Living With Homosexuality

Just to be clear from the start, I am not in any way shape or form homosexual. And yet, as will soon become clear, I do know quite a lot about it due to the fact that thirty two members of my family, immediate and extended, male and female, are openly gay.

I remember when my younger brother came out back in the sixties not really quite understanding it. I was to put it mildly somewhat confused. In no small part I think that was because in my callow youth I really was quite behind the door when it came to matters of sex and personal relationships.

In a very short time my brother and I drifted apart, not because of his homosexuality, but rather despite his preference for male intimacy. The fact was, and still is, my brother is really quite a complex character and I am quite a simple being. I can remember at least three times when my brother tried to kill me, seriously. I never understood why and I still don't. I can only imagine it was some sort of deeply felt sibling rivalry on his part. In the end we lost all contact for the best part of forty or so years. As we had absolutely nothing in common and I felt no emotional connection to him, there did not seem to be much point.

Finally, due to the passing of my mother about nine years ago, we kind of came back together. I approached the reconnection with the hope that with the passing of the years he had matured enough for us to get along. And for a while everything seemed to be working out just fine. And yet.......

Among the many things that became increasingly irritating about my brother was his insistence on declaring his homosexuality to everybody we met. Now I fully understand the need for gay people to come out, to shake off the shackles of shame and not feel the need to hide their sexual proclivities from the world at large. However, it really did bug me that every time I introduced my brother to a friend he would say out as loudly as he could "Hi, pleased to meet you, my name is Joe and I'm gay." Sometimes he felt familiar enough to make lewd suggestive comments like "Hi, my name is Joe, I'm gay and I love to suck......." You can fill in the space at the end with whatever you like. Personally I felt embarrassed at his over forthrightness.

Over the years I seem to have accumulated a great many openly gay friends, male and female, and as a rule they do not behave like this. I accept, without feeling that I have to fully embrace, homosexuality on the part of my friends and other members of the family. When I challenged my brother about his behaviour he claimed it was within his rights to behave any way he felt like and that the reason he so openly declared his homosexuality was for far too many years gay people had had to hide their sexual status away from polite society.

In the end our reconnection came to a termination due to other problems, like his selective memory about past issues. He was a troublesome child to my parents, particularly to my mother, with some of the antics he got up to, like legally proven arson and thieving, for which he was sent to jail. And yet to listen to him now all his past misdemeanours never happened, they were fabricated by my mother because she would not vaccept his homosexuality, which is an outright lie and an insult to her memory.

In the end my brother alienated himself from all of the family NOT because he is homosexual, though he will try to claim that that is the reason, but because of the way he is in matters nothing to do with being gay.

For my part I wish him no ill. I sincerely hope he finds some sort of peace in his life and is able to one day admit at least to himself where his life problems really begin and end. And that place is certainly not in being gay. It would serve him well to think on about all of the pain and hurt he has caused with his wayward, selfish character, instead of living in constant denial about who and what he really is.