Sorry for the silence. I’ve been in the left coast for the week. I was in VACATION YEAH! mode and did not want to sit at the computer for more than two seconds.
So, I was out at the gay bar last weekend, chatting with a new friend. She asked me, “Have you always known you were gay?”
Complicated question, especially when you’ve both just had a few drinks. But, since I’ve been asked this question before, I already had an answer. “Well, I always knew I was different, but I thought it was because I was deaf.”
Honestly, though? It’s true.
So let’s start at the beginning. As I’ve said in this blog before, I was mainstreamed. As a child, I didn’t care so much that I was different – as long as I could play with my sister and toys and the giant 10 foot mounds of snow in my backyard, I was cool. I wasn’t even really aware of being different because people tended to treat it as a non-issue (except for a few bigots or ignorant fools).
Later on, around the time I hit puberty, I began to be more aware that I was different. I didn’t seem to fit in with my straight peers. They were talking about all these things that were totally foreign to me. Even if I understood what they were saying on a physical level (eg, I lipread them successfully), I just couldn’t relate to the content of their conversations.
Well, in middle school, I kept on figuring that I was different because I had grown up deaf and I therefore had different experiences than my peers. So, logically, they would have different things to talk about, like the inherent hotness of the opposite sex. Totally makes sense, right?
Needless to say, that illusion didn’t last for very long. I came out as gay at age 15.
Since I had very little access to an actual gay community, I completely immersed myself in the books and films. I could never really identify with the characters, though. I explained this away as being due to… you guessed it, deafness. I didn’t fit in with the gay community because they were hearing and I was deaf. Totally logical, right?
When I went to college, I moved to a major metropolis and, for the first time in my life, met more gay people than I could count on my hands. Some of them were even deaf! Suddenly, I couldn’t explain away all of my differences as being due to deafness. The fact was, I simply did not fit in for deeper reasons than the fact that I’m deaf.
So, five years after coming out as gay, I came out to my parents yet again and began to redirect my life in a more appropriate path. To make a long story short, they were super-upset at first, but now they are among the most supportive people in my life.
Do I still feel different? Heck yeah. Am I at home in my own skin now? Oh, yes. Here’s the thing. I’m more comfortable saying “I am a deaf bisexual man” than what I used to identify as because that label is accurate, whereas the previous label never quite fit properly. That makes me a lot more at ease with my difference than before.
