I thought about setting aside the post I’ve prepared to write about how yesterday was such a horrible day in this country. But all I wanted to say boils down to: this is who we are. Everything that happened yesterday was exactly who we are. If you aren’t happy about that, let’s change it.
Now I’m going to move on because wickedness consumes enough airtime (screen time) as it is.
I have been thinking about guideposts. If someone, by how they live their life, is to be a guidepost, it can only be for pointing backwards, since the future is a mystery no matter how sure you feel about it (a lesson I hope we’ve learned at this point). And if you’re to be a useful guidepost to the past, you need two things: to understand where you were and to know how far you’ve come.
With that in mind, and recalling my awkward Keegan storytime that kicked of my blogging in 2020, I want to delve once again into younger Keegan’s wayward mind.
I cannot claim any real authority to discuss topics of sexuality and gender on any broad scale. Neither can I say that my experience with either has been particularly difficult or damaging, as I know they often are for others. So with both of those things being said, I thought that I might use my own personal experience, which I am somewhat an expert on, to address those who, perhaps, have had an easier time with those two subjects. And, hopefully, illuminate for them how, even if they have settled easily into their identities on the questions of sexuality and gender, there is still some harm being done by the way our society deals with them.
Growing up, I accumulated a lot of Thoughts on the term ‘Man’ and what it meant. Over time, consciously and subconsciously, I developed a system of identifying markers that I associated with Man. Because of what my brain space looked like at the time, it wasn’t (consciously) a way to make sense of masculinity so that I could stay in the closet, as some queer men do. I didn’t even realize that I was in the closet. I just knew it was important to understand what Men were.
Part of the issue for me was that, even though I didn’t understand that I was gay, I had always felt intuitively that I wasn’t quite a Man. And that, rather than aggressively pursuing behavior of a certain sort so that I could fit into the category more fully, I should bar myself from certain things because they were permitted only to Real Men. Since I was not a Real Man, then, I oughtn’t do certain things because it either wasn’t permitted for people like me or because I genuinely didn’t want to (the line between those often being significantly blurred).
The list of things that were not permitted was lengthy and, to be frank, pretty bonkers. And they were all over the map, things that would make sense for most of us to associate with masculinity and other things that I’m still not sure how I made the connection. Many of them were pretty clearly connected with being a {man} but the ways in which I made them traits of Men took it a little too far.
Before this gets any more confusing (actually, if you’re confused, I’m not sure what follows will elucidate anything for you), I will give you an example. Shaving.
I first started shaving my face I think around my sophomore year of high school. I didn’t have much facial hair but it was enough that the peach fuzz was gross if left untended for too long. It’s whatever, people in our society who have facial hair generally start shaving around that time. For me, though, there were two problems. I was in a bit of a catch-22 in terms of the rules of being a Man that I had laid out for myself.
First, having facial hair was something that only Men were allowed to do. If you knew me in high school, you’ll know that I did actually have a goatee for quite a bit of my high school career. That was an acceptable allowance because a) it was not that much of my face and b) it didn’t transgress the Man rules because people mostly saw it on me as a sort of odd, funny, unique thing rather than a Man thing–or at least that’s how I saw it. (There’s a lot more to be said about the caveats and loopholes I made for myself but that would take forever to explain and also is even more bizarre. I tried to think of a cut-and-dried example to share with you and trust me, shaving was the simplest… I am a mess)
Second, shaving was also strictly in the province of Men. The act of shaving itself felt like such a masculine ritual to me–think about all the movies and shows that include a scene of a man shaving, or doing something while half his face is still covered in shaving cream. It is a Man thing. It definitely was prohibited to me. But I also knew that declining to shave would mean breaking another Man rule (and I had enough self-awareness to acknowledge that it would look icky).
So. Every morning, after I got out of the shower, I’d have to debate with myself about whether today’s transgression would be shaving or stubble (such stubble as I had, at least). Even by the end of high school, when I was shaving pretty much every day (and not totally unreasonably), it still felt like that argument was happening in my mind. It was a lose-lose, I just got more used to the one option because I thought that at least I looked better that way.
And I’ll tell you something else. I think I’ve come a long way disassembling masculinity for myself and trying to rebuild my gendered world in such a way that I can consider myself a man (I do consider myself a man, though the word itself was forbidden to me for many years and still carries the teensiest bit of imposter syndrome with it). I still feel that shaving my face is something very masculine–not that it has to be for anyone else, of course. But instead of feeling myself outside of that, I can say that shaving is part of how I participate in being a man. Lower case. Accessible. Me.
I know that was probably a lot. A lot of me being a Big Yikes. A lot of me capitalizing too many things and having far too many parenthetical asides.
But I really hope you made it through. Not because I particularly wanted you all to know those things about me, but because I want you to know that you are okay just the way you are. If there’s anything I can say to help you feel a little more comfortable in your skin, I’ll say it. Don’t let others set up rules for you about how you must understand your identity–and don’t let yourself be constrained by rules that only you know and which only wound you.
Don’t be afraid to do things. Don’t be afraid to seek new things if the things you’re presented with aren’t your scene. Have interests, whether they’re the ones that others prescribe to you and you actually enjoy, or ones you’ve found on your own, despite everyone else’s best efforts. Open doors for yourself and walk through whichever you like.
I don’t know what kind of guidepost I can be on this matter. But if nothing else, I can show you a bit of where I was. I’m not certain how far I’ve come but at least I know that I’m not there anymore.
I can say proudly that I’m a man, that I’m a gay man, and that I’m (mostly) the kind of man I want to be. Because I get to decide what Man is for me. And all the valuable stuff, I’m convinced, isn’t connected to gender anyway.