Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
One that the may not be obvious to you, or to even him yet, is that coming out is a process, and one that never ends, and for a wide variety of people, it's going to be more painful to be 'honest' everywhere than just being themselves. Coming out to you is a step, coming out to your mom if he does is another step. Even if you broadcast it from a megaphone while doing the full Folsome Street Fair on main street, there will still be people the next day you have to decide whether you need or want to come out to.
The flip side is that it's not a process that's fully under your own control. My brother got outed to our paternal grandmother by Facebook. I had to disclose to my employer once. The more you choose to do it, the less it can sneak up on you.
But that doesn't mean it's always better to be in control either.
I'll caveat that there's a reverse of the lemon problem, here. The people who are always down to fuck are always out on the market, and the people who want a long-term closed relationship aren't on grindr and aren't spending as much time at gay bars. There's places the two spheres meet, but especially given the various preferences and interests floating around, it's not necessarily obvious when you're crossing the boundaries.
There's also some messiness where a number of gay men self-identify as sluts but may not actually have casual sex or even want that high a body count. Sometimes that's because there's sluts-in-every-other-sense, and sometimes it's because they like the identity but don't actually have the drive. Hell, there's even people who love the idea of casual sex, but only with people they know so well and in such limited situations that it's basically just a small-case polyamory (or, hilariously, monogamy-with-named-sex-toys). 'Sapiosexual' is a really obnoxious self-identifier, but it is pointing toward and around a concept with some meaning, just corrupted as a signifier by the mess of people who kinda abuse it.
(I'm trying to write up something more serious for urquan on this, but I need to go into more detail for his use case.)
That may not be the most actionable information -- 'oh boy, tons of eligible bachelors that absolutely wouldn't give you a second glance' kinda sucks as a recognition point -- but I've... found it helpful to know.
I'll second other people saying that, especially if they were meant in good spirits, I'd rather people make jokes rather than walk on eggshells. It is kinda funny! It is something that's not really ever going to make 'sense' at a deep level to you! Just throw some self-deprecatory signs hitting your team too, accept a few jokes going your way, and it's how family should treat each other.
((Tbh, the most obnoxious stuff I encountered was were there wasn't any humor intended. There's still a very uncomfortable bit that, no matter how much my father is happy about my brother and his husband now, we'll both remember when he told us, trying to be nice and trying to be paternal, that he didn't care whether we brought home a white girl or a black girl or a hispanic girl, so long as we brought home a girl. The Saturday Night Live jokes were just funny.))
That's... a difficult situation, and if it helps, give him my sympathies as someone who's had to make decisions around (lighter) variants of the same problems. A lot of the answers are going to depend both on what he's willing to do, what risk (and what kinds of risks!) he's willing to accept, and how much his biology is going to fight with him. I'll avoid repeating the obvious 'try to have it all' stuff or diving into useless esoteric options (eg: just find a trans guy who wants to get knocked up who cares whether that'd even work for him), but a few unintuitive options:
There are women who you don't have to trick. For a fujoshi or a woman with a very low sex drive, a closed-relationship-focused gay guy can be an even more-desirable-than-normal catch. Sometimes that's a lavender marriage (yes, there are lesbian fujoshi), but sometimes it's just what works for people. Doesn't even have to be a lie; you can honestly say that you married for the sake of kids, but you're great friends: then people who need to know can know and those who don't can decide what they want to believe. This has some good options on having biological children, if some that might make for a few uncomfortable discussions and maybe a bit of a boner-killer moment. There's levels of gay where the flesh might be unwilling but there's no mental objection (or even fingers that might be willing to put in the hard work when required), and on the other side, my brother turned down a threesome he really wanted because the third's girlfriend wanted in the room fully clothed. If your brother's toward the latter end, this probably won't work well even if the woman in questions swears she's lesbian or asexual. On the upside, if you don't particularly care about a woman's appearance, you get to select for personality, and there's a lot of diamonds in the rough.
Ultimately, it's still a polyamorous relationship in the literal sense, if one where there third never gets dicked. It's also putting a massive amount of trust in a third party that you can't love and might grow to love you or need something more from someone, and to be blunt, while having little or no leverage over them. Optimistically, I know a few people who took this path and didn't divorce until after the kids graduated, and one who did and didn't divorce at all. You get a good idea of how much lust and love keeps most married couples from driving each other nuts once you see someone taking this approach. Even if that doesn't happens, it's a secret that has to last decades, and that's a lot of pressure, and I can't speak as to how the kids took it. I also don't know how prevalent fujoshi are in India, nevermind how he'd find one he likes well enough to spend decades with.
