It mostly defies our efforts to disguise it. Whatever that otherness is seems to come from somewhere deep within us. The label fell into disrepute, but lately a number of well-known researchers in the field of sexual orientation have been reviving it based on an extensive new body of research showing that most of us, whether top or bottom, butch or femme, or somewhere in between, share a kind of physical otherness that locates us in our own quadrant of the gender matrix, more like one another than not. Maybe a better way to phrase it would have been “third-sexer,” the category advanced by the gay German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld 100 years ago. I once placed a personal ad in which I described myself as “gay-acting/gay-appearing,” partly as a jab at my peers who prefer to be thought of as “str8” but mostly because it’s just who I am. I’m not so much out-of-the-closet as “self-evident,” to use Quentin Crisp’s phrase, although being of a younger generation, I can’t subscribe to his belief that it is a kind of disfigurement requiring lavender hair rinse. I know this from strangers who find gay people offensive enough to elicit a remark-catcalls from cab windows, to use a recent example-as well as from countless casual social engagements in which people easily assume my orientation, no sensitive gaydar necessary. It takes only a glance to make my truth obvious. But most people immediately read me (correctly) as gay.
Nor am I typically perceived as androgynous, not in my uniform of Diesels and boots, not even when I was younger and favored dangling earrings and bright Jack Purcells. Gay men are more likely than straight men to have a counterclockwise whorl.Īs a presence in the world-a body hanging from a subway strap or pressed into an elevator, a figure crossing the street-I am neither markedly masculine nor notably effeminate.