I've had at least ten people in the last 48 hours tell me I look like a child molester, but God dammit, I want a mustache. I've been trying to will hair out of my face for years now and I'm finally, at age 23, able to push out enough upper lip and chin hair to give the illusion that I have a full goatee. Admittedly my facial hair grows in sporadic patches of blond and resembles something that would grow off of a orangutan's elbow, but I think I look great. To everyone else apparently, my facial hair grows perversely.
While I have trouble growing facial hair, I have no qualms about growing a neck beard. If I go even one day without shaving my neck I will have enough neck hair to fill a pillow case with. In fact, I think if I went a week, and got in a car wreck, and my air bag didn't deploy, my tuft of neck beard would keep me from getting whip lash. It would just hit the steering wheel and gently soften the blow of my neck. Sometimes though, I let my neck beard get out of hand and on those days, I feel profoundly masculine. Which is why now, more than ever, I am trying to grow a goatee. I need to feel like a man.
One thing I've noticed about gay men is that you are instantly put into one of two boxes, based on femininity or masculinity. "Hi, my name is Ryan, can I buy you a beer?" I might ask a handsome gentleman at a bar, but what he is really hearing is, "Hi, I'm Ryan, and I love getting fucked in the ass." Getting fucked in the ass, in the gay world, classifies you as a bottom. If you prefer to be the pitcher, then you are a top. When gay men meet each other for the first time, they are without a doubt deciding if the man in front of them likes to get fucked, or be fucked. It's just the way it works. When I flirt with bottoms, they think that I am a bottom, and will not give me the time of day.
If my masculinity were to be summed up by a sound, it would be the sound an English tea cup makes when it cheerily tinkers on the miniature plate beneath it. Because of this, many men think I am incapable of preforming the sexual role of a masculine top, and therefor write me off. Personally, I am both. Sex is fluid, sex is instinctual, and my sexual identity will never be put into one box or another; and I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at it. I don't want to be with someone romantically or sexually, if they think of themselves as a top or a bottom because it's limiting and boring.
Still, I have to cave to my social demands, and try to look the part. Try and appear more masculine. I've been working out everyday for months now, and my body looks less like a deflated balloon draped over a nail, and more like a Ken doll after a run in with a belt sander. I feel more masculine with muscles, and with facial hair. I don't know what kind of guy I'm trying to attract, Jen would say I'm trying to attract children, but I do know that at the moment and for the first time in years; I love the way I look. So the facial hair stays.
I've been struggling with my outwardly feminine inclinations for my entire life. I was seven the first time I got made fun of for it. At that age, I ran on the daycare's playground with my arms swinging behind me, my wrists limp, and my hands flopping up and down with the motion of me feet. Some kid pointed out the fact that I ran like a girl one day during a heated game of kick ball. After that my dad spent many nights teaching me how to, "run like a man" so I wouldn't get made fun of. He would place his balled up fists by his sides, his arms in 90 degree angles, and say, "hold your hands like this and move them back and forth with your feet." Then I would try, my hands going limp in front of me, and making me look like a gay T-Rex.
Then there was the time in eighth grade that I became aware of the boys in the locker room, and their impressive bush's. I thought it was really disgusting that everyone had mounds of pubic hair, but I was still jealous that I had not developed a grotesque curly forest between my legs. I remember my first pubic hair like it was yesterday. It was towards the end of the same year and my friends took me to an amusement park near Kansas City. We were on a roller-coaster called the Momba and moments before the coaster let us go down the first drop, I raised my hands above my head. While I was admiring the 250 foot view I noticed a weird curly thing attached to my arm pit. When I realized it was an armpit hair I didn't take my eyes off of it the entire ride. Through the twists and turns, ups and downs, I never took my eyes off it. I just watched it flail in the wind, relishing in the idea of being a man.
Recently my fascination with masculinity, especially in relation to myself, has lead me to scare off yet another man. Actually I'm pretty sure he was just an ass hole that stopped calling me back after three weeks. His name was Tony. Tony Bologna. Being me though, I have to pick apart everything I did to possibly have scared him off. The hard part is, I was literally so charming, the only thing I can think of possibly detouring him is my new love for not wearing deodorant. I love the way I smell, and he did not. I know this because he said, "Ryan I don't like the way you smell." Perhaps I should have taken that as a hint to maybe slap some deodorant on my pits, but I'm kind of in a fuck it mood lately and don't feel like appeasing a man for his affections. I'll work out and look good for men, but I will not cover up anything about myself, not even my scent...which I will admit can get pretty bad after an Indian buffet or night of binge drinking.
I'm in a weird limbo of finding a comfortable level of self expression that captures both my feminine side and my masculine side. The thought did occur to me, in a moment of self loathing, that maybe Tony Bologna just didn't think I was as masculine as he would have liked. Then I started to think that maybe I wasn't manly enough, maybe I wasn't man enough for him. Thankfully before I plummeted into a pity party summoned from my healing fear of my own femininity, I caught myself. I was just to much man for him. It's as simple as that.
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