Being a unicorn isn't that bad, if you've got the right mindset. Chances are pretty good this makes biological children harder (barring finding a bi guy who likes the idea paternity roulette, tbf a surprisingly common kink) even if the couple in question wants kids, but if they do, you get to be the friendly uncle who's always around while skipping a lot of the bad parts of parenting like having to figure out discipline. There's jealousy in not being someone's one-and-only, but if you absolutely have to make a compromise on that, it can be both easier (they're not direct competition!) or harder (they can do something I can't, they're going to steal him!) where the one exception is a different gender. It's easier to be closeted, like this -- you'd be surprised how many older folk assume you're pining over the wife! -- but it's also even harder to come out.
There are risks, here, even with the compromises: being pumped-(and-pumped-and-pumped)-and-dumped does happen to gay unicorns as with straight women unicorns, like the fujoshi there's a risk of jealousy from the other partner and now it's fucking-polyamory, and this can get into weird legal situations even inside the United States or UK. I wouldn't even bring this up while he's with his current boyfriend, but if he's staying with him even as said boyfriend starts talking more and more as they start settling down, it's worth spelling out that this is a choice, even if he thinks he's not making any choice yet. And it is a survivable one, if not a perfect one.
Long-distance relationships can be both easier and harder than you'd expect. Having a partner that only exists through a VOIP call 300+ days a year sucks when you need a human touch, don't get me wrong, and I know more than one LDR that got really rough when the two long-time lovebirds found that they were only sexually compatible at a keyboard. You have a lot more space to select from, though, and a lot more people trying this stuff care about longer-term relationships to begin with. It's also easier to stay closeted (at least in meatspace), and a lot more compatible with a number of home obligations. On the gripping hand, though, this can turn into a massive psychological pressure such it feels like immigration to the LDR's homeland or emigration of the LDR Will Fix Everything, and that's both not true and can lead to bad decision-making with regret.
Also doesn't help with the biological child focus.
Be a good sounding board. Especially if he doesn't have many meatspace gay friends separate from his boyfriend, it's very easy for a guy to go quite literally nuts as they stew over hard decisions without any external grounding (or falling down the /r/relationships or LLM rabbit hole for said external grounding, which will quite happily work toward driving you even more nuts). It's a really bad situation to be in, and I'm not exaggerating or hyperbolizing when I talk about this like going crazy. Having someone you can be out to, even if they can't empathize fully with a specific problem, as long as they're going to be honest and serious and open-minded about a choice, helps a ton at not getting unmoored or badly fixated.
And that's going to be uncomfortable at times! I'm bi, and I still absolutely know more of my brother's preferences than I ever wanted to know. The watersports joke is not the worst of all possible worlds. It's still better than having family who can't tell if they're obsessing over someone.
Uh oh. I wasn't trying to prompt an instruction manual.
I'll caveat what I've said before with the point that I don't really engage with the gay community much any more, and when I did it was more of an experiment due to loneliness than it was a serious desire to build a world there. I think you could technically call me bisexual, but the number of men who do anything at all for me is very small, and very highly selected as the most feminine group among those. Basically the sort who you could sort of squint at and imagine they're a woman.
The kind of masculine disgust towards the effeminate and the flamboyant that you see in gay men like self_made's brother and the other gay commenters here was never true of me. Even limiting to that group, a 10/10 on my scale is about as attractive as a 3/10 woman, and that's being generous. I find true masculinity actively repulsive, and still cannot describe how even straight women could possibly find men attractive, despite understanding they have every mechanism of natural selection on their side. Given those limitations, and my romantic orientation that contrasts with what you typically find in the gay community (even if subcultures that are more assimilatory exist), the project was always rather statistically doomed to failure.
If anything, I'd say I identify more with the gynandromorphile concept that rae once discussed than with bisexuality-re-bisexuality, and I can't distinguish passing trans women from cis women in my patterns of attraction. That said, I do not experience autogynephilia and find the concept rather strange.
