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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.
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.
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 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.
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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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