For straight people, there’s a default life laid out: get an education, find a job, get married, have some kids and raise a family. By that time you’re 50, with another two or three decades to kill, worn out and ready for some peace, fat, complacent. You run out the clock.
For gay people, there’s no default life. The existential problem is more urgent. Marriage and kids are not an available option.
The above is from a blog post that Joe Clark linked to with the text Heterosexualist Christian does BlogJamDC. What happened is that a fan of Andrew Sullivan (a gay Catholic right-wing blogger that, coincidentally, Yossi Gurvitz rather likes) attended an event that Sullivan promoted on his blog, except that instead of being the political blogger event he expected, it turned out to be a gay blogger event.
I thought that his observations echo what I thought and felt when I first ran across a gay cultural event. In my case it was an evening of texts by gay writers called יש לו דרכים משלו, that was put together by an editor I worked with at the time, Yair Kedar. When they took the production to the Edinbrough festival, a friend of mine joined as one of the three actors presenting the texts, and when we met he confirmed to me that he was gay, and I told him that I was dating Suzie, because this made me feel an odd kinship with him.
Because I felt we had both put aside the default life
.
But, bullshit.
Turns out that my friend (well, former friend – we aren’t in touch) had his eye on the default life
. He got married (big wedding) and had a kid. OK, he’s divorced now, but so are lots of dads.
In retrospect, I realize that was bloody arrogance on my part – gay people are forced to give up the default life
without any choice or ability to negate this (although my friend proved otherwise), while I was just a dilettante, taking what amounts to a self-indulgent vacation from the mapped-out path.
I submit that if I’d stayed with Suzie for the rest of my life (like John Brunner living from his twenties until his old age with a woman twenty years older), I would have abdicated from the default life
. But, see, we broke up, and I didn’t.
I recall hanging around at friends’ weddings, seeing my peers with kids, feeling like a bloody romantic outsider, destined to walk a different path.
Turns out I was just a fucking tourist.