Happiness & Gayness

Submitted by Aidan

No, I'm not talking about the fact that gay used to simply mean “happy.” I'd like to talk for a bit about being gay and simultaneously being happy. Kind of arrogant, right? Who the fuck am I, as a 23-year-old who has never had a serious boyfriend or held down a steady job, to think that I have acquired anything like the requisite wisdom to answer the question, “How can I be happy?”

So I'd like to start out simply by saying that I don't think I have anything approaching that kind of wisdom, and responses in the form of e-mail, comments, and follow-up posts are welcome. With that said, happiness is something that we all seek, including this 23-year-old newbie, so let's dive in:

I guess that observation is as good of a place to start as any: We all want to be happy. If you don't want to be happy, then you don't understand what the word means. I think we all have a duty to try to be happy. Not only for our own good, but for the sake of everyone we encounter every day. We could dramatically improve the lives of our lovers, our friends, our family, and our coworkers if were genuinely happy people, or at least strove to be as happy as possible.

And so, while it's a worthwhile goal to pursue, equally important is recognizing all the obstacles we face, be they self-imposed, a result of our upbringing, or imposed by the world around us. We all have confused and conflicting notions of what happiness is.

We seek it at bars, parties and, we seek it in career and in financial stability, money, we seek the company of people who make us comfortable and accept us for who we are.

And the reason we do this isn't because we are stupid.

A gay bar can be a really great time. I remember the first time I went to a gay bar. After about 30 minutes of nervous chatting with the bartender, I was approached/picked up by a guy with a striking resemblance to Hayden Christensen. Never mind the sex that was to come later, just sitting there and talking with this blond beauty and knowing that he had picked me out of everyone else was an intensely powerful and validating experience. I was thinking to myself, is this what gay life is really like? Hot damn, I should have come out of the closet a long time ago!

It wasn't until the next weekend, when I met this same guy at a house party, that I realized that he was giving everyone at the party a fake name that night, as he had given me the previous weekend, that I understood gay life would be a lot harder than that glimmer of pleasure and validation I had experienced initially.

But it was such a powerful, intoxicating and enthralling glimmer that I could easily see myself seeking out similar experiences, over and over again for the rest of my life, until I was that sad, old, lonely troll at the bar, yearning for my lost beauty and the lover I never found in a place where I am simply not going to find it. Yet perhaps, just often enough, I might find something which approximates it closely enough to keep me coming back for more.

And so in my own life, I think I need to work on the fact that I have habits which, however fun they are, aren't really going to bring me lasting happiness. I drink too much, watch too much TV, waste too much time online and on Facebook. (Don't get me started on Facebook. How is it that I can waste 2 hours on a website that I don't even find enjoyable? Much of it is simply consensual stalking, and its scary that it's so popular).

Instead, I spend far too little time doing things that might make me happier, like cultivating good friendships with quality people and learning how to be a better friend myself (not to mention becoming the kind of person I would want to subject someone else to in a relationship), volunteering and finding interesting hobbies. These things all sound so cliché, but they are clichés for a reason. Nobody ever dies thinking, “If only there had been a 10th season of Seinfeld, I would have been happy!”

We need to recognize that we all have ideas and (gasp!) judgments about what we think will make us happy, and we should try to recognize those things and figure out whether they’ll lead us to actual happiness.

I have made the determination that using illegal drugs will not make me happy and successfully avoided them. I've also decided that smoking cigarettes will substantially decrease my happiness, but have not been as successful at acting on this determination.

Does this make me a drug-phobic square who has been oppressed into thinking that chemically induced pleasure is evil? I wouldn't be particularly bothered if anyone chose to label me that way (although I would certainly think that we have, at the least, wildly differing notions about reality) because I know that I have good reasons for avoiding drugs and wanting to quit smoking.

And so, armed with a sufficiently pessimistic attitude about human nature, but also recognizing that making generalizations about life and behaviors and classifying them as good or bad is something that we all do (whether we admit it or not), here are some of the things that have occurred to me:

1) I have appetites that will never be satisfied. Chief among these is probably my stereotypically male appetite for sexual variety. But I also have an appetite for fun, pleasure, and money. Realizing that I will never get enough of these things to satisfy my desire for them, and learning the self restraint required to be happy with a healthy, moderate amount of them, is probably one of the hardest but most rewarding tasks of adulthood.

2) Homophobia ain't goin’ nowhere. A bare majority of Americans think that same-sex sexual acts should be legal. We might get widespread gay marriage sometime in the future, but it will probably always (far longer than any of our lifetimes) continue to be a controversial issue in American politics, similar to abortion.

America will never become a land of peace, love, and happiness where parents universally celebrate when their child comes out of the closet and gay people are fully integrated and accepted at all levels of society. This is because of the universal tendency to demonize the unfamiliar and the different.

Most people will continue to grow up to be straight; gays will always be a minority, and blaming homophobia for my problems will not make me happy. When I first came out I directed a lot of anger toward my stupid “closed-minded” parents and the religious community I was raised in, etc. I wondered why I wouldn't have had a normal adolescence with boyfriends and puppy love and heartbreaks? Then I realized I was falling into the trap of victim-hood thinking; which, of course, is a very powerful trap to fall into.

Was I victimized by my upbringing and having to stay in the closet? Maybe a little. But I also recognize that my parents gave me a far better childhood and education than the vast majority of people on this planet and I should count myself grateful if a little homophobia thrown into the mix is the biggest thing I have to complain about. And I don't think they are actually homophobic; they still love me even if they don't like that I'm gay. They genuinely think that by accepting my homosexuality I will not become a happier person. I disagree with that. While I would love it if they could fully accept my sexuality and joyfully attend my wedding (if I ever have one) I also know that will never happen. So, why don’t we all move the fuck on and agree to disagree.

3) Good friends and lovers are hard to come by. There are a lot of shitty people out there. The trouble is, when someone is trying to become your friend or get you into bed, they are good at hiding it. Most people are nice, kind, and decent to their friends, at least to begin with. The danger is probably even greater when selecting a lover. There is a powerful tendency to impute moral goodness to people we find sexually attractive and enticing, or to friends whose company we find entertaining and enjoyable. Unfortunately, in reality there is no correlation. Finding good friends is hard work, and we often take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to forming social circles.

This is a mistake.

Choosing people in whom to invest the emotional commitment involved in close friendships is a big decision, and close friendships with quality people are doubtlessly one of life's greatest rewards. However, friends who do not disappoint, annoy or anger us on occasion frankly do not exist. Bad friends do these things out of malice, and if you recognize a pattern of genuinely malicious behavior from someone you thought was a friend, it's time to pull the plug.

But good friends fuck up too, and it's important to learn how to forgive – which is really hard, because it often requires admitting we were wrong.

4) We gays aren't that different from straight people. We all share the same (wildly imperfect) human nature. We complain about a lack of older gay couples to look to as role models, but I wonder if, in their absence, it's not such a bad thing to look at older straight couples. As my dad said to me after I came out, “Homosexuality is something that has been almost universally regarded as a bad thing throughout human history. I would advise you to think long and hard before embracing this. Bourgeois normality is probably your best shot at happiness.” Obviously there are some misconceptions in this statement. But my dad is generally a wise dude, and I take what he says seriously. Can't I just have a gay bourgeois normality?

I think about these things while also knowing that there is such a huge gap between knowledge and action, and realizing that I have a long, hard road ahead of me as I strive to incorporate, as part of myself and my everyday life, those habits and virtues I feel the happy man possesses. Maybe that's why youth is characterized by energy and optimism: To give us the strength we need to become happy people.