I'm a Man Who's Always Felt a Little Queer. But I Don't Trust Other Men.

In 2017, Sirius-XMU kept playing a song called “Apocalypse,” and every time I heard it, I had to pull off the road, so siren-like the sound.

I must have heard the song 40 or 50 times before I looked up the band and discovered that Cigarettes After Sex’s lead singer was a man. I immediately wondered what was wrong with me. Not my ears, not my attention. Me.

My mind had been picturing a ‘50s torch singer—someone like Peggy Lee or Julie London, or cutting to the ‘80s, Julee Cruise, David Lynch’s choice for soundtracks from Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks. I had been so certain that the singer was a woman, and when I found out that he wasn’t, I started wondering again about what it might mean that I’m attracted to a man’s voice. 

I lean to the heterosexual end of the spectrum. I don’t find most men attractive, but there are exceptions. David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase. Mick Jagger, too, long ago. And that long-haired disc jockey who kept talking to me when I was seventeen. I don’t reject men as sexual partners in the abstract, just in my reality. I’ve seen and heard enough not to trust men with my body, and I suppose I’ve felt this way ever since my childhood pediatrician tried and finally succeeded in touching me in ways that all my instincts were raging against. I was only 12 and knew what he was doing was wrong, but I had grown tired of stopping him all alone. Of course, I never told anyone about his touch.

As a young adult, I did consent to one man touching me like that. Nothing happened when he did: nothing good, nothing bad. Just nothing. I felt nothing and offered nothing. He finally grew tired of the nothing and so quit trying for something. I knew he had sex with men and women as often as he could. He was a close friend of mine; we went dancing together sometimes. Years after these dancehall days, he caught the AIDS virus. He became an advocate for safe sex and health care for gay men. He died before I could see him again or touch him.

Men too often force themselves into whomever they can, and I just don’t want anything forced into me.

I used to dance with men and women in gay clubs, and sometimes I danced with strangers, and sometimes I kissed them, too. Some wanted to take me home, but I wouldn’t go with them. I didn’t always know what I was doing there or why dancing in gay clubs attracted me. I could say it was the better music and that would be true. But would it be the whole truth? And if not, what other truths are there?

I’m deeply suspicious of sharply dressed male strangers who smile and stare at me, unblinking, longer than they should, and even rough male acquaintances who talk freely about “getting some” from their wives. I’ve released seemingly easy male friendships because the man’s true bullying side took over. I’ve known so many men who have forced themselves on women. I have been married for 40 years and have two daughters. I wonder what my wife and daughters experienced in their single days. 

Not so long ago, my wife told me she needed to confess something. When we had been dating for only a little while, she went out again with an old boyfriend. He wanted to have sex with her and she didn’t want to but relented and then begged him to stop. She said he did, but it took her almost 40 years to tell me this story. Was it the whole truth?

Recently, I’ve found myself extremely attracted to another writer I know, a trans woman much younger than me. She’s gorgeous, and I feel so drawn to her. She once wrote a story about a man who forced himself on her—she wrote as if only the physical part of the “he took me from behind” hurt her. I don’t think this is her whole truth.

I hate that in becoming female, she learned so quickly what we men do to the women, and men, we want. I think she was scarred more by being taken than by the ten-hour surgery she wanted so that she could fulfill her true destiny.

Something died in me when I read her words. And her voice—her tone sounds like the singer from Cigarettes After Sex, just with an accent.

Today I was reading a creative essay by a student of mine. I loved her piece about someone she once loved. But in that piece she had to write about someone she formerly loved, a man I’ll never know but whose type I’ve known most of my life. A man who forced himself into her.

It goes on. Men too often force themselves into whomever they can, and I just don’t want anything forced into me, and like the trans woman writer I admire so much, I can’t see myself ever consenting to a man again.

My wife knows all of this. I’ve asked her if I might be queer, and she’s asked me the same thing. We both understand that by many people’s standards, I’m not queer at all, except for the part of me that kissed those men and let one of them touch me. Or the part of me that’s drawn to the masked gay country singer Orville Peck. I do feel desire for him. I think I would let him kiss me if he wanted to, and if I were a single man. The same goes for Julee Cruise if she were still alive, and the former student I’m so attracted to.

My wife has asked me to please tell her if I ever decide that I’m gay or want to be with a man. 

“I’m not attracted to most men,” I tell her. “And I don’t trust them. And besides, it’s you who I love and who I want to make love to.”

So many men declare their independence through their masculinity and heterosexuality. And then they lie and cheat and hurt those they want and those they really don’t want but will take, and those who do or don’t want them, and even those they actually love.

Writing all of this helps even if it doesn’t actually clear my confusion. I would rather write and read about the confusion and pain, though. At least it’s at a distance, and when I tell it “No” it tends to listen to me and stop.

Until I ask it to continue.