Psychologically and sexually, we crave ownership. Emotional ownership. And if that sentimental tie is denied to me, my love ends up always feeling clandestine.

I walked into my office one day and saw the glimmering face of my coworker dying to tell me something. I lay my newspaper on the couch and said, “Good morning,” to which she responded “Guess what? I’m engaged!”

It is hard to know how to behave in front of extreme misery and extreme happiness. The everyday is so drenched in immobile in-between-ness, a sudden moment of unusual bliss can throw you off.

Good morning, good evening, have a nice day, do we get paid today, line one for you, your father called, board meeting on Sunday, the network is down, none of my writers are getting back to me this week.

Her “I’m engaged” felt like a beautiful shock, but also like an inevitable and accidental slap in the face.

When someone falls and hurts themselves, or when someone wins something that you don’t, is a moment that can make you a little bit speechless while you assess your toolbox of social responses you never considered because they are so foreign to your own palette of possibilities.

Recognizing joy and pain in the other can be disconcerting. But more than figuring out how to convincingly congratulate her, staring at the recently engaged happiness of my coworker, her state of grace pointed to my powerlessness.

“Look at the ring!” I look. I am happy for her happiness. But the feeling of admiration quickly becomes a nauseating recognition of my own social impotence: I. Never. No. I will never be engaged.

The impossibility of marriage for a gay man brings doom to his emotional life. No matter how ridiculously in love I ever am, how mutual it is, there is nothing to look forward to.

Maybe he will forget his socks in my bedroom and I will wash them to feel espoused. Maybe we will move in together and we will get a futon at Ikea and we will pretend we are building something.

Maybe he will let me drive his car. Maybe his mom will invite me for Thanksgiving so she can introduce me to her sisters as “Daniel’s friend” — “roommate” if she’s feeling tolerant.

Maybe we will fight over the way he presses the toothpaste and maybe we will wear dog tags with each other’s names. Maybe we will know we belong together.

But our dreams will always be midget-sized. As much as we try to stretch them out, to indulge in the deliciously silly illusion that we can last forever, there will never be a day in which we can be officially “us.”

Not that a paper means more than a feeling. But humans need outside recognition to truly exist. And when this recognition is overtly familiar, it may be easy to take it for granted.

I go to Sendik’s to get groceries. The cashier tells me her husband “loves these!” (pitted Kalamata olives). And even though I am getting it for “him,” I can’t bring myself to say “Mine does to.”

My silence makes feel asexual. Castrated. Half-human. Handicapped.

In the parking lot I overhear two ladies talking about their new Volvos. One says, “I told my husband I wanted it in blue, but they didn’t have it at the store.” The other responds, “Michael loooves the blue one, too.”

And I think of how whenever mentioning something personal, a gay person feels the automatic need to check to see if anyone is listening.

People get married and have gotten married throughout history for a reason — for plenty of reasons. But a vital one is that, psychologically and sexually, we crave ownership. Emotional ownership. And if that sentimental tie is denied to me, my love ends up always feeling clandestine.

And desires seem to become sterile whims, short-lived perversions, dead with impotence of blooming. A kind of love that is given only “this much” to unfold, when the beauty of love is its latent lack of limit.

The fact is that because of love, “normal” people can gain new citizenships, move from city to city, country to country and not be called crazy. Quit their jobs, quit their dreams, acquire new dreams, get new last names, get respect.

But a gay man’s love — a gay woman’s love — it has no future, it holds no profits.

It is irreproducible like our sex, underdeveloped like our identities, castrated like our psyches.

And yet still beautiful, terminally beautiful.

> Comments