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2000-10-30
I spent a good part of Sunday hovering around the playstation, trying to decide which game I wanted to try to resurrect for the afternoon.
It's odd. I don't usually enjoy playing videogames. I like them in concept, but in practice, I lose interest rather quickly. There are some exceptions, but not many. I almost never complete the games I own. Thankfully, my little brother is in charge of most of the purchases in that department, so I just pick through his home-entertainment run-off.
I finally settled on this one game called the Legend of Mana. The concept is quite interesting. Rather than starting off your quest in a definite position with a definite landscape, you begin on a featureless map. Rather than being able to walk a definite distance to a definite place, you jump from one idealization to another, each a potentially infinite distance apart. The "map" is nothing more than a grid with which to organize these conceptualizations.
As you continue, you're given little tokens, totems, symbols that perfectly communicate the essence of a given place. From the shape of a wood-carved mailbox, you deduce the shape of your future residence, and so it springs into being. A carved-jade egg is the condensed presence of a limestone cavern, a floral and a leaded glass lamp the quintessence of a cobblestoned town at street lamp-lit twilight.
***My dad found a phallic mushroom growing in our yard on Sunday, as well. It seems like penis is all that's been on my lips of late, (giggle) but it really happened!
It's a grotesque little object. Well, it's not so little, and it has a shaft like a pink foam nerf arrow with a shiny, gangrenous black head. And it reeks of ammonia. And it's sitting in our hallway in a plastic bag because I have a scientist for a father.
Well, not just because I have a scientist for a parent. Marble has a physics teacher for a mother. She and her mother would go to Toys R Us together in search of toys which demonstrated some principle of motion. My dad and I would search Laredo's outskirts for places to collect bacterially contaminated water.
***I found out from Marble yesterday that Manuel (whom I previously referred to as Glover, because at the time I was trying to keep this journal Oasis compatible, so that people could come to and from there with a consistant set of names. Now that I'm no longer writing for Oasis I'm no longer worrying about it.) did not know my orientation until very recently.
I found this quite funny because I'd been under the impression I'd come out to him indirectly when I made a suggestive comment about Scott Bakula while we were watching American Beauty.
Here's the AIM transcript:
DementiaMilkwood: by the way, manuel didn't really know that you were gay until a few days ago
MrPlutonium: really? so much for subtlety.
DementiaMilkwood: we were talking about magnetic fields around people, and i told him i've always had a magnetic field around me that attracts felines and gay men
DementiaMilkwood: and he said "so robert's been following you around, huh?"
DementiaMilkwood: and i added your name and a couple others to the list, all openly gay
DementiaMilkwood: assuming he knew
DementiaMilkwood: and he said "Mark gay? No, Mark's not gay. he's just asexual."
MrPlutonium: I guess he either didn't hear me or it didn't process when I made that comment about scott bakula
DementiaMilkwood: and i said you were gayer than robert
On a side note, I'm sure Robert (otherwise known as Latex) would be thrilled that he's become the touchstone of gayness (gaiety?) among our highschool alumni. [Imaginary Reaction: "Wow, gayer than Robert? That's some high-grade faggotry. That's some 24 karat gayness, right there."]
I'm sure that at some time I would've been reassured by Manuel's reaction: Mark? He's just asexual.
Remaining in the closet requires some amount of schizophrenia. Well, maybe that's too strong a word. It requires some compartmentalization. And that's what I did. Genitally-endowed me was for the late night hours, living briefly in the distance between the phases of my sleep schedule and that of my parents.
Schooltime, daylight me was dry. Intellectual. Politically minded. Stand-offish, off-putting. Asexual me was a role I played well, and was comfortable with.
This may seem counter-intuitive to someone who hasn't processed it, but my coming-out, however gradual, has not been the result of finally giving into cravings of intimacy or anything of the like. It wasn't as though I couldn't withstand the pressures of my sexuality, just the opposite. What happened was that through a trick of American culture, these two separate sides found some common ground: Politics. (The very same entity that'd created this separation in the first place.) Through this, these two pieces of me that had become almost spontaneously dissociated somewhere around the 7th grade gradually began to realign.
In my weird naievet�, I'd never considered being gay anything that could be politicized. Well, I'd seen things, AIDS rallies, the whole don't ask/don't tell compromise, but it somehow didn't click. Not even with the whole Ellen deal. When it finally did click, it was with Oasis and some prodding from Marble.
While I don't have time at the moment to dig through the Oasis archives and try to find what I did those two or so years ago, I may eventually. What I found, besides the all-too-familiar testimonials of masking attractions towards fellow classmates, were thoughtful (more thoughtful than I'd ever been on the subject, anyway) writings on homophobia, ranging from discrimination to full-on violence, and so Mr. Asexual woke up for a moment and said "Hey! Something is truly fucked up here, and I'm not doing anything to change it!"
I'm not sure exactly what was going on in my head during those years. It wasn't shame, exactly, about being gay that kept me in the closet. That's keeping me in the closet. It was, on some levels, a refusal to admit that I was anything less than inhuman. And really, I was in the closet about everything. During my highschool years, I probably would've willingly become permanently invisible, had I been given the choice. Since I wasn't, this resulted in everything from baggy clothing to a greasy, tangled shroud of shoulder-length, then back-length hair.
Just as these two sides found a bridge to one another in politics, they're now reconnecting themselves in the name of Good Writing, too. While I can't say I do it every day, there are times... times like these, where I use this diary to reclaim bits of humanity that I've been denying for roughly half my life, placating the repressive watchdog in me by saying that it's for the good of the journal.
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