That's the actual takeaway I had from my college experimentation (my moral and visceral opposition to casual sex were pre-existing, though it strengthened them). Given such inclinations are fairly despised by straight men ("faggot"), gay men ("tourist"), and trans women ("chaser") alike, I had limited opportunities to act on it and ended up just dating cis women with whom my pattern of attraction was well-trod and socially legible. I broke some hearts along the way, and so some element of my subsequent interest in the topic is trying to find the right sequence of words so I can explain to myself, to the cosmos, to no one and to everyone, that my desire was never to hurt anyone and I was just lonely, lovelorn, and surprised by what I found in places I never expected to find it, and I broke hearts because I was afraid I would pull someone truly close and then devastate them in a worse way if I turned out to be wrong about myself.
Hm. I'm not familiar with any changes in the term's significance since around 2013 or so, but I dated a girl in school who unironically called herself that. And genuinely every woman I've ever dated has said words to that effect -- my current girlfriend jokes that she wants her children to have "your juicy brain genes." I'm not the sort of person that goes around bragging about IQ, but the thing that is statistically unusual about me is verbal intelligence, so it's not really surprising to me that people who went, "that guy is special" all identify the same trait in me as the most attractive one. But words, of course, are both my gift and my fortress, and the instrument I use to connect is the same instrument I use to hide.
Maybe it means something else now, but back then it meant something like, "attracted to intelligence as a personality trait more than other features (but not exclusively)." Some people are like that.
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My brother is fast asleep, so I can't quite ask him right now, but I think that even just having close family and friends know the truth would be enough to provide him contentment. He's not the kind of person to agonize over what random acquaintances or distant relatives think, and neither am I.
Sure, there might be times when he struggles to decide whether his sexuality needs disclosure, but I don't think it'll bother him too much.
Thank you. After several people reassured me that they personally didn't mind, I'm over my (minor) worries. It made a big difference that my own brother straight up acknowledged that he didn't mind and didn't want me to change. I wish that had been enough to make me entirely sanguine, it almost was, and if he's happy why should I care what anyone else says?
Agreed. He's a sensible young man, and has his own strengths. I respect his ability to figure out his own goals and needs, while being committed to supporting him all the way through.
Anyway, this conversation made me emotional, so I went and woke him up just to say I love him. You really can't say that often enough, in my experience, and regret never feels good.
Good thing he knows literal fujoshis in his circle of acquaintances, and probably friends. You could well be right that someone might consider this setup their dream. And worst case, my family are gynecologists and he might become one. We can pull out the ol' family turkey-baster as and when needed. Intra-uterine insemination is easy enough, any
Tom, Dickand Harrycan pull it off.He's young. There's time to explore plenty of options, and I'm grateful for that. I'd be much sadder if, say, he'd only spoken up a decade later. Or whispered it to me on my death bed.
I do not quite feel ready to explore the true limits of his attraction to women, but I know it's very limited. Who knows, maybe from the rear any ass is grass and he's willing to mow the lawn. A sufficiently high dose of viagra could make someone screw a corpse, or at least hard enough to make it a technical possibility.
(Out of curiosity, do lesbian fujoshi consume yaoi, or just yuri?)
Call me shallow, but ain't setting my brother up with any uggo, be they man or woman. He deserves better haha. Although I must admit that I have learned the hard way that an unpleasant personality can easily overpower the allure of a pretty face.
I kinda went down a rabbit hole looking up what you meant by "unicorn". It seems I am not as terminally online or up to date with gay culture as I imagined. Huh. I guess I see the appeal?
I don't want to go into too much detail, but even during their intern year, his BF did some regrettable things because of "loneliness", and that's just a month or two of not seeing each other.
I don't think I can make an LDR work, from some experience, but my brother hasn't really tried. Who knows, maybe he'll change his mind. I just don't think a bi, severely conflicted man is the right choice, even if I like him myself.
I see you also mean other LDRs, and sure, I guess if he does meet someone as appealing, I think he might give it a good shout.
Hey, he's my brother. He's going to Claude and not ChatGPT if he absolutely must use an LLM for life advice. Jokes aside, I do intend to be there for him, and after @reo 's nudging, I intend to be proactive about it. I found out many things last night, and not just that he's gay. He loves me to a degree that makes my heart ache, and I didn't quite know it. If he can't count on me, what does being my little brother even mean?
I absolutely don't want to watch. Not even think about it the details really, but to be fair that's more to do with me being straight than a prude or homophobe. I'm the kind of guy who skips ahead when a porno decides to zoom in on the guy's face or his cock. Who decided that's a good idea??
Anyway. I wanted to say that I'm very grateful. You're tied with Reo for people who, by themselves, made this cry for help worth it. I'll pass it all along, thank you so much.
Bit of a tradeoff where the strength of other connections can make it hard to grok, rather than merely believe, when someone close says that they trust them.
