Reflections at Midlife Crisis Time and the Tiger Beat of my Youth

When I was a young man, I scoffed at the idea of the "midlife crisis".  Seemed like psycho babble nonsense to me.  But, oh man, now that I'm there, count me among the converted.  While I have plenty of legitimate external reasons to feel lost, bewildered, frustrated and just plain hopeless, the ever so acute nature of those feelings seems to have grown exponentially from within.  The icing on the cake came today, when I realized that 50 years old is right around the corner.  A mere four years away.

I've always been a sucker for a sappy movie.  Often a movie or TV show can touch me deeper than most of real life.  But lately I've noticed that I'm more and more moved by characters and themes that portray all of the things that my life has lacked.  It can be any movie or TV show.  The sense of purpose and destiny Luke Skywalker embodies.  The final episode of Big Love's Season 2, when Bill gazes with warmth at his wives and children, obviously acknowledging his good fortune.  Norman Dale's story of incredible weakness followed by redemption and a new start at life in his 50s in Hoosiers.  The weird lives and love shared by the Hecks, with all their ticks and oddities, in The Middle.  All of these portrayals, and many more, have caused me to question my life and what I have done and have failed to do with it.

Yet, I also feel very ungrateful for not recognizing what I have had.  If I died tomorrow, friends would shake their heads in sadness at the brevity of my life.  But, really, in the grand scheme of things, I've been fortunate.

My last trip to Utah drove that point home.  Among my wide and deep collection of oddities, I like to visit cemeteries.  I walk among the markers, great and small, and wonder about the lives they represent.  I paid a visit to the Salt Lake City cemetery this trip.  I wandered among the luminaries of the LDS church and the common Mormon names.  But a set of obviously uncared for, and apparently  forgotten, headstones belonging to two brothers whose lives spanned just a couple of years each caught my attention.

For all my frustration with my life, I understand intellectual level that I do indeed have much to be grateful for, not least of which is the opportunity to have lived it.  In Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's Bill Munny observes that "it's a hell of a thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have."  These young boys died without ever having much at all.  Here I am feeling somehow cheated by a life that at the very least I actually got to live.  That observation should help.  I should be able to appreciate all the good I have experienced instead of focusing on the bad, no matter how significant.  I should.  But I do not.

Finally, I know who I really am.  Finally, I am able to be honest with myself about what I believe and more importantly what I do not believe.  Finally, I see my childhood and family the way they were, not the way I wished them to be.  By all rights I should be blossoming in this new knowledge and understanding.  Instead I feel alone, lost and frustrated.  Perhaps, with time and patience, things will get better for me.  Everything I know of a midlife crisis tells me that it will.  But it sure doesn't feel that way right now.  Some days I think I'm holding on by my fingernails, and then just barely at that.

And another thing, I just recently realized that there was yet another early indicator of my basic gayness.  Tiger Beat magazine.  I remember it well from my childhood.  I believe it is where my sister acquired the Shaun Cassidy posters that decorated her room.  For whatever reason, I only now remember how important Tiger Beat was to me.  I'm not sure exactly when I first noticed the magazine, and its various journalistic peers, but I know it was early.  I also believe it was my first real sexual awakening.  I remember stealing glances at them at the supermarket checkout stand, perhaps as early as 10 or 11 and continuing on through my mid-teens.  I say stealing glances, because I somehow knew that a boy shouldn't be looking at magazines like that.  No one taught me to like those magazines and the strangely beguiling boys on their covers.  I felt it from the earliest time that I had any real sexual feelings at all.  Ah, how the pieces fit together.  Gay is what I was, am and always will be. 

No Longer Willing to Fake It

At the outset, I would like to make clear that  while I am an atheist and completely and totally reject Mormon (and all other) theology including the concept of god(s), I am not an enemy of religion.  Notwithstanding my disagreement with the LDS church and my view that certain aspects of its teachings can be harmful, I am very grateful for the friendships and positive experiences I enjoyed throughout my life, in particular as a child and a teen.  I also appreciate the stability, foundation and purpose that religion provides in the lives of many.  Further, I believe the basic principles of an LDS teachings, truly lived, will lead to a good life and a good person.  It doesn't work for gay folk, but most folk aren't gay.

That said, I have always struggled with the pressure, and even need on my part, to conform.  To feel, think and act in the ways I was expected to.  In no aspect was that more true than with respect to my experiences in the temple.  From the very first time I attended that temple, I felt extremely uncomfortable.  Extremely.  But that's not what I was supposed to feel.  That was clear.  At most, I was permitted to be a bit confused at first.

And I tried.  I really did.  I would tell myself that I needed to be patient.  Calm my feelings.  Enjoy the beauty.  The thing is I never could.  There were a few times that I could kind of, sort of feel relaxed at the very end.  But I can't honestly say that I ever truly felt comfortable or had a spiritual experience.  Frankly, I just felt weird.  And dishonest every time I said "what a beautiful experience" just so I could feel like I fit in with the expectations and proclaimed experiences of those around me.

My mission was the same thing.  I never, ever felt comfortable saying "I know".  But anything less than that was simply not acceptable.  Missionaries were not permitted to hope, really want or even just believe it was all true.  I know was the only correct expression.  And I swallowed the "a testimony is gained in the bearing of it" nonsense - was this Packer or maybe McConkie?  Only now can I look back and see what utter folly that was.  Certainly if you say something over and over and over again, you may eventually come to believe it.  Even assuming good faith on the part of those trying to convince me, it was still simply brainwashing.

That has been the pattern of my life.  Be straight, act straight, date straight.  Be Mormon, act Mormon, talk Mormon.  Fake it until you make it.  Be patient and somehow miraculously it will all become true.

I really think I'm done with that now.  Being "done with it" doesn't mean that I will no longer make an effort to fit into my community.  To be a part of society, we have to accommodate the community around us, whether at work, in our neighborhood or even in our families.  But making those accommodations need not require us to deny who we truly are.  For instance, at work I neither hide nor proclaim my sexuality.  Some know I'm gay, some probably assume I am and others neither know nor care.  I try not to hide what I am and I try not to make what I am a particular point of emphasis.

Whatever else, I don't want to pretend that I'm having a spiritual experience when I am not.  I don't want to act like I'm a red-blooded straight American man when nothing could be further from the truth.  I will be who I am, believe what I believe, like what I like and make no excuses for any of it.  I have a long way to go to put that plan into action, but until I do I will not have truly accepted the gay, atheist, Lego-loving, Harley-riding, insecure loner that I am.