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[lotesse]

I - here's the thing - my Ex was a self-hating queer man, and he tortured me over it for the better part of a decade.



When we started dating, I was happily out as bi - I'd stayed up late one night reading Ginny/Cho fic on Into Raspberry Swirl and had no problem assimilating the information that I could like girls as much as boys, I was a virgin, I wasn't a Christian, everything was possible and none of it scared me.

He told me that he used to scourge himself with a belt when he masturbated, and I think I still believe him. Anyway, he never criticized me for being bi, but he worried at it constantly: how was I so okay with it, how did I know?

Probably, he's bi too. We liked each other, but both could have paired with same-sex partners as well. None of this was ever a problem for me, but it fucked him up but good. When I was about nineteen, he started doing this "testing" shit, where he would look at gay porn and then straight porn and depending on when he got hard he would either chill or freak the fuck out. When I was home from college, having sex with me was a more intense version of the same thing: if I aroused him, everything was all right, but if I didn't there was gonna be hella drama. Obvs, put that kind of pressure on arousal and it's not going to happen nine times out of ten, and the whole gig really messed with my head and heart; it felt like rejection, but he would be crying, and I would have to reassure him that it was all okay.

I remember this one night - it was summer, and we'd rented Kinsey on DVD to watch at his ratty little rental house. I'd been looking forward to seeing the film, because Kinsey had been a girlhood hero of mine. Watching it, he had a panic attack, a sobbing session on my shoulder, and then a nosebleed that ended up all over my neck and chest and the sofa and later the bathroom and we'd had the lights low so suddenly I'd looked down and there had been glistening wet dark blood all over everything. It was like something out of a dream.

He was brought up Catholic, not Muslim - but from the outside, gotta say, all Abrahamic religions look just about the same. Variations on a theme, like.

Sometimes I feel bad for the nice older poz guy I finally unloaded him on, but mostly I'm so grateful I could kiss the man's feet, because I got out thanks to him.

I am feeling so fucked up about the Orlando shooter, the self-hating Muslim queer man, and his abused girlfriend who dropped him off at the club door. This is where toxic masculinity becomes tragic, and I am strangled by pity and disgust and rage in equal and conflicting measures. These poor self-hating queer men - and the way they can make other people fucking suffer for it.

I don't mean to suggest that any of these things are on the same scale. Mostly I'm just wailing.

Comments

[ithiliana]

That just sounds......so horrifyingly terrible for you!

I do feel sorry for him as well, but.....what you say: These poor self-hating queer men - and the way they can make other people fucking suffer for it.

The ones who take out their self-hatred and rage on other people.

And religions.

The guy I had a HUGE crush on my second year in college who desperately wanted to be an elementary education teacher (and in Idaho, in 1974, that would never have happened--he ended up working in the military education system, overseas, last I'd heard)--HUGE crush. And by the time I met him, I wasn't a virgin (didn't realize I was queer, but it's not surprising that the men I most adored all tended to perform gender in non-normative ways), and was all LOVE LOVE LOVE. He'd get drunk, then sort of make a pass, then call it off (or his friends would dramatically drag him away!).

When the next year, we finally had sex sober, at HIS suggestion (I'd given up and was content with the friendzone which HE put ME in), the first thing he did after was leap out of bed, and say he felt terrible, and freak out when I did not feel terrible, dirty, sinful, etc. (I mean, the sex sucked and not in a good way, not surprising, but I was all happy because LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE).

And yeah, fuck Abrahamic religions.

*hugs*

[lotesse]

I mean - I survived it, you know? But it's their sadness that gets me, every time, that terrible endless sadness of needy men. Argh. Sorry for what sounds like a pretty bad experience in your past, too.

[ithiliana]

It is definitely this endless neediness--though these days I get enraged that women are so often expected to take care of it (impossible as that is). Patriarchy oppresses men in some ways as well, and I think this issue is one aspect of it.

It was tough--but luckily fairly short-lived (this was happening after my parents' divorce, and I dropped out of college, went to work as a waitress a while, then went back to another university with my mother's support--Dad demanded I do a "man's" major, not English, and things got a lot better--including me realizing that I loved women too, and I have never met any who had that kind of issues, and even found a few men who didn't either--mostly in the theatre department at my uni).

[highlyeccentric]

Abused wives, plural. I'm kind of sickened by his father's comments, too. Re: first wife's report Omar was violent: "if they had a chemistry problem she should have come to me".

That is... chilling.

But yeah. I feel you. I also have one fucked-up self-hating queer man (atheist) in my dating history, and that did not go well for me.

[lotesse]

The father is a ... piece of work, all right.

Heck with the terror list, I want people with DV backgrounds to be banned from owning guns.

Sorry about your brush with self-hating queer dudedom. What a mess we make of folks, here in the world.

