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My Brother Came Out To Me Last Night
I should mention, for context, that I've been somewhat jealous of my younger brother for most of my childhood, adolescent and adult life. He was born with good looks in a way I was not quite born with, and then, in what I can only describe as an act of aggression, decided to go to medical school and become extremely jacked. I am fine. I do alright with the fairer sex. I have made my peace with this in the specific sense of someone who has not entirely made his peace with it but has successfully reduced it to an occasional background hum rather than an active grievance.
He is also, and this is relevant, the sort of person who has had men and women throwing themselves at him more or less continuously since approximately puberty, with the kind of effortless appeal that people like me analyze, in our more honest moments, with a mixture of admiration and despair. And yet, as long as I've known him as an adult, he's never been in a serious relationship. When I asked about this, which I did both seriously and as a recurring joke, he said he was aromantic and asexual and couldn't be bothered. His stated motivation for building an enviable physique was to "mog women," which is a sentence I found both deeply unhinged and strangely admirable. I told him this was fine because I could be interested in women on behalf of the both of us. He found this less funny than I did, and occasionally scolds me for letting my dick lead me into places neither of us would go with a gun.
(He had even shown me pictures of the girls in his batch, and the incoming ones. There was a startling paucity of hot women, especially in comparison to the batch that overlapped with mine. I'd know, I dated quite a few of them. I considered this a reasonable excuse too.)
All this serves to demonstrate that I believed him. Mostly. I'd put it at maybe 80:20 in favor of actually believing him, with the twenty percent being a vague unease I didn't particularly want to examine. He was categorical about it and the aromantic/asexual explanation was not, technically, impossible. I had, only recently, learned that he'd even kissed a girl once in high school, which was more than I'd achieved at that age, a fact I mention because it seemed like evidence at the time and I want to be honest about the quality of my evidence. I told him, several times and with complete sincerity, that if he were gay it would change nothing. He denied it each time. I let it drop, because pressing it felt more like satisfying my own curiosity than actually helping him.
He came out to me last night, under circumstances I won't describe except to say that they were upsetting and that my first instinct was to hug him, which I think was the right call. I told him I loved him and would continue to love him unconditionally, by which I meant at a level that extended to helping him with light body disposal if the need ever arose. He laughed. I think laughing was good. He cried, and I think he needed to let those tears out.
I had hoped for a little more time before telling the rest of the family, but our mother appeared, and he told her too. I could see he couldn't hold it in for another minute. She needed a moment, and then she was fine, because she is an extraordinary woman, and I have told her so myself, and I meant it. I would be doing well to find a partner who is even half the person she is.
Our father is a harder problem. He has a heart condition serious enough to have had him hospitalized for atrial fibrillation, which is the kind of detail that complicates an already complicated conversation. He's a good man and a better doctor than I can ever aspire to be, and he's not someone I'd describe as homophobic exactly, but he's also not someone for whom this information would be accepted with equanimity. I think he would come around, after experiencing some serious emotional pain and confusion. I'm less sure about the cardiac implications of the journey there, and neither my brother nor I have figured out what to do about it, beyond trying to get him to improve his health first.
Once my brother had actually told me, I was not particularly surprised to learn that his partner of several years was the person I'd known as his best friend since the start of med school. I was fond of him. I'd tutored them both through parts of medical curriculum. I'd thought of him as something like a younger brother, in the version of that concept that doesn't involve him sleeping with my actual younger brother. I would happily accept him as a brother-in-law, my brother could do much worse.
The problem is that his boyfriend is bisexual, wants to eventually settle down with a woman and have children, and has a shrewish and emotionally manipulative mother who has apparently made this preference known with some force, even if she doesn't know he's bisexual. They're both finishing their intern years, neither of them wants to do long distance, and my brother has said things are going to end soon. This is, I think, going to be genuinely painful for him, and I don't know what to do about it. Lesbians will tell you, if you give them the opportunity, that dating bisexual women has a similar actuarial quality to it - not universal, not inevitable, but a real enough pattern that people have been writing about it for as long as gay marriage has been legal in the West. My brother's boyfriend's stated plans match this pattern fairly well, and I'm sorry about that.
