I write a lot on this site about what I’m doing in the world, and less about who I am, in some sort of larger sense. Or something.
So much so that despite writing about “queer things” with some regularity on the blog, I don’t much talk about queer stuff in a concrete sort of way. For instance, I don’t talk about being gay at all in my “about page.” Weird. At one point it was incredibly important to write those things.
I’ve thought from time to time that I make a better “professional queer” than I do a “real queer,” even if thats a fraught distinction, It’s kind of true. At some point I’m going to have to figure out how to figure this out. For the moment, I’m going to postpone that transcendental realization.
Anyway. About “boyfriends” and I suppose girlfriends as well, though I don’t want to universalize or project. I have a friend and blog reader (hi!) who is very interested and invested in having a boyfriend, and all that accompanies that, while I can totally understand the way that, particularly for queers, being attached confirms identity experience, this isn’t a project that I’ve ever been very interested in. “These things happen, particularly when you’re not looking for them,” I’ve often said. And I’ve generally found that to be true, though not absolute.
In real life, I generally refer to TheBoy by his name or in an ironic nod to the 70s and 80s culture as my “friend” (given that I don’t talk about friends in my cohort very often, it’s not incredibly odd). I’ve often wondered how this kind of positioning affects the closet/not-closeted dynamic, and often conclude that I really don’t care. I enjoy the freedom and possibility that being vague allows (the boy has a potentially gender-neutral name in the diminutive/common form, indeed as do I,) though there are clear problems with this.
I’m not sure how to build this transition, so I’m not going to try. The other piece of this puzzle in my mind is that I don’t “crush” particularly well, which has lead me to declare (somewhat falsely) that I don’t really have a “type.” I can’t remember having a crush for more than a few days without them finding out (usually by virtue of me telling them about it.) TheBoy is an exception to this, but I was in high school for g-d sakes. It’s actually kind of funny, because I don’t think of myself as being particularly forthright about such things, but there’s data to challenge that. Weird.
Anyway, there are going to be socks in a few days. And neurosis aside, warm feet are always a good thing.