This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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My friend Chris Denny wrote the prose below in recognition of it being three years since he came out, just a few weeks after I did.

I still remember the first video call he joined in one of the online support groups we participated in. He panicked when he realized that his real name rather than the pseudonym he’d been using appeared under his name, having neglected to change it in the settings before joining. The realization that someone would know who he really was terrified him.

For all the struggle and doubt and pain I’ve felt and worked through since embracing my queerness, Chris has felt all that tenfold. As he writes below, his life now is very different from what it was. His choosing to be authentic brought its fair share of loss.

But I think anyone on a similar journey can appreciate what Chris has to say about what all it has led to.

-Ty

Heart throbbing from scalp to soles. Fear so cold it slowed everything down beneath the adrenaline. The deeply unspoken finding its light for the first time.

These words could destroy me, my marriage, my life.

I would later discover they would. But not as I feared. And not yet how I could have hoped.

The silence was already destroying me. Avoiding the potential deconstruction of my life was no longer an option. Forward was the only path.

“I think I might be bi.”

The storm that followed upended every aspect of my life — my understanding of God, relationships, humanity.

It came in swells and feeder bands. Heart-shattering depths. Cracks of joy and hope and light. Rage. Fear. Despair. The great unknowing.

The dread ebbed first. The weight I hadn’t fully grasped until it lifted. The visceral fear that if I were fully known, I would be unlovable. It receded and never returned.

Every relationship changed overnight. Some shattered so fundamentally I would never feel them the same again. Others deepened into something more honest. More vulnerable.

In the quiet loneliness, in the void of what was, the voice of the boy was heard again.

For decades I had turned my attention from him — toward who others demanded I be. Promises of healing, love, success. A relentless pursuit of validation.

As those communities, congregations, and covenants I once dedicated my life to receded, so did the allure of conditional love. In the void, the boy’s voice grew clearer.

As so much ebbed, something new began to flow.

Into the deep end, often with the grace and poise of a teenager.

How to be a single dad.
How to build a home of my own.
How to make friends again.
How to be a queer man.

Like a child, trying things on. What I liked. What I didn’t. Where I belong — and where I don’t. What makes me steady. What feels like me. Sorting the fear of trying from the fear of losing myself.

The parts of me the years quieted but never silenced flowed back. Playfulness. Creativity. Wonder. Goofiness.

And yet so much stayed steadfast — my heart, my values, my faith, baseball and butcher’s knives.

When the compass had long been set to the expectations of others, and those people receded, all that remained was the voice of the boy.

Six years ago, I knew I was queer.
Three years ago, I said it aloud.

Today, I understand more clearly what it means to be queer.

But even more than that, I understand what it means to be me.

Under blue skies and calmer winds, the chaos has ebbed. Dreaming has begun again.

I am less certain of what lies ahead than at any other point in my life.
I am the most steady I have ever been.

A quiet farewell to surety and control.
A dawning steadiness of the boy who never left.

I’m proud of him.
I’m grateful I finally listened.
I missed him.

Today my life is unrecognizable. Nothing like what I feared.
And yet, in so many ways, deeply familiar. Native.

The joy of being seen and known.
The freedom of not knowing and simply being.
The hope of dreaming again.

Grateful for all that flowed
and even for all that ebbed.

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Most names are pseudonyms.

When Cory and I first got in the club, we promptly headed to the clothing check to drop trou, then went down to grab our first drinks. A vodka and Redbull and a Montucky tall boy in hand, we parked ourselves at the top of the stairs of the second floor landing.

I scanned the crowd of men, all in various states of undress and styles of harness. It was early so everybody was still being reserved, talking in groups that were periodically interrupted by a prolonged ‘hello’ makeout session or quick ass grab as someone joined the circle.

Surprisingly, I soon saw two folk I knew; one, Jace, I’d chatted with online for months and had wanted to meet for a while. The other, Xander, a hot one-night stand from nearly a year ago when I was last in town.

Jace saw me, raised their hand and broke off and came over. We had just exchanged hellos when someone brushed by us and knocked my drink, splashing it on them a bit. I felt the vibe shift and they said they’d see me around and headed back to their group of friends. The abrupt end to the conversation deflated me a bit but I tried to not let it get to me.

I decided to try and say hello to Xander. Tapped him on the shoulder, said we’d hooked up while I was staying at a B&B up the hill. He was kind but it quickly became clear he didn’t really remember me and we awkwardly parted.

Cory asked if I wanted to check out upstairs and I was happy to move away from my embarrassment. The first group of gogo dancers were just finding their stations and getting into the beat when we stepped up there. There was a good size crowd but it was easy to weave through guys who were either dancing or chatting. I was still tense with anxiety from my self-perceived social flubs downstairs so only bobbed my head and swayed a bit to the music. I caught a glimpse of another guy I knew from the apps but held back. He seemed pretty engaged with the guys he was with and I just wasn’t feeling confident and up for a third strike.

My beer was almost finished and they hadn’t staffed the bar next to the dance floor yet so I headed back down to grab another. I ran into Jace again and we actually exchanged a few words but the music was so loud at this point that I could barely follow what they said. They stepped away again and I was again left alone, wondering why I was doing this to myself.

I was determined to attend something akin to a circuit party. I have friends who have been to Lazy Bear in Guerneville. I’ve seen the (relatively) SFW photos and videos from it and other destination events such as Puerto Vallarta’s Beef Dip, Bear Week in Provincetown and the recent Atlantis cruise splashed across social media. I recognize that what is on social media is, at best, a veneer upon reality, but I longed for it just the same. I’ve been able to express and explore my queerness over the past three years, but within the day-to-day limitations of being a man married to a woman with two young children in a community dominated by puritanical hypocrites.

I wanted to be able to wear a tank top that says “woof” or shows a man sniffing another man’s armpit without disdainful whispers. I wanted to be in a pool with a bunch of other men in speedos or nothing at all. I wanted to be on a dancefloor lit by strobes and spotlights surrounded by men in harnesses and pup hoods. I wanted the possibility that a man would come up to me with a warm smile before pulling me in close and not have to worry about being home by a reasonable hour.

At the same time, I will likely never be able to attend a true circuit party. I have enough guilt saving money up for my next tattoo. The cost to travel to an exotic location, pay for the overpriced meals and drinks, is untenable. The incredible logistics of planning such a trip when I have a demanding day job paired with kids with numerous activities and commitments. Then there’s the emotional and ethical hangups—my self-conscious awareness that I do not possess six pack abs or tree trunks for thighs like many attendees at such events, the fact that I would be leaving my wife to manage everything at home while I live a temporary libertine life…

So I looked for one-night events that could give me a taste of the experience. And that’s how I came upon the Seattle Beef Ball at Massive promoted by Matt Bearracuda. I could easily go over for the night and drive back the next day. Bought my ticket online, booked a (relatively) affordable hotel. Began obsessing over what my outfit would be for the night (it was boxers and jockstraps encouraged).

Online I shared my plans for that weekend, modeled my planned attire, bantered with guys such as Jace who said they would be there and would like to meet me in the flesh. But having an itinerary, tickets, outfit, those were just logistics. Would I actually let myself have a good time? Would I be able to not think about whether I looked hot enough or was acting “queer” enough or being cool enough. Would I feel like I belonged? Or would I do what I had done the rest of my life—retreat into myself, too afraid to miss out but also to act.

I was again at the top of the stairs on the second landing after Jace moved on, resigned to my evening being an exercise in self-pity. Then Bruce found me.

“Excuse me, do I know you?”

We’d spent an afternoon together more than a year ago, after he reached out via one of the apps. Over lunch he demonstrated his nerdiness (he had a NERV-branded cellphone case) alongside his rugged handsomeness (he had played international rugby). He invited me back to his apartment. He was impressed how much I ended up coming after he topped me.

“Yeah, hi Bruce! I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“First night out in a while. You’re looking good.”

He pulled me close and I leaned in and the kiss was deep and long.

“It’s great seeing you, I hope we run into each other later,” he said as he walked down the stairs.

I didn’t realize that Cory had found me and was nearby.

“They seemed nice,” he said, smiling.

That seemed to change the entire trajectory of my evening. I went down to get the new beer and ran into Norman, a pup I’d only begun getting to know in the last few weeks. He was effusive when he saw me, hugged me and said to find him later.

After that I found myself back upstairs on the dancefloor where Bruce saw me again, we again made out and he introduced me to his fiance and another friend, who I also briefly made out with. Enough tension had drained out of my body that I actually felt like dancing, getting close to a handful of men who moved in and out of my orbit.

Before the night ended I would twice be sucked off by a twink as well as by Norman, who beckoned me into the dark room following a make out session after we found each other again. And then, as Cory and I left to stumble to our hotel, I ran into Bruce outside as he was buying some street food and we made out once more.

The next evening, I was home when the withdrawal began to hit me.

The prior part of the day after Beef Ball was fine–a quick chai and chocolate croissant for breakfast at the bakery a block over from our hotel; a stop at an amazing Asian market where I picked up exotic KitKat flavors and anime-branded sparkling water for my kids; the long drive listening to Orville Peck and Lily Allen’s musical evisceration of David Harbour.

But once inside my house and inundated with the typical domestic travails, the disquiet settled in. For someone who is usually annoyed by the raucous noise of my home life, I was suddenly missing the vibrations I felt in my chest from speakers and a woofer over my head the night before. Despite a tendency of always feeling constrained in my house, I craved being pressed in, grazed against, held. Visions of the prior night’s panorama of hairy chests, jock strap-covered bulges and knowing smiles flashed in my head.

I’m embarrassed at how low my mood became over the next two days. I wasn’t familiar with the term dopamine drop but apparently it’s a not uncommon phenomenon after a big social gathering.

“Tell me it’s fine that I’m spiraling emotionally after going to my first circuit party,” I said in a message to my friend Mark a few days after.

“It’s fine and likely normal. Validation is powerful,” he replied.

“Ok.”

This wasn’t just sadness at a party being over–I can count on one hand the number of times in my life where I felt the same level of connection, acceptance and welcome as I did by the end of that evening. I ended up feeling so delightfully unaware of myself, firmly rooted in the present moment and the sights and sounds and smells that all entailed. Of course, events known just as much for being celebrations of queerness and acceptance as for harboring rampant substance abuse, fetishizing ideal white physiques and sexual behavior that can border upon the unhealthy, is neither sustainable nor practical, much less real connection.

However it’s more than the power of validation. It seems hypocritical to say I strive to be a loving husband and present parent when I’m pining for an experience that, quite frankly, is about the exclusion of my family, is something I will never share with them. I wish I could say I’ve found a way to reconcile all that.

So I don’t know if I’ll make it to another event. If I do, who knows if it will be with those who were at Beef Ball and made it so meaningful. I’d like to try again to get to know Jace and not let a less-than-ideal first impression that was a result of my nerves and some asshole knocking my drink on them close a door. I’d like to say hello to the other acquaintance I saw on the dance floor, try to not let my predilection for social catastrophizing win out in the end.

But ultimately I just want to be immersed in the sound and darkness of a club, condensation building up on the windows, hands upon my skin, a beard close to mine.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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I regularly point out to my oldest child how goth they are.

This happened most recently after a recent clothes shopping trip with their mother to Hot Topic. Once home they modeled a pair of super wide legged jeans with star patches on them, t-shirts baggy enough to fit my hefty frame and they made sure to also have black lipstick on.

“God, you’re so goth.”

“No I’m not! You’re so mean!”

I want to be clear that their retort was made in the same playful whine they make through a smile and repressed laugh whenever I poke fun at them, be that for their undying devotion for Bill Cipher or constant hunt for queer characters to ship in the anime they watch. And she dishes it out, too; calling me old and “unc,” subtly and not-so-subtly pointing out my baldness and mocking my unhealthy addiction to chocolate milk.

I have no idea if they are actually goth. I knew plenty of goth kids growing up who would have vibed in that outfit. But my kid also likes to wear short sports skirts in pastels and tie-dyed shirts they made at camp and to steal my hoodies. One of their requested Christmas presents was a raccoon tail, which they have happily worn out to dinner recently along with much of their more goth-like attire. I’ll be honest, I took a mental deep breath when I noticed she was wearing it. I’m ashamed to admit that my thoughts briefly flashed to the looks it would get in the white bread conservative community we live in. But she was excited to have it on and as long as it didn’t interfere with her ability to put on her seatbelt in the car…

There’s an interview clip involving comedian Kevin Hart circulating in some social media circles. He was interviewed by comedian and media personality Ziwe Fumudoh and she asks him if he’d rather have a gay son or a thot1 daughter. Per culture website Complex:

“I would rather have two healthy kids. Like, it doesn’t matter to me,” said the father of four. “Two healthy children and the fact that you have to put them in those categories says a lot about who you are.”

“I’m just telling you I think the real problem is in the thinker, not the answerer. The thinker,” Hart continued with a pensive facial expression. “Maybe you should, maybe you should just ponder on that for a second,” he added.

The comedian wasn’t always so enlightened; Hart made homophobic comments in the past–including disgust at the potential of having a gay son–that earned him backlash (and the loss of work) in recent years.

Hart’s response turns on its head a toxic either/or hypothetical situation that has circulated on social media since 2021 and depends on homophobic and misogynistic framing. While he’s been praised for it, he also has earned some derision, with some noting that the interview was done on a satirical program that is more akin to Zach Galifinakis’ infamous Between Two Ferns than a sit-down with Oprah Winfrey or Barbara Walters and his straight-face response may also be a similar act.

Gloria Hemingway didn’t even have the luxury of satirical words from her father.

A 2021 piece from All That’s Interesting noted the AMAB child of renowned author Ernest Hemingway had qualities her father took pride in, such as her athleticism. But the author, who became a cultural touchstone of heteronormativity and traditional masculinity, reportedly went berserk when he found her trying on one of her stepmother’s dresses at the age of 10.

At 19, Gloria was arrested at an LA movie theater. Her father told media the incident was due to her “taking a mind-stimulating drug before such things were fashionable.” In reality, Gloria was arrested for using the women’s restroom.

The incident resulted in the author berating Gloria’s mother and blaming her for their child’s behavior. Gloria’s mother died suddenly that night, and Ernest Hemingway blamed his gender nonconforming daughter for her mother’s death. They never reconciled and roughly ten years later, the author was dead by his own hand and his daughter 40 years after that, albeit by natural causes in a Florida women’s jail days after being found unconscious on a beach.

Growing up, my own father often steered me toward Hemingway’s works, most notably his Nick Adams short stories. He saw in them a model for what he wanted to instill in me–courage in the face of fear, stoicism, toughness, confidence2. At one time during my teenage years, he wanted me to go on a “vision quest,” though he never really explained what he meant by that. He pushed me to take up sports, which led to mediocre outings in wrestling, track and field and tennis. He once said he was proud of my own interest in writing, “even poetry.” And he told me that if any of his children were to become gay, he would think he failed as a father.

