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The Gay Piece

Zachary Jarrett

    There was a time in my childhood when concerns about sexuality, gender, and other such matters were all but absent. I flowed from day to day, each an epoch in itself, not wanting an explanation of the world, but simply living it. Then came the pivotal moment, an event so traumatic as to be the catalyst of every negative event in my life from that point forward, or so it seems.
    I remember little of my life before the divorce, before foster care, before meeting my abuser. My earliest memories are locked away, kept from me by the passage of time and my minds own selfish insistence on me persisting. But I wont talk about those events in much detail now, only the affects to that cause.
    I found myself living with another family, kept apart from all my siblings but my sister Allison, and with new parents and new brothers. I remember Brian the most frequently when I think of the themes I will contain within this exercise. Brian was an effeminate teenage boy who was one of the birth children of my foster parents, his voice was high and giddy, and he had a kind of energy that I had not experienced before. He crossed his legs at the knees, he was concerned with his physical appearance in a way that somehow seemed taboo, in fact, all of his predilections seemed somehow against the grain, much to the chagrin of his, and now my, parents. I didn’t know what “gay” meant, but I heard the word for the first time then. Too young to concern myself with things like sexuality, I thought it just meant the way he behaved, his voice, his mannerisms. Attraction, I didn’t understand, WAS a part of it, but I couldn’t conceive of such things. I did know that his parents and siblings found it amusing and somehow damning as if his “different-ness” somehow made him ridiculous. I remember trying to take on Brian’s behaviors and was met with the same ridicule as he was, but they simply thought I was mocking him and thought little of it.
    Even as a child I liked to grow my hair long, and at that age it was a blonde so intense it was almost white. They called me cotton-top as an endearment because of it. I was slight of build, my face was lean and thin, and I was short for my age. Consequentially I was often mistaken for a small girl, something that I think bothered my mother more than me. It bothered me then, but not enough to stop me and my sister from braiding each others hair.
    I won’t go too much into detail of the events of my abuse in this piece, I’ve done that in other mediums, other pieces, and it doesn’t need to be tread over again. There is such a thing as beating a dead horse, and that isn’t the purpose of me writing now. Suffice to say I started my sexual experience as a human young, and with a much older man. Even after I left foster care, my mother would let me spend nearly ever weekend in his “care”, and not understanding at first that what he was doing to me was abnormal, I still loved him like a father. Years would go by in such a manner, even after my family moved from the suburbs of Richmond (where he lived) to the blue ridge mountains outside of the town of Crozet. As I aged I began to understand that most boys weren’t like me, most boys didn’t have this secret thing that occurred with their “fathers” when the lights when out and we were supposed to sleep. As I began to enter puberty the acts became pleasurable, but somehow all the more wrong. I liked it, what I felt when things happened, but I knew that it was wrong. The confusion of both enjoying and being horrified by what was happening to me will never leave me.
    At a time when most boys were on the look out for girls, I didn’t know what to think, how to behave. My friends sensed that I was stunted in this way, and one by one abandoned me, no longer wanting to spend time with me. I found myself attracted to girls, but also enthralled by the idea of boys. Going to school became horrible, I never knew where to look, or how to act, or how to speak. Through middle school I stopped socializing all together, into high-school I had no friends. My grades plummeted, I stopped taking care of myself physically, my long hair became matted and full of knots, my clothes I hardly washed.
    Discovering the internet was an important turn for me, both the secret and at that time painfully slow world of pornography, and the mild degree of social interaction afforded by chat rooms. It was here I could express the apparent taboos I had acquired or had been born with without persecution, as my peers had already taken to treating me like a pariah and calling me “gay” or “faggot” at every turn. With slowly downloaded videos I found myself experiencing pleasurable acts separate from the abuse that had happened to me. This became important because my malefactor had disappeared from my life nearly overnight, and I didn’t have him or his creative assortment of magazines to keep me company. At first it was men and women, then trans women (whose juxtaposition of genitals and apparent gender amazed and excited me) then in the chats I started talking to young men my age. I don’t remember the first time I had cybersex with a boy, but I do know that it was always “by accident”. I found myself unable to chat in the main room of the chat rooms, the regulars had too closely knit a group of friends, and even in that digital environment I was too scared to do that. Instead I’d enter a private chat with all assortments of people, trying to find those that wanted to talk about things of a sexual nature a lot of the time, but also trying to form some kind of social connection, but my life was sorely lacking that at the time. Upon entering a private chat I’d rattle off the now infamous anagram “ASL” (age, sex, location), and SOMETIMES the person would be male and within my age group. Those that weren’t immediately turned off by me being male as well would then SOMETIMES want to engage in sexual acts. Keep in mind that these things didn’t happen with ONLY males, but with a wide variety of people. I always had my eye out with a trans person, something that was then a rare find in chat rooms due to stigma. The advent of the webcam took things up a notch, deep in the midnight hours I’d fine people to display my pleasure too, sometimes men, sometimes women. I began exploring my body in methods that were taboo among the “straight” led society I live in.
    Pornography was difficult for me, a combination of my inherent fears about myself, and the odd headaches gay porn gave me from time to time, kept me from being able to enjoy that part of myself fully. It seemed that if I kept the acts cerebral, as in text based chat with the occasional guy online, I was fine. HOWEVER simply enjoying the male form would bring on memories, headaches, and self loathing. The attraction was there, the will was there, but the pain of the acts kept me from perusing them. I locked myself off from the idea of being with a man for these reasons, and the thought of the trauma such an experience might inflict.
    My first partner outside of the chat rooms was a young woman about my age, but only by happenstance, she pursued me, and if she hadn’t it would have been many more years before I found someone. This is another period of my life I’m going to gloss over, because it isn’t pertinent to what I’m trying to say in this piece. What I will say is that there was a person inside of me that hardly spoke, who I think started in those chat rooms, or maybe just opened its mouth for the first time, and Rebecca, my first love, was the first real person to experience that part of me.
