Young Gay Love

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

(I originally wrote this last Friday, April 17th)

Yesterday evening I found myself contemplating an idyllic experience of what I would call "young gay love". I noticed a few especially attractive young men at the Apple store in Uptown. One man in particular caught my eye.  I found my eyes slowly and sensuously moving over his form. I especially noticed his face and his butt. Fantasies of love I never experienced when I was in my twenties floated through my mind. I imagined an equally attractive and young man as my boyfriend. I visualized myself cuddling with such a beautiful man. I imagined warmth, tenderness and kindness between us. And then the sadness was upon me. Like a figment of unrealized, imaginative fantasy my reverie fell away. And there was my sadness.

I feel sadness that I never experienced young gay love. Of course the world was a somewhat different place when I was a twenty-something. Being open about being gay was simply not easy at that time in Texas. It was one of many reasons I left the state after completing college. But then I went on to continue being an overly-responsible young adult. Instead of being a relatively carefree and uninhibited twenty-something I gave a year of my life to a volunteer program and then subsequently spent three years as a member of the Jesuit order. As I noted in a recent writing my life has often felt backwards.  I lived the life of an adult too much when I was chronologically a child. Now here I am a man in my forties and I want to experience all the joy I didn't in my twenties.

My eyesight continues to be a source of much inspiration in my written life. I never really clearly understood how my early life history had effectively veiled my eyes until I took the plunge and tried out EMDR therapy in 2013. Now I find myself wanting to caress the forms of countless beautiful men with my eyes. I feel very much like an adolescent. I still feel entranced by the idea of making up for lost time. Perhaps in some way my time wasn't lost so much as it went too often unappreciated and under-appreciated. My contemplation of the beauty of the male form is something I unintentionally do on many days now. I find myself often wondering how I missed so much beauty.

If it is indeed true that a person can live out a significant developmental period later in life (long after it would typically take place) I wonder how I can live out adolescence now. What would be a healthy way to do this? Would this manifest as me putting up countless images of attractive young men so I can feel inspired by them? Is feeling especially attracted to somewhat younger men a normal developmental response to a thwarted or under-lived adolescence of a male who becomes a gay man?

I find myself yearning for the companionship and warmth of other men who are my age peers. I thus feel drawn to men who are not just younger than me. I simply don’t know the best places to find them. I nonetheless feel an urgency to be about this search. Or perhaps I should not frame this as a search. Maybe this is more a matter of being open to what presents itself. It isn’t realistic to expect to manipulate certain results into being. I suppose it can be realistic to be strategic and discerning about my deepest needs and desires and, by doing so, set a course for a new destination.