10-16-2023, 06:12 PM
(This post was last modified: Yesterday, 07:05 PM by gayprojectforum.)
Hi Project,
I started reading Gay Project posts when I was 19, now I'm 35 and I continue to read Gay Project posts. Above all, Project helped me not to get into trouble and to think before acting and I must say that it was useful. At 19 I was enchanted by a guy I liked very much, who I will call Luke here, even if this is not his real name, I would have done anything for him. At that time I appreciated people who were out of the ordinary, those who have that bit of genius and recklessness that gives a pinch of spice to life, it seemed to me that they lived life with another intensity, while I felt too normal, which for me then meant too banal, even as a gay man. Then, reading Project, I began to follow a path of detachment from myths and irrationality and of greater awareness, I began to realize that things can be more complicated than they seem and I also began to ask myself a few questions about things that I saw around me, and so, analyzing certain behaviors of Luke, I began to find some slightly strange things, which according to my logic made no sense and which I couldn't explain, and this fact kept me from getting carried away by enthusiasm. At the time I only knew Luke by sight or a little more, he sometimes hung out with the small group of friends that I also hung out with, a small group in which, at least in theory there were no gays, in reality I was there and years later I had proof that there was also another guy who I will call Matthew here, who didn't interest me much, or rather I would say at all. Matthew was a man of very few words, Luke, on the contrary, was a flood of quotes and jokes. All this, then, magnified the figure of Luke in my eyes. Luke hadn't joined the group of friends to get in contact with Matthew, who seemed to me 100% straight, but simply to show off, but I understood this later. Over time, after a few months, things changed and it became more and more evident that Luke was now just targeting Matthew, and this seemed completely senseless to me. I was very jealous of Luke and the fact that Luke was now quite clearly interested in Matthew made me nervous but I couldn't do much about it. One day I made up my mind and addressed the problem with Matthew, even if taking the problem very distantly. It was more than evident that Matthew was annoyed by Luke's way of acting and I remember that, to summarize his thoughts, he had made, regarding Luke, the gesture one makes to indicate that another guy is out of mind. After a few days Matthew just disappeared from circulation, and I think it happened precisely because he wanted to stay away from Luke, while Luke remained in his small group of friends. I was happy with Matthew's disappearance, which had left me free field with Luke. On the one hand I was very tempted by the idea of trying something with Luke, but it was however very dangerous, and on the other hand I remembered Matthew's extraordinarily significant gesture. At that time on Project there were several posts about prudence, with very eloquent examples. I continued to hang out with the group of friends but with a certain detachment, I was interested in observing Luke but remaining apparently not interested. I just wanted to understand in concrete terms what Matthew's gesture meant. Luke began to take an interest in another guy, who I'll call Louis here, very cute guy, really very cute, but who was radically straight, and who I knew quite well. After a while I made up my mind and asked Louis what he thought of Luke and he told me that, in his opinion, he didn't have all his wheels in place in his brain and added " and he even made me a half-declaration of love!" I looked at him surprised and Louis told me that Luke, to get out of the embarrassment of the situation, had told him that he had a girlfriend, who I'll call Mary here, and that he would introduce her to him, which then happened, but the story didn’t end here because, a short time later, Mary became pregnant and Luke married her when they were both only twenty years old, and invited all his friends to the wedding. We gave him a collective gift but none of us went to the wedding. After the wedding Luke disappeared and I told myself that there were several things that didn't add up in Luca's behavior: first he tried with Matthew and then with Louis and after a while he got a girl pregnant and married her... No! It didn't make sense. Ok, there are fluid sexualities, but that gesture of Matthew was always stamped in my mind, a gesture which said it all. We learned only after a long time that Luke’s marriage had lasted just a year and that after the divorce or perhaps the annulment, I didn't quite understand whether one thing or the other, Luke, even leaving behind his son, who had been entrusted only to his mother, had gone to live in Prague, in an apartment paid for by the family, but we didn't hear anything else. What does Project have to do with all this? It definitely has something to do with it! By reading Project I learned to be prudent and to understand that before starting to fly high, you need to understand if it makes sense and above all if the guy you see as the guy of your dreams is really the guy of your dreams. If I hadn't kept my distance from Luke, I probably would have remained entangled in some story with some pathological implications and I don't know how I could have gotten out of it. I was very young then, but Luke's story was like a kind of vaccination for me. In practice, when I met a guy who might interest me, I used to put him under the most accurate scrutiny, I analyzed him with X-rays and at the first sign of strangeness (I'm talking about true strangeness bordering on the pathological, and there was some!) I distanced myself and went back to being on my own. A few years later I met my current boyfriend, who I will call Francis, we studied each other for a long time before taking a step out into the open. Both he and I were two perfect singles with some female friendships and neither of us had the rainbow flag printed on our chest, but we have been able to identified each other anyway. We both spoke very little and the first approaches were very slow, his behavior was hesitant, like mine, but always coherent, that is, without strangeness and without excesses. I felt he was very similar to me. We never talked about girls between us, it was clear that we found each other interesting but neither of us had the courage to take a step further and come out, then at a certain point Francis broke the ice and said: "if I prefer to go out with you rather than with a girl, from my point of view there is a reason..." and I replied: "also from my point of view!" We didn't explicitly tell each other what the reason was but it was obvious to both of us. Between us we didn't use either the word gay or the word homosexuality, we only talked about ourselves as two friends who love each other, even if little by little we had become more than friends. We would both have had problems in the family if our story had had public implications and therefore everything remained in a strictly private dimension and I must say that I don't mind it at all. The fact that no one pries into our relationship seems extremely positive to me: no chatter, no gossip, no judgments from people who have nothing to do with us, it's just me and Francis and our relationship belongs only to us, we don't have to give explanations, we don't have to conform to any model and we don't have to play any part in comedy. Francis and I are first of all friends in the profound sense of the term, that is, we understand and support each other, there is also a bit of sex, when it happens, and not even a little, we have the pleasure of being together, people see us as two unrepentant singles, waiting for their soul mate, who in their opinion should necessarily be a girl, but we found our soul mate a long time ago. Above all, Francis has a quality that I like very much: he is a normal guy, like me! He's not a genius, he's not an Apollo, he's a normal guy, without alarming oddities and without megagalactic dreams in his head, I feel good with him and not out of habit or for a quiet life, as I read in a recent post by Project, but because I feel him like a guy like me. Perhaps this post may seem like an apology for normality, obviously for gay normality, but frankly I don't think so, we don't feel exceptional but we have never had the feeling that we were missing something.