I’ve spent much of my life seeking to make sure I didn’t fail my father. This is not to say that he’s approved of all my choices; he thought journalism “stressed me out too much” and didn’t understand why I chose it as a career. My choice to live in the middle of the towns I moved to for work, rather than out in the open country, puzzled him. This past summer he avoided acknowledging the tattoo I got a few years ago, a pop culture practice he ascribed to a vain waste of money when I was growing up.

But I won awards for my writing, which he lauded, and gave him grandchildren to shower with affection, albeit from halfway across the country. And I’ve kept my queerness from him. When I was younger that meant self-hatred and shame, depression and suicidal ideation. Now I curate our conversations, audit my appearance, hold my tongue more than I should when he goes on rants about “boys thinking they’re girls.”

My oldest child makes no such effort with me. They enter every room I’m in eager to share their thoughts, no matter how unhinged or how little context their audience may have of the topic at hand. They are proud of every drawing they show me. They constantly belt out songs from the musicals they are obsessed with. And they pose whenever they are excited about their outfit before heading to school or play rehearsal or a birthday party.

Sometimes I tell her the clothes they are wearing are inappropriate, albeit for seasonal reasons (“No, you are not leaving the house without at least a jacket when it’s below freezing outside” “Why are you leaving the house in just your socks?”). Sometimes I ask them to not be so loud, primarily because my sensitivity to loud sounds has worsened in my old age. Sometimes I tell them I wasn’t listening because I was in the middle of a task and give me a moment and then I can pay attention.

But I’m grateful that their instinct is to come to me being fully themselves. Because, hopefully, that means they never have to ask themselves what kind of child I would rather have. They have the confidence I never had, and without even knowing who the hell Nick Adams is.

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One of the most prevalent pieces of writing advice I’ve heard throughout my life is “show, don’t tell.”

Don’t just tell that a character was happy or sad or angry, show their facial expressions, what they do with their hands, or how their body shook and trembled. Don’t just tell that it was a beautiful day or a foreboding night, show the breeze whistling in the trees or the indecipherable sounds coming from the dark. Show the light from the bedroom window, show the din from the street, show a character’s hopes and dreams.

I’ve endeavored to show through my writing here how I and others navigate coming out late in life and living our queerness. Much of Sitting Queerly is focused on the deepest questions, the most fraught conversations, the largest fears of the late-blooming experience. For the most part, I think I’ve done a good job, as have the others whose writing I’ve shared or perspectives I’ve transcribed. All has been in service to showing others who are going through a similar journey that they aren’t alone and that there are paths they can follow.

But what about everything else? The day-to-day? The little moments? The medium-sized moments? Saying and acknowledging your queerness is one thing, applying it to how you live your life—what you actually do and say, what you memorialize, what catches your attention—is another thing entirely.

So I’m going to show you what a year for a late-blooming queer dad in a mixed-orientation marriage looks like. Some of these photos will have some obvious connection to queerness with rainbows, protest signs and drag queens. Others will just seem so, well, mundane. And that’s because that’s largely what life is, mundane. The chores, the shifts at work, the family crises, the weekends with kids1 and brief nights out for drinks.

When I began coming out I couldn’t visualize what it would be like to live a queer life. The fact is, it looks like any other kind of life; summer camp with a kid, fun with friends, scary moments, quiet moments. And I think there’s value in showing that.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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The holidays are stressful.

So I offer you…dinosaurs.

UNTO YOU A RAPTOR IS BORN: Part of the Little Library of Christmas Drear

I made the photos in this little book a decade ago, when I was still deeply closeted and ashamed of being queer. I had just started seriously doing something about my mental health, having gotten on my first anti-depressant/anti-anxiety medication, but was far from stable or safe. Add in the pressure of trying to create a magical holiday experience as a young father trying to dig our family out of debt on a single income and, well, I was struggling.

And yet making this deeply quirky, ham-fisted and irreverent series of photos of toy dinosaurs portraying the story of the Nativity brought me a lot of joy. I shared it via my Instagram at the time and it didn’t go viral or anything. But the few friends who “liked” it and the even fewer who commented that they thought they were hilarious buoyed me through a time of year that increasingly seemed more gauntlet than celebration.

In retrospect, this was a first taste of living authentically. I didn’t care that a lot of folks wouldn’t get it, would consider it uninteresting or weird or inappropriate. It made me happy—still makes me happy—and that’s all that mattered. Just like how coming out was, ultimately, about me being happy—me being me—regardless of what others thought.

Whatever your plans for the remainder of 2025, I hope this brings you a little joy. Or, at the very least, inspires you to make some for yourself.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

Subscribe now

TW: religious themes, childhood trauma

The following is a slightly abridged transcript of a sermon given at my church in July 2025 by one of our newest members. Some words have been added or modified as indicated by brackets [ ] to ease comprehension or protect privacy. It’s a bit long so I won’t make any further commentary other than acknowledging that while her story is very different from my own, her pursuit of authenticity is shared by me and I think many others. I am glad she joined our community.

If you’d prefer to listen/watch it rather than read, you can find it online under the services for July 27, 2025, between the time stamps of 40:56 and 1:13:26.

My first memory, being baptized. My second memory was when I was three years old. I don’t know why I have one memory when I was two and one when I was three and then I don’t remember anything until I was 27. But when I was three, my family lived up in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, and we were big farm families, ours was five but there was a bunch of good Catholic families that had bunches of kids and we did thanksgiving out at an uncle’s house.

So we gathered for food and the men went out on the porch to spit and chew and tell war stories, the women went to the kitchen to cook, the boys went out to play in the barn with the kittens or whatever and us girls went into the back bedroom and played dress up. I was in seventh heaven. And I got all dressed up and I came out when they called dinner and everyone was fine until the men came in and when the men came in my dad took one look at me and went ballistic. He shamed me, he embarrassed me, he told me to get out, to go change clothes.

From three to six I lived out on the ranch, didn’t know anybody and I always knew I was a sissy because dad told me I was and started first grade and nobody knew me. But everybody knew Frank was a sissy because dad said so. So in the first grade when they asked me—everyone in the class knew each other, they were from town and stuff—and they asked me ‘what’s your name?’ and in the blink of an eye I went from being Frank to being Ed. I needed a macho person to protect me. And Ed was my dad; ex-Marine, farmer, he spit and chewed and smoked, he did anything that was manly. So I decided I was Ed. Went well until the teacher-parent conference. But that’s another story.

I did all the macho stuff because Ed was there to protect Frank. So I had to be macho. I wrestled in junior high and I played football in high school and I threw discus and shotput, anything that was manly in high school I did.

So I got married when I was 18 and I went to work for Computer Science [Corporation] because men took care of their families. My draft notice came up when I was 19 so I dodged the draft and enlisted and spent four years and two months and 23 days in the active Army. And when I got out I went back to work for Computer Science Corporation and I joined the 104th Division over here…a training division. I was a drill sergeant. It would come in handy later when I became a pastor. I rode motorcycles since the time I was 19, very manly, and I still love motorcycles and I still ride one. You’ll see it occasionally, I’ve been here once on it. I did all the manly things you were supposed to do.

And every night, when the lights were out and my wife went to asleep and I was by myself, I would dream of being Frankie and what it would be like to be a woman. And it was a world that was not allowed to be shared with anyone until I was 75 years old.

…the ministry allowed me to have my soft side. I was still Ed, I still rode my motorcycle, but I could I could nurture, I could love, I could listen, I could empathize in ways that I never could before I became a minister. I spent 26 years in the pulpit. And I retired and shortly after I retired, my wife of 56 years developed Alzheimer’s.

Two years before she died, she forgot who I was. I continued to take care of her. I told my [current] wife I was not going to use this phrase but I could take care of her not because she’d forgotten who she was but because I could remember who she was, and God reminded me.

So it went from bad to worse and I continued to be her sole caregiver and July of ‘23, a horrible horrible month, in July of ‘23, we went to the doctor on July 3 and he told us [my first wife] has six months to live. We went home and she didn’t know me–she was sleeping in another bedroom by that time because she didn’t know me and she didn’t want to sleep with a stranger–and God and I talked for a long time. I don’t really know if God told me this or God agreed with me, but we had a talk. And we decided was that if I ever was going to come out, it was going to be July 3, 2023, and I decided to come out.

And the first miraculous thing that happened, a week later I went into my cardiologist because I had congestive heart failure. I’d had it for 18 years and that doesn’t get better by itself. And they ran the lab tests and a couple days later I went in to see the doctor and the doctor goes ‘what’d you do?’ What do you mean? We talked and talked and finally, I had been coming out to people and I told him, ‘I came out a week ago, a week before the test.’ And he goes ‘OK, we don’t have a medical term for this, but us cardiologists call it a happy heart. And when you’ve been under tremendous stress–75 years of it–when you’ve been under tremendous stress for a very long time and its suddenly lifted, often your heart will heal itself.’ And here I am.

My wife died Dec. 23, she lived five and a half months, not six. And on Dec. 29, six days later, I contacted a realtor to sell our home and a contractor to fix anything wrong with the house and to take everything in the house and liquidate it for whatever it cost to fix it up.

And I contacted my family about me coming out in October and I said if you want to hear more let me know and if not you won’t hear from me again. I didn’t hear from my son. I heard a little bit from my sister, kinda wished I hadn’t. My son would call and ask how is this or that but he didn’t mention transitioning. And he called me up and said, ‘Dad, I want you to come home, Mom’s dead.’ And I said ‘you know I’m transitioning, right?’ ‘Nooo.’ ‘Well, I emailed everyone and you were on the list.’ ‘We never saw it.’ ‘Fine, why don’t you go talk to your family about me coming to live with you before I come and live with you.’ And two hours later he called me up and said, ‘yep, come on, I’m gonna come down and we’re gonna drive back together.’ Wonderful, wonderful family. I have been so blessed.

I went in to see an old friend…and on my way back I went past West Highlands Methodist church and I wasn’t going to stop…And I drove by and my car just went in…I talked to the secretary, they were having a district clergy meeting. I used to belong to that, I walked in, I knew some of them…Then the secretary came in and grabbed me by my ear and dragged me into the United Women of Faith group and plopped me down in an empty chair. And those women did nothing but love on me. I experienced the presence of Jesus Christ so powerfully that day.

And they listened to my extended story for a long time and they were so gracious. And afterwards the lady I was sitting next to stood up and said ‘do you need a hug?’ and I got the best hug in the world. That was Jan. 2, Sept. 7 I married her. God put us together, our souls just melded.

…the people of the church were just wonderful to me. The pastor is a good friend of mine. But he had a problem because the [Methodist] church had just split and there were people in the church who didn’t want people like me around, especially in leadership positions. So we started out, I talked to him and he goes, that’s fine but I don’t want you wearing this, can’t have that in church. So dress modestly and let the people get to know you. And I’m a pastor and I can understand he’s just trying to keep peace in his church and there’d been a division in the denomination. I understood where he was coming from, I didn’t appreciate it, but I understood it. So I did, I dressed very modestly, jean skirts and blouses and after two months I was like, you know, I’m gonna go worship God and I’ve shown up like this ever since and nobody said a word.

And then somebody came and said, ‘Frankie, would you like to read scriptures on Sunday?’ And I said ‘I’d love to read scripture on Sunday, go ask the pastor.’ And they asked the pastor and he took it to the administrative council and they discussed it and voted on it and it came back to the pastor and I got to read.

The next month they came to me and said ‘Would you like to sing in the choir?’ ‘I’d love to sing in the choir, go ask the pastor.’ I got to sing in the choir. And they wanted to know ‘could you be the lay leader?’ ‘Go ask the pastor.’ And I could be the lay leader. And then the church on its own, after being discussed at the administrative council, the pastor came to me and said ‘you can do anything in the church you want.’ I thought that was so neat.

When we got married, we went to the pastor and he said “well, let me take it to the church” and they took it to the church and they said we could be married there and he refused to do it for theological reasons. And I tell the church, I tell them their still lucky to have [him] because he’s a man of integrity. If he wasn’t a man of integrity, even though he thought I should not have a Christian marriage, he would have done it and bowed to the wants of the church. He’s a good man, I really appreciate him.

…then two weeks later, there was someone I didn’t know in the pulpit. And I knew in that instant that I hadn’t been on the consideration list to preach…And I went and talked to the pastor after that and said ‘I can do everything in the church.’ ‘Absolutely.’ ‘Everything except for consecrate the elements.’ ‘Well no you can’t do that.’ ‘And preach.’ ‘Well no you can’t do that.’ And I left and here I am. And I walked in here and you all went “Welcome, Frankie! Would you like to preach?”

…now, let’s do a little sermonizing that helps explain why I’m here and why I’m comfortable with who I am. Ok, Genesis 1:27. It’s always interesting to find out what’s in the Bible and what isn’t in the Bible. I’d like book, chapter and verse please. Where’s platypus? I thought you guys were biblical scholars. Not there. How about, in Proverbs, cleanliness is next to godliness. Is that there? My wife still hasn’t forgiven John Wesley for that one. Not there. How about the holy Trinity, where is that in scripture? Nobody? It’s not there. What about Jesus Christ’s birthday? None of this stuff is in the Bible. Geez.

What does the Bible really say? So many people don’t have any idea and so many of us rely on tradition instead of scripture. Trinity, I wanted to check this to make sure I get this right, was at the First Council of Nicea, from 325 A.D. It’s when that terminology was coined and brought together and we had us a godhead. We had God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, a male. Which never should have happened at that point. A few hundred years later, we had the Vulgate Bible translated from Hebrew into Greek and Latin. In Hebrews, the Spirit hung over the waters. That was feminine. But didn’t we just say the Trinity was Father, Son and male Spirit? It wasn’t until that council and the Vulgate Bible. Hebrew is feminine, Greek is neutral, Latin is masculine and we’ve had a male God ever since in its entirety. And it’s not scriptural and it’s not how it was originally written.

Why did they only do a Trinity? You know, we could have had two and two. Because what was the fourth entity we should have included that was never questioned as feminine? Sophia. Feminine. It should have been male-male, female-female and how would our world look today? The Quadrinity. That’s not how it went down but it’s probably how it should have gone down. I’ll read the whole scripture, what the heck, ‘God created humankind in His own image. In the image of God He created them, male and female He created them.’

Boy, that male and female gets us so hung up. It’s amazing the number of people who stop at junior high—middle school now—biology. They teach you XX, XY, we have males, we have females, that’s the end of the story. And I swear, a huge amount of people in this country stop there when they want “we wanna follow science!” Well, that’s junior high science. If you go on and study when you get on to college, you find out there’s XXY, which I personally think I am, I’m still trying to get tested. And there’s all sorts of different flavors of XX and XY and it’s not just one or two or five or ten, it’s a spectrum of people.

