Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Bro, no judgment, but you sure talk a lot about how many gay men come onto you (because you hang out with gay men) and then get really defensive about how totally not gay you are. Like, at this point either you're doing a bit, or...
It is a bit? I would hope that's blazingly obvious my man. Would you prefer I start throwing in "/s"? I find that approach crass.
I think you know me well enough that you should believe me when I say that if I had any real desire to engage in happy fun times with another man, there's nothing stopping me. Why don't I? Because I don't care to.
I am not gay. I am not a bisexual in denial. I like putting penis in vagina. I have the self-awareness to find it rather amusing that I find it fun to hang around gay people. I have been accused of having the musical taste of a gay man, but then again, they're the Jews of the music industry (let's not talk about the gay Jews).
It's become enough of a pattern that people are asking questions. It may not in fact be because you are gay, it could be because you've discovered a new subculture that makes you feel at home while you are going through a tough time and helps you connect with your brother (I think you said he was gay?) it could be something totally different. However it's usually because you are gay so even if that isn't it - it is certainly an impression you are slightly giving off.
I well understand why people might suspect I'm gay. I find it amusing, really, since at least to my own satisfaction, I'm as zero on the Kinsey scale as one can get. Adjusting for the kind of floating point error you wouldn't notice on a pride float.
Am I offended when people online suspect I'm gay? Not really. If I cared, I wouldn't supply the material. I'm more annoyed when people take my rather definitive declarations that I'm straight as evidence of denial. Gee, the dude who regularly writes essays about falling in and out of love with women is gay, is all I can say to them. Bisexuality is a harder to adjudicate diagnosis of exclusion, but we've moved past the ICD-10 paraphilia era.
I can only sigh in exasperation. If I regularly defend gay and bisexual subcultures against attack, it would take a particular form of intransigent self delusion to not acknowledge tendencies to join them. I don't acknowledge them because they don't exist
Honestly, there's are plenty of prosaic reasons I hang around with gay people. I started going to a gay pub entirely by accident (I have that essay about the shock of realizing it's a gay pub, I'm not very observant at times), and picked up gay friends. This well predated my brother coming out, but might have contributed to him feeling comfortable doing so. He could see I was more than comfortable treating gay people as human beings, though I can only hope that he had enough reason to trust me before that. Humans are weird like that, he could have told me a decade back and I'd have had his back, that's what brothers are for.
What else? Those environments are, as you suggested, quite novel to me. And there's always some drama going on, I pack my own popcorn. I also appreciate that they're quite understanding and accepting spaces, not that that's for my own benefit. I do not like moral busybodies, not that you can't find them there too.
More recently, I'm seeing a (straight) woman heavily enmeshed in the culture. She dragged me to a drag queen night the first date (I went willingly, I was just curious), and her best friend is a gay influencer. That kinda constrains the option space for me, you know, not that I particularly mind. If there's booze and people to tell me about their mental health issues, I'm content. You only get one of the two at work.
You're heading full throttle into a lonely existence where you wondered where the years have gone.
What do you want? If you just want a relaxing time with nonjudgmental mildly drunken coevals, fine, but long-term I have serious doubts about that as a path toward fulfilment. Humans need a bit of drama and conflict. If you want a break from women, fine, but then you're not even doing that.
There's big writing on the wall here and that you clearly do not see it amazes and saddens me, not because of you but because it says something larger about human's incapacity for self awareness.
Do you think my "jokes" about feeling like it's time for me to settle down and have a wife and kids are just jokes? They aren't.
I am acutely aware of the risks of pushing these things too far. I only need to look at that uncle of mine for a good example of the worst case scenario. By his accounting, a lothario in his 20s and 30s, then turning 50 and feeling awfully fucked and lonely (not mutually exclusive things). To his credit, he did try. He was married to a woman for a year, and she had BPD.
To my credit, while I was with my ex with BPD, I had the brains to not marry her. Despite being intensely in love with her, and seeing a future together. If she hadn't been crazy, I would have been married with kids.
In other words, if you're telling me to settle down, you're preaching to the choir. That's been the plan for several years. The hard part is finding someone who I think fits the bill. The good news is that that's going well. I'd like to be a good husband and father, and not just in possession of more than my fair share of dad jokes. If I need examples, I just have to look at my dad and my grandpa.
You might ask where the delay arises? Well, you try marrying when you're in such a transitional stage of your life, rather unmoored geographically. It's not easy. I met someone I could see myself marrying last year, and as predictably as I had feared, geography ended things.
Not too get even more Ask George here, but I think possibly the routine of hanging out in bars with homosexual men is not the ideal environment to meet women. Now it may be true that you do not wish to meet women in bars--and if this is your viewpoint, you are probably not entirely unwise. But I suspect that, with your job, social hours are limited. Why not find spaces where you are at least more likely to run into a woman free of emotional baggage? (cough, choke, wait, hang on, let me get some water...) I mean a woman who might have less emotional baggage than the types who frequent gay bars in their attempts to get the hell away from straight men.
Gay pubs are absolutely not the right venue to meet women, but I don't really go there to meet women. I go there for for the booze, and because that's where a few of my non-work friends live and try to die.
I meet women the old-fashioned way: on dating apps or at work. Well, at least one of those is lindy. I will ignore the monthly arranged marriage my dutiful elderly parents drop on my doorstep like a mouse missing a head.
Women without emotional baggage? Where does one find one of those? They clearly aren't looking for psychiatrists.
Jokes aside, I am dating someone with just enough to fit in the carry-on allowance. And we go to places other than gay clubs. I just had a lovely day with her at Loch Lomond.
I had to look up lindy. It is a word I shall never use. I didn't know you were dating anyone other than seeing the lesbian sometimes. I hang my head in shame for not being up-to-date.
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