First, it should be noted that everyone has prejudice.

Pre=before, judice=Judgement. Judging a thing before you know everything about it. This includes agism, racism, sexism, homophobia -- but also any generalization or prediction.

It is human nature to make generalizations -- and it's for the good, too. If you see a sabre-toothed tiger coming at you, it's best not to spend too much time diving its intent before running.

You have pre-judged the tiger.

However -- if, while running, you see a stop light and STOP -- you've let the generalization"Red Lights Must Be Obeyed" rule you. Generalization, at best, is a tool to allow us to shortcut decision-making processes -- but we need to understand that they are there, and are sometimes wrong, and set them aside when they are not helpful.

So here's my story:

When I was a teenager coming to terms with my sexuality I had some funny ideas, largely because all I knew about being gay was from Penthouse jokes and risqué vaudeville routines my grandfather performed at the annual town talent show.

I thought that to be gay was to be nelly, to have a life that wasony about sex,and to do disgusting things in the bedroom. Love,d ating, commitment, home, family -- all these were absent in my view of the meaning of "gay".

So imagine my burgeoning horror as I found myself with an attribute or two that, in the eyes of my community, damn me to gayness.

To begin with, I wasn't into sports or competitive games. Team play was beyond me. In 4th grade I had speech therapy for a minor (lateral) lisp -- that still comes back when I'm tired. I sound like Wallace Shawn as the Sicillian in Princess Bride. I grew up in books in a time and a place where if I wasn't about baseball and girls I was likely a queer.

Of course, more damning was my attraction to boys.

There was some confusion around that, as I'd fall in love -- something unadressed in the Cannon of Gayness in rural Maine. On the first day of kindergarten, I recall, I chose the cutest boy on the playground to be my best friend. And we were, for many years.

Ah, such innocence.

Later, as body and mind matured, I pondered sex.

I remember being a bit high-strung about it, as I suppose most adolescents are. Fromt he first time I conceived of the notion (probably from overhearing a careless epithet), I remember wanting desperately to experience a penis in my mouth.

Yet I refused to face the specter of gayness. I knew I wasn't a nelly old queen. And I refused to grow into one.

I formed bizarre theories -- "If you're into dick, of course you have to be with a man, but if you're into butt, you should be with a woman." (This theory was shattered by an erotic dream in which I made love to my crush at the time, and I for the first time "got" that loving and being attracted to the person makes a difference.)

Many of my theories of love and sex were doomed to be dashed -- though one nearly killed me. But that's another story.

I eventually started to hear of a thing called "Bi" and I latched myself onto it. This was a way to not be gay.

I never quite got around to looking at whether it was accurate -- but I started responding to taunts from bullies about my "faggy long hair" and such with, "but I'm Bi."

Oddly, that shut them up. Probably more because I was responding openly rather than cringing and denying.

Life progressed,a nd despite some dabbling and fumbling, I had yet to really explore my sexual reality until my senior year.

One day (this would be '88), a friend approached me with an odd offer.

His name was Gabe. Gabe Montanaro. Watch that name, you'll see it in credits one day.

I had a huge crush on him at the time. On him and his whole damned happy, hippie show-biz family. Turns out his mom is a councilor, and was to be attending a conference on gay and lesbian youth in Portland (The City). She had asked Gabe to invite along and Gay friends he had. He asked ME.

In my head, a small war raged on, in a matter of seconds.

On one side, I wanted to deny any gayness and yell at him for making that assumption. Never mind that I'd nibbled his ear and pretty much made my crush apparent. On the other -- I *really* wanted to go to the conference. Badly.

One side won, and resoundingly, and I said, "Yes, I'd love to go."

So that weekend I drove with his mother to Portland, and we sat and watched a panel discussion of the problems of Gay Youth. I have NO recollection of whether it was good or bad or waht. But I was in the room with ACTUAL gay people -- who weren't drag queens, diseased, ashamed, in-your-face, depressed, on drugs, or ANYTHING I had come to expect. They had interests and talents that had nothing to do with their gayness. They had jobs, went to school, and DATED. They fell in LOVE.

My world shifted.

And ... the guy in the middle was cute. Sweet, even-toned, and cute. May a LITTLE femmy, but not much.

After the panel, I went up to talk to him. We chatted about something, and when it was time to go, I opted to stay a while, and Mike (that was him) promised to drive me home.

Woo! I was about to hang out with gay people!

I was TERRIFIED!

I was afraid I wouldn't be gay enough -- that there was a secret handshake or code word I wouldn't know. I was afraid that there'd be scary drugs and sex the second I left neutral territory. I was afraid I'd be raped, killed, or turned into a drag queen.

I was afraid they wouldn't like me.

I imagine we went to dinner or had coffee or something, but we wound up at the home of a friend of Mike's, and we sat in the living room and listened to music and talked. There were other people there, I'm sure, but I don't remember them, somehow.

So we talked -- about what, I have no recollection. I was 17, he was 21, yet he seemed as unsure as I was. I started to relax, to find that I was meeting and talking to someone, enjoying it, and no one was trying to push me in any direction. The girliest man in the room was the one I was smitten with ... how's that for irony?

At some point, I had to go to the bathroom.