Then, you get to grad school and then they really start muddying the water because they say you’ve got all this stuff we taught you in undergraduate school but there’s modifiers. And if the modifier is attached to an XX, a woman, she won’t develop as a woman she’ll develop as a male. Because the modifiers lock. And if it modifies XY, the man will develop as a woman and never know the difference.

So that’s kind of where I’m at. But then I got to thinking–that’s a dangerous thing for me to do–I got to thinking, and what happens if God really means what God said? He created humankind in His image. Male and female He created them. Well, from my own personal experience, he created me a biological male. I will die a biological male, I will live my entire life as a biological male but he created me as a feminine soul. He created me XX and XY. My body, I don’t care what I do to it, will always be, basically, a biological male. My soul since the day I was conceived, has been feminine. And it will be feminine into eternity. It’s kind of like being left handed. When did you find out you were left handed? What do you mean when did I find out, I’ve always been left handed. When did I find out I was transgender? Well I’ve always been transgender but it dawned on me when I was three years old. I didn’t have the words or anything else but I knew what I was.

What if the Bible means what it says? Did you ever hear of intersexual individuals, when a person is born with male and female genitalia? I’d heard of those folks for years but never knew any, I kinda thought it was a folklore, something somebody made up. But right after I came out I started attending the Metropolitan church…and I met a delightful person there, a young woman, a nurse, and she was intersexual. And she sat in the back of the church so she never got filmed–because the front of the church was filmed [during services] and the back of the church wasn’t—because not everybody can come out and it would have destroyed her life to come out. There were people looking for her. Her family was not happy with her. They had tried to modify her, psychologically and physically, when she was a child and she finally escaped.

And I thought, well, that’s cool I know one now and two weeks later I met another in a trans group. So then I knew two. And I ran into one in our community here, that’s three. I’d have never guessed. And God created them all and God loves us all and we’re all part of God’s creation and how can you say you have to be either XX or XY well what about…? You need to be who you are, not who others want you to be.

The scripture concludes with Revelations 21, I thought it appropriate to end with the last verse in scripture because it really does close it. ‘May the grace of the Lord Jesus be with everyone. Amen.’ But wait, there’s more! You’re supposed to have three points and a poem. I had four points and this isn’t a poem but it works. From Candy O. Camperson:

“The painful part of being a transgender kid is not knowing you’re transgender. You know you’re different, but you don’t know why. Other kids know you’re different, too, and they never let you forget. But no one gives you language for it. No one gives you books or information about it. There’s no visible adult transgender models…because family and society warned you to stay away from those ‘queer’ people and stop being such a sissy. And so you learned to sit there quietly, uncomfortable and different, never fitting in, trying to be invisible and you are truly alone.”

But I would add, except for the ever presence of God’s love for you. Now we can say amen.

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I’ve been thinking about a scene from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums the last few days.

Deadbeat Royal Tenenbaum’s cancer diagnosis scam has been found out. His oldest son has angrily called for a cab so the family can evict him from the family home. His ex-wife can only call him a bastard and bitterly say goodbye. As he’s on the street, about to leave, he turns to his youngest son.

ROYAL: You know, Richie, this illness, this closeness to death. It’s been very profound for me. I feel like a different person. I really do.

RICHIE: Dad. You were never dying.

ROYAL: (Smiles) But I’m going to live!

Last week’s general election here in the U.S garnered a lot of takes, here on Substack and elsewhere. Some have called it a ‘bluenami,’ others just a clear repudiation of the GOP and anything aligned with Donald Trump. After everything over the past year—the darkness and despotism, the cruelty and coldness, the abject disregard not just for the law but humanity—this election appears to be providing hope.

“We’re going to live,” folks are shouting.

Meanwhile, on election night, a transphobe who is buddy-buddy with disgraced Florida ex-congressman Matt Gaetz get re-elected to one of my community’s school boards.

My city council, which has become a running joke of scandal and ethics violations, retained the council members that have contributed to that reputation. And they will now be joined by a former state representative who is buddy-buddy with another former state representative who was expelled from the Legislature after it was discovered he authored a white Christian nationalist manifesto calling for the murder of men unwilling to live by his faith.

A neighboring city failed to amend its charter to move to a district-based system for its city council, thus allowing the current bloc of near neighbors (which includes the mayor who sicced homophobes on a restaurant that dared to host a drag show on Easter weekend a few years ago) to maintain its grip.

Yes, Zohran Mamdani’s victory is an incredible achievement and opportunity for a truly progressive political movement. Yes, the defeat of vehemently anti-trans gubernatorial candidates on the East Coast is affirming that attacking one of the more disenfranchised communities in the country is not a winning platform. Yes, the schadenfreude of seeing the half brother of our country’s abhorrent vice president not just lose but be demolished in his political ambitions is delicious.

But those races are high-level, high-profile. The mayor of a major city, governors of states far away from my side of the country has no impact on the reality on the ground in my community.

Progressive seismic shifts rarely manifest in my solidly red region, where only candidates who thumb their nose at our blue state’s government ever gain traction. It is hard to feel like Nov. 4 was a win for progressives when I know that attacks on trans students in my community are going to continue, the line between church and state will grow thinner in my community and the wealthiest and well-connected in my community will continue to use local government to their personal advantage.

To be fair, Ben with pointed out there were municipal, school board and other local government races around the country where progressive candidates ran the table and I’m happy for those communities. But those races are, again, of some higher national interest. For example, elections in political bellwethers such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia are used as tea leaves by national pundits to hone their predictions and peddle their wares.

We’ve seen this spin before about ‘bluenamis’ or ‘blue waves’ or whatever you want to call them. Despite those occurring, we still have a federal government starving our nation’s own children, abortion rights have been stripped from women with marriage now on the block for all but straight folk, people have been imprisoned unjustly, countless books have been censored, hundreds of thousands have been forced out of their jobs for no other reason than the capricious whim of oligarchs.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, too quick to remember what happened not just last year but in 2016. Perhaps I’m underestimating the momentum all those high profile electoral wins will give to the movement fighting our nation’s further descent into fascism. Perhaps I just need to get up off my ass and seek to make things as I’d like them to be in my community, as Hamilton Nolan recently pointed out.

After all, Royal Tenenbaum eventually did make amends with his estranged family.

But that was a movie. And he died in the end.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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NOTE: This post was originally published just after 7 a.m. on Oct. 20. Due to some posting issues with Substack, it was accidentally deleted and is being reposted.

I was chatting up a guy on Scruff and we were getting a little hot and heavy in between sharing about jobs and other things.

He was very much my type, at least going by his photos. Taller than six feet, full beard, meat on his bones, a mischievous yet warm look in his eyes. And our conversation had me further crushing on him, as he talked about his backpacking trips and how he loved a good cuddle and makeout session.

Somehow in our exchange of texts I mentioned that my youngest child painted my toenails earlier that day.

“Please don’t have any of that on if we ever meet up.”

“What? Why? It’s just nail polish.”

“That’s something women do.”

***

This past spring, sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling wrote about ruffs, a bird species that lives on the Arctic tundra. Specifically, she wrote about the four sexes of ruffs—one female, three male.

Most ruff males fall into the category she called Independents, or Indys. The most colorful or fanciful looking, Fausto-Sterling noted that they were the most likely to show aggression and display typical courting behaviors during mating. The next largest population of males she called Satellites, or Sats. They are not as ostentatious as Indys nor as aggressive in courting females but still sometimes succeed.

Then there are the Faeders, or Faeds.

This third male sex looks more like the species’ females with their brown and white camouflage plumage. They lack the “ruff” of feathers that the other two male sexes display. And they do not engage in any of the aggressive behavior that the Indys use to challenge and drive off male rivals.

They may not fight, but boy do they have balls! In fact their testes are twice as large as the Independents’. They are what field biologists informally call “sneaky fuckers”. They blend in while the Indy guy courts a female. When Indy’s efforts get her all fired up, the Faeder dashes in and does the deed before the Independent knows what hit him (so to speak).

Fausto-Sterling’s observations made me think about Fort Slocum.

Fort Slocum was one of the main military installations where soldiers shipped out to Europe to fight in World War II. It was located north of New York City on an island in Long Island Sound.

Only months after it was activated as an embarkation post some soldiers decided to put on a “Girlie Show” — an all-singing, dancing and cross-dressing performance, “written specifically for the talent on post,” which did not include many women at the time.

Though the post newspaper downplayed the cross-dressing, that aspect was played up by Universal Studios in one of their newsreels.

Those newsreels were distributed to thousands of movie theaters across the country as they were one of the primary ways folks learned about current events. Untold numbers of civilians—men, women, children, saw men dressing up as women to perform a stage show before going off to war. And they likely thought nothing of it, maybe viewing it as the boys having some fun before they have to go off and do their duty.

And that leads me to Queen.

I was a child during the height of their popularity in the 80s. Pop music wasn’t a big part of my upbringing but I have faint memories of hearing “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the radio in the car from time to time. I attended my first NFL game in the mid-90s—a quintessential American male experience—and “We Will Rock You” was blasted over the stadium sound system, everyone including jersey-clad dads with beer bellies belting it out in drunken unison.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned Freddie Mercury was bisexual (not gay, as many still erroneously think) and I was a little surprised that fans of such a traditionally homophobic cultural touchstone as professional football would adopt an anthem sung by a decidedly queer individual. But the rest of Queen’s members were not queer so maybe that straight-washed the band’s rep.

Then I discovered Queen’s music video for “I Want To Break Free.” As Bisexual.org wrote:

Against the backdrop of a quintessentially British abode, each member of Queen slipped into roles traditionally reserved for the fairer sex, donning aprons, stilettos, and feather dusters with a playful panache. Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon morphed into exaggerated personas of domesticity, injecting the song’s rebellious spirit with a deliciously devilish charm.

Throughout the filming, the band embraced their roles, infusing each scene with a captivating blend of camp and charisma…from wielding vacuum cleaners with a seductive swagger to engaging in playful banter with feather dusters, the band members reveled in the opportunity to push boundaries and ignite the imagination.

I’ve never questioned my gender, never felt I did not have a body or parts that did not match who I knew myself to me. I have always known that I am male.

But I have always questioned my portrayal of being male. I have relatively long, slender fingers, a physical trait I noticed more among the girls and women in my life than the men and boys who had shorter, broader digits with compact and rough fingernails. My chest was a source of intense shame, as it was pretty prominent even when I was very young and I hated going shirtless and being mocked for my “man boobs.”

Part of the reason it was so easy for me to deny being queer for so long was because I wanted to be the guys I was attracted to as much as I wanted to be with them.

But it was more than physical characteristics. I was shy and introverted. I liked playing with dollhouses. I was more bookish than athletic.

Even In my adult years, the things I gravitated toward, received joy from, seemed more traditionally feminine.

After buying my first house, I went out thrifting for stuff to put in it. I found a few pieces of furniture I loved, like the dark stained and tall chest of drawers I still use and the little unfinished console table that ended its days living an ignoble life as the abode of my film developing machine.

But I got most excited about the dishes.

Living alone, I only had maybe four place settings. I became fixated on finding a nice set of eight or more. I had never hosted a dinner party in my life but damn if I didn’t want the accoutrement necessary for one. I ended up cobbling together two sets with gold and silver rims, very simple yet elegant, I thought. I’ve seldom used them in the 15 years I’ve had them but they remain something I treasure. But they were also something I was sure to never gush about to anyone, lest they think me less of a man for being so enamored with thrift store china.

I’m not unique in this experience; if anything, I’m garden variety. Lots of queer men grew up questioning or doubting their masculinity and not just due to their sexuality but in how other boys picked up on how differently (i.g. poorly) they performed masculinity.

Which, really, is all gender is: a performance. A part we’re told we have to play and the moment we’re born we’re constantly given direction on how to do it and not do it. Stand like this, don’t cross your legs like that, boys don’t cry, on and on and on.

And even after coming out I experienced a crippling reinforcement of the physical and behavioral ideals that had kept me in the closet, now from elements of the queer community. Whether it was disdain at a man having painted toenails or not working out six or seven days a week or not appearing “rugged” enough.

And that was all the more reason I questioned why Derek1 had any interest in me.

We had chatted online for a week or so. I had swiped right but in a devil-may-care mindset; he lived close enough to me but still a healthy drive. He was a good bit older than me but a lot of the guys I’ve gotten to know are my senior. Regardless, I never expected him to reciprocate and when he did, I panicked a little as we scheduled a time to meet.

I met him at a Denny’s and we chatted over a decent enough lunch. He works in aerospace, is a big fan of Tina Turner. What’s more, his queer life experience is similar to my own–out late in life when he was married to a woman (he said the divorce was amicable). He has two adult sons and, recently, a grandchild.

But I struggled to focus on all that rather than the effort it took for him to squeeze his musclebound frame into the booth. Every inch of his deeply tanned skin was taut over the seeming cables and boulders and plates underneath it. Even though I’d seen all the photos on his profile of him flexing in the gym, seeing it in the flesh was a whole other experience.

Eventually we ended up back at his townhouse. We were sitting on his couch, legs touching, seconds from kissing for the first time but first, I told him I needed to know why he swiped right.

“I mean, looking at you, I wouldn’t think you’d be interested in a guy like me,” I said. “I don’t see myself as being very masculine compared to you.”

“I actually think you’re quite masculine,” he replied.

This simple affirmation was sincere. I could tell by the intensity of his eyes as he said it. But I didn’t fully accept it. Maybe one day I will. Maybe one day I can be more like a faeder, more like one of those crossdressing G.I.’s, more like Brian May and Roger Taylor and John Deacon that day on a set in 1984.

Maybe one day I will embrace masculinity—my masculinity—regardless of how others assess it.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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As Bisexual Visibility Month comes to a close, I am tendering my resignation as a bona fide bisexual.

The term has felt like an ill-fitting t-shirt for a while. Like one you get at that show of a band you really like but the merch tent only has a size too small in the one shirt design you want but you have enough hubris to convince yourself you’ll lose weight and it will fit magically one day.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the band. That is, I still love men and women. Mostly men. OK, men and one woman. And that’s part of why I just don’t think bisexual fits me.

I have eyes for one woman in my life, my wife. She’s got me locked up. I don’t notice other women, don’t daydream about other women, don’t long for other women. Just her. And I am quite happy that she is who I wake up to and who I come home to, that I can lay my head in her lap after a long day or tease her for how she says “ruin.”

I can’t say the same for other men. I fantasize about different men all the time. I think about the guys I currently count as FWBs. I still think about Harry. I think about the guys I’ve connected with but we sadly didn’t end up having a lasting relationship. I think about the hot dads I see running shirtless during my morning commute. I think about guys I only know via online spaces.