[anghraine]

I'm terribly sorry about what you went through. I've never been through abuse of any kind, but my hero as a conflicted baby lesbian/aspiring writer brought up Mormon was Orson Scott Card, and I was devastated to discover what he was like—then devastated even more, in a different way, to realize that he's almost certainly a self-hating queer man. I know exactly how that environment can fuck you up (and in my case, it was ameliorated by my unorthodox centrist mother and the relative improvements of the 90s/2000s), and in some ways particularly men and how often they end up lashing out.

It's not that there's no responsibility—but it's so much easier to joke about closeted homophobes and go on and on about what could possibly be influencing each particular man and not the whole suffocating miasma of it.

[lotesse]

OSC is just agonizing, isn't he? I think it was partially the pain leaking out in his works that drew me to them as a teenager - he's so close, so close, to being able to state what hurt him and how, and start to heal from it, and then he warps back around into ideology and is lost again.

From what I've seen, growing up Mormon can be pretty rough, even with a good family to protect you. A lot of the girls I grew up with got their sparks squashed out by that culture, and the boys end up with these ego problems that are really weird and hard to deal with.

[anghraine]

He really is. From his work, he really felt like a ... kindred spirit, I guess, and I suppose on one level he really was. I do feel like something—happened at some point and he just lost his shit. (His books on writing are still some of the best I've ever read, and it's like he completely lost his way in just paranoid hatred.)

Growing up Mormon is ... complex. Even within my relatively tolerant family, I had to deal with a ton of issues, much less within the wider community (my mother always joked that she could deal with anything as long as I wasn't lesbian—not meaning it literally, just as a joke bc the idea was so patently absurd, but it seriously fucked me up and ofc I had no concept of what being lesbian would even be beyond Bad and Evergreen looked terrifying). But there were also things like changing trends—there used to be a ton of "bishop roulette" where your experiences were enormously subject to the culture of your particular region. Being LDS in SF is a world apart from being LDS in eastern Oregon.

And there's been this mainstreaming effort that's pushed the things unorthodox Mormons could cling to underground (e.g., no talking about the mother goddess and directly worshipping her is forbidden—but it was much looser growing up). And there's so much hostility from other conservative religions and obviously from liberals that you feel like you're under attack constantly, then as a queer Mormon you're attacked directly or indirectly from within the community too, so it's just relentless with no way out. And the compulsory heterosexuality is tied up with beliefs about immortality and the afterlife—celibacy is lesser than heterosexual marriage, not ~purer~. And since there's also tons of gender essentialism, with men as pursuers, a single woman who was never asked by the 'right man' is just unlucky, whereas a single man who doesn't pursue any women is not only denying himself full participation in celestial communion, but denying it to the woman he 'should' have chosen; ergo selfish and sinful.

Not to say it's 100% worse for queer men in all ways, but there's a special pressure explicitly caught up with masculinity, along with inconsistent messages about what the supposed rightful place of men to 'preside' means with simultaneous insistence that it's wrong to domineer over women. And these days there's plenty of documentation about how, for all its issues, the early nineteenth century church was actually much more egalitarian that it is today (for instance, the women's organization was designed to be entirely under the authority of female leadership and was originally run independent of the men's organizations, but over time brought under centralized male authority in theory—and there's often considerable tension between the women leading their organizations and the male authorities they theoretically defer to). Which affects how women relate to it and how women are treated in some really odd ways. Evangelical rhetoric around women creeps a lot of LDS people out, as well as just really open misogyny (one of the many reasons Trump has brought us swing state Utah), but the gender essentialism and 'soft' misogyny pervades pretty much everything. A lot of separate spheres going on too—often the dominant personalities in a community are women, but they have to frame it as either operating in appropriate women's roles or negotiated through their husbands.

I'm rambling, but anyway, OSC is a very extreme case, but it is something I see a lot—people who are able to 'stray' quite a bit further from the norm than I saw among conservative Protestants—it's officially OK to advocate for gay rights as long as you aren't being gay yourself, which is mindbending—but it's like a rubber band. You'll see people almost there, and then they hit the edge and bounce far far back, or just snap altogether. I get the self-hatred and sense of persecution and bizarre ideas about gender and duty and so on, and even things like him going on about how his abuse as a child doesn't count because it's not Real Suffering like wartime refugees or starving poverty. There's so much emotional repression, not at all just sexual—anything that smacks of 'contention' or putting yourself (esp women but men too) ahead of others, letting yourself be offended, blah blah. For someone like OSC, acknowledging his own suffering would be questionable/selfish/indulgent in itself even aside of what facing it would entail.

(He reminds me weirdly of Samuel Johnson describing heterosexual marriage as one of the "innumerable modes of human misery" and talking of how everyone is horrified at being themselves and has to constantly distract themselves from the horrible reality of their own minds and natures. Um, no, that's not actually inherent to the human condition, it's just the horror of your own life that you're projecting onto the world. In OSC's case, and the shooter, in horrible damaging ways.)