What my brother actually wants, as far as I can tell, is pretty unremarkable: a long-term monogamous relationship with another man. The problem is that this particular preference is not especially well-served by the available options. Indian gay men are - like gay men anywhere - by my brother's account and my own observations as a regular at a gay pub in Scotland (the people are friendly, the drinks are cheap, and I have a good essay/attempt at ethnography up about it), primarily not looking for that. Marriage out of genuine love rather than social convenience is unusual. This is not a value judgment about anyone's choices (which I consider none of my business), it's just a bad match between what he wants and what's available, and I find it sad in a way I'm not sure how to articulate. His preferences would have absolutely worked in his favor if he'd been straight, there would be no end of women queuing up to marry him, perhaps even three at a time.
He doesn't plan to come out publicly, which seems to me like a reasonable decision rather than a failure of nerve. India is not the country it was in 2013 on this issue. It's also not a country where "my son is gay" lands the same way in a rural extended family as it does in a Mumbai apartment, and the collateral damage to our parents from a wider family reaction would be real. My mother's side is probably fine, they're upper class cosmopolitan liberals. My father's is more rural and uneven. Even the people who would eventually come around might do damage on the way to coming around, and my brother has done the math on this and decided he'd rather not. I think that's reasonable: he has thick skin, but it's our parents who would suffer from the scandal. Keeping things on the down-low is simply the most pragmatic choice either way, for the foreseeable future. Yet I do not want him to have to live a lie.
One thing I keep noticing, now that I know: he passes as straight without any effort at all. He likes fast cars and action movies and video games. He is more fastidious and picky about clothing than I am, but well within the range of normality for heterosexual men. He was about as good as hiding his orientation as one can be, while refusing to screw dozens of hot women. He is as straight as one can be without actually being straight.
He has no patience for flamboyant men of any orientation, and his boyfriend is similarly nothing like that. This is relevant mostly because it's part of why I half-believed the aromantic explanation for as long as I did, which now strikes me as a somewhat embarrassing failure of imagination on my part.
He told me, among other things, about a gay doctor who had opened a hookup conversation by requesting golden showers with no other preamble. He found it funny that I immediately opened that essay I mentioned on my phone - a piece I've written about my experiences at the gay pub, which apparently contains my own account of politely declining the same request. We have more in common than I'd realized. Neither of us are looking for quickies with gay men, albeit for rather different reasons.
I told him he should have told me earlier. He said he thought I'd be fine with it. I said he was right about that, and that he should have told me earlier anyway. This didn't really go anywhere productive, but I think we both understood what we were trying to say. I am sad that it took him this long to find the confidence to express himself, but I absolutely do not hold it against him.
I've made gay jokes at his expense, in the past, not knowing. He says he never minded and wants me to act exactly the way I always have, and I've agreed to this, and I'm still a little sorry. He's told me not to be. I think both of these positions can coexist without one of them needing to win.
The thing that is keeping me up tonight, l is that I can't actually do much. I can love him and I do and I will. I can be the person he calls. I can be the person who acts the same as always. What I can't do is fix the relationship situation, or make my father's heart stronger, or speed up whatever social change would make this easier for him. I can't make the world different from what it is.
If anyone has practical advice rather than reassurance/validation, I'd be glad to have it. I'm not looking for confirmation that I'm a good person for loving my brother without conditions, which I do not consider an achievement. I want to know if there's something useful I can actually do.
Options discussed with him include emigration, continuing to pretend to be asexual, or even a lavender marriage with a beard of the lesbian type. He is too ethical to trick even an eager straight woman into marrying him for the sake of cover, and he wants to be close to his real partner, whoever that turns out to be. He is also less than keen on permanently moving abroad, at least for anything longer than a residency. He wants children, biologically his, and I want this for him too. I think he'd be a good dad, and that I'd be a good uncle.
