I... I cannot stand living like this any more!
No... I don't mean suicide. Of course I don't mean suicide---suicide is not for the likes of me. It is for cowards and people who have really no other alternative for living on and prospering that they decided to apply the Final Solution. I... have not gotten to that stage, not yet anyway, and probably not very likely that I will ever be in that stage.
But I should stop changing the subject, shouldn't I?
I am nearing thirty, just another couple of years more actually. My parents are very old, and they are already hinting that they wanted to play with their grandchildren. They started with pressuring me to find a wife and then giving them some grandchildren. But now, they have relaxed the requirement to just getting them grandchildren some how and that they weren't picky as to the ``how'' part. I had jokingly asked if I could just get a kid from a one-night stand and they looked seriously back at me, unblinkingly for a whole minute before nodding their heads slowly at that prospect. That got me scared. That got me really scared because frankly, I don't know if I can even grant them their wish through a one-night stand.
I'm gay.
I had always known about that ever since puberty hit and I found myself getting aroused by virile looking young men in those body-building magazines instead of the waif-like models that adorned all the others. But it wasn't something to talk about to anyone---no one cared about sexuality then. No one, not even the sex education instructor that the school hired from an outside agency. To them, there was only one kind of sexuality---heterosexuality.
Maybe I was too headstrong then as I am now, or maybe I just didn't know any better. But I never really bought into that crap. Or rather, it could just be that I was distracted by other things to avoid having to deal with my sexuality head on. Studies, preparing for competitions, these all took up almost all the rest of the time that I ever had. Dating of any gender was not something that crossed my mind, and I nearly forgot about the past and my orientation until I went to the US to study for my college degree.
The environment was radically different. Some people talked about sex freely, as though it were like any topic that you and I would just talk about in public, like the weather or politics. Okay, maybe not politics here, but in the US they are passionate about the two dominating political parties and have a tendency to engage in ``debate'' about how their favourite political particy compared to the other one. Sometimes sparks flew about, but that was to be expected.
I wasn't expecting the whole issue of me finding guys sexually arousing and females less so to reawaken in me, especially not in college after a near ascetic existence from whence I came from. Without going through the sordid details, let's just say that I have managed to confirm with myself that I was actually gay and not some repressed heterosexual who had kept the repression on due to a lack of viable environmental support.
But I don't live in the US, and that has nothing to do with why I can't stand living like this any more. Well, I lied; it has some relationship with why I can't stand living like this still, but it was more as providing the backdrop in which my latent preferences were revealed upon me, and the sudden realisation of how my kind cannot exist from whence I come from.
You see, from where I come from, being gay is illegal.
They don't even try to do the subtle thing of banning same-sex unions, or even argue from the moral and conservative viewpoint. They just made it illegal, labelling a specific preference as being inadmissible by the law. If there was a need for an example for thoughtcrime, this would be it.
No one else knows I'm gay, not my friends, and definitely not my parents. For me, it's relatively easy to keep up the charade; I just live an ascetic existence no different from the times when I was still studying, except this time I merely replace my studies and extra-curricular activities with work instead. And thankfully for me, I had none of the stereotypical flamboyant behaviour of gay people (where the hell did they get that kind of impression in the first place?), and so it was easier to pass as being like a regular Joe instead of one half of Brokeback Mountain.
But I am starting to feel the unspoken pressure of conforming with the heteronormative terms of the society that I'm in. My parents with their no-so-subtle pressure on wanting grandchildren was a big clue. The kind of gossip that some of my acquaintances spread around when they discovered that the dates that they had tried to set me up with failed quite miserably with the girl on the date saying things to the effect of me just being indifferent to her. Even my boss started to drop hints about possible dismissal for having a homosexual preference through some oblique reference during a group meeting---don't ask me how he did it, just know that it was done.
Sometimes I wonder, is it really all that illegal to pursue one's dreams and follow one's heart? It's not like homosexuality could ``spread''---unless of course they are afraid that the moment being gay is made legal, a slippery slope would ensue and cause a re-quilting of the social fabric, causing them to be marginalised instead. I don't know. I don't care enough about it either. All I want to do is to figure out how to avoid the grandchildren question from my parents.
Perhaps they might understand and accept me for who I really am.
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