I don't know how to be gay
Years ago I was browsing Barnes & Noble and found a big hardcover book called How to Be Gay. I didn't buy it. For one thing, I was broke at the time. I was significantly behind on rent, struggling with inconsistent hours at my hourly-wage job, and I didn't have a credit card. But also I was honestly a little disappointed when I opened to the blurbs and realized it wasn't strictly speaking a practical manual as the title implied. This is not a review of How to Be Gay. Actually, I still haven't read it. But why did I want a manual like that in the first place?
Will I ever be as gay as this train?
As Pride Month goes, June 2025 got off to a pretty rough start. Actor Jonathan Joss was shot to death by a neighbor in San Antonio, Texas in what his husband says was the culmination of months of harassment targeting the couple's sexuality. Big-name US corporations that only a few years ago had bedecked their public branding in rainbows for the whole month, now chastened by backlash, kept their acknowledgments of Pride to a more limited audience or refrained altogether. The participation of these corporations was never essential to Pride, but their absence signaled an ominous cultural inflection point; there was a reason they were chickening out. Since the start of the second Trump administration, an onslaught of government policy sought to cut off trans healthcare access in a variety of settings and eject visibly LGBTQ people from the civil service and military under the banner of an “anti-DEI” effort. And the very streets that Pride parades would walk in cities across the US were menaced by masked, plainclothes immigration police rounding up arbitrary groups of brown people in service of Trump's signature campaign promise of “mass deportations”.
All this is simultaneously dispiriting and motivating toward living as openly queer. After all, it was resistance to police repression that birthed Pride in the first place. My partners and I took the kids down to a local Pride festival in a park in central Connecticut, a laid-back event with musicians, a drag show, food trucks, and stands for various local orgs. I felt oddly duty-bound to show up with my rainbow watchband, like I need to make sure that collectively we are seen, visibly present in public. And at the same time I feel especially bad at doing that. Every outward manifestation of pride feels a little like a contrived affectation.
In short, I feel inauthentic. It probably doesn't help that, being autistic, I struggle with basic aspects of identity performance: modulating how I speak, subtle aspects of my posture and body language, and so on takes sustained, conscious effort and it's exhausting. Nor that I have an attenuated relationship to gender, one I like to describe using that refrain from (historical gay icon) Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”: “I would prefer not to.” Nor that I fall somewhere on the asexual spectrum. (I once heard someone say that her gay and asexual identities were less compound or in tension than they were like neighbors, where one would sometimes casually drop by the other unannounced like Ned Flanders in The Simpsons.) Nor that having kids tends to provoke various assumptions (which often contribute to people misgendering my partner, too). I am something particular, something that doesn't really have a cultural archetype I could even try to measure up to. But for some reason the model I keep coming back to, what I am maybe measuring myself against at a semi-conscious level, is some image of the gay man. It's certainly closer to who I actually am than straight masculinity as I see it.
There's a certain experience some people describe where “the closet” never really felt like a viable option. Something like: Well, it was obvious from the start who and what I was. Obvious to me and to everybody else. Sometimes that experience comes with a lifetime of microaggressions. Sometimes it comes with out-and-out violence. For that reason, it doesn't feel right to envy this kind of experience. But sometimes I do, a little bit—just the part about easily knowing who I am.
This June I find myself needing as much as I ever have to see all kinds of LGBTQ people out there just being themselves, and in particular to see all sorts of gay men (and gay-adjacent, male-adjacent people like myself) thriving and living their lives. I don't need cultural “representation” in the sense of people just like me becoming celebrities and holding seats of power. But I do need representation in the sense of seeing that all very different sorts of people are happily living outside of a constrained straight and cis experience. It gives me some kind of strength.
Much love to you all.
Where not otherwise noted, the content of this blog is written by Dominique Cyprès and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.