I think a lesbian going after yuri only gets the title weeaboo, if that. Fujoshi are pretty much defined by the M/M bit, lesbian or straight woman alike.
It's been around a decent time and not really limited to or even central for gay stuff -- cfe 2014 M/F + F -- but it's not the most common term. I don't want to undersell the risks and downsides to it as an option, but it is an option, and compared to some of the other compromises he might have, not necessarily as bad as it seems from the horror stories. There are still horror stories, and searching for a long-term relationship like that is hard.
Oh, yeah, other LDRs, and specifically looking more broadly to start out. Would not recommend trying to turn an already-stretching relationship into a long-distance one on top of existing stresses unless there's literally no other option. That said, if he's having trouble with a shorter absence, even just long-drive-same-general area LDRs will be painful. I don't get touch starvation, but I've seen what it can do to people.
You joke, but there's significant risks to the thing telling you your ideas are great and should be acted on immediately being smarter and more rational, especially if you're already lovesick.
Fair, but not quite what I was trying to caution about.
There's a lot of tiny things that are going to suddenly seem to come in a whole different light, and they're going to show up everywhere. A joke that gets a smirk and could have a prosaic explanation will no longer have that prosaic explanation be the only one. A favorite media, or a style of dress, or haircut, or a guarded behavior around his cell phone or computer browser history, could derive from his orientation. Some of them will be genuine connections; some will be spurious. Some of them, you'll miss even now, and that's the dumbest class of infohazards available, and I'm not going to spell the likely ones out.
Some of them he will need to say outright, to someone.
Given your day job, you'll have heard much, much worse. It's still a little harder to handle when it hits close to home, and even more so when your expression is trying to outpace your actual thoughts. It will be uncomfortable, you will flinch, and you will need to not let that be what you remember from the interaction. Even the small talk needs to be more important, in your mind.
It will be normal again, some other day. It'll be something you don't really think about, no more than you think about his birthday or hair color or his favorite drink. Today, and maybe this week, your pattern-matching side will be oversensitive.
Heh. It is a weird decision. To be fair, as much as the old Blue Collar Comedy Bit was as much written for its politics as for its accuracy, there do genuinely seem to be some actually-straight guys that do seem to fetishize parts of porn scenes that involve and focus around the men, if only as some way to center themselves within the media.
But I will also say as someone with a healthy (if not exactly red-blooded) appreciation for a nice hefty set of balls and a hefty cock, there's a lot of straight porn that centers them on screen and doesn't do a good job selling them.
Fair enough, and my brother was very convincing when he lied/mislead me before. Not that I hold it against him, I understand, even if I'm a little hurt.
After intense and dedicated research (asking ChatGPT), I must believe you. But holy fucking shit. What the hell is going on here??
I'm not kidding, this is probably the most perplexing thing I've learned in years, I genuinely do not understand why a lesbian woman would enjoy watching media about two men making out. I understand why straight or bi women like yaoi, but lesbians?? I'm half tempted to dedicated my life to research into the topic, but I do enjoy making money.
While not as emotionally shaken as I was when my brother came out, on an intellectual level this is far harder to parse. Whatever, I'm a psychiatrist, I've heard some really weird things. I had a dude tell me he was dead while sitting there, talking to me, and he absolutely meant it.
You're right. I'm still coming to terms with it, and wondering about all the things I missed. But not to a degree that's debilitating, so I hope that reo was wrong when he says it might take months or years to process it. Either way, the fact that I'm fully supportive and don't see my brother in an entirely different light was established to my satisfaction the moment he told me, and that's what really counts. A few drinks, a few drunken chats with my gay friends in Scotland? I'll be as right as rain. I want to talk about this with my closest friends in India, but I promised my brother I wouldn't share with anyone who poses even a meaningful risk of outing him. You guys thankfully don't count, but even then I felt obliged to ask first.
I suspect they, like Clavicular, are best described as being male-to-male trans. Autoandrophilia for men who are already born male. Whatever, I've heard of weirder kinks, and I prefer man on women porn to the solo female/lesbian stuff, even if it technically has infinitely more times the men.
Thanks again, and I mean it strongly. You could make a killing as a coach for conflicted gay/bi men or even their relatives trying to come to terms with it.
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As far as I know lesbians are more into yaoi.
Kinda funny that yaoi appeals to everyone from lesbians, straight women and (some but not all) gay men, while it’s mostly straight men that are into yuri.
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