ESSAY | LGBTQ+ | COMPANIONSHIP
More on Missing A Gay Man’s Mind
Gay men need the companionship and mental stimulation of other gay men
The congruence between my mind and that of my gay, third-world correspondent two generations younger is remarkable
Recently, I wrote an essay titled I Miss Another Gay Man’s Mind.
Gay men need the companionship and mental stimulation of other gay men,” in particular the ‘company of others of [our] kind.’
I am a decrepit, 73-year-old old-fart, an aging American Baby Boomer (1946–’64), born January 3rd, 1948, at the leading edge of my generation.
In gay cultural Hell
Sixteen years ago,
I wound up in a Deep-South region of the United States called Northwest Arkansas in a city called Fayetteville. This is rural, Ozark-Mountain country. Here there be Republican bubbas with open-carry permits and God in all His many brick-and-mortar manifestations and even a couple of virtual ones that broadcast daily over the airwaves. This country is home to some of the most conservative, right-wing, Republican religiosity I have ever had to endure.
I am an atheist, a very liberal Democrat, an urban-centric Northerner, a cosmopolitan Washingtonian, a veteran of 1970s San Francisco’s free love hedonism, a gay man, and an existentialist extraordinaire. I have never felt nor been so out of place. I have no business being here.
Coincidentally, yesterday, I received an email from a cherished correspondent that prompted me to revisit my essay with the intent to compare it to my correspondent’s letter. This essay is the result.
My correspondent is a young, 21-year-old, third-worlder, born February 29th, 2000, at the leading edge of the iGen generation (Gen Z) (1997–2012/15). He is a gay man possessed of unquestionable moral and ethical principles with an incredibly intellectual, seriously sophisticated mind.
He wrote,
I remember you once asked me about my personal experience as a gay man. I’ve read a little bit about yours, so it is only fair you also get to know mine. … I was born on [February 29th,] 2000, in [a city on a Third-World] continent, and raised in a small town, in the middle of nowhere. My parents are no intellectuals. They’re very much a product of their time and space. My father was especially so. They couldn’t have been any different.
I can be different, because I can self-analyze. I am capable of introspection. I am different because I am a product of my own thoughts, not a product of my environs or of my upbringing.
Despite our cultural, spatial, and temporal distances, he could not more perfectly have described me were he my official biographer who had set out to do so.
I was born in and raised for my first six years in Leoti (Lee oh’ ta), a small town in western Kansas in the middle of nowhere. It was so small that everyone knew everyone else and, more tellingly, everyone else’ business. I do not doubt that, despite our 52-year temporal and our cultural separation, my correspondent’s experience in his small Third-World town in the middle of nowhere is essentially identical to mine.
I am an INTP/J type on the Myers-Briggs personality index, which less than 3% of the population share. I denote that type with “P/J” because I am nearly equal P and J.
We are notably given, perhaps overly so, to introspective self-analysis. I have been since seventh grade. I am different from my parents and most of my generation “because I am a product of my own thoughts, not a product of my environs or of my upbringing.”
In my earlier essay, I wrote,
I miss the shared knowledge and implicit understanding of what it meant to have been forced into the closet from an early age because one believed that he was anathema to his family, was a perversion of God’s plan, and was a rude stain on His otherwise pristine landscape. However accepting, however caring and concerned, however empathetic, the straight mind is simply unable to comprehend the magnitude and lasting effect of the psychological injury that does to one.
My young, iGen correspondent wrote,
[W]e violate social orthodoxy by showing sexual interest for members of our own gender. By definition, we’re homosexuals. By extension, we’re outlaws.
We go against the laws of all major Western religions. We are at odds with the common definition of family. Even the laws of nature, which privileges male-female copulation, seem to contradict our very existence. … The shame that the realization of my own homosexuality brought upon me was unbearable. I was raised to despise queer people, and I held nothing but contempt for those who did not behave according to the norms. To be honest, in a way, I still stigmatize effeminate men.
With the exception that his is the more erudite and sophisticated phrasing, we tell the same story. We write about and carry the same stigma. Our experiences and thinking could not be more congruent.
It is the gay mind of his type that I miss.
I miss the touch of a mind like my gay young correspondent’s mind even if but remote through email
When I wrote in my earlier essay that gay men “need the companionship and mental stimulation of other gay men,” that we need the “company of others of [our] kind,” I did not have my email relationship with him in mind.
Rather, I had in mind an in-person relationship.
Email, however revealing, however personal, however open, approaches neither the intimacy nor the symbiotic energy deriving from close, personal presence. It is the spontaneity and interaction of two like minds in each other’s intimate company that I find so gratifying.
I had just enjoyed a two-hour luncheon with Bradley, a gay man born in 1964 at the very tail edge of the Baby Boomer generation. Some 30-odd years ago, he was a friend of Loy, my partner, lover, and best friend. He came to live with us here in Fayetteville for two or three years. Bradley, Fayetteville born and raised but now a Dallas resident, had come to town for three days to help his father in his grief at the loss of his wife, Bradley’s mother. He took time out to reunite with me over lunch.
Our discussion ranged from reminiscences to the state of “gaydom” in Fayetteville and Dallas to the current political scene. We talked of his current partner and my now dead one. I knew what it is for him to love another man so completely. He knew what it was for me to have had and lost a soulmate so perfectly attuned to me that we finished each other’s sentences. We each knew what the other had endured as he negotiated life in an un-accepting at best, condemnatory at the worst, straight world. As we sat there, we each felt the other’s experiential influences and knew them because they were our own.
It was on his departure that the realization that I miss the in-person interaction with another gay man’s mind that is of an equal capacity and disposition to mine struck me with flash-flood force.
Even though my cherished, gay, young correspondent and I will never know the satisfaction and reward that come from
the intimacy [and] … symbiotic energy deriving from close, personal presence, [nor] the spontaneity and interaction of two like minds in each other’s intimate company,
I nevertheless hold dear the virtual relationship we have through our email posts.
It is the touch of his mind and minds like his and the dynamism rising like a Phoenix from the keenness of an in-person touch of a mind like Bradley’s that I miss.
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