It was one of those bathrooms where you spend some time fishing around to find the light switch. I walked in, it was dark, and on the floor near the toilet was a small basin with something dark humped up in the middle. In the darkness, it looked exactly like someone had taken a dump in it.

I shuddered, and resolutley found the light switch, all the while imagining all sorts of weird, debauched reasons for a basin with shit in it to be on the bathroom floor. Interestingly, rather than be horrified and running screaming, by this time I had a vested interest in learning as much as I could, so I vowed to try to be mature and accpeting of whatever it turned out to be.

It turned out to be a rag in some soapy water -- looked kinda like someone had been scrubbing the floor and left it there.

I tried hard not to laugh in relief (laughter in the can would elicit questions I wasn't ready to answer), and did what I needed to do, and returned to the livinig room.

We spent more time talking, and by this time the friend's housecat had hopped up onto the couch between us, and we absentmindedly started petting it as we talked. Because we were both a bit ... engaged ... the cat got LOTS of activity.

Eventually we were stroking each other's hands more than the cat.

Then in Hollywood style, we were in each other's arms, making out.

For DAYS.

I remember my first senior year of High School as waiting for the weekend, so I could go to the city to be with Mike. We dated for a while (long enough for me to fuck my schoolwork and fail one course too many), and in the summer I moved in with him. I'd met his parents, and they liked me, we'd had dinner together. IN the summer, though, he moved in with a friend -- who happened to be exactly the sort of gay man I'd thought they all were.

I'd gotten over the "all gay men are raging queens" thing, but still had a bit of fear and loathing about the ones that WERE.

And man, this one was a bitch. But Mike and I were happy, and, as I recall, unemployed -- don't know how we lived, actually. I gradually got used to the roommate. I learned how to enjoy sex (I'd been too uptight to really enjoy it up until then, but actually having a recurring partner makes some things easier).

I did not learn enough, fast enough.

We dated for most of the summer, and it was very romantic. The bitter Queen (our roommate) left us alone pretty much, and we spent a LOT of time together.

A LOT.

So one thing I hadn't learned was that it's good to have a certain amount of space in one's relationships.

After a while, my libido started trailing off, and I was no longer interested in sex. Mike took it well, didn't take it personally, and was still by my side. I, on the other hand, was sure it meant something.

Another thing I hadn't learned was that sometimes sex-drives come and go and shift over time, no meaning required.

I decided it meant I no longer loved Mike.

I hadn't learned that love is not equal to sex.

So I broke up with him. His response was ... not good. Here I thought I was being very mature and reasonable -- but to him I was breaking up with him out of the blue. He went white. He hyperventilated. He fainted. I got mad at his feminine hystrionics.

I hadn't learned that different people react differently. I hadn't learned that being "feminine" was a meaningless term.

I walked out on him, pissed and 100% sure I was 100% right.

Mike, for his part, was a trooper. He managed to get me to agree we could still be friends, and we were, until I moved away, about another 6 months. The Bitter Queen kicked meout for being a bastard to Mike. In retrospect, I mighta done the same thing.

During that summer my libido came back (but it never occured to me to go back to Mike, though now I think I should have), and Mike and I went to the Youth Group, and I met and fooled around with some other boys.

One day, a woman invited me to e bisexual picnic. At the time, my view of bisexuality was as off as my view of gayness had been, but really vague. I just figured bisexuals were sex-addicts or something.

But I said yes.

And it was ... wonderful! They were all long-haired hippie people like me! Oddly, it had bothered me that no gay people I knew were long-haired hippie people like me. ParTICularly as I'd been called a "long-haired faggot" at school.

So, after a long talk or three at the picnic, I realized that THESE were my people. I was Bi. Not just "bi" but really Bi. It felt good. It felt liberating. It felt like coming home.

It was, of course, very silly for me to self-identify as bi because I liked the group more. But as I learned more, I realized that Bi really WAS the best label for me. Until I decided to eschew them all.

So I came back to the Youth Group and made my announcement.

There was stunned silence. A break was called for.

Later, I was told I might be asked to leave, as the group was for gays and lesbians. "And the questioning!" I said. They decided to put the decision off for a few weeks, and eventually decided I could stay -- but some of the lesbians were unhappy about it, claiming they felt unsafe knowing there was a bisexual MALE in the room.

Pissed me off. They were talking about excluding me because of my sexual orientation and gender -- something the group existed to help PREVENT in the world at large. Shortly after that I left the group -- it didn't feel safe for ME anymore.

Eventually I moved back in with my folks and went back to school to ACTUALLY graduate. Seems like all this took years, but I graduated in '89, and met Mike in '88.

I think of Mike from time to time. If I had the means, I'd apologize. But there are three Mikes with his last name in his town -- supposing he still lived there -- and hundreds in Maine.

Over time, I developed my theories of sexuality (even while I was in Bible school), altered them, discarded them, built new ones. Now it mostly boils down to variations on YMMV and Safe, Sane, Consensual. I no longer loathe effeminate men or drag queens (though the one time I did drag I was petrified. Of what I do not know -- I need to re-address that at some point). I no longer feel I'm just like the hippies.

But even more than ever I now know I'm learning.

2003-04-30