les voix: For/Getting｜Re/Membering

What I am, besides my name for the ‘who-ness’, becomes the most difficult question to answer, if people are not asking about the occupation. As a gay man, I have doubted myself whether I am qualified as a ‘man’ – not because of my sexual orientation but gender performativity, but now, I even started to question, again, if I am qualified as a ‘gay’.

People say it may be more fluid of their identities when they are young, but this does not apply to me. Oddly, as growing older and older, I have been becoming a lot confused than when I was young – absorbing everything that people taught me about who I am.

I always consider myself as ‘gay’ since I was very little, and I even came out to almost everyone that I feel comfortable with. I told people, I am gay. But one day, I could not help but ask, ‘what does gay even mean’. It means homosexual – people who are ‘sexually’ attracted by those who are of the same sex. This sounds making sense, because I surfed on internet, looking for and fantasising male pornographies rather than female ones. Thus, I completely accepted this concept and embraced – and even fought for – such an identity.

The other day, I heard people say, ‘love wins’, and then I got confused again. Does gay identity – or homosexuality, or homoeroticism – even involve with love? What does love mean? Why drives me puzzled is that most of people I ‘think’ I ‘love’ are sometimes different from whom I ‘fell in love with’. I fell in love easily with people that I feel sexually attracted to, but at most times they just stepped off from my life when such infatuations faded away; people say, it is ‘chemical’; it is rather intuitive than emotional.

For those I feel I love, I am way more tolerant; I share everything with them; I just cannot help but thinking of how to make them happier and what would make them so. If this is love, as experts suggest, then it is weird that it does not necessarily always involve ‘sex’. Of course I love some of those that I fell in love with, especially those who ever became and is my partner; however, besides them, most of people I do ‘feel loving’ are not male – or more accurately, they are not classically manly.

Some of them are women, as biologically defined, and some of them are men who share more characteristics similar to my girlfriends rather than men – they are sweet and considerate; they are neither aggressive nor violent and do not swear all the time; they are funny but not just hilarious. In fact, I sometimes ‘feel’ more scared of men. In my life, it is men – especially heterosexual ones (though I am still sexually attracted by them) – that hurts me more. Honestly speaking, I sometimes fear or dislike them as I ran away from my dad or my supervisor. So if gayness of me means I love men, it becomes awkward, because actually I hate men more despite the sexual drive.

Probably, sexual orientation simply means attraction by sex, which is more intuitive. It does not necessarily involve the senses of care, trust, intimacy, reliance, friendliness, or sympathy – which may constitute the so-called ‘love’, in my opinion. If so, then something confuses me; that is, why gay identity now induces love’s winning. I mean, I am not sure if the gayness in me makes me love, though I am clear that it makes me sexually driven by some men. To be more specific, why has sexuality – or as some may put in this way as ‘eroticism’ – been having to engage in conceptualising ‘love’ – or intimacy, trust, or reliance? Does it destroy my gayness if I dislike most of men in this world?

Now, gayness – one of the categories within the inventions of ‘sexual orientation’, beyond the medical appropriation of ‘homosexuality’ – seems to be not just a sexual identity but also a loving identity. And, this has made my belief – since experts associate ‘identity’ with a psychological state, subjectively – in being ‘gay’ shakier than when I first understood it. I prefer it simpler though I know it is deemed to be complex – just like that I sometimes doubt that I am a ‘man’ is because I was born biologically as a man or I think I am a man.

Nevertheless, I do not have some features that what people think of ‘manhood’, or sometimes, I think I am feminine. But, I am still considered as a man for how I look but not for what I think or how I act. If so, then that ‘identity’ issues involve with mental state does not make sense, and there are just too many similar experiences. Born in Thailand, growing up in Taiwan, and raised by parents who prefer a united China, I, when I started to live abroad, became a Taiwanese – in a cultural sense, but not a solid belief in any national identity.

After a sense of where I am from, of who I think I am in terms of gender – either as a role or a performance, still interrupted by my biological definition in the end, and, now, the last bit of my ‘feeling of identity’ is gradually loosing, again, for the unpurification of gay identity with the discourse of love’s purity.