I Remember, Part 5

I need to address something less pleasant today.  It has been eating away at me for 4 years, and I need to share.

Last year I embarked on something of a journey of memories, trying to make sense of some of my past.  They are just little memories that I had hoped would help me see a bit more clearly and hopefully give me a connection to someone out there who might say, "Yeah, you are not alone.  I felt that too."  You will find all those entries here:  Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; and Part 4.

But now I need to address Part 5:

It was September of 2004, over four years ago, when I made a decision.  Thirty years old.  Surfing porn--mostly the gay variety--in my tiny apartment.  Isolated.  Lonely.  And about to attend the wedding of my final college friend to be married.  Earlier in the year, I had had a fascinating conversation with a work friend about the wild oats she had sown over time, and that while she was much more restrained now, that she really did not regret what she had done.

So I made this decision: I was going to go experiment sexually with guys.  But the precondition was that it would only last for 4 months, until the end of 2004, and then I would stop.

I find myself regretting that decision, and yet it is hard to explain why.  Somewhere in my mind was this idea that I was still going to be married to a woman someday, and have children, and a simple life in the suburbs.  It was going to happen, and I just needed to continue to trust and wait on the Lord to bring her along.  And I also held pretty strong convictions about sex before marriage, in that I was not going to go there.  But somehow I rationalized that if I messed around with guys, it did not really count and I could continue to carry around my virginity as a prized possession.  

So I started using websites heavily, no longer just looking at guys but attempting to contact them.  I quickly learned that not all guys where what they seemed, but I managed to find some super nice guys--two actually--who where patient and understanding with my inexperience at everything sexual and helped me along a bit.

Since you did not stop by here for a homemade porn story, I will skip over the juicy details.  I never did anything which made me uncomfortable.  For the first time in my 30-year life, I had experienced naked closeness with another man.  And at risk of plagarizing or even defiling the creation story, "It was good."

Yes, I had some guilt and shame.  No, I couldn't tell ANYONE what I had done.  But it wasn't bad, and I actually fell for one of those guys and suffered through my first real broken heart (another long story for another post).

I am so stuck with that idea that I made this 4-month decision 4 years ago.  I promised myself I would sow some wild gay oats for 4 months, and then head back to the straight and narrow.  I broke my own promise.  What if I had kept my promise to myself?  What if I had decided to head back to Straight-ville?

My words are not doing me justice right now, because I am having trouble expressing my true thoughts around this.  I think I am asking, Would a person with a gay sexual orientation make such a promise to themselves?  Or is this more indicitive of a person with a straight sexual orientation who "wasn't gettin' any?"  Was I playing the system, holding onto a straight orientation but cheating myself in the process?  Was I confused?  Did giving myself license to "gay it up" for a while lead to all the heartache in my head and in this blog?

I have said before that I was not with all these woman for my entire life and then decided to go fool around.  In fact, I have been on very few dates in my life, I have never steadily dated a woman, never had a girlfriend (the hand-written will-you-be-my-girlfriend note I passed to Rachel in 9th grade does not count), and honestly, I have never even romantically kissed a woman.  Not once.  Not in my thirty-plus years.  How pathetic is that?

I spend so much time arguing with myself that if I had just dated girls, and kissed them, or if I did now, that the confusion over my orientation would fall away because I would see that girls are not so yucky after all.  I would have the confidence to go be straight.  And suddenly my desires for a woman's body would bloom.  Maybe the Journeyman doesn't know what he's missing?

But do straight guys honestly cuddle up with another man and think, "Wow, this quiet masculine moment between us is amazing.  I could stare into his eyes for a long time, and touch his face, and run my hands through his hair, and dispense with anything overly sexual involving genitals and be really really content and at peace right now?"

So I am lost between a homosexual world that I do not fully understand, which is marked with trouble and prejudice and even a sense that I may never find a man for me, and a heterosexual world that I have never experienced in the first place, perhaps out of lack of desire or perhaps out of lack of confidence or perhaps even just plain fear.

But my 4 month experiment has now stretched beyond 4 years.  Has it brought happiness?  Maybe some.  But has it brought confusion?  You bet.  And hurt?  That too.  And perhaps a sense of hopelessness?  Yeah, that came too.

I'm going to stop here, but I think I need to root around in this subject a bit more in another post.  Thanks for letting me think out loud.