Could I still claim to be bisexual? Sure. It is a valid sexual identity. The individuals I am attracted to are of more than one gender expression. That is technically the definition of “bisexual.”

But there’s a reason why “technically” is considered a modifier of a position when that isn’t actually the position many would claim if they felt there was a better option. Can I really consider myself bi when I only have the hots for one woman? Can I really consider myself a fan of a band that I only listen to in passing?

However, that’s not the impetus behind my decision to no longer consider myself bi.

It’s this…

…because it reminds me of how fucking terrible fans of something can be.

Some fans feel they have the right to dictate to other fans—or even to creators—of the thing we’re all supposed to love. They tell us how to be passionate or what is deserving of that passion or who is allowed to be included in that passion.

It’s not a disagreement about what the band’s best song or album is. It’s the deliberate intention to drive away or even harm those fans who don’t hold their same views. It’s the effort to twist the thing we’re all supposed to love into something only some people get to love.

I still love the band. I still love more than one gender. I understand that others identifying as bi don’t necessarily ascribe to the views proclaimed by the group in the article I linked. In fact, most don’t. It’s just a term that they feel describes who they love.

But if the term for that love is going to be co-opted by those who actually want to harm other fans, then I don’t want it.

I’d rather be queer than be a “bi”got.

Queer has range. It has depth. It’s broad. It doesn’t pigeonhole you or others. It invites questions and discourse because it can include so many different things.

I’d rather use a term that includes more folk. I’d rather welcome fans than turn them away, much less seek their destruction.

Not sure when I’ll make it to the next show, but I hope I see you there.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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Influencers Samantha Greenstone and Jacob Hoff have been popping up in the online news cycle and blogosphere in recent weeks. A straight woman and gay man, they married in 2024 after being best friends for nearly a decade. I wrote previously about Samantha and Jacob and my conflicted reaction to learning about their relationship. Some have called their relationship a lavender marriage due to their mixed orientation, and the couple insists they are monogamous and yet still fully their identities. One of the more recent pieces on them has Samantha affirming that her and Jacob are more than romantically involved; they are trying for a baby.

David Peattie, a Sitting Queerly reader, and his wife are also monogamous and bisexual, though he leans toward Gay+1. David was kind enough to join me for a conversation where he provided a glimpse of their marriage, the joys and the challenges it involves, and why he cried when he read the card Tanya gave him for Father’s Day this year.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Sitting Queerly: First of all, I'm glad that you're willing to talk and share your story a bit and everything. I was really fascinated how, even though you're not a late bloomer, your experience of having known you were bi for a while and your wife knew you were bi when she met you and you married and everything. Yet you want to begin experiencing that part of yourself again but you're constrained. To start, when did you first realize you were bi?

David Peattie: By early high school I started realizing it. I was not interested in my fellow classmates or anything. I remember reading a book about Matisse and I then I saw a picture of him and I just was drawn to his art and then I realized, “oh there's more than just this art thing.” I didn't really pay too much attention to it because it just felt like a funny feeling, one that I liked but I didn't know how to nurture it. Then, by the time I was in college, the first person I ever had sex with was another man and I realized that wasn't just a one-off. I realized I am drawn to men and women, and by my junior year I was pretty much out to most of my friends. It was the early 80s and there was a fear of bi men. There was the AIDS epidemic, and bi men were given a lot of the blame for why it was crossing over into the straight population.

SQ: I can see how that would be a difficult time to be identifying that way.

DP: I think that there was—and still continues today—this idea within the gay community that a bi man is someone who's gay and just not willing to admit it yet. The same thing with women I dated. They could tell that I was really attracted to them. It wasn't something I was faking, but where did my interest really lie? I was at Pomona College in Southern California, which felt like a safe place to be queer. There weren't too many other people who came out and said "I am bisexual." I was willing to do that because I'd never felt any concern that I was going to kind of get any kind of abuse around it. I knew that some people might think "Oh bisexual … so you'll fuck anything." But once somebody got to know me, that was clear that wasn't who I was.

I came out to my sisters but I didn't come out to my parents until 1989. I was dating a much older man at the time and I thought, I'm not going to introduce my boyfriend to them. That would just freak my dad out. Age differences are more accepted in the queer community, but in society at large, it’s something that people are uncomfortable with. But I did come out to them and my dad pretty much was silent. He wasn't horribly upset. I think he just was hoping it was some kind of phase. But it was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and my mom burst into tears. It was not because she was homophobic. She just thought it would make her son's life much harder. I'm not sure that it did, but she was worried that I was going to get AIDS. I told her I don't do anything unsafe.

Three months later I got together with my wife Tanya, so my timing of coming out was not great. She happened to be in Boston where they were living at the time, and I said "Oh you should go visit my parents.” She had never met them before or she might have briefly in passing with a whole bunch of other Pomona College students. Most people would not meet their partners’ parents on their own. But she has no fear, and so she did. I got this wonderful postcard from my dad that just said "Yes!" I spoke with my mom on the phone and she said "Oh we just adore Tanya.” I said “I think she’s pretty wonderful. AND she's a woman!” That was followed by a nervous chuckle at the other end.

Before Tanya and I got together, I felt that I was never going to have a long-term relationship because I'd never had a very long relationship with men, and I thought I'd probably be with men. But everything seemed magical when Tanya and I started seeing each other. We had been close friends for 9 years, so it was an easy relationship to step into.

SQ: What initiated you to go from a friendship to an actual intimate relationship?

DP: Tanya had been married for about a year and she had a really fun, funky wedding. I even was in it. It was in kind of a rural area outside of Santa Cruz. They had to park all the guests in one area, so I was parking people's cars and shuttling them up to the wedding. She likes to say she ended up with the man who parked cars at her wedding. It sounds like she ran off with the valet.

SQ: That's a great story!

DP: Her mom saw where our unique connection would lead before we did. Once I went with Tanya, her husband, and her mom to a concert in Santa Cruz. She saw Tanya and I dancing, and she figured out then that we’d end up together. The thing that finally made us realize that we should be together was when Tanya and I took ecstasy. I’m a bit embarrassed to tell that story.

SQ: Why are you embarrassed to say you took ecstasy together?

DP: Well, it sounds like it took drugs for us to figure it out.

SQ: I mean, how is that any different from ‘oh, we got drunk one night’? I myself have never taken E, I've smoked weed a few times, I've taken one gummy in my life. I've otherwise not done anything and I have no interest in doing them but I'm also, like, as long as people are being safe and mindful and not abusing it or anything, whatever. We all do things to free our minds a little bit every now and then, I don't think you need to be embarrassed about it. How long after her first marriage ended did you guys date and then did you get married?

DP: Three months after she and her husband split up, we started seeing each other. But she lived in Santa Cruz at the time so we had about 2 hours of drive time separating us.

SQ: Right, you were in Berkeley.

DP: Yes. We would alternate me going down there and her coming up. We did that for about 4 months. Eventually, she was looking for a new teaching job, and I said “Why don't you look for a job up here, and we can move in together.” So she came up, moved in, and got a job right away. We had a kid in 1993, but we weren't planning on getting married, partly because our gay friends were not able to. There was really nothing driving us to do it until we were selling our first house and moving into the house where we live now. The real reason we got married in 2005 was capital gains tax. The wedding was in the middle of our housewarming party, a total surprise to our guests. I highly recommend that as a way to do it. It takes the stress off, and it was super fun.

SQ: So, Tanya is your best friend, your soulmate, but when did you start getting the urges to get pounded by a guy again?

DP: Both of us started taking some meds that seemed to suppress our sex drive and we drifted into rarely having sex for nearly 10 years. I felt like we were losing the intimate side of our relationship, something I really cherished. I’ve always thought of myself as a very sexual person, so not having that component was difficult. We were becoming loving roommates. I tried to work through it with her, but when she and I would talk about it, she would say “it's okay.” But I didn’t want it to be okay.

About two years ago, my sex drive began to bubble up with a vengeance. I started noticing whenever I would go into a room with men I would think "How about that one? How about that one? How about that one? How about that one?" I wasn’t sure what was going on. This second adolescence, why now? After several months, I let Tanya know what was going on in my head. We took a trip to Spain and I told her “I don't know what's going on. I know we haven't had much sex lately, but I really need you to know that I'm in high-sex-drive mode, and I have been really attracted to men. But I'm also still very attracted to you.” We reconnected to our intimacy then, but that spring after we came back, I realized this is not going away.

One night we were having sex and I said "I really want to get pounded by a man. How would you feel if I had sex with a man again?" The funny thing is I don't even remember saying that. But it really threw her for a loop. At the moment I didn't think that this was a problem, I was in sex-brain mode. Only afterward, when we were getting ready to go to sleep, I realized she was bothered by something. I said “do you want to talk about it now or later?” She said “I need some time to think about it.”

Because we’ve always been in sync, I assumed we were on the same page. We were never jealous of each other. I always felt so secure in our relationship that I didn’t think this was going to be an issue. Back when she and I were doing the long-distance relationship, I had told her I wasn’t going to come down to Santa Cruz because I was too busy. I hooked up with a gay friend of mine. It was a quick one-and-done deal. It was kind of fun and exciting. I told her about it on the phone, and I could tell she was not happy. She said “you're too busy to see me, but you're not too busy to do that?” I explained it was different because traveling to see her was 4 hours of travel time alone. I didn't initially recognize that her reaction was tied to her feelings about monogamy.

Before my bi-cycling, the word monogamy didn't come up, but I wasn’t planning on dating once we moved in together. But in the back of my mind I felt that, because of our secure relationship, she would be okay with me having sex with men.

After she had time to think about it, she said "I’m sure if I were more evolved, I would be comfortable with this, but right now I’m not." And so began a long period of lots of difficult discussions.

SQ: I came out to my wife and she has been super supportive, she's very pro-LGBTQ, our joke is that she is the gayest straight person and I'm the straightest gay person or queer person. We worked through it and then I was like “I need to explore this.” The first thing she asked was “so you want to have a threesome?” and I'm like “no, not at all” and she's like “oh thank god” because she had no interest in that and then she asked “do you want to sleep with other women” and I said “nope.” “You just want to sleep with men.” "Yeah." She's like "Okay I think that's fine. It's something I can't give you, why would I feel threatened by that?" So the fact that it is only men for me, that's helped her cope with it.

That's not to say that she's not struggled, she's had anxiety, we did do some couples counseling. There was a period of several months where I struggled in the bedroom and it was for likely a variety of reasons but that's a whole other thing. But I had never been with a man until we opened things and then I did, I had a boyfriend for 6 months, been with a number of men since then and it is something that I'm glad I did because it definitely has helped me better understand myself and better connect with myself.

But I'm curious, from your perspective, because you had known you were bi for so long and you had been in other relationships with men, what's different between intimacy with a woman and intimacy with a man?

DP: I've tried to explain to Tanya that there's this male energy that I love and it is very different but I don't know that I could really describe it.

SQ: Yeah it's just so hard when it comes to understanding the difference. Male energy, that's a good way of putting it. What's funny is that it's not even that I like it rougher when I'm with a man or anything else. It's just I don't feel like I have to be the most assertive the whole time, I'm not the one leading everything, I'm not the one initiating everything. Sometimes I am able to just let the other guy I'm with go “hey I want you to do this” and I'm like “great let's do that.” It's kind of a relief, it takes the pressure off, it really does.

DP: Other than Tanya, I'm not attracted to women at all these days. We went through a period of exploring what opening up the marriage would look like for us. Eventually we realized it wouldn’t work. She realized that she is monogamous to the core, and no amount of discussion was going to change that. So, we settled on some accommodations. I would play (chatting and camming) with men online.

We check in every day, connecting even if we don't have anything to share emotionally about what we're going through around this stuff. That way it's a routine and there's never any sort of we-need-to-talk stress. Sometimes we need to talk and sometimes we don't, but we're always talking. I tend to be an over-sharer. I'm very open. We finally got to the point where she said she actually didn’t want to hear specifics about my online activities, so I respect her wishes. But because I'm not telling her, I feel like it's a secret, like it's this important and intimate part of my life that I don’t share, although everything else in my life I do. I have a hard time with that. Journaling helps.

SQ: I struggle with that so much myself. Even though we're open and [my wife] knows and everything, I still feel like my life is split in two and they happen to live within the same person and both sides are aware of each other and people on both sides, in both spheres realize there are other people on the other side but they're not mingled, they're still very separate. I struggle with that so much because I feel like part of the whole reason for me coming out was now I get to be authentically who I am and yet.

DP: After a few months she said she’d be open to me getting an erotic massage, but she was worried about contracting an STI, so she set a few boundaries. The first time I came back, she asked "How was it?" And I was vague: "It was great. Why aren't all massages like this, they're not avoiding any part of you, it's like this total massage thing.” But after I’d gone to the same masseur a few times, he’d forgotten about one of the boundaries and started to give me a blow job. I reminded him of my agreement with my wife, and he stopped, so it was fine. But when I told Tanya about it afterwards, she was upset because of what he did instead, which was something she didn’t know was happening. So, she felt betrayed because I hadn’t told her everything that happened that first time. We agreed that I would no longer get erotic massages.

Then, just recently, she wrote me a card for Father’s Day saying “My Father’s Day gift to you is that I want you to have an erotic massage with no constraints, no contract. Just don’t bring back an STI, and we’re good!” I started crying because I knew that was a huge thing for her to do. I'm excited about it, too, but it really touched me that she was willing to lean into that discomfort. So far, it’s going well.

I also feel really fortunate in our sex life. This isn't a substitute for sex with men, but she loves pegging me and being in that dominant assertive role. We have a varied sex life that's fun. We’re constantly innovating. I feel lucky. So many men who are in this situation don't have a sex life at home. That would be really hard.

SQ: I have to say, as much as I know that you really want to do more, I can tell that you're being mindful of boundaries and you're respecting your wife's wishes and you're maintaining the monogamy of your relationship. At the same time, your wife, I have to say, I'm so impressed that she's giving you grace and she'll struggle with something and she'll test it a little bit, see how she does. There's that recognition that it's hard. But she's not mad at you. She's willing to try because she loves you.

I can tell that you also love her, you're really seeking to respect what she wants, what she expects, you're being open with her about things and that's so hard. I struggled with it just because I hid it for so long and I just was so used to hiding it, not because I was trying to hurt her but I was trying to protect her. It's remarkable when couples can be so trusting and transparent with each other. I feel like that's such a rarity even in like normal hetero relationships.

DP: We've had conversations about the notion of compersion, the feeling of getting joy in the pleasure that your partner gets with someone else. It’s never been tested, but I feel like I would have compersion for her. If she came to me and said "I want to explore the bi side of me," I'd be so happy for her. She questions whether compersion is real or just an excuse for people who are into polyamory.

