Coming Out with Hideous Men

If you listen to the waves, you find no pattern, only noise, until you listen for a long time. Then you hear the tides.

In the same way, four data points do not a pattern make.

I have only had relationships of any significance, all with men - four mostly nice men, who vary across axes but were all nerdy, bespectacled, and storytellers.

At the same time, four people do not constitute an identity. I think anyone reading this has probably figured out before I have that I am not entirely straight (few are, if you believe Kinsey), nor am I average on the axis of asexuality. I don’t know exactly where I put myself - demisexual sounds close, as does butch, but bisexual, asexual, queer, pansexual, kinky, dom, sapiosexual, semisexual, caregiver, and plain old weird are not wrong either.

If this was any other time in history, I would have no questions. I would marry the rich middle aged bachelor from a good family that my parents had steered me toward, pump out my kids, and have done with it. Yet I was born in the late twentieth century, a time of new waves of feminism, pride, and openness, which has allowed me to question just who the fuck I am. I want to have a scientific answer, but again, four data points don’t give much to find a trend.

I just started reading David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. If you ask any student of modern English, he’s pretty close to the modern classic author. The stories so far focus on men’s bodies - the way they are used, how they grow and change, how they interact with other bodies, and how they are experienced by the mind inside.

Wallace was an observer of bodies, a gatherer of data points about the human condition. He condensed those observations into short stories and novels, abstracting those data points into Picassan shapes and colors for easier (or, if you’re an English student, more difficult) digestion. As such, the ego is a prominent character in Wallace’s writing - exterior events processed and reprocessed through self-narrative and retelling. The inner voice is forced to the foreground, along with all the insecurities and foibles that people try to obscure.

Which brings me back to me - while I may not be the center of the universe at large, I am still the center of my own universe, my own experience. My inner voice runs in the circles that Wallace’s hideous men run through, constantly trying to pick patterns out of individual waves and coming up with more extreme extremes. If I do things that can’t be explained, if I have traits that can’t be defined, if the wave equation collapses with imaginary components, am I still worthy to be treated as human? Do I make sense? Do I have a valid reason to exist? And as always…

Why me?

Many, including Wallace, have tried to turn to religion to answer the unanswerable, but since religion seems to deliberately preclude uncertainty (the whole basis tends to be “I believe”), it also precludes a lot of what appears to make me who I think I am - the questioner, the cynic, the one about two degrees off center. Religion doesn’t want for answers - it claims to have them.

Answers reduce complexity to something more understandable. If one takes Wallace, or almost any modern or postmodern writer, with any kind of seriousness, he suggests that a reduction of the complexity of person to an attribute, or even a few attributes, leads to absurdity.

At the same time, human minds are predisposed towards pattern-making and compaction of information, which at even a moderate level demand reduction of that information to a label or a number, lest we become overwhelmed by the noise of complexity.

When it comes to my sexuality, I can tell myself I have almost no information (again, four serious relationships), or way too much (most of the world simultaneously screaming about sex and sexuality), opposite problems that lead to the same result - insufficient data to deduce the trend my pattern-loving human mind wants so badly. If I were to find a trend, the right words, a good pattern, I don’t know if I would be mature enough not to make it a center of my identity, like so many of Wallace’s characters do of their sexual tendencies.

At the same time, sexuality is one of the aspects of life that people are not allowed to be agnostic about - everyone has to pick at least one label. Unlike religion, people are not allowed to say that they don’t want to play the game. After all, people are quantized, so love must be quantum.

And of course it matters, because we as a society have declared that it matters. Even though I am biologically female and have a boyfriend, the exact way I identify has an impact on employment, risk of suicide, government census data, friend group, physical health, mental health, relationship with family, and more.

So to complete the process of coming out, without the option of sexual agnosticism, I find myself reaching for a corruption the Catholic apologetic for the question of salvation:

Am I gay? Straight? Bi? Pan? Ace? Something else?

Yes, of course I am.

No, I am continually searching.

I hope so. I really do.