    Gender is a complex subject, or so I’m discovering. As I said earlier, I was often mistaken for a girl as a child, and there were girlish things that I enjoyed, but I always was keenly aware that that part of me wasn’t welcome. Any deviation from standard male behavior was savagely mocked by peers and family alike. I found little ways of acting out, however, the length of my hair being one of them. To keep people from mocking me further, as soon as I began to grow facial hair I forsook shaving altogether and grew a long beard, an ability I thought at first a blessing. In high-school, having a beard meant people no longer took me for a girl, people mocked me less, people kept their distance.
    It was probably that beard that attracted Rebecca in the first place, she used to refer to me as “goatman” as a loving endearment. However, in private moments together over the phone in the night I began to show a different side of myself, when speaking my voice would become light and go up a few octaves, almost a mimicry of Brains voice from my childhood, but even more so. It wasn’t just my voice, it was my body language, my mannerisms, it was me, or some part of me, speaking out loud for the first time.
    Realizing that who I was was fractured wouldn’t come for many years, what I did know is that in those private moments, in that identity that I could only share with her, I was truly happy, maybe for the first time since I was a small child. It was, however, one of the reasons she eventually left me for another partner, and that hurt tied itself into the fear of sharing that part of myself, and it would be years before I had the courage to do so again.
    Eventually I graduated high-school, namely because I transferred to an alternate school with open minded staff and a smaller student body. I found myself then on the verge of life but with two major problems having been recently discovered. I was disabled, physically, and mentally. I had what the doctors at the time suspected was a form of schizophrenia (they didn’t know about my sexual abuse, however) and what would later be determined to be a severe form of PTSD. I also had a debilitating spinal deformity known as Scheuermann’s Kyphosis. Kept apart from society by the crippling social anxiety from the PTSD and the very literally crippling kyphosis, I started the process of getting disability, and with a few years moved in with my brother with my “own” income.
    The years with my brother stagnated me, kept me locked in place worse than anything I could have done with my twenties. I was forced to devote every ounce of time an energy to him and had no room for socializing (even if I were able) or self reflection. It was only when I cut ties with him that I began to, once more, explore myself, but before that, before moving out even, I met someone who changed my life.
    In the twilight of my youth, just before the move, I met a woman named Colleen in an online chatroom. She was fierce, and strong, and very openly bisexual. She saw through the many layers of psychosis and trauma that made up my brittle damaged mind and didn’t turn away, didn’t find me wanting. It wasn’t attraction I had for her, it was fellowship I sought from her. I told her everything, all the details of what I’ve transcribed here, all the little secrets I’d kept from my family and friends, and she didn’t think me gross or damaged, but encouraged me to explore myself. The years with my brother were bitter for our friendship, as she lived a few hundred miles away, and we were both too scared to meet, but also due to the isolation forced upon me by him. When I finally got away from him, when I finally cut ties, she was there to support me emotionally like few others could.
    I had few friends after that, Mr. Richards (a mutual friend of my brother who stopped talking to him in favor of me) was one of them, Rebecca (who remained my friend even after our tumultuous relationship) was another. Colleen was the unspoken third, the bearer of all my secrets, the one person I could confide anything and everything with.
    She was the first person I came out to, spoke with in depth about my sexuality and my gender and all the glorious weirdness that is me. Years later I would in turn tell my other friends, and eventually (and weirdly last) my therapist, who should have known all along.
    Finding terms for the parts of me that didn’t make sense was a big deal for me, I wanted an explanation, a clean cut reason for the malfunctions I found within myself. Recently I discovered that Brian, my foster brother of old, had turned out to be transgendered all along, and that along with prolonged discussions with friends and loved ones, and a lot of soul searching, led me to discover that there is more to my gender than I once believed. Gender, it turns out, isn’t that simple. I wasn’t trans, as I first thought, because there WAS in fact a part of me that very keenly wanted to remain male, and I wasn’t entirely cis, because there were times when “Binks” the name I gave the effeminate voiced female portion of my mind and gender would speak up and make herself known. The closest explanation I’ve found is the term Genderfluid, wherein my gender identity is in a constant state of flux from male to female and back again. The long form explanation for my “condition” is biologically male, with my gender identity being genderfluid, and my gender expression being mildly androgynous (though I’d very much like to expand on just how androgynous or female my expression becomes).
    Understanding my sexuality came first, however. I was deeply afraid of men, it would seem, and apart from musings online and in chat, I was terrified of being... well, different, being gay. I had associated homosexuality with those terrible early moments of my sexuality with my abuser, even at times thought that he had “turned” me gay somehow. With time, effort, and a whole mess of therapy, the idea of being with a man became more plausible, and the occasional crush less... crushing, the desires I feel less awful, and more another aspect of who I am.
    I still struggle with who it is I am, and who I want to be with, but it’s getting clearer every day, and with that clarity I have hope. I haven’t had much luck with relationships, but I have a DEEP desire to be loved, and to love others. “Others” in this case being virtually any consenting adult. My attractions range all across the board, so much that I’ve found that the closest term to describing me is “Pansexual” or: not using gender or gender identity to chose a partner. The effect of this is that I’m attracted to basically everyone to varying degrees, though its more of a weird hierarchy of attractions, with cis and trans women at the top, trans and cis men at the bottom, and other non-binary individuals scattered throughout. I don’t know if that is “right” for being pan, but its the way it is for me, so maybe being right in this case doesn’t matter as long as I’m true to myself.
    One day, it’ll all make sense, and maybe I’ll even be brave enough to share my secrets with the family I know and sometimes even love.

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