When we finally made the decision that we were monogamous, it made her feel so much better. That doesn't mean that things wouldn't change … monogamy has more of a gray zone that I initially thought. But she understood that I wasn't just holding out until she became okay with my getting a boyfriend. I just have to figure out how to find joy in my queerness and keep our relationship strong.

It's not easy. I definitely have melancholy around this, but I know that the damage would be 10 times worse if we were to open up our marriage. We go to a bi meetup once a month over in San Francisco. We've gone to lots of queer things. She loves to explore in the bedroom.

Therapy has helped a lot. I went through a lot of therapists. They were all LGBTQ, but they didn't understand my overriding need: I want to maintain this marriage … that's my most important thing. But finally, I found one who really understood that and said "Yeah, we can work with that." This is someone that I spent over 35 years with intimately and 9 years before that as really good friends. This is who I need to spend the rest of my life with.

SQ: I understand on a certain level why some therapists or folks say you need to be open to other possibilities; you can't hem yourself in because that's what's going to lead you to not really examine all the actual solutions. At the same time, I feel like sometimes they approach that from viewing marriage as this one form in that you're fully monogamous, that there is no other kind of intimacy that you can experience even when it's condoned by your other partner. There are other ways of doing it beyond that.

I'm glad you both have found a way. It's a struggle, it's a journey, it's a challenge obviously but it does sound like you both are pursuing it hand in hand and being as supportive and honest with each other as you can be at this moment.

Are you interested in sharing your story as a late blooming queer or being part of a mixed-orientation marriage? I’d love to hear from you! Email sitting_queerly@yahoo.com.

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I turned on paid subscriptions for Sitting Queerly a little over a year ago. I had no illusions that this would be lucrative, that doing so would provide enough for me to support my family as I looked for work after being laid off. However, creative work is just that—work—which is deserving of remuneration.

So, I made a zine.

It’s spicy.

No. Seriously.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous putting this out in the world. These pages hold a lot of intimate moments from the past few years. A lot of vulnerability.

And you can have a copy of it.

For anyone who becomes a paid annual subscriber over the next week (Sept. 8-15), I will email them a PDF copy of Imprinted Encounters, along with directions on how to print and bind it if they choose to. And I’ve slashed the annual subscription rate in half, to just $25 or about $2 per month, to lower the barrier.

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All current paid subscribers have already received digital copies of the zine as a thank you for their ongoing support.

I understand some may view this as me going back on my commitment to not paywall any content on Sitting Queerly.

This zine is unlike anything I’ve made before. Not just because of its graphic content, not just because it is, first and foremost, designed to be a physical rather than a digital artifact. It is deeply personal and intimate. Much of Sitting Queerly is emotional labor but making this truly pushed me. And I think it’s fair to seek remuneration for something like that.

So what’s in it? And why a zine?

Imprinted Encounters is a retelling of sexual encounters I’ve had with men since coming out and since my wife and I opened our marriage. Some entries are one-offs, folks I was interested in but that interest wasn’t reciprocated after our first rendezvous. Multiple ones are from my time with Harry or other men who are still in my life. All of them have helped me better understand my needs and the importance of embracing my queerness. The writings are accompanied by prints I made, some that I’ve shared in my Notes.

I’m in no way qualified to expound on the role zines have played in queer culture specifically and the counter culture more broadly. is an excellent place to start if you are unfamiliar. But zines have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years after their halcyon days in the 1990s. I think this resurgence is a combination of nostalgia from GenX/millenials, increased accessibility to digital design tools and, unfortunately, a trend of censorship of anything that isn’t in service of those who have the most privilege, namely straight, Christian, old white men.

As people at various levels of society seek to drain the color from our lives, zines offer the opportunity to set those colors. Zines have no gatekeepers but the very individual(s) who put them together and distribute them. They are as much about utility as they are about joy. They are tangible reminders that our experiences, our feelings, our hopes and dreams, are real.

One of my dilemmas of going paid a year was wanting to provide paid subscribers something extra while not creating barriers for free subscribers. I pledged at the outset of Sitting Queerly that I wouldn’t paywall content—Sitting Queerly is intended to be a community resource and a paywall limits that utility.

So I offered extras to paid subscribers—the option to initiate chats with me, a handmade patch or journal sent to them, or even a signed copy of one of my decidedly not queer photobooks.

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I haven’t lived near where I grew up for coming on 20 years and I have no intention of changing that.

As much as I miss Midwestern thunderstorms, good barbecue and exploring creeks on foot and canoe, I could never live as the person I am there, not now. My memories, my history, my relationships from the first half of my life there and are still present there, remind me too much of why I spent most of my life hiding, being angry, being ashamed.

And yet, so much of how I continue to view the world, for better and for worse, is associated with that place. My love of the ocean is informed by how the Kansas prairie left me awestruck. My strong belief in never cursing the rain because you never know if it will come back comes from generations of farmers in my paternal line. My dogged refusal to accept help is a remnant of a culture steeped in pseudo-stoicism.

Place also played a significant role for Taylor Brorby, author of several books including his memoir, Boys and Oil. Growing up where there was a very stringent and specific view of masculinity and identity, it wasn’t until he was an adult that he could really begin living as a gay man. And yet, despite the repressiveness of where he grew up, of the hostility of some family still there, he still holds it dear.

Fascinated at how Taylor blended his identity with the more traditionally masculine cultural touchstones he grew up with, I reached out to him and he graciously agreed to a conversation.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Sitting Queerly: Thank you again, Taylor, for joining me for this conversation. You know, I just finished reading Boys and Oil about a week ago, I actually picked it up from one of our libraries when I was browsing one day and it just grabbed my attention. I understand that it's out now in paperback correct?

Taylor Brorby: That's right.

SQ: Excellent. I know some of your background; you grew up in North Dakota obviously, in Center, and then you lived in Bismarck, your family has a lot of history there. Can you tell me more about what led you to want to write Boys and Oil? How long from when you first got the germ of the idea that that could be a story that people would want to read and how did you start writing it, what was that process for you?

TB: I'm sort of a recovering poet, as are maybe most writers. Since life is long, you start writing--or trying at least--longer forms, but poems feel like these tiny little pebbles you can pick up and tuck in your pocket. They seem deceptively simple because they're short, but of course anyone who writes poetry knows they're anything but simple or easy. I really started stringing together a lot of the book in--I wouldn't call them formal chapters--it's more movements, sections that are maybe only a page long, vignettes, things like this. And after you write enough of those you gather them up and go ‘okay, now what's the order?’

But the book started almost with the very first thing I ever got published back in 2011. I was in graduate school for the first time and a friend I was in school with had gotten published by Minnesota Public Radio for an opinion piece and got paid 50 bucks and I thought ‘Oh, well if she can do it I certainly can.’ Competition can be a healthy thing.

And so I wrote an op ed on Sunday afternoon, submitted it, and then on Monday I got an email back. I thought ‘Oh great they've already rejected it.’ No, ‘you can find it live online, we'll pay you 50 dollars’ which, at that time, felt like that was a week's worth of groceries. I thought ‘Oh these people talk about rejection. Whatever, this is easy.’ There were months of rejection for publication afterwards, but it got me addicted. That was my first time seeing my name in print and that essay was all about being outed. So I feel like I can trace a line from that first piece all the way to 11 years later and writing Boys and Oil.

SQ: To get more into the book and the stories that you tell in it, one thing that really stood out to me, I was fascinated by how you tie your queerness to place— your sense of place and your sense of home, especially since you grew up and would go hunting or you would go fishing, spend a lot of time in the outdoors. In today's culture those are not things that are typically associated with people who are queer. We are associated with a more urban culture, a more cosmopolitan kind of culture. And yet you really see the outdoors is as much a part of you just as much as your queerness is part of you. I'm curious how those two intersect for you personally? It very much reminded me of A Sand County Almanac, just kind of this quiet observation of things so I didn't know if you wanted to speak further about that

TB: Well, I grew up in the part of the world where the Badlands are my backbone and the Missouri River is the main artery of my life. I didn't grow up in a world with beautiful art museums or distinguished symphony orchestras or great live theater. These things I love, of course, but what I grew up with was the volatility and majesty of nature. You're in a very heightened relationship when you're out hiking around--if badgers are chasing you or if you fall into a creek and get wet or when winter comes rolling through. There's a huge amount of drama there. I definitely enjoy urban centers. I find my blood pressure is lower in cities I feel I can get out of--so New York is very uninteresting to me, Chicago is uninteresting, these are places that are difficult to get out of. The Twin Cities I very much enjoy, Kansas City I enjoy, Denver similarly--you can get out and get into nature quite quickly, and I think I feel myself breathing easier. The type of nature I think about is largely devoid of humans. Now that doesn't mean hiking in the mountains: mountains get enough attention in nature writing. And I think the prairie is extreme. People go ‘Oh, well I'm doing a long weekend hike or mountain climb.’ Great, they can do that in a weekend. How many people do you know who've crossed the prairie on foot?

That part of my identity, it's what I was born into, I guess that's the short answer to your question. I definitely wanted a wider world, I wanted to be a Disney illustrator--it turns out they don't live in Center, North Dakota. I wanted to be a symphony conductor--Center doesn't even have enough people for a viable symphony orchestra. I knew, based on what I wanted to do, I'd have to go elsewhere, but getting back, especially on the Great Plains, I can feel my chest open. The blue in the sky in that part of the world is a paler blue, that Missouri River is just the most stunning waterway on the continent for my imagination and it's the wellspring that everything comes out of me.

I think what growing up in nature as a queer person did was train my eye to pay attention, not only on humans but on the wider natural world. You have to know if danger is nearby when you're out in nature or how to be prepared--and the same thing can happen even when you're in a major metro area of having to have your wits about you and I guess part of it is, to your point, we hear stories of gay people living in New York or San Francisco maybe Portland or Seattle, if they're more interesting writers, but we don't hear about being queer in Topeka or in Broadus, Montana, or in Rawlins, Wyoming, even though there of course are queer people all over. I think part of it, in the writing of it, was to express that most of my life has been lived outside and not in these sort of cultural cosmopolitan areas where people go to cocktail parties and talk about themselves. I've got brook trout to catch. It's the world I grew up in, so it's the world I guess I should be writing about, too.

SQ: The story that you would tell about being a wrestler and everything as a way to build rapport with everybody…I actually did do a season of wrestling in middle school because my dad insisted, got a broken clavicle for my trouble. The way you wrote about it it's also a way you kind of fantasized about the closeness of it. Obviously you're queer and so there's some kind of an intensity there but you weren't even thinking of it in very explicit terms just the actual physical act of touching seemed really important but but it was also about looking normal, blending in.

TB: I think there's that, and also when you're a pint-sized Viking, sort of being able to signal: don't mess with me in these certain ways. But I think the private part of it is, growing up in such a repressive culture as the Great Plains, men I grew up around, their sentences are as long as the short grass prairie. ‘Having a good day?’ ‘Yep.” That's where we're at, and so the idea of being physically close to another man, regardless of even talking about being turned on by this, it's like I didn't grow up with men being physically close to one another and a lot of them would stand around, if they had their beer and they were supposedly hanging out with their buddies, it always looked very standoffish.

So, I mean, maybe blending in, but there would have been an easier way of blending in by playing football or continuing on with basketball. The wrestling team was not this big thing where I grew up necessarily. I think it was literally finding a sport where it was the idea is it’s the only sanctioned way where it's approved of for boys growing into young men to literally touch each other--and I mean just literally physical touch, not groping. There is a certain--I want to be sensitive to this--there's a certain permission girls and females in this culture have in terms of open affection. On the Great Plains you never see two boys at wedding dances dancing. Little girls can do that, but if two little boys did that, their fathers would be out there ripping them apart. We need physical touch as humans, as babies we cry for it, and if we don't get it, we become stunted developmentally and otherwise. I kept thinking, I'm someone who, if I'm supposed to have friends, can't we also physically touch each other? That's what we're all craving but instead we sort of have to stopper ourselves up. It was getting some emotional needs met rather than just, “oh my grandpas will give me a hug” or “I know my mom will give me a hug.” There’s a bigger population out there, and shouldn't men also be in a culture where we're more open and expressive?

SQ: You write about your family, you write about your sister who you clearly have a very close relationship with, your parents, your grandparents being very formative to you. I'm sure that was all hard to write on a certain level or did that come out easily, was it very kind of cathartic?

TB: My memoir is not a “burn it all down memoir,” it's a traditional coming-of-age memoir. For my life story, though, we have to go back 350 million years to the origin of the prairie that I grew up on and then bring it up to close to the present, so I think of it as a book that does that rather than the big blow up of being outed and the fallout from that. But my whole task in that book was to show my parents authentically. I wasn't seeking revenge.

The night I was outed, that scene, I had probably worked on it for about a decade, to get that right, because there'd be times where I was really angry while writing it, so then it felt like I was trying to get revenge, or there'd be times where I was too apologetic, which also didn't feel authentic. I had to have a big conversation with my friend Pam Houston about it. She gave really smart, and in some ways almost obvious advice, but you sometimes just need to hear it from outside of yourself. She said ‘you just got to tell it how it happened and not shape it, just give us the event and what you were doing because a reader has a good bullshit detector. If they feel like you're trying to manipulate them to agree with you, then they're going to really be suspicious of anything else in the book.’ and I thought, “ah, that's right,” so I worked really hard to just tell how it happened while also planting seeds earlier in the book of tender moments with both my mom and dad.

There's so much that, if I wanted to write a revenge memoir, I could with the material I have from them but that, to me, wasn't the point of this book. Yes, I was outed, I don't have a relationship with my parents. I also thought there needs to be a book that shows that life goes on, because part what the book does is it that it takes on that American myth of “your parents will love you no matter what.” We often say, and people throw this around all the time--they're lazy with their thinking and words--that love is unconditional. I really have come to believe love is conditional, but if you have felt that you've been loved unconditionally, it's because someone continually chose to love you. That's incredible, because it's an active choice rather than saying you're born to these people and that automatically means they're going to love you. My parents were not monsters growing up, they were very supportive, they were great until they weren't.

There's this huge myth in our culture that anyone you share a bloodline with is going to love you--it's just simply not true, so I wanted to also have a book that involves my family, the full extent of it. What I hear from readers a lot is that they're moved by the death scene of one of my grandpas in the book. Part of it is to show life goes on, even if parents abandon you.

SQ: I really like how you point out that your parents weren't monsters. They were very supportive: they moved to a whole other city because they realized you were not thriving where you were. A parent doesn't do that if they don't actually care, but at the same time parents get disappointed in their kids all the time.

