Reader Submitted
June 23, 2008
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As you’re probably aware, June is Gay Pride Month. To show our gay pride, we’re having Gay Week over at Boinkology: from Monday to Friday, it’s all gay posts, all the gay time.

SUBMITTED BY XORN SMITH: I think I’m lucky in that there’s not much I regret at this point in my life. At least with the big choices I’ve made — with regard to family, friends, relationships, career — I don’t think I’d change anything. That said, if there was one thing I could change, I think I would’ve explored a same-sex relationship when I was younger. (And explore is, I think, a much better word than experiment.)

The most recent time this pang hit was when I was reading a New York Times article about Season 8 of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which is being done by the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, in comic book form. The Times story, accompanied by this picture of Buffy and her female lover post-coitus, brought out that old familar twinge that I wished I’d been comfortable enough with myself when I was younger to sleep with another guy at least once. I think I would’ve learned something about myself if — and it’s a big “if” — I’d been secure enough to handle that experience at that point in my life. More to the point, it might have been fun. What’s interesting about the Season 8 storyline, and what resonates with me, is that Buffy isn’t gay or being depicted as coming out. Rather, as Whedeon puts it, “She’s young and experimenting, and did I mention open-minded?”

The first time it seriously hit home that this is something I wished I’d explored was a late night in 2003. I wasn’t much past my 30th birthday and I just finished watching Velvet Goldmine for the first time on Bravo. The film is an ode to the glam rock era and is very, very loosely based on the alleged relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop. The entire movie is about finding one’s sexual identity and also about the question of one’s true identity in general, so it’s not surprising that it brought up the question of same-sex exploration for me. That I saw it so close to entering my thirties also played a role: rightly or wrongly, I associate same-sex exploration (for people who predominantly identify as straight anyway) as something to be done when you’re young and having turned thirty I felt like that avenue, now that I actually might be comfortable pursuing it, was somewhat closed off to me.

It’s not that people can’t or shouldn’t enjoy same-sex encounters past a certain age. It’s more that in my case, as I got older, casual sex became less and less appealing outside a committed relationship. So if I was going to have sex with another man now, I think I would have to be as part of a real, fuller relationship and that just doesn’t appeal to me at this point in my life. I’m not sure if that makes me shallow or enlightened, that I can be bi-sexual in considering a physical relationship, but not a long-term emotional one. Regardless, it’s how I feel at this point, so I think the chances of me partaking of that particular pleasure are now pretty slim, hence my regret.

There’s a scene at the end of Velvet Goldmine where the camera pulls up and way from Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale’s characters hanging out together half-naked in a blissful, post-fuck moment on top of the Rainbow Theater. The sun is rising and they’re splitting a quart bottle of Euoropean beer and greeting the cold dawn, shirtless, raw, and beautiful. There’s a freedom in that moment, an abandon, that I know I won’t find in my “adult relationships,” even as they offer their own set of rewards, more permanent and tangible than the fleeting exhilaration of young, uncommitted fucking. And maybe it is that loss of inocence — in knowing that that moment Ewan and Chistian are sharing doesn’t last — that I’m mourning as much as the chance to have explored sex with another man. Perhaps that’s what I’m really longing for — that time when sex was much more wild and reckless and even more dangerous (in an emotional sense, not a physical one.)

So fellow students of Boinkology, is there an age limit on same-sex exploration? Am I the only straight person who feels like they missed out on this? Alternately, did any straight readers have a same-sex encounter when they were younger that they wished they hadn’t?

[Photo by luderbrus]