I went and saw “Walk The Line” with Jason last night. We went to a movie theater we hadn't gone to. The system was down and screwed up so you couldn't buy your tickets at the machine so we had to (ulp!) wait in line! I guess it was appropriate because of the title of the movie.
I LOVED it.
I was thinking about my memories of Johnny Cash and the first thing that comes to mind is the song, “A Boy Named Sue”.
It's an interesting song. It isn't homophobic as more as it is a commentary on masculinity. It's more about overcoming the fear of inferiority one feels from something they must endure from childhood. For the guy in this song, it's the fact that he is named Sue. He is mad because he hates the fact that he is named Sue and it makes him angry and mean and vengeful.
For someone like me, I am not named Sue but I am born into a world where I am gay. I am angry and vengeful in my own way but it is a more inward vengeance. I don't beat myself up obviously and self destruct in a big way, I do it in a very subtle way that is only being recognized now in my middle years. I am angry at myself for NOT being outwardly confident and masculine and in the way I percieve it, avenge the fact that I have shame for being the way I was born.
Passive aggression is what I have. It is what I learned. I learned to be ashamed at something like this because it doesn't make me perfect. I observed a childhood where if something wasn't done “right” it was not good. It was a simple and toxic philosophy. This dosage was even more toxic because I knew I was different and I observed the very close family members and friends that I had around me react to the term gay with disgust. When I would listen to the song, “A Boy Named Sue” the first thing I thought was that it wasn't good to be thought of as effeminate. Whether or not I was effeminate as a child (I was). It was the fear and self loathing taught to me by the world around me that was most destructive.
I didn't know what to expect from my life. My life was about escaping me. As I came out of the closet molecule by molecule, friends dropped out of my life, my guy friends especially. Harrowing to me is the night I sat in the car with my friend Sean as I dropped him off and began to talk about who and what I was. It was the last I ever saw of him. Then there were the people who told me it was ok but the tone of their voice and their reaction told me that it disgusted them and that they would seemingly tolerate it but “just don't go into detail”. The details were my heart and soul. I shut off. It became more of an effort and a habit of feeling I needed to make great effort to get anyone to really like me for who I really was. I hid behind humor and silliness and insincerity.
Recently I have begun to observe, deal with and heal these feelings. Having this horrible self image has attracted just enough toxicity into my life to make me have to work to get over it. Fortunately I have friends who my sexuality has nothing to do with who I am. But even so, MY personal toxic shame put a wall between myself and those people and without effort on my part I feel I could lose these people in my life as well. I have always felt that I had to run the show. I used to be angry about that. But now I just see it as a means for me to pull myself up and out of my toxicity and allow myself to show my true self to these people who already recognize and love the faint glimmer they see of who I really am.