It's fair to say that you're a bit of an environmentalist and everything else like that so how does your environmentalism tie to your queerness, how do they relate and intersect with each other?

TB: I'm just a lazy intellectual. How couldn't they? I'm a gay man, I care about where I live, and the planet, and, therefore, they're related. I think when you're gay or queer and you grow up in a place where you're being gaslit all the time, you learn to question everything. For instance, in North Dakota, every lake is supposed to freeze. The lake I grew up on does not freeze. In fact, in January, even if it's -20 out, you and I could sit in it and it would be bathtub warm: because the water from that reservoir is used to cool the coal-fired turbine the engines of the power plant where my mother worked. I grew up in a landscape of lies and, if the lie is every lake in North Dakota freezes, what else is a lie I'm being told? ‘This is the way we have to exist, we have to live.’ As the men say, and as I say early in my book, this is “God's country.”

But they make their living by unmaking that part of the world. They literally are ripping the earth apart. That has to create some psychological distress in people who are victims of largescale industrial capitalism. There's no other way to earn a living, unless you're a rancher, in my home county. But even if you're a rancher, you're hoping that the coal mine comes your direction because there's coal underneath your land--and then you're not going to have to be a rancher or farmer anymore. You're just going to sell your mineral rights and they'll rip the land apart and you'll retire someplace else--maybe Bismarck--and have a larger bank account.

For better for worse, I actually believed those lessons I was taught in Lutheran Sunday school--that you're supposed to take care of the planet and shepherd God's good creation. That's also why I went outside, to see how beautiful this landscape is with redwing blackbirds and mule deer and the Missouri River and ask, Why are we destroying it? It really made me ask that question, though I didn't have a language around that until college when I was taking different literature or environmental studies classes. I learned to think scientifically: this is what's going on or this is what burning coal does in the atmosphere. I found people who wrote about the natural world, like Terry Tempest Williams or Aldo Leopold or Edward Abby. There's this huge bevy of literature that helps me see the place that I grew up. And to your point, Ty, we largely haven't been writing overtly about queerness and the natural world until quite recently, and so that also felt like something this book needed to accomplish: to show a little gay boy getting arrested over oil pipelines and going to some scary parts of the country that have extractive economies.

SQ: This is maybe a bit of a provocative question but it kind of ties into what we just talked about, but how does it feel to love a place and want to fight for it when you didn't fit in and where the people there didn't want you?

TB: It's heartbreaking. The most interesting people from North Dakota don't live there anymore. Name a famous North Dakotan who lives there--there aren't any. Doug Burgum is now the Secretary of the Interior and he's hoping to unmake the world. Any famous North Dakotan was just passing through or tried to get out of there. It's really heartbreaking--it's an abusive relationship. You're trying to get the abuser to stop abusing, and that's pretty difficult when you're talking about 72,000 square miles. It would be nice to grow up in a landscape that isn't poisoned by nitrate inputs, like in the Red River Valley, or maybe we shouldn't be blowing up the Badlands for oil, and maybe we shouldn't be flaring natural gas. It’s difficult, because people are not left with many options. It's like I say in the book ‘everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty.’ It's the least visited state in the country, so it's not even a place people think of. At least Wyoming has Yellowstone or the Tetons but North Dakota has the wood chipper from Fargo and Mr. Bubble, so it's pretty bottom of the barrel there.

I think that's the hard thing, growing up in that landscape of lies where people say out loud North Dakota is beautiful. I just guess I believe if you think something's beautiful, you wouldn't wreck it. These people make their money by wrecking it and they're victims of a system but, boy, they would punch you if you told them that because they pride themselves on being tough and say racist comments like the weather keeps the “riff raff” out, so it's a hard place. The perk of being a writer from rural America is that we're living in this political moment that was tested out in rural America quite a while ago. If New York publishing invested in rural writers, we might be able to stave off some of the worst stuff we're living through right now. Until then, we'll continue to see this large-scale destruction on a national and global scale.

SQ: Are you working on any new work right now?

TB: I've got a lot of books. I'm waiting for New York to stop slacking, Ty. I tend to write a book a year. The late poet Jim Harrison would say, ‘I don't think it's that unreasonable to write a book a year.’ That sounds about right. I actually think of myself as a slow writer or a slow worker because there are a lot of ideas up in this melon top but they have to germinate for quite a while. I don't write until I'm ready. I don't write every day like I used to. When I was younger I would, just because I thought it's like training: you got to train and get there and now I only write when the book's ready. But it seems that there's always a book ready. I sit down with my yellow legal pads and write by hand. A good day of writing for me is three or four pages, which is maybe about a thousand words total, handwritten. If you do that every day for about 90 days, you've got a book manuscript. It only takes you three months. Then I shove it in a desk, let it breathe, and revise it later. I'm sort of seasonal. In a way, I'm a farmer--I grew up around farmers, so I've unintentionally become an intellectual farmer. I take a break, draft another book, but by the time I'm finishing drafting that book, the other book's been resting for quite a while, so then I'm a sober editor about it. I've got three unpublished novels right now and I'm working on my third memoir—the next two are about being a Type 1 diabetic and about losing my nephew. Then, I just plan to let it rip and keep writing novels.

SQ: I really do appreciate you taking your time today. Anything else you'd like to close with for prospective readers, especially those young readers maybe that are just looking for somebody else like them?

TB: As writing teachers, sometimes people are over obsessed with asking students ‘who's your audience, who's your audience?’ You know, I hope the world's my audience. But to make it easier on myself I say "well I'm writing for a single gay boy in Broadus, Montana. I've actually never even been to Broadus, but I can point it out on a map, and I'm sure there's a gay boy growing up there." I'm writing this book for him because he needs to have a book on his library shelf because I didn't growing up. I didn't have a book like mine. I'm not even sure I would have read it growing up, but I thought having Boys and Oil in the world gives people permission to say, "Oh someone else is like me out there, maybe this is something I could do--admit to myself who I am wholly rather than hiding." And I think right now we just need to be really supportive of our libraries because they're places that kept me going in my childhood. So, anyone who's listening, be kind to your librarians and maybe run for your library board as well.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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My friend Mike first showed me this piece for his own blog, Highways And Hallowed Halls, a few months ago and I immediately knew I wanted to share it via Sitting Queerly when he was ready.

My own experience with a counselor that gravitated toward Christian platitudes never addressed my queerness as I fought tooth and nail to keep that part of myself hidden at the time. However, their eagerness to suggest removing agency from my life as a means to alleviating my distress at the time is quite similar to what he experienced as Mike wrestled with his queerness while being “helped” by a Christian counselor.

This post is critical of Christianity but it’s beef is more with the twisted interpretations, power structures and cultural expectations that have been imposed on it rather than the tenets of the faith itself.

When I finally started to come out of the closet, one of the ways that I processed my story was by reading through old journal entries.

So much has changed over the years and looking back has helped me connect with my younger self as well as understand why and how I managed to stay in the closet for so long. One particular aspect that feels important is that I had a long-term relationship with a “Christian counselor.”

The person I saw is a licensed therapist, but we always called what he did “Christian counseling.” And it did feel different from the therapy that I’ve experienced more recently. This post is not to drag an individual, but I am definitely critical of the idea of Christian counseling overall.

My main critique is simply that much of the “Christian” aspect is not based on research or best practices. For instance, here are some ways that Christian counseling is different from therapy in my experience:

• My counselor prayed for me at the end of every session and asked that God would support me in my struggles. Prayer is seen as an encouragement, but in my experience it was often a way for me to give up control of my life to God. This prayer at the end of the session may have had the effect of undoing some of the progress I had made to become more self-determined.

• They very frequently related my problems to “the fall” which basically means that my problems were a result of my “sin nature.” The emphasis on sin and “the fall” may have reinforced the feeling that my problems in life were intractable. In other words, I was not empowered to solve them.

• My Christian counselor seemed a little too comfortable with my suffering. They did not really seem to think of it as something that needed to be fixed. Some things could be changed, but in general, Christianity and Christian counseling taught me that suffering was good for me, that it is God’s way of testing our character, and, bizarrely, that it means we are doing the right thing because God is teaching us something through the suffering.

• I don’t remember them affirming my sexuality in a meaningful way, preferring to make general statements that were not untrue, but also not very helpful like, “It’s always going to be a part of you.”

• One phrase they repeated many times was that “every man feels like they aren’t enough and every woman feels like they’re too much.” This was mentioned in individual therapy as well as in couples therapy. The idea apparently comes from God’s curse of Adam and Eve in Genesis which I might try to unpack in another post. For now, I’ll just say that I don’t typically find generalizations around gender to be helpful and that these kinds of religions aphorisms often end what could have otherwise been a productive inquiry.

When I first decided to start seeing a Christian counselor (with much encouragement), I was so scared to talk about my personal life that it certainly came as a relief to find someone I could trust. I needed a lot of help and in many ways found the support that I was looking for. It was even somewhat affirming to hear things like the idea that my sexual attraction would always be a part of me. I was raised to think of sexuality as something that could change so in this sense, I didn’t technically receive conversion therapy. I feel like what I received was more similar to the hypnosis in “Get Out.”

Read the rest at Mike’s blog, Highways & Hallowed Halls.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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This week’s post is courtesy of , where he writes about subjects ranging from the vexatious creative process to bald spot gazing. I highly recommend you check out his publication and his recent work for .

This Pride, I came to an exciting realization: I have more friends than ever who identify as bi.

In my early twenties, none of my friends had come out to me as bi. My perspective on bi folks was shaped by my first exposure to bisexuality: the infamous “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl” episode of Sex and the City.

I accepted the show’s core claims about bisexuality: bisexuals are unserious and messy. At best, they should be seen compassionately, as being in a process that will inevitably end with being gay, so we must be patient with them. At worst, they are predatory and perverted. After twenty-five years of being openly gay and meeting plenty of bi people, I unlearned these smears against bi folks. Now, I want to help others unlearn them as well.

I Made Peace With My Resentments

As I began writing this piece, it slowly dawned on me how many bi friends I have. I think it took a while to realize this because most of my bi friends happen to be in relationships that pass as straight. As a cis gay man married to another cis gay man, I’ve always wondered at the privileges that must be enjoyed in passing for straight. I admit that, on occasion, thinking about other LGBTQ folks passing as straight sparked some resentment.

That resentment is rooted in the explicit, relentless visibility of my sexual identity.

On my wedding day, immediately after our ceremony, my husband and I were whisked away to a room in the back of the venue, handed champagne and led to a couch so that we could process what just happened and collect ourselves. The second the door closed, we toasted to the vows we’d just taken, both of us still a little shaky from the limelight. It was a huge relief to spend some time with just the two of us. Outside our door, we heard glasses clinking and cocktail hour music blasting.

That’s when a caterer knocked. We remembered then that the wedding coordinator told us that they would bring us some hors d'oeuvres after the ceremony. At the sound of the door knock, we realized we were both ravenous and quickly opened the door.

A woman wearing all black and holding two trays of food entered smiling widely, but when she saw that we were both men, her smile flagged.

“Congratulations,” she said, tentatively, looking back and forth between us, “but where’s the bride?”

My husband and I looked at each other in shock and looked back at her. I mumbled, staring blankly at her, “Oh, um…there is no bride.”

A moment of confusion followed, then a heavy realization swept over her face like a black cloud, slackening her jaw. She apologized profusely and brought us more food than we could’ve possibly eaten in one sitting. After she closed the door, we joked: “I hope she doesn’t find the bride!”

But there was also real hurt there. Why, on this of all days, did we have to be reminded that some people do not see us as being in love? That when some people look at us together, they start searching for our wives? Compulsory heterosexuality threatened to delegitimize our relationship every day—even on our wedding day.

I feel a lot of resentment about this. I wish sometimes that we didn’t have to think about how to present ourselves to the HVAC repair people or which one of our coworkers we can talk to freely or which settings are okay to give a kiss goodbye and which ones we have to plan our goodbye kiss in advance.

But, I’ve become grateful for these disadvantages. They give me something to relate to other gay people about and they provide opportunities to resist normative structures when I feel bold. In short, being in a gay marriage is a recipe for catharsis. And talking to my bi friends in straight-passing marriages, I’ve learned that this access to catharsis around sexual identity is not a given.

For a straight-passing bi couple, perhaps the caterer would have correctly identified them as a bride and groom, but she would almost certainly miss their sexual identities (asymmetrical hairstyles notwithstanding). When I’m targeted by compulsory heterosexuality, I face delegitimation, but by always passing, by never being delegitimated, straight-passing bi folks never get the opportunity for catharsis I describe above. They never get to say “fuck the system: I’m kissing my husband now.” In short, they do not have easy access to public-facing actions to help them resist erasure. Meanwhile, I’ve got a built-in resistance option. Delegitimate me and I’ll just make out with my husband in front of you.

I Accepted Differences in Privilege

Straight-passing bi folks don’t have to worry about some of the challenges I do, such as the future of their relationships’ legal recognition; however, in the context of our world right now, it’s crucial we’re able to hold together an LGBTQ coalition that integrates multiple and often contradictory experiences of privilege. We have to get used to saying things like: bi folks enjoy privileges I don’t have and I enjoy privileges they don’t.

Context often determines whether I or my bi friends receive privilege. Once, my bi friend showed up to a pride event in support of queer students. Because he is in a straight-passing relationship, he was applauded as an ally. Celebrating someone for being someone they’re not sends confusing mixed messages.In middle school, after my first date with a girl, I earned clout with the cool kids at my homeroom table: “Your girlfriend is so pretty!” said the most popular girl in school. I was being patted on the back for something I couldn’t relate to. Misplaced affirmation can be erasure. A gay person who hasn’t come out yet isn’t straight just because their straightness is applauded. Similarly, a straight-passing bi person at a pride event is not an ally.

While erasure consistently challenges the “B” contingent of LGBTQ, plenty of queer folks must fight to maintain their visibility. I can usually count myself out of this struggle. It’s easy to be out to my colleagues and students as a married gay man. When I introduce myself to my students at the beginning of the year, I am able to rely on a seven-word sentence that does much more work than it has any right to: “I live with my husband and dog.” This sentence prepares my students to accept me without feeling sanitized. It implies, “see? I’m just like your family. There’s a marriage, there’s a dog.” No one has too many questions. They generally can understand that I simply have a family that looks different from theirs. It’s not an ideological thing.

My gay privilege allows me to frame my sexuality as circumstantial—as a situation rather than a deep inner truth. Of course, there’s some dishonesty in presenting myself this way. I’m gay and I love being gay. I simply have the privilege of not having to express something profound about myself every time I come out. I once had a colleague who is gay and not closeted, but also wanted people to know he was gay. He was faced with a much trickier situation than I am as a married gay man: should he stay in the closet and not feel fully himself, or should he stage coming out conversations? When he chose to come out, he found himself in emotionally exhausting, often awkward one-on-ones with coworkers. Less efficient and more labor-intensive than my trusty seven-word sentence.

