LINEFEEL: The Gay Friend

Content Warning: Queerphobia, Being a baby, AIDS, Suicide 

Hello, Patrons and Public.

Happy Late Thanksgiving to all my American friends. You all have or had families, and navigating that is a unique part of your narrative. (I was with found family and not blood family for this particular year.) I imagine many of my readers are queer, and some of those readers are dealing with the idea of being misrepresented, if they are even capable of safely coming out of their closets. You don’t need to be queer to experience misrepresentation, but the LINEFEEL series, and this post in particular, is about how it feels to be oversimplified and diminished as a queer person. Regardless of your political affiliation, gender, or sexual inclinations, I pray the language of my experiences serves you well. 

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Most 8th graders suck, a law of nature doubly true for 8th graders in the mid-aughts. A dusty Freewebs account serves as a testimony that my 8th grade self was not an exception to this rule. I have a love/hate relationship to this troubled child that I was, wherein I look back on my past self with laughter but also sympathy. A few friends have read my old journal entries aloud in my livestreams, and the recurring theme in all entries is that a much younger Jonathan—despite the efforts of his family—felt unappreciated and unloved. He would have done almost anything to feel like someone thought he was cool, interesting, or likable. 

In my small Christian school, we didn’t just lack diversity, we were so homogenous that we didn’t even realize it. In the entire school, there was one openly not-straight student, Kevin, who came out as bisexual during his junior year. In some ways, Kevin’s bisexuality was threatening beyond homosexuality. It felt like he was half-assing admitting that he was gay, giving everyone in our small Christian school an extra layer to deal with when he came out. He would tell my sister how excited he was, to learn that a song we liked was actually a coming out story. My sister and I found that realization to be inconvenient. Part of us probably thought that it was a joke, that something as uncommon as queerness was in a popular song we liked without our even realizing it.

By senior year, my sister was off at college, and on weekday mornings I was the last person to leave the house. With that independence, there were a few times I was late for the schoolbus because I was busy jacking off to Flash animations of Starfox characters fucking each other. (Ian R. Soulfox, if you’re reading this, let’s do a trade.) In my teenage hubris, I hoped that my fetishes were limited to cartoon videogame characters and not IRL men. I had already built up stereotypes about queer people that I was resolved to not fit into. Sure, I was charismatic, eccentric, and I sometimes talked in a lisp while roleplaying as a character, but that didn’t count. That wasn’t the same as my friend’s brother coming back from summer break and acting gay for attention. At least my affectations were self-aware. 

As the eccentric class clown, the kid that was good at art, the youngest sibling, a mama’s boy, a gentle person by nature, someone who played more video games than sports, and as the son of a father who wasn’t always around (though not for lack of trying), I used to say that I’m a Fox-News-tier collection of fake reasons someone catches the gay.

My friends in high school made a Facebook group called “I thought Jonathan Duncan was gay when I first met him”, which had over 50 members. That's pretty funny, how everyone thought that. Reminds me of that kid in 3rd grade who called me Mrs. Duncan because I was impersonating a woman once. Dumb little kid didn’t know that I was just a great actor.

While in university, my sister told me Kevin contracted AIDS. In an attempt to rationalize my God as loving, and my life as separate from Kevin’s, I considered how his life of sin must have brought him to contracting that disease. Later that year, Kevin’s younger brother shot himself in the head. If they had a queer kid in the family, my rationalizing continued, it made sense that other parts of the family were broken, too. 

This trend of oversimplifying The Other continued. I felt confident that I had many examples in life, internet, and media, of how gay people were being hypocritical. They wanted to be treated the same as everyone else while also acting so flaming in those pride parades. They wanted us to think they’re capable of being professional while also wearing little rainbow pins. One of my gay coworkers had sex before marriage, several times, with his boyfriend. If they can’t get married, it makes sense that they’d settle for being promiscuous, I rationalized, while continuing to masturbate to gay furry porn in secret.

Last week, I jokingly tweeted to a queer friend from my Christian school, now happily married to his husband, that perhaps he should have prayed harder. I bestow upon him the St. Otteran award, for being a secular mind with divine patience for my passive postgrad floundering.

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As funny as it sounds, I wasn’t always queer. When I was just old-enough to have a sex drive, I remember the hottest thing I could think of was Xena the Warrior Princess, but with blonde hair, her taut muscles covered in blood from a fierce battle, on her knees and fellating me. I remember flipping through a stock image booklet from my dad’s advertising job containing some softcore porn—some real life girl boobs—and having my heart race and dick become stiff. My best guess is that my interest in gay porn started as a reaction to homophobia from my mom and society at large, as well as the fear of damaging women by sexually exploiting them in porn. Two women kissing each other was hot and a trope even a baby Jonathan noticed in pop culture. But two men kissing, on purpose, that’s just not okay. What if their parents knew? They’d be in so much troubllllllllllllle. Why does that make it hotter, that my mom and millions of others—including myself on some level—would hate that?

I used to think it was all social stigma delegating the hot factor. Nowadays, I think bravery is a huge part of it. Once I learned that God did not design sex exclusively for the heteronormative marriage we constructed in the last 200 years, I realized that I would need to be brave just to admit all that to my family, and somehow even braver to admit that to myself.

Queer or straight, having sex sometimes requires a lot of bravery of both (or more) participants. My greatest sexual activities, in my limited perspective, came from feeling that something is right but still trusting myself more than I ever had before. I did a lot of radical trusting of myself in the last decade. Doing my best to live a life of integrity is what brought me to accepting my queerness and celebrating it in the face of the lies I was told about my God and my truest self. To those who are annoyed by the Pride movement of minorities, am I allowed to be proud of myself for doing difficult things that I never thought possible? Or is that too ostentatious for an anti-Pride person to respect me?

