Reassessment

In the course of an e-mail conversation I've been having over the past few days with someone who's kindly taking a lot of time and trouble in trying to help me come to terms with some of the problems stemming from my being a closeted and frustrated boylover, I've looked back on one or two things I wrote, in this blog and in 'Cuckoos', over a year ago. It's been an interesting experience, in comparing what I said then with what I think and feel now. It's not that what I wrote in the old posts was directly dishonest, but there is certainly an impression that I was trying to rationalise my feelings in a way that isn't in line with true reality. In a nutshell, I've spent the first year or so of my blogging 'career' telling the world, and, perhaps more significantly in this context, myself, that I'm bisexual, when that doesn't now appear to me to be true. I have little or no doubt, as things stand now, that I'm gay, and always have been, albeit that my attraction is towards boys rather than men, despite the fact that I've been married for the best part of twenty years, and that any thoughts I've had to the contrary have been nothing more than 'wishful thinking' on my part, aimed at trying to construct a persona acceptable to the outside world, because I haven't had the courage to accept and embrace what I really am. I read somewhere, early on in my meanderings around cyberspace on this subject, a quote saying 'if you ever think you might be gay, you almost certainly are', the thinking behind the quote being that, even in the 21st century, there is so much negativity in so many people's minds about gay people that anyone who wasn't gay wouldn't want to go anywhere near even the thought of the possibility. Well, I had my first 'I might be gay' thought when I was not very far into my teens, and, with hindsight, if I'd had access then to the sort of resources that are now available through the internet, the 'I might be' would very soon have been replaced by 'I am'. Would I have been happier now had I come to terms with myself at that stage? It's impossible to say, really. From a family perspective, I think my dad would have, perhaps a little reluctantly, accepted me for who I am, but I'm almost certain that my mum never would have, while of my siblings, the older of my sisters would have been with my mum, the younger with me, while my brother would, I think, accept me now, but probably wouldn't have then. Rereading that last sentence about my family, it really only applies to my being gay. If I was to throw the boylover element into the equation, I doubt that any of them would be able/have been able to come to terms with that, with the possible exception of my youngest sister. And my position within my own household is similar - my daughter knows and accepts the truth about me, but my wife would, I think, struggle badly with the 'gay', and would definitely not be able to cope with the 'boylover'.
OK, so having, perhaps definitively, come to terms with myself in this area, what do I do about it, if anything? If I 'come out', even as gay, and certainly as a boylover, much of my life goes down the toilet. My marriage, and with it my home, and maybe even my daughter, at least until she's no longer a minor, my job, because I've seen more than enough of the bigotry at work to be pretty sure that most of my colleagues would refuse to work with a 'paedo', even a celibate one. In other words, nothing really has changed. I still have no viable option than to carry on in the closet, living a lie every day of my life. If I wasn't so inured to the situation, it would be a bleak prospect indeed, but I suppose if I've put up with the consequences of my cowardice for as long as I have, I can carry on putting up with it.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B