I finally stopped empathising with – or entertaining the attention of – gay and bisexual men that decide to stay fully in the closet due to fear, while engaging in the straight world without an ounce of nuance. That was the caveat I had to find before finishing this article.
Because you can do a lot of greatness from that side of the fence, without ever revealing yourself. You can label yourself as you want, straight or bisexual, but as long as you love and cherish your partner, and respect and DEFEND the lives of others as much as we respect your right to keep your sexuality private, I have no problem with you.
I used to have enough compassion to understand the multiple reasons why men might never come out or discuss their curiosity. Religious families, brainwashing (and the long journey to undo it), homophobia or simply being misunderstood when it comes to bisexuality.
But this year has proven to me that replacing the disadvantage of being openly queer for the anxiety of being found out turns men into weapons of mass destruction.
Because DL men will ultimately end up hating everything and everyone except, maybe, other DL men.
They will be jealous of the women in their life for the attention other men gives them.
They will hate openly queer people for their authenticity.
They will blame society for forcing the closet as the only alternative to still be considered men.
And they will compete against genuine straight men for being everything they say they are.
And let’s not forget, they will use, abuse and weaponise femme and trans people in order to reinforce the same toxic masculinity that keeps them in fear on the first place.
And ironically, they will be the ones sacrifice all morals and any person necessary in their quest to self-identify as something that they are not.
Absolutely everyone loses when a man goes DL
The more time they spend building up that fake facade that allows them to have the cake and eat it, the bigger the web of lies grows, until the sheer thought of coming out or exploring their sexuality openly becomes an impossibility that dictates their personality and their actions without any agency or control (exactly what they are fighting to retain).
How do you justify the years or decades of deception, gaslighting, manipulation to people that thought they were worth reciprocal loyalty?
How toxic must it be to internalise in full isolation both the shame of their lies and the victimhood of their circumstances while at the same time not having any support from their peers? To know that any validation and recognition earned was always against a character that never truly existed?
That empathy that I gained and I still have for Enis and Jack, the main characters in Brokeback Mountain, doesn’t extend now to newer generations of queer people living in such a multicultural city as London in the year 2025. What before was survival, now it’s the entitlement of playing victim to your own homophobia.
Because it doesn’t stop at omitting aspects of your sexuality, which is the part that everyone should be entitled to. Eventually, they will be forced to lie, deceive and compartmentalise anyone that dares to come close to them, while mirroring the behaviour of people that would hate their true self. They won’t be able to ever commit entirely to any relationship, either platonic or romantic, because it will always be based on a false premise that they know will rarely be savaged if the truth comes out.
If they never make the step of coming out, they will ultimately be forced to find a suitable woman they can use as cover, keep up the illusion of commitment to everyone around and to conceal their feelings (both good and bad) towards their own femininity and other men. All this while constantly fishing, within plausible deniability, for anyone that might shared their situation, so that they might have a chance of having a true “partner in crime” that they can classify as a safe connection. They will need someone that is either far removed from their life or with the exact same level of commitment to the scam so that the risk of being exposed can be used as the basis of trust. So much that their lives will always revolve around creating the conditions for such things to happen.
Choosing the right prey, using their hide, to cover
Preferring a long distance relationship – or prolonging one for as much as they can – that allows them time and space for these opportunities. Finding a partner with low self-esteem in order to hide the lack of true care and physical attraction or to use psychology to justify your triggers and reactions to things that shouldn’t affect you the way they do. These in turn creates an outside image that no one can’t really put together cohesively. Being unable to discover true physical intimacy, true sexual satisfaction, the constant fear of STDs, the duality of acting like queerness is alien to you while fully knowing what it entails. Being forced to hide in conservative and religious spheres, living amongst your enemy, having to partake in the hate they profess (and that excluding yourself from causes rejection, until it is not an option) for people that in reality are much braver that they are. To have to live like a secret agent keeping tabs of their personas, so that any suspicion is met with a reasonable doubt or a solid explanation.
If this all sounds like a recipe for mental health issues, imagine the burden on those that from the outside looking in spent their lives believing in earnest that those inconsistent behaviours must all come from an entirely different place. The effort in trying to make something work that was never meant to. Being unwillingly trapped in a no win situation where the truth will break you and the lie keeps you in a stage set up for someone else to play a role that they were never required to.
Once I realised how perverse it is to justify all that for a chance to have the benefits of manhood, I don’t think I can condone it or tolerate it anymore.
When the veils gets thinner, and you start seeing the cracks
Because I can now see those behaviours in a lot of self-professed straight men, to the point where I know wonder if the patriarchy designed from the beginning to permit its bisexuality as a default while retaining the authority over women. Those same women that if allowed, would welcome open sexuality even if it is just to feel safer knowing that who they date is a genuine person capable of feeling the same way that they do. Vulnerable, exposed, afraid.
Is this what we are imposing on all our children? Is this is what we have driven “some” many men to do in silence? All in order to ”stop“ ruining the aesthetics of patriarchy? Are you fucking kidding? Is that the whole point? Let the world burn before admitting that love involves all aspects of ourselves upgrading as we grow old, not the ever so narrow tunnel vision of what the word “man” corrupted just in order for some (including me, if I chose to) to use it to their advantage.
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