This nuance found in Pride Parades, specialty events, and safe spaces, was something lost on a much younger Jonathan. He would—and definitely had before—said something like this:

Hahah, gay people, am I right fellas? What’s with the rainbows and limp wrists and their fashion sense? Kinda weird how they talk in lisps all the time. Do they, like, go to a school to learn how to be gay? Haha, I’m not being homophobic, I’m just wondering.

The tone isn’t a facsimile of what inspired this post, but the idea is similar. Many of the LINEFEEL drawings are inspired by an artist I used to look up to. He’s a Conservative Christian and a queerphobe. This time, he was interviewing a gay artist who was, I gather, one of the “good ones” by appearing straight-enough and masculine-enough to not be annoying. A mark of his maturity, I assume, was found in accepting his father who does not support his “lifestyle”. I doubt this gay man understood what Pride was about, but if I’m wrong, he neither acted like it nor took the opportunity to educate this queerphobe artist on it. In fact, I expect both men are queerphobes in their own ways. However, only one of them is obvious about it.

In the TEDx talk Why Am I So Gay,  Georgetown University senior Thomas Lloyd expands on the question in the title, which he received many times in his life, even before an age where his sexuality was established. Many platonic reasons having nothing to do with orientation flag him as “gay” to the public, and yet he continues to be very public about his being gay. Why?

He cites a grim statistic at the halfway point. While HIV infections have mostly gone down, they’re actually increasing in queer people of color. The stat projects that 50% of all current college-aged men of color who have sex with other men will have HIV by the time they’re 50. This happens because men of color, from a place of “down low” culture, feel even greater social pressure to not identify as gay. If one does not identify as gay, one is therefore less likely to seek preventative care, community groups, treatment, or other public resources. How could Thomas hide himself, knowing that certain populations will be disproportionately harmed while he enjoys the love and support that allowed him to thrive?

I don’t think either homophobic artist in that interview would be friends with Thomas. His clothing fits him snuggly. He holds his wrist limp to his side as he exits the stage, his uneven legs force an almost playful stance, and, credited to his Italian heritage, he gestures actively as he talks. On stage, and likely elsewhere, he is not introverted, low-key, nor is he macho.

At the time of filming, Thomas was invested heavily in Catholicism, even teaching Sunday school for years. A week before his lecture, he participated in a drag show on campus. I like to think his religiosity would curry favor amongst queerphobes, but I can’t help but think that drag would be a step too far in the eyes of those looking for reasons to preemptively dismiss him.

For the longest time, before even considering myself as queer, I had wondered, “What kind of queer person would it take for my mom to actually listen or change her mind on all this?” After coming out, I had to ask, “Was it me the whole time?”

Despite never losing my faith, despite always trying to do well by others, myself and my God, my mom does not want to hear my testimony. She doesn’t want to talk about Scripture or learn about sexuality or sociology from someone who is “gay”. She only wants someone who looks like her, acts like her, worships the same fear-mongering achievement-based God. I thought I was going to be her best shot, but I’m not that person. I’m her gay son now, despite not identifying as gay. When she denied me the chance to share these things with her, when she reduced me to a rainbow straw man, I was livid. I still am, sometimes.  My whole life I tried to keep our family together. I stayed with her even when the emotional cost was huge for me. That was the best I had, but my best was never enough.

It’s a paradox, demanding dignity as if I’m the same while needing to speak up because I’m different. And to some of my old family, some of my old friends, and millions of people who don’t know me, here’s what they think of me now:

I’m fun, but you can’t trust my moral compass. 

I inconvenience others when I speak my truth.

I’ve lost my way. I’m living a lie.

I’m going to hell when I die.

If what I want happens, the entire country will fall further from God’s will.

I’m the gay friend. 

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What’s the antidote to this suffering? If you’re someone who liked a friend or family member before falling out of touch, and you’re bothered by the queer shape of them now, what should you do?

If I could have my old friends and family do anything, it’d be this:

Ask me. Ask me where I’ve been. Ask me the moment I knew I wasn’t straight. Ask me what all this sex/gender/spiritual stuff means. Ask because you want to know, not because you know better. Take me seriously when I share my journey with you. Don’t fight to explain away the world I’ve experienced, just because you haven’t seen it for yourself yet.

When I talked to a friend who said I wasn’t welcome in his home, after viewing me as a sexual deviant for being polyamorous, I basically worded it this way:

“I don’t need you to automatically agree with me. I don’t need your religious beliefs to automatically shape to mine. What I need is for you to view me as a complex person who you still love and care about. I need you to take it seriously when I say that I’ve seen things you haven’t, and that I wish someone told me all these things sooner. I wish I had a Jonathan to explain things to me 20 years ago, but that was a cultural impossibility. So please believe me when I say that talking about this has a huge emotional cost to me, and I wouldn’t be telling you this if it wasn’t very, very important that you listen.”

The friend I’ve told this to, I know he hasn’t forgotten me. Telling me I wasn’t welcome in his home destroyed him. He lost sleep over that phone call. I don’t know where his beliefs are right this second, but until then, we’ll probably be thinking of each other almost every night. 

If you’re someone putting yourself out there, sharing the parts that cost you everything and often cost others nothing to hear, this writing is dedicated to you. I’m so sorry for your pain, but so grateful you showed up to be the person I didn’t have when I was younger.

Love, 

-J

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