(He's confident he's gay rather than bi. The one time he kissed a girl in high school was, in his words, awful, and he reports no meaningful response to straight pornography. If he were bi I'd probably have given him the pragmatic advice to sleep with men for a while and then settle down with a woman, which is the easier path through the particular society we grew up in. That option isn't on the table.)
PS: He is okay with me asking here.
I'm pretty much your brother except I'm in accounting and am more of an autist. Grew up in the third world, thick skin, very heterosexual-passing in attitude, zero patience for flamboyant and dramatic anybody. My circumstances probably don't apply to your brother and Malaysian Chinese might actually be more chill than Indians about this, but I came out to my immediate family relatively early in life (in spite of my sister seeming to find it very weird and barely speaking to me about anything relationship-adjacent even today), and I hold my extended family at enough arms length that I don't really have to tell them honestly what I'm up to. I could not be more happy to not have to deal with female bullshit in dating, and am currently in a very committed long distance relationship with a bisexual guy (note I've already met his mother, it's a serious thing, there is a plan down the line to actually move in together).
In other words, it's possible to actually make this work. I second the advice of expanding his social circle into countries that are more accepting of these things, the more widespread buy-in there is to the idea of the Rainbow Identities, ironically enough the more normal the open homosexuals become. It's a consequence of social pressure that only the people who are super comfortable being openly gay in places like India are also probably not the kinds of people you would want to partner up with ever, virtually everyone else that's more normal is also less likely to be contrarian and radical for the sheer sake of it and as a result more susceptible to the pressure to conform. But don't rush into anything after a breakup. It's a recipe for bad decisions you'll just end up regretting. And bars dedicated to the Rainbow Community are never good places for finding long-term commitment.
Ultimately though, there's an inherent tradeoff between staying in India and being close to one's same-sex partner. You can't have it all in that regard. And keeping a relationship under wraps while pretending to be asexual or having a lavender marriage is a half-measure that's likely to involve a lot of deception and will probably be ridiculously exhausting after a while. I'm not sure how easy it is for him to keep his extended family at length in the same way I do, or to fail to inform them of goings on in his life. But in my experience being overseas makes the act of deflection way easier. I just lie to my extended family about my life every now and then, and barely think about them again. He's got you and your mother to back him up, which also makes any spiel he spins more convincing.
As an aside, you should not feel that bad about making gay jokes. You've been supportive, and if he tells you it's fine I see no reason to disbelieve him. I make quite extreme and very slur-filled jokes in that caliber all the time with close company, and can relate to seriously not wanting someone I know to tiptoe around me for fear of hurting my feelings. It can be very condescending to feel like you're being coddled or unintentionally forcing someone to self-censor when you would just prefer they be themselves, to the point that every time I get a sense that any of my friends are doing that I sometimes push them in the direction of making these jokes. Probably not a good time at the moment since he may be going through a breakup soon, but just thought I would add that.
Thank you. I'm glad to hear from someone who's lived through this themselves and come out intact.
I can't really compare cultural conditions in Malaysia to my part of India, but my brother is close to being maximally lucky in terms of what he can expect in these parts. Maybe he'd be even better off if our parents were left leaning academics, but then he'd be poorer too, so it's a wash.
The thing is, my brother was never particularly involved in the local gay community. He doesn't consider his sexuality core to his identity, he's not an activist. His close friends are mostly straight, and the women he hangs out with don't see him as a gay best friend (even if he can be catty on occasion, and so can I). I don't think he specifically wants to immerse himself in the LGBT community, he just wants to be accepted as a normal dude who just happens to prefer sleeping with and loving other men.
He passes for straight even on scrutiny from his closest family and most of his friends, albeit with some suspicion. I do think that he might benefit from moving somewhere more liberal, but there are very good arguments for staying. He was never as dead set on fleeing the country as I was. Ultimately, it's up to him and I'll help figure out how to make it work.
I wouldn't go that far, honestly. India isn't Uganda or Saudi Arabia. He could probably cohabit with another man and dodge questions indefinitely, unless he publicly declares that he's married to a man and starts making out in public. Even then, I think he could get away with not much greater risk to life and limb. My mom joked that if he ends up a gynecologist, then there'll be plenty of women seeking him out because he's gay. There's a kernel of truth there.
