Analyze This

By Adam Kuhn
Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007

I was casually flipping through my psychology book the other night, studying for a test, when I noticed the section of the book that covered sexual orientation. I couldn’t help but explore. I was curious to see what “experts” thought they knew about homosexuality.

To my surprise, I came to find the text relatively accurate. I discovered the book came from a Manhattan publisher in 2005, and quickly became more surprised at the inaccuracies in the text. For example, it’s believed that the more older brothers a male has, the more likely he is to be gay (I have no older brothers); a distant father and overbearing mother produce gay children (Both of my parents played equal roles in my development: There for my childhood, essentially dead for the rest of my life).

I did however appreciate the paragraph that almost perfectly described the reason behind my column: Being gay and living in a straight world. In this section, it put a heterosexual individual in the shoes of a homosexual.

“Imagine being ostracized or fired from a job for openly expressing feelings toward the opposite sex, or if you overheard crude jokes about heterosexuality, or if most movies, TV shows, and advertisements portrayed a homosexual lifestyle, or if your family pleaded with you to change your heterosexual nature and enter into a homosexual marriage.”

Even though the paragraph goes a bit beyond my column’s typical subject matter, it does effectively convey the difficulty involved living out of one’s element. You might be able to tell the people making fun of you to kiss your ass, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have the same luck hitting on a guy outside a gay bar.

Another interesting sentiment it presented was how unaccommodating a society can be for a minority. “Whether a culture accepts or condemns homosexuality, heterosexuality prevails, and homosexuality survives.” Well obviously… we’re here.

The book applied this idea to left-handed people. Some time ago, boards of education were made to decide how many left-handed desks to produce based on statistical information that surveyed how many children were growing up left-handed. During my childhood, I never once saw a left-handed desk, and I went to a public school in Connecticut’s largest city. I’m left-handed and gay… I’m screwed.

The perfect example of this “out of one’s element” concept is my job. It’s dirty, tough, and is almost entirely repetitive, physical work. Appropriately, all of my co-workers are straight “manly” men. I’ve spent the last year trying my absolute best to fit in, but after months of hearing them talk about girlfriends, watching them ogle the skinny girls that walk by, and making bets over sporting events, I’ve reached the end of my rope.

We all put on different faces for different situations. There's a time and a place for your casual face, your sick humor face, your professional face, and finally your natural face. After long, deep consideration, I finally decided to establish myself at the work place.

A fellow worker-bee of mine is a little younger than me. He's one the straightest people I've ever met, and doesn’t appear to have too much exposure to worldly things. We got on the conversation of how the newspaper at my college published (cough, slaughtered, cough) one of my blogs. He asked what I wrote about, and I told him. The conversation went from there. Over the next couple days, I can tell he’s a bit uncomfortable with the idea of working with me.

Under any normal circumstances, my response would be “to hell with him” but being this a job, the only solution would be for me to leave, and that’s not going to happen.

When you’re not “one of the guys”, is it possible to relate or even co-exist with those who are, given the extreme differences? Is it worth it to try? What is the cost? What are the consequences? What are the right steps?

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