Tuesday, December 2, 2008

The closet

Why did I call this blog "thereisnocloset"? I spent a lot of my life with this nagging doubt in the back of my mind that said: I have some issues with sex, there is something wrong with me, I'm a little strange, and one day I'm going to have to confront it. I used to think that it must be just because I was shy as a teenager that I could not get the hang of the world of dating, and that once I get over that, my sexual personality should become unleashed. I then became a reasonably adjusted and moderately self-aware adult, and still kept waiting for that sexual flowering to happen. And when it wasn't happening, I kept worrying and telling myself that I must be repressing something. I had fleeting fears that I might turn out to be gay if I looked too closely. I mean, what other possible explanation could there be for me not wanting to have sex with men? Until this year, when I did some serious sitting down with myself and allowing for anything I was, to be okay just as it is. And the horrible scary truth that I had to accept about myself was that, once I opened that closet door, it contained a big huge... nothing. A gust of wind. Echo... My id, let loose upon the world, would rather do something else. The option of "just not interested" had never been considered before, not as valid anyway. We, children of Freud. To have the thought "I never feel any need or drive to have sex with anybody, and that's perfectly okay, because that's just how I am" - was hugely liberating, and so much of my past, my behavior, my being different, my not fitting in, suddenly made sense. It was the first time for me to think that other people were actually experiencing something all along that I did not really know how to relate to because it simply wasn't there for me. I had done my best to imitate them because I figured this was just how we are supposed to behave to be normal. It had not occurred to me that other people actually felt driven by sexual attraction. To realize now that the reason I had always felt awkward and confused, was because I really was different, and that there is an option to be who I am, be aware of my actual feelings and have them be legitimate... Celebration!

3 comments:

  1. I've just opened a thread in AVENes about whether the closet makes sense w.r.t. asexuality.

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  2. I love your blog, and I know that I'm about 9 and 1/2 months late posting a comment on this post. The conversation about the closet is an important one. Unfortunately what I've read on the AVENes hilo and elsewhere, is "there is no closet because I have nothing to hide/i've not done anything wrong". This is so not cool because it implies that that people who identify as gay do have something to hide.

    What we in non-heteronormative communities have in common is a "stigma management" issue. And discussing ones asexuality can freak people out just as much as discussing ones homosexuality (perhaps even more so now as there is more awareness and understanding of homosexuality).

    There is social stigma to being asexual. While there may be no social stigma to abstaining from sexual activity, we as asexuals are not in that category and we're technically considered "deviants" (yech!). People assume at best we're repressed, at worse that we're totally f^cked up sociopaths.

    The closet is a place to avoid social stigma. There will be no closet when there is no more social stigma.

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  3. Gays and bis use to hide their same-sex attraction, contrary to aces. Gays and aces might also fake opposite-sex attraction, but this is not hiding, but faking. You may hide when there's something, but you can't hide when there's nothing.

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