music, books, love and kindness

 

I hate how men can be sometimes (with toxic masculinity) but I love how they really could be, in an alternate reality.

Every man I have ever found appealing is just a character on a TV show and they always seem to care about everyone, even if it's only in the smallest of ways. They can be very manly and tough without being toxic.

In the darkness of my living room, the glow of the tv and the easy way I fall into made up worlds and the facade of a glass of wine or two, I like to pretend I can believe anything.

The lead actor, Aaron Stanford, on the tv show 12 Monkeys, Kirk Acevedo on Fringe (and also on 12 Monkeys) Jason Bateman, but only as the animated Nick Wilde in the movie Zootopia movies. I don't want to be with men intimately, but I like them so much in non-threatening, comfortably distant ways.

Ever since I started realizing what my feelings about girls in high school and later on women, in adult life, meant I have struggled with the fact that I’m attracted to women, even if it’s mostly emotional and romantically.

I pretty much am sure I could live to be 1 million years old and I still wouldn’t fully accept I’m gay.

I want to like men the way I’m supposed to like men, I really, really do.

I'm reading a book right now called The Queer Thing About Sin: Why The West Came to Hate Queer Love and I get the intro so very much:

When I was a teenager, I believed I was going to hell. For centuries, it was almost universally acknowledged that all gay men would. It wasn’t until years later that I asked myself where that idea came from, and why was it that, thousands of years ago when the Bible was written, people decided that queer love was a sin? 

It hadn’t always been a sin to be queer. In many cities across the ancient world, same-sex love was celebrated. So how did homophobia take root? Why did so many societies start executing men and women for the same love once praised by their philosophers and rulers? 

I have personal reasons for wanting to know the answer. My father died when I was two years old and for many years being Christian made me feel whole. Christianity gave me a compass with which to navigate the world and allowed me to commune with the people I’d lost. But that all changed when I fell in love with another boy at school. 

The love that upended my world was clandestine and unrequited. Little girls and boys grow up knowing they will get married; they sketch out the geography of their future relationships long before they even feel physical attraction. For queer people, desire arrives unannounced – it comes as a lightning bolt through a clear-blue sky. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. I had to keep it secret from him, from the world, and at times even from myself. It was what Christianity taught me to do.