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Notes -
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 am a gay man and on the one hand I find your concern and thoughtfulness toward your brother charming and thoughtful but on the other hand somewhat patronizing and broadly misunderstanding the situation of homosexuality and why it is painful to be gay. Straight people usually imagine homosexuality as being difficult because of things you pointed out- your brother teases you and society preassigns expectations for your life in heteronormative ways and because, traditionally, heterosexuality is seen as a more standard and common and productive and positive situation compared with homosexuality. And indeed, even most gay men are stuck in this mode of understanding homosexuality vs heterosexuality today. But none of these things are even particularly bothersome and all of them are facile concerns compared with the fundamental impossibility of homosexuality that is incompatible with true fulfillment in a way that heterosexuality is able to provide.
The reason heterosexual relationships are so positive for people is that a man completes a woman and a woman completes a man. Every man compares himself to those around him. He is competitive with other men. When he is with a woman, he compares himself to the woman. When he compares himself to a woman, he sees his masculinity. Hopefully, he is bigger, stronger, taller, more masculine than the woman. He is absolved of the pain of inadequacy felt when comparing himself to any other man. Finally he is more rational, more brave, more logical than the other. A woman too is liberated with a man. She no longer has to compare herself to the dreaded prettier sister or neighbor girl. She's surely smaller, prettier, more petit, softer, more feminine than her man. She is sweeter and lighter and more compassionate. Finally the couple can be secure in their own traits in comparison with one another.
In homosexuality you find no comfort in this way. If your partner is more masculine than you are, is bigger and stronger and braver, you can only see in yourself someone less masculine and less big and strong and brave. If your partner is less masculine than you are, you can see yourself as bigger stronger and braver than him, but it is at the expense of your partner's ego.
In the end I think that homosexuality best operates on a level of respect and mutual understanding. I have three ex boyfriends whom I still respect very much as men and as people and as former lovers, but I know that each relationship was doomed from the start. We can love each other and respect each other for who we are but it takes a level of maturity to understand that the partnership can only ever be so deep.
Anyway, my point is that the real tragedy of homosexuality is not what you think it is. Do not condescend to understand his pain when your view is so facile and your experiences so superficial. No amount of social engineering is ever going to change what happens between men. The left can demand a change to opinion until they turn the world inside out and insist that 2+2=5 but they can't insist their way into fixing homosexuality. And neither can you, in all your good intentions, fix anything for your brother. It's not your load to bear.
There’s more than one way to have a homosexual relationship. Some couples are perfectly comfortable having a more masculine and a more feminine partner. I think the main upside of not being straight is realising you don’t have to fit into the heterosexual norms, but also that you don’t have to deny them entirely and can pick and choose - be a feminine man who feels safe and petite in your partner’s arms, but is also the main breadwinner, be a masculine stay at home parent, etc.
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