You can go to high end clubs and see clearly flamboyant gay or trans people, and it's not a problem. There are practicing doctors who are out as gay (or make zero effort to hide it) and they do fine.
I see no real reason to tell our extended family either, I think it's fine with him if just me and our parents know. If he was genuinely asexual, then the same questions would arise, and we know he's already very discreet. I don't think he wants the fuss of a public marriage, and everything else can probably be shoved under a suitably robust rug.
Thank you. He really doesn't want me to walk on eggshells around him, or to treat him any differently. I don't intend to. If I say that something is "hella gay", then I am not claiming that homosexuality is inherently bad, anymore than when I say "Jesus" out of incredulity implies that I'm a Christian (quite the opposite). I never had any malice in it in the first place. If he did object - while I'm a free speech advocate, I am perfectly happy to adjust my vocabulary depending on context, fortunately that's not necessary.
Same here; I come from a relatively liberal, atheistic family, though the same thing could not necessarily be said about the extended family. My immediate family have basically agreed it's a good idea not to tell them lest they Actually Die.
It's good he has supportive people like you helping him along.
It has less to do with life and limb (I didn't perceive that as anything other than a remote risk) and more to do with my uncertainty about how sustainable the situation really was in the long run; for example whether the extended family would ever seriously pressure him to get a wife and child or something similar. Extricating yourself from pointed questions about that is a bit more difficult when you regularly see them, and there's less of an excuse to not show proof of whatever you lie to them about. Admittedly this was also based on a bunch of stereotypes about the extremely close-knit and privacyless nature of Indian extended families which I imagined would have made it harder. Or maybe that's just representative of the type of Indian who chooses to migrate to Malaysia.
But if the family situation is such that you can indefinitely deflect it and get away with not telling your extended family anything, then yes, ignore that part of the comment; the calculus changes significantly. Though the ban on commercial surrogacy is definitely still a consideration.
I think this is one of these attitudes that's very common among gay people who don't centre their identity around being gay or relish using it as a social bludgeon against others, the type that doesn't care about being an Activist and mainly wants to live undisturbed as you've stated your brother does. The converse is depressingly common in some circles though - I was once in a friend group with a "non-binary" woman who compulsively engaged in such tactics to police people's behaviour, and it took a herculean effort for me to contain my disgust. I find myself so estranged from these people, it's almost as if I'm looking at a different species entirely.
Your intuitions aren't wrong, per se, but India is a big country, with many different kinds of Indians! For example, if my brother had been born to a few of my paternal uncles, he might not have ever come out until his immediate family had died of old age.
The more conservative parts of our family are not that conservative by Indian standards. Enough to make us worry for the sake of our parents, but not ourselves. He's not going to be shunned or attacked, but our parents might face pointed critique or thinly veiled criticism. My dad is more old-fashioned than my mom, and he might internalize it and agonize over if he raised us right or if this is somehow his fault. I stress that he's never said or done anything actually homophobic, and he would probably get around to it eventually. It would just hurt him a lot.
It helps that our extended family doesn't live with us, or next door for the most part. We aren't very close to our dad's side anyway, we'd lose little if we had to cut them off or be cut off. Unfortunately, can't say the same about how my dad would feel, such ostracism would hurt to the core. I don't think it's likely, but I think there's a non-negligible chance of it. His older siblings raised him after his dad died, and he has tried to return the favor ever since, well past what I would personally deem reasonable. Let's just say we would significantly more wealthy if he had been more selfish and hadn't put half my cousins through college and uni.
Right, I did say that I'm perfectly happy to hang around with LGBT people, but I draw the line with the "queers" or "Enbies". Call me cynical, but the majority are just ornery and attention-seeking straight women in denial. This caused plenty of conflict with an ex of mine, but I don't care. If you are functionally indistinguishable from a straight person and only sleep with straight men, my charity wears thin (barring the terribly dyed hair and baggy clothes, which does not constitute a distinct sexuality).
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