Captain America and I Have Much in Common

At first glance, one commonality is undeniably our shared great looks. A close second, Captain America carries a shield which enhances his personal powers and abilities. I carry a Yeti coffee mug with the magical essence of bean to enhance my own. Aside from our common outward attributes, we share something deeply internal.

The Captain surfaced back into society after having undergone a seventy year hiatus, where he had been essentially frozen in time. When he "unthawed," all of his family and friends, everything he knew of himself and the world of his past existed no longer. Time had marched on without him. Advancements in technology were mind boggling. He had to adjust, to acclimate, to wrap his brain around the nuances of the environment in which he then found himself.

Likewise, I experienced a fifty year hiatus where I, too, had been frozen in time. For fifty years I had existed within the paradigm created by society. I grew into the person others expected me to become, completely unaware there was a significantly different me. At fifty years of age, married with five children, I suddenly thawed and emerged from the proverbial closet that had so long incarcerated me. I had to learn to breathe the new air and walk in the new gravity on a significantly new planet upon which I found myself. I awakened to the reality I had been gay my entire life, forced to conform to a straight man's world. Where do I go? What was I to do next?

Since my early years, I had not developed mentally and emotionally as a gay male. I never experienced any gay relationships, never had a gay friend, a boyfriend, or dated other guys in high school, college, and certainly not in the ensuing years. I found myself a fully grown man, who at the same time, was a new born gay. How, at fifty, was I to grow into this new found skin?

I know I am not alone in this regard. Other older guys like myself have found themselves caught in a netherworld, suspended in between the post World War II period completely closed off from sexual orientation issues, and its stubborn old school paradigm of normal, and today's much more openness and acceptance of LGBTQ persons and issues. Much has been due to the explosion of technological innovation and the Internet spawning shows like MTV's Real World, and a generation having grown up completely online with the influences of social media.

No one spoke of gay anything in my growing up years. I knew no one who was gay, or at least openly. I grew up knowing I was different and never understanding why. What emerged was a fascination with younger gays. I began observing and studying each developmental group of gay males, adolescent through college-aged. For years I attempted to recreate, or simulate, and build a mental-emotional history for myself from my childhood to my coming out, by seeking and forming friendships with younger guys willing to humor my pitiful, yet not unresolvable, situation. Thus explains the focus of my writing upon the younger LGBTQ population. In many ways I am still very much one of them, still on the raod to maturation. They have directly and indirectly helped me to better understand myself, and more importantly, helped me grow into my true self.

I'm inspired to write for a younger gay audience, and for a young at heart older audience that finds itself in an amazingly new, awkward world, like had been the case with me. It's a labor of love, a burden I accept to help give those in need the support we all need as human beings in the process of our "becoming."

~g