a ‘gay lifestyle’, and that there is something inherently wrong with it
2. It creates the illusion that one’s sexuality somehow defines one’s way of life, and
3. It leads to the false conclusion that being gay is OK, but accepting that you are gay is not

I think I've addressed item number one. There is no 'gay lifestyle', just as there is no 'straight lifestyle'. Plain and simple. I've said it before, and I'll say it again... we are as diverse as society itself.

I think I've also addressed item number two - albeit indirectly. While there is a relationship between an individual's sexuality and his or her lifestyle, it is not unique to being gay. Every human being on the planet has choices to make about whether to be promiscuous, chaste, or somewhere in between. For most humans, the sexual drive evolves over a lifetime, as does one's sexual behaviors. Someone who is a complete horn-dog in his or her youth can evolve to be happily monogamous in later life. And vice-versa. The point is that this has nothing to do with being gay or straight. It is simply a matter of being human.

The third point is much deeper from my perspective, and has very serious implications. I'll spend more time on this in an upcoming blog, but for now suffice it to say that this misconception is a primary source of pain - even agony - for many LGBT people struggling with sexual identity. In many ways we've been 'reprieved' by a growing acceptance that we don't choose to be gay, yet we are still held accountable for 'choosing' to live a gay lifestyle. The inference is that to be accepted in society, we should deny who we are in order to conform to societal expectations. It forces us to choose between personal happiness and fulfillment, and a lifetime of denial and deception. There is no salvation in denying your true self. More to come on this later.

As a final thought for this blog entry, I'll share with you my own view of the caricature I described earlier. Much like the wistful allure Mardi Gras holds on some in mainstream hetero-society... the unabashed flamboyancy of an out and proud queen has a similar effect on me. While I have not spent much if any time in that (outlandish) world, it represents to me a freedom of spirit, courage, and self-acceptance that I can only admire. I do not and will not judge, because I think there is a little bit of pink in all of us - it just shows through some more strongly than others. Ironically, I actually do have a box full of pink feather boas in my basement - a story for another time - but perhaps it's a sign that it's not as foreign to me as I like to think. ; )