“So what kind of music do you listen to?” – It is the inevitable question… Gay guys always ask it. Their jaws usually drop when I respond, “Music isn’t important to me: Madonna, Cher, really I don't care – they have nice voices, but I treasure silence more.” Their shock seems to be saying, “And you have the nerve to call yourself a gay male?” If there is one thing I have learned from the response to this website, it is that many gay teens feel isolated from the gay world just as much as they do from the straight world. …Well I don’t like to sing, and that’s good for the rest of you because I can’t do it worth a damn. I don’t care about shopping, nor do I like groups of more than three, I’d rather it be just two. I don’t like to perform on stage, and Broadway musicals excite me just about as much as getting new tires for my car (which isn’t much). So I’m supposed to like sports right? Because if you’re gay you’re either “straight acting” or “flaming”. But I don’t care for sports… or pastel colored wall paint. Yeah, that’s right, you heard me – “I don’t care for sports, AND I don’t care for pastels!” And get this: I love men, and women make my stomach turn, and I think target practice with a gun at a firing range is fun, and I can play the piano fluently. How about this one: I love to run hard and work out and I know my way around a car engine, and I watch Golden Girls. I love to laugh until I cry, but I’m not afraid to kill spiders. Even though this is all true I’m being silly to make a point… the reality of being gay and being open and honest with yourself is not about fitting in with the jerks at the clubs or the sluts on Queer As Folk. It doesn’t mean you have to cry when you watch a Hallmark Movie Special, or crush aluminum cans on your forehead when you finish your drink. It means that my existence and your existence and all of the other people who feel like they aren’t part of the “gay scene”, AND the fact that we’re open about our sexuality is destroying the stereotypes and replacing them with the truth… which is, what? That gay people are just like everyone else, except for the fact that they are attracted to the same sex. Not “evil” or an “abomination”, or a pack of pierced punk freaks who are into witchcraft and watching Kitty Bartholomew decorate a den on HGTV. If you don’t feel like you fit in, I want you to know that you are not alone, and that the reality is that only a small percentage of gay people fit the stereotype. It is okay to be yourself, no matter if you like feathered boas or fixing Harley’s, or, like most gay people, you fall somewhere in between.

A smart guy once asked me, “If I don’t have feelings for women, but I feel completely alienated from gay culture, then where am I?” We’ve isolated ourselves, I know that now, I finally saw it. The clubs, the “scene”, is a part of gay culture, but we’ve allowed it to define us… a glorified minority that shines as a stereotype in our minds, and the mind of the world. It is what people think of when they imagine a homosexual, it’s the ammo that politicians use to argue that it is immoral, and it is the fear of gay teenagers who think that they must adapt to the culture since that is “what gay people do”. The real gay world, the “majority”, is people like you and I; it’s the scared teenager, the smiling class president, the quiet boy in the back of the room. And in that teenager, that class president, and that boy in the back of the room lies our real power; our political victories are nothing compared to them. But we’d rather kill ourselves with our “pride” because we fail to see that change won’t come from a rebellious exhibition, but that mere act, with all its good intentions, is precisely what is keeping that teenager, that class president, and that boy in the back of the room deadbolted into the closet. There is nothing sacred, there is nothing safe, there is nothing real, there is nothing normal… there is no reason to come out of the closet. “I don’t want to be in the closet, but if that’s what it looks like outside, I’m not going to open the door.” Change will come when we stop rebelling, start taking responsibility for the kind of image we convey to our gay brothers and sisters, and realize that the true power is unleashed when gay people feel safe enough to exist in gay culture to open their closet doors.