I Sympathized With Struggles Unique to Bi Folks

When I tell people I have a husband, they don’t need—or want—to know many more details. Many of my bi friends in straight-passing relationships face an opposite problem. If they choose to come out, invasive personal questions abound: how do you know you’re bi? Have you ever slept with a same-sex partner? Is your marriage open? Does your partner know? Is your partner bi too?

The questions do not come from a bad place; the people asking the questions have simply let their curiosity overtake consideration of the comfort of the person they’re talking to. A common enough experience, like when people, after learning that I’m married, ask which of us is the “woman” and which is the “man.” Due to bi erasure, bi folks are much more prone to being interrogated by questions like these.

In the wise words of Boromir, one does not simply come out as bi; one assents to a process of proving their bi-ness, or making it believable, or making it relatable. For some reason, non-bi folks have a hard time accepting bi identity and moving on with their day.

When the caterer learned that my husband and I were gay, she moved on. She quickly accepted us for who we are after the reminder that people like us exist. If only bi people could be so lucky. I’m not unfamiliar with the feeling of my sexuality being doubted; when I was a teenager, being gay was “just a phase.” But after time, these kinds of comments became less common. Common wisdom suggests that if people do gay stuff, they probably like it. Meanwhile, if bi folks are in straight-passing relationships, they are straight until proven bi.

But bi identity can never be proven. It must be accepted. It must be believed.

As my dear bi friend puts it, “I think of my true inner being as a tender thing that needs to be protected and honored, so to not be openly bi feels like I’m abusing myself.” And yet, how can one be openly bi all the time, apart from wearing a bi pride flag or getting a tattoo? A long-running joke about bi folks is that they take any opportunity possible to tell you they’re bi. The implication is that they’re belaboring their point. But bi folks wouldn’t have to belabor their point if they had friends come to their aid more often. And if LGTQ allies of bi folks don’t lead the charge in believing and validating our bi friends, who will?

We need to start more conversations about how to support our bi friends. Let’s flood the airwaves so that we can dilute the toxic messaging I once believed and that too many still do. I have reached this place of enthusiastic support for my bi friends. Their struggle is different from my own but is no less worthy of support and love.

Geek Out

A memoir, pedagogy, and literary criticism newsletter.

By Brenden O'Donnell

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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Hey man, I just want to let you know, I get it.

Your situation is not easy. And unfortunately not uncommon. One need only look at all the faceless profiles in any gay dating app in our community to know that there are a lot of guys who know they need something but aren’t prepared to be open about it.

This is not to say I wasn’t let down when I went back to see why you didn’t respond to that last DM where I was complaining about the weather and saw all your responses in our thread gone. One half of a whole conversation. Just gone.

What kills me is we weren’t even being salacious. We talked about where we came from, what we did for a living, the joys and frustrations of parenthood. We skirted the edge of that part of ourselves, especially you. I could tell you wanted to wade deeper but I could also tell you were convinced each step would send you sinking to the bottom.

Given what you told me, I suspected your disappearance was because you were afraid of being discovered and the subsequent suspicions and accusations followed by the crushing feelings that can only be felt between intimate partners. And I know that those impositions are not without understanding, without precedent. The very fact of our interaction, no matter how benign, was enough implication to assume wrongdoing because they led to wrongdoing on your part in the past.

That doesn’t mean what you are going through is right. Or healthy. Or sustainable.

You know exactly what you are missing because, unlike myself, you knew who you were before you settled down. Maybe not precisely or confidently, but you felt things decades ago that I’ve only just begun to feel in the past year or two. I can’t imagine the person I would be today if I could have admitted to myself in my younger days that I wanted to be with a man, much less acted on it and had that feeling reciprocated, even if in a clumsy, hamfisted way that young adults are prone to. And you aren’t even wanting to feel the most intense aspects of that part of yourself. You just want it to get some air, some sun, go for a stroll every now and then.

As I told you, I know how lucky I am to be in a marriage where any fears of disgust or rejection by my partner upon learning of my full self ended up being unfounded. And thank goodness because I can’t imagine a life without her in it. But I also can no longer imagine a life without me—my full self—being in it.

You deserve nothing less.

Perhaps its melodramatic for me to write this. After all, you did eventually reconnect, albeit via an anonymous profile and our conversation is far more stilted, far more terse, far more infrequent, than before.

But I hope you realize the validity of who you are and what you need. I hope she realizes those things, too. I hope for the day you no longer have to delete, to hide whole parts of yourself to feel loved.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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I started writing a whole post and…it wasn’t healthy. Or constructive. Or enlightening.

Suffice to say my plans for the final weekend of Pride didn’t go as planned and it’s left me down.

So instead I’m reflecting on this piece by Gino Cosme and thought others might benefit from it as well.

“What Pride does—beautifully and necessarily—is create a moment of collective visibility. But visibility without sustained intimacy is like a spotlight in an empty room. It illuminates the space without filling it.”

Unfiltered Clarity

The Loneliness That Follows Pride: When Visibility Isn't Enough

The confetti settles, and suddenly you're sitting alone in your apartment wondering why six hours of celebration left you feeling emptier than before…

Read more

a year ago · 5 likes · Gino Cosme

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On June 26, 2015, mine and my wife’s second wedding anniversary was only weeks away.

Our first child had just turned 8 months old.

We had just moved into a new house that spring.

I was still working at the declining local daily newspaper, my wife was surviving what would be a very temporary stint working in a school district communications office that was managed via passive aggression and bitterness.

And, that morning, it was in that house, likely sleep deprived, getting ourselves ready for jobs that we hated, preparing to take our daughter to the caregiver we had found via one of my co-workers, that we had the TV on with cameras live in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

I know I was elated, celebrated with my wife the moment it was clear that the Court had ruled 5-4 in favor of James “Jim” Obergefell, had made same-sex marriage legal and a guaranteed right for all in the United States. But I otherwise have no specific memories of that day.

So I looked back at what I wrote in my journal.

Never forget that you once thought differently. You didn’t hold some of the more abhorrent perspectives on homosexuality but you did think less of its practitioners. You thought “maybe not marriage but a civil union.” You thought “maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to adopt.”

You get credit for eventually making a 180, with the resources of friends and family, who showed you they are people, first and foremost, who are as deserving of courteousness and respect as anyone else. They are good people.

But you shouldn’t be too proud of yourself, when you stood up and pumped your first this morning when the court decision blared on the screen. You, after all, had helped instigate past resistance to this happening.

Be mindful of your shortcomings. You still have work to do.

And there’s an arrow drawn from the end of the first paragraph over to the next page, which is blank except for a few lines written in the runic script I had long used to provide an extra layer of privacy. Decrypted, those lines read:

And how much of this stemming from your own internal conflict

A conflict you have yet to resolve fully

The brevity of those two sentences understates the depth of that conflict that had raged inside me.

How I had agonized over the feelings I had, dreams I had, about some boys growing up, young men I went to school with, men I saw out in the world.

The communities I sought to join in an effort to eliminate or maybe control or at least cover up those feelings and dreams.

The voice in my head that said I would always have those feelings and dreams and it was best to get it over with so I could stop having them or at least not have to see the faces of family and friends when they learned of them.

On June 26, 2025, we are in a new house, but only several doors down from where we watched the announcement of the ruling (it’s now occupied by a lesbian couple who have made it far more beautiful than we ever did).

Our oldest is 10 and her sister is 7.

I am working in journalism after eight years away and my wife is working in schools, but we are far from hating our jobs now.

Our 12th wedding anniversary is only weeks away.

I have come out to her, to many friends, to some family. We have opened our marriage. I have found great new friends among other late bloomers and queer folk. I have experienced things that I dared not let myself before, convinced that there would be no turning back if I did so.

And I was right about that; I can’t turn back, nor do I want to.

And there is still work to do, on my part, on the part of all of us.

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More than a year ago I wrote a three-part series on body image issues. In the first segment, I shared nine tips on practices and mindsets I had adopted that helped me work past my insecurities, my fear of my body being judged as “less than” by others, and so on.

No. 2 on that list? “Avoid dating apps/social media or, at least, minimize use and find body positive/diverse accounts to follow.”

There have been countless studies, articles, editorials, etc., written on the detrimental impacts of social media. Depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts all tend to be higher among those using social media the most as they feed into comparison and competition mindsets. They negatively affect body dysmorphia, too. And queer dating apps, Grindr in particular, are possibly even worse when it comes to mental health impacts.

And that’s why I found recent paper written by extolling the healing power of baring ourselves on one of the more notorious social platforms of the current moment so fascinating.

Kevin pursued a career in mental health care after going through counseling in college, which helped him accept his gay identity and begin to process the baggage that came from a conservative upbringing.

“One of the things that I started to find was that I just carried not only that shame of identity, but that shame with sex, you know, where...like shame about performance, about my body, the way that I look, the lack of confidence that I have in pictures, things like that,” he told me.

Kevin began to realize he needed to “reclaim his story,” as he told me. And, for him, taking a step so bold that he couldn’t run and hide from his shame was what led him to become an adult content creator.

“That's when I started to play around with OnlyFans and Just For Fans. And it was definitely an adventure in the beginning, and I struggled with it. I tiptoed in and out, where I started it and then I stopped and I started again and I stopped it. I think I did that maybe like three times before I really felt like, you know, okay, there's something to this.”

Kevin was gracious enough to take time to chat with me recently about how he’s applied his own queer journey to his coaching work, including encouraging some clients to become content creators themselves as a means to become comfortable in their own bodies. I’ve edited our conversation below for clarity.

Sitting Queerly: Your work as a personal coach and then your content creation work started to mix. What was that like? How did they start to overlap?

Kevin Martin: I initially started as a counselor and a therapist, more in the traditional medical side. As I was doing that, I was finding there's something missing here where clients would be telling me their stories and what's going on.

And so that's why I started to go down the coaching route…there's a lot of creative opportunities here to really do some cool work. The areas that I got the most excited about that I felt I was most equipped to help clients with was definitely within the sexual empowerment realm.

So that was happening on the business side. But then for me personally, I was starting to do OnlyFans for my own personal healing. But then I started having clients who naturally would be talking about feeling a lot of sexual shame, ‘you know, I'm really struggling with this showing up within my relationships, I'm having these challenges with it.’

It just kind of like, they started to just weave together, like, ‘okay, yeah, you know, this is what I've found to be helpful for me. This is what my experience is like.’

And then I was just looking around to see if there are other people who are doing something similar. And then I was coming across people like Will Tantra, some really great content creators who blend these worlds really beautifully that are very, very empowerment-based, very human-centered, that's still sexual in nature, but it's a different feeling.

Some of the videos that I do are like guided meditation. So I'll, I'll leave like a meditation video, but you know, might be naked, or there might be some like central touch in there, or it might lead to like masturbation at the end, but it's grounded in reconnecting with your body.

SQ: I know a fellow late bloomer who has an OnlyFans with his partner. It’s a way for them, for him, to reclaim himself a little bit as well. Now your OnlyFans, it's primarily solo content, correct? It's not collaborations or anything else like that, correct?

KM: I do have a few collaborations but it has been mainly solo. But I just filmed a video with somebody so I'll putting that together. I think there's a bit of a different layer to that part of it. For me, I just find that I'm very emotional in nature. I need that depth of a connection to be with somebody, so partnered content has just been a bit more challenging just because it's hard for me to step into kind of a...purely performance kind of mindset. I'm still kind of checking in with how I feel about it, but it was cool. It was a cool experience to have like the intention of our time together to be filmed.

SQ: So, how has this worked for yourself? Like you said, it's helping you with your clients and it's kind of meshed, but on a personal level, how has it helped you? What are you experiencing now as a result of that work?

KM: It's definitely helped me to...to respect where I'm at and to really embrace a mindful component of what sexuality looks like. I'm finding what I enjoy, what's not my favorite things to do. And not only like, just within the act of sex itself, but also within the structure around it, if that makes sense, where there are times where I feel, you know, super horny and I might be in that state for a couple of weeks. But then there's months where I'm just like, there's nothing there.

It's also interesting now that I’m building up a bit of a following there. There can be times I feel obligated to keep everybody happy per se. And I can definitely tell if I create content out of that space, I don't feel super great about it. And you can also feel it like you can just feel it in my captions or in the content or in the video or the picture itself, where it's just kind of like, there's a heart missing here.

SQ: That sounds so much like Substack. I mean, for about the first six months when I was (publishing), I felt really good about what I was putting out and everything. And then you just hit a wall but feel obligated to put something out every week.

I know that you talk about in the paper that you wrote, obviously this is not an approach that everybody can do for a variety of reasons. Their personal situation may prohibit them from (creating content) due to their job or their family life or whatever.

But I know that one thing me and other late blooming men contend with isn't just the sexual shame, but also the really negative body image aspect and the unfairly comparing ourselves to how others look. Is that something that has to also be taken into account with this and that you may have other aspects of your trauma or your experience that just make this not a viable thing to do?

KM: That's such a great question. And yeah, I think that's something really important to consider. There are so many factors that could play into why content creation would be or could be really helpful for somebody, but where it could also be really tough and really challenging. And I think the best thing that anybody could do would be to lay all of that out on the table. You know, what am I looking for? What going to be helpful about this for me? Why am I doing this? What's my intention? What's my reason? But also what are those things that I'm, that I'm concerned about?

You have to be very deeply honest with yourself in that conversation. Like anything with sex, we don't know how we'll feel about it until we do it. It could be really helpful because sharing yourself in such a vulnerable and open and honest way is giving yourself permission to be seen and to also be desired. We can end up sending ourselves that message of ‘I'm allowed to take up this space.’

But then there could also be the other side, we might have expectations of how we’ll be received or things like that, and they might not be met. And I think all of that's really important to consider. What will we do with those emotions if and when that were to happen?

SQ: Definitely. Full disclosure, I have two Instagram accounts. I have my public one that I've had for forever. And shortly after I came out, I wanted to have one that is just for being queer. I wasn't out to really anybody but my wife and my therapist. I wasn’t ready for other people to potentially see something I shared by accident that comes from a queer account and they're asking questions.

Obviously I'm sticking within the bounds of the terms of service for Instagram, but I'm posting myself shirtless and things like that or wearing a jock. And I see how that has helped me get more comfortable with who I am. I've never felt as comfortable with my body as I have since I've come out. There are guys who are attracted to how I look, even if I’m not attracted to my own body shape. But at the same time, it's also helped me just be more comfortable in my body and seeing how it looks. It's not exactly the full approach that you're doing, but it's kind of a light version of it. Do you see that as being constructive as well?

