The Big Gay Move

It started with my facial hair. My partner of four years preferred a clean-shaven face to my patchy stubble. After we broke up, I decided to let it grow out. I’d always liked the way it made me look: less boyish, more like someone who might occasionally have sex.

I joined the San Francisco Gay Men’s chorus, spending three hours each Monday night singing with two hundred and fifty queens in a converted Bahai Temple on Valencia Street. I did drag for the first time; I adorned my lanky frame with fake styrofoam curves and stumbled my way through choreography set to “Boys” by Lizzo, hobbling in platform boots through the Castro. By the time I attended my first sex party in an unmarked loft space in SoMa, I’d already been inching towards the decision for years: I was ready to leave the city I called home for somewhere new.

Until then, the thought of uprooting my life in San Francisco was unthinkable. But gradually, it began to feel inevitable, even urgent. Because in my late twenties, seven months after breaking up with my ex-girlfriend, Sara—and nursing a seven-month-old beard—I came out of the closet.

That’s when I started doing things differently. I formed new friendships, experimented with my look (aforementioned beard, shaggy 1970s California surfer flow, purple lipstick to parties, a lightning-bolt earring), and dated voraciously. All of it intentionally—much of it feverishly—in an effort to create distance from what my life used to look like: happy on the surface, not particularly well-examined, and decidedly straight.

But for all the meaningful progress I’d made in San Francisco, it still wasn’t enough. I needed a more substantial upheaval—actual, physical distance from my old life. So in May of 2019, I packed my bags and moved to New York City.

That first month, finally a resident of the city I’d fantasized about since my first visit as an eleven-year-old with my jazz dance troupe, I became a monk. I didn’t consume a drop of alcohol at a rooftop bar or grind with any shirtless strangers in unmarked warehouse parties, attend an art opening or see a single Broadway musical. I didn’t find a new queer community.

Instead, I deleted my dating apps. I rediscovered Netflix. I journaled some, but less than I’d told myself I would. I grabbed drinks with college friends when they reached out, and saw an off-Broadway show with a second cousin. But most nights, I stayed home adjusting to the unmistakably un-San Franciscan dimensions of my Brooklyn apartment. When I felt lonely, I’d Yelp gay bars and go after work, less to hook up with someone, more as a reminder of what it felt like to be surrounded by queer people.

I relished the anonymity of newness. After seven years in San Francisco, it had become impossible to separate my former city from a past version of myself, one that no longer felt aligned with my present-day reality. My move afforded me time to consider how I wanted my life in New York to look different, hoping that difference would feel closer to who I believed myself to be. I needed physical distance from San Francisco in order to create emotional distance from who I was when I lived there.

Which is why I made my Big Gay Move to New York City in the first place, somewhere I hoped I’d feel freed from expectations—friends’, family’s, my own—of who I ought to be. And in the absence of those expectations—real or imagined—I could finally just be.

*

The disconnect between selves began, fittingly, in the back of a small, off-Broadway theater on that fateful first visit to New York City. My jazz dance troupe was seeing the kind of chic contemporary dance show completely lost on my pre-teen sensibilities—no sets, all black attire, wordless music, not a single sorcerer.

Seeking stimulation elsewhere, I left the rest of my group at intermission to buy snacks for act two. As I slipped back into the theater, candy in hand, the house lights dimmed and two dancers took the stage. The male dancer, incidentally, was shirtless; and I, incidentally, was no longer hungry for Reese’s Pieces. My fascination lasted all of three seconds before the fear set in. By the end of the show, I was already performing mental pirouettes, convincing myself that what I’d felt couldn’t be who I was.

By the time I reached high school, I’d nearly managed to convince myself that I was straight. I met my first girlfriend at Jewish summer camp. We were both counselors in training, and our senses of humor aligned. She gave me my first blowjob behind a yurt. I tried fingering her after lights out on the softball field. Our summer romance continued into the fall.

She was beautiful, strange, on the tomboyish side, and from an entirely different state. We’d talk on the phone a few times a week, and she came to visit me once in Seattle before I ended things. I liked her, but when we were together, I always felt low-grade performance anxiety that I could avoid more fully on my own.

All this time, I still gravitated towards people and things that brought me joy and fulfillment. I wrote and performed in my college’s major musical theater production, RA’d a freshman dorm, wore costumes more days than not; I made sketch comedy videos with my brother, traveled, volunteered for an AIDS charity. But I was ultimately living an authentic-adjacent life. By the time I started dating Sara my senior year of college, it was second nature to distance myself from guilt, pain, and fear.

The closest I got to acknowledging my sexuality to myself during our relationship came more than a year into dating. We’d both moved to San Francisco and I stayed most nights at her apartment, a spacious two-bedroom with a view of the trolly tracks. One morning, I woke up early in her bed, chest thumping, underwear sticky. I’d had a gay wet dream.

I tried falling back asleep, hoping the evidence would evaporate while I slept. But lying in my soiled briefs, I allowed myself a fraction of honesty to think, OK, I’m somewhere on the sexual spectrum, but I love this person enough that I can make this life work. And I believed it enough that I carried on as usual.

Eventually, though, the anxiety and fear that I’d long managed to keep at bay became consistent. Sara got there first, intuiting my sadness and needing change of her own. After four years of dating, she ended things.

And even then, fully coming out to myself took seven months, and the moment had nothing to do with sex.

My brother and I had just gotten back from a high evening stroll to the one-bedroom we shared in the Marina district. I sat across from him on the floor of our living room/my bedroom, finishing our joint. I was so stoned that I was acutely aware of my every movement, every word I spoke, even the tenor of my voice—performances that had become second nature.

My brother asked me some innocuous question I can’t remember. What I’ll never forget was the way I opened my mouth to respond, but hesitated. In my high state, I noticed that I had paused to scan my answer for anything that might betray queerness—a routine subconscious calibration that was suddenly, horrifyingly conscious.

I was so stoned that I was acutely aware of my every movement, every word I spoke, even the tenor of my voice—performances that had become second nature.

Finally, I muttered something non-committal to move the conversation forward. But the realization stuck. I understood what the rest of my life would look like if I stayed in the closet: I’d never be able to have a fully authentic interaction, high or otherwise.

So I came out to my siblings two weeks later in an Ethiopian restaurant, without having so much as kissed a boy. I’d flown home to Seattle on a Friday for SeaFair, the city’s annual celebration of waterborne debauchery and naval power. For two days, I downed Jell-o shots and shotgunned beers on speedboats in the middle of Lake Washington, my straight send off.

On Sunday, I proposed dinner with my brother and sister on our way home from dropping off a friend at the airport.

As we pulled our minivan into the restaurant’s gravel parking lot, I defaulted to the avoidance that, after fifteen years, felt congenital. This doesn’t need to happen today, I thought. Maybe over the phone in two weeks slash seven years?

“Alright, I’d like to go around the table and share major life updates,” my brother suggested innocently, as we took our seats at the small round table in the middle of the otherwise empty dining room.

“I’d like to go last,” I said, sensing my update might monopolize the conversation.

My sister shared some challenges she was having with her then-boyfriend. My brother, his job hunt. By the time my turn came, I was shaking. The words I’d avoided saying—thinking—for fifteen years wanted out. Even my brain, so gifted at circumvention, couldn’t see a way around telling them. So I did.

“I’m bisexual” I said (three months later I would admit a preference for men).

“That’s so awesome!” my brother responded without missing a beat.

“Wow!