KM: Totally. I love what you said. No matter what our community says and a lot of the messages that get dumped onto us about the expectations and how we should look, how we should be, how sexual we should be. One of the main things that I want to be a goal of my work across the board is to shut those shoulds up.

But we feel them. And they’re so hurtful and so painful. And we take those messages in and then we go to bed wondering what's wrong with us. What's broken with us. And nothing is.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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When I asked Pedro and Fer about how they were remodeling the queer bar they bought late last year—whether they were doing it all themselves, had hired contractors or some mix of the two—they smiled knowingly and chuckled a little.

“A lot of sweat and love and hate,” Pedro said.

“It’s been a rollercoaster,” Fer added.

“A lot of it is that we have the gay audacity,” Pedro said. “Like, ‘a patio? Sure I can pour concrete.’ ‘Sure, I can put up a wall.’”

At the time, they were a month out from their grand reopening and no room was complete. The decor and furniture were largely missing in the two main social spaces. The bathrooms, having needed heavy renovation from years of water damage, still needed fixtures. The bar and lounge still needed work, including the rehabilitation of the iconic saltwater aquarium nestled into the wall above the taps at the back. And that outdoor patio? That’s a project for the future, they said.

This isn’t just any queer bar in any town. For nearly 30 years, Out & About was the only queer bar in the Tri-Cities, a relatively isolated and staunchly conservative metro area in eastern Washington, in the predominantly Latino part of town1. In fact, according to data recently published by Uncloseted Media, Out & About is the only queer bar for hundreds of miles in the vast, dry expanse between the largely urbanized west side of the Cascades and the equally remote cities of Boise, Idaho and Missoula, Mont. in the Pacific Northwest.

And for the past eight months, as Pedro and Fer have worked on renovations, it’s been shut down. No thumping bass, no bombastic drag queens, no cocktails with heavy pours. Even those who had only gone there sparingly in recent years said they felt an uneasiness about Out & About being quiet.

But the guys aren’t sweating it. Perhaps it is that gay audacity Pedro mentioned. However, they also know the stakes, the expectations. They know the space that they need, that the community needs.

“It’s why it has taken so long,” Fer said.

Uncloseted Media

7 Revealing Findings from a First-of-Its-Kind Map and Analysis of American LGBTQ Bars

Read more

a year ago · 18 likes · Dan O'Connor and Tory Lysik

My first experience going to Out & About was memorable only in how unmemorable it was.

It was only a week or two after I had come out to my wife. I was perpetually exhilirated and terrified all the time. I was desperate for community, for connection. There were plenty of online groups that I had connected with but they were barely a salve for the itch I had. I wasn’t even trying to get into anyone’s pants yet, I just needed to talk to another guy about…everything.

I knew of the bar. I knew it was a queer bar and yet it didn’t really seem to have much cachet within the local queer community outside of the drag shows that were held there. At least, that’s the sense I got.

Yet, when I saw an FB Events listing for a “Bears & Boardgames Night” there, I glommed onto attending. I was a tangle of nerves the day of, not sure what to do with myself beforehand. Over eager I drove over early and waited the 15 minutes before it was supposed to start before going in.

Technically, the bar wasn’t open yet; it was early in the evening, before its regular hours. A random employee directed me to a large room that had a pool table and other assorted tables and chairs. A guy who I recognized as the event organizer waved me over.

In the end, no one else showed up. I still stuck around, played a few rounds of Sushi Go! and tried my hand (poorly) at Hues and Cues. I had a beer outside with the organizer while he had a smoke and I shared that I had just come out and he passed on some wisdom that I have since forgotten. He was nice enough but we haven’t really stayed in touch.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a disappointing evening. Nevermind that no one showed up for the game night, the place itself was deader than a door nail. The dance floor in the room across the main entry was empty. No one else had even come in to grab a drink. And while most bars don’t look their best when the overhead lights are thrown on, this place looked particularly drab. Music played over the sound system but I don’t recall what it was.

There is the distinct possibility that I had set way too high expectations for my first queer bar experience. The likelihood that I would be confronted by some wild scene or interaction that would equally titillate and challenge me emotionally and ethically was just as much ridiculous as it was an expression of internalized homophobia.

But in the two years since, as I’ve connected with more folks in the local queer community, I’ve gotten the impression that I wasn’t the only one who saw Out & About as something of a letdown. Whether being terrible about promoting their events or just not having a good vibe, most in the community either traveled far out of town to bigger cities for nights out or went to a handful of queer-friendly bars and clubs of varying security instead of our area’s only true queer bar.

It’s old news that the queer bar is struggling.

There are plenty of reasons why service-based enterprise in the business of serving food, drink and a good time go under. But queer bars and clubs have additional factors that are influencing their demise, some of which may actually be good things.

The increased acceptance (relatively speaking) of queer folk in society means we don’t have to look for like-minded friends or fuck buddies strictly in back alley holes-in-the-wall. There’s a growing sobriety culture within queer communities, a response to the increased likelihood for queer folk to struggle with substance abuse. And online dating has shifted the hell that is dating to a virtual rather than a physical plane of torment.

The article I linked above notes that other spaces–cafes, queer community centers and the like–are filling the gap that gay bars once did, providing potentially healthier spaces for people to connect in. And for those that still want to imbibe, many bars have become accepting of their queer patrons, including some in my area.

However these are trends of larger metropolitan areas, particularly those in blue or purple states. In red states—or, in this case, in deeply red parts of blue states—the void left by the disappearance of gay bars is more impactful.

Of course there are non-bar gathering spaces for queer folk in places like Seattle and Portland and Spokane, the closest major metros to the Tri-Cities that are hours away. There is no queer community center here. The local chapter of PFLAG does have a dedicated office where individuals can drop in at times and there are regular scheduled events such as a queer craft time and teen social hour at one of the municipal libraries, but those are often only on a monthly basis.

While there are queer-friendly bars and clubs here, that friendliness can fluctuate depending on any given night’s clientele. Fer, who told me loves to go dancing, said there are a few places locally where queer folk can take to the dance floor with a same-sex partner, but it comes with risk. On any given night, he said he doesn’t know if someone will try and pick a fight with him for dancing with a man.

This illustrates the other issue around queer bars—their general lack of cultural diversity. There are some that have focused on specific queer communities, such as queer Black men and women, but most have predominantly served white queer folk. There’s an unfortunate history around gay and lesbian bars discriminating against BIPOC folk, but that’s just part of the issue. Music, theme nights, decor, even drink specials are reflective of a bar’s clientele, the community it serves. We enjoy being in places that feel familiar to us, that have other patrons that we perceive as being like us.

Pedro never got that sense from Out & About. He lived near and in the Tri-Cities while growing up. There’s a significant Latino population here, particularly from parts of Mexico such as his native Durango. Downtown Pasco, the part of the community where the bar is located, is filled primarily with panaderías, mueblerías and joyerías.

But Out & About appeared like any other bar in a mid-sized white bread American town among them. The few times Pedro went there, it was hit or miss whether he would connect with or even see other queer Latino folk there. In the end, he moved away to places such as San Diego and Mexico City to find other individuals and communities he could identify with, he said.

Yet it was Out & About that brought him back to the Tri-Cities, along with Fer. They were living in Seattle and saw a posting online that the bar was for sale. Pedro shared it with Fer and they both looked at each other, again knowingly, and knew what they needed to do.

The whole reason I had the opportunity to speak with the couple was because of a rare intersection between my day job and my identity. You can read that piece to learn more about how they’re renovating the bar, the architect they worked with and the community members who are eagerly awaiting the reopening of a longtime avatar, for better or for worse, of the local queer community.

They are aware of the downward trend facing queer bars and other queer businesses. They also are aware of the harassment they may face, from private individuals as well as public officials. Anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric and policies have gained traction among school boards and city councils here. A few years ago the sitting mayor of a neighboring city essentially sicced archconservative activists on a business in her community for holding a drag brunch on Easter Sunday, despite the event regularly being held on the same Sunday in April every year.

Yet, throughout my conversation with Pedro and Fer, it was clear this was about more than a business venture. This was literally about community for them. About creating the kind of space that Pedro never had while growing up, about providing a place where queer Latinos can not only dance together safely but to music in their mother tongue and to the rhythm and beat they recall from their earliest memories of christenings and quinceañeras. It’s about creating a place where the elements and atmosphere speak to their cultural experience, such as a small private lounge area that may be used for more intimate and kinky events named after a Mexican folktale about star-crossed lovers and the slightly modified name of the bar to include the battle cry of a Cubana singer of guarachas.

“There are so many people who are wanting this,” Pedro said.

“It just comes down to playing the music,” Fer added.

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

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Toward the end of an online workshop on biphobia and embracing one’s bisexuality in late 2024, of Boyslut fame issued a call to his fellow bisexuals:

When I talk about community and talk about how important it is and how to find the bi community…I saw a question earlier about how do we create more non-sexual bi spaces. And the answer is you just have to fucking do it. I wish there was something that was exciting. Get on Reddit, get on these places where bisexual people commune and do it. And the first few things, it’s not going to get out a shit ton of people but over time…And making sure there are bisexual places that are fun, not just support groups, which do exist to limiting degrees. But do bisexual rock climbing. Bisexual and poly people fucking are obsessed with rock climbing. That will get a gajillion other people.

Zach and co-workshop speaker Leanne Yau of the blog Poly Philia offered a few other possibilities such as Renaissance fairs, drive-in movies and rage rooms. I contend that outside of Renaissance fairs with their opportunities for gender play, none of those options seem inherently bisexual.

Tuning into the workshop was part of my effort of looking for community, or at least looking for ways to build one. Yes, I had progressively come out to more people in my life, my marriage endured being opened and I developed friendships of varying depths with other men.

Yet, I felt alone. I feel alone. My engagement with queer folk is largely relegated to occasional one-on-one lunches or drinks, chat threads and pleasant yet disappointingly short-lived connections.

And that’s because my queer social interactions hinge on one of two elements: commiseration or carnality. It’s all support groups and sex. Everything is tenuous and transient.

There is nothing wrong with those elements on their face. So much of the queer experience is about finding a shoulder to cry on or a bed to jump into, and for good reason. The rest of the world denied us understanding and persecuted us for who we love. We need space to lament the time we weren’t true to ourselves. There’s medicine in celebrating the human body and everything we love about it and want to do to others bodies and have done to ours and, out of a sense of survival, those celebrations were discreet and fleeting.

Late bloomers especially need opportunities to find support and explore queer intimacy1. We have years—decades!—worth of shame and guilt to process and dismantle. We have fears to overcome like whether to enter a queer bar or even just admit to ourselves that it’s OK to desire what we desire. We need time to learn how to navigate the cultural mores of a group of people we were often told was every type of horrible thing but are really the most welcoming, loving and understanding people I’ve met. We need to agonize to others over how to be honest and transparent about who we are.

A support group discussion or meeting doesn’t exactly make for a fun Friday or Saturday night, though, nor necessarily build lasting community. I’ve seen that recently in the support groups I’m part of. Folks join while in a tailspin. They find stability and understanding and solutions, for which they are grateful. But, gradually, they post less, miss virtual meetups, don’t reply to DMs. There’s no malice or disdain, it’s just…that’s only one piece of themselves.

And as much as sex is a prominent feature of queer culture, a single-minded emphasis on it comes with its own baggage—body image issues, an often unhealthy worship of youth, an undercurrent of substance abuse. And while I can’t speak for everyone, I think most want, on some level or at some point, the kind of intimacy that lasts longer than a hurried quickie in a club bathroom or hotel room. You can only scratch an itch so long before you realize you need more lasting and meaningful comfort.

But then, who am I to talk? I’ve gradually fallen away from the very groups who saw me through the depression, anxiety, thrill and joy of my coming out. Plenty more have joined those folds since that time and, while I’ve offered support and guidance, I’ve largely become a lurker, reading distantly of the struggles and victories of other late bloomers. It’s not that I don’t care about what others are going through, it’s just…it takes a lot of energy, you know? We’re supposed to guard our energy, our hearts, our emotions, right?

Yet, I also want someone to put that work into my energy/heart/emotions. But with the exception of Harry and the first man I had sex with, all my other intimate relationships have been fleeting. Not necessarily one-offs, but two-offs, three-offs. Of course, not every connection can be lasting but I talk a lot of shit for a guy who says near the top of his Scruff profile “not looking for one-offs.” I like to blame a lot of this failure to find deep connections on where I live, a deeply conservative metropolitan area which doesn’t have any true queer community spaces2.

The reality is, community building is hard. And men suck at it. We can be great at a lot of things, but putting in the work to create, maintain and grow friendships—much less social networks— that support, nurture and celebrate is not one of them. There’s different explanations for why this may be but none of that changes the end result that a lot of guys end up isolated and thinking they just have to handle shit on their own.

Even when we do engage, we’re largely bystanders. This past winter, after the current administration came into power, I learned about a meetup for queer folk in my community to just support and chat. I went, wanting to find an entry into local queer community and maybe vent a bit. But I largely bit my tongue; most of those attending were trans or non-binary, or their partners. There was only one other cis-male and he was as equally subdued as I was.

This wasn’t because I didn’t have interest in connecting with or supporting trans folk; quite far from it. But as a white, cis, seemingly het-presenting man, I am at least aware at how much safer I am. I was afraid anything I said in support would sound hollow or performative. Any concerns I voiced I feared would be perceived as relatively hyperbolic. And what could they say or do to connect with me? Clearly our experience is too different for us to find commonality, right?

I do not have a pat solution for all this. There is no “one easy trick” or clear five-step process to building communities. But I know I need it. All of us need it, more than ever. And the only way to do it is to…do it.

And as scary as that fact is, I know it’s true. Because my friend made it happen just by organizing a game night. Yeah, I felt awkward as fuck at first, as I waited nervously in an armchair while texting my friend to see if he was enroute only to have him wave across the bar to me. As he introduced me to another of his friends, after more friends arrived, after the first round of Codenames.

But before that final round, before my friend got loud because he had tequila, before the queer ones among us laughed knowingly when someone asked who’s on top, I felt it. I felt comfortable. Accepted. Seen.

So, that’s my goal for Pride this year. Put myself out there, and not just with sultry selfies or panics about whether to come out to my parents when they visit later this summer.

This past weekend I made a date with a guy I recently connected with to just go to a baseball game. It was a good time (even if the home team managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory). Yes, there was thigh massaging and knowing laughs but it was otherwise pretty PG. Was there a tinge of regret that we wouldn’t have an opportunity after the game for some more private time together? Sure. Did I potentially overplay my hand by going in for a kiss that wasn’t fully reciprocated when we said goodbye? Yes. But it was still just a fine night out, connecting, trying to get to know a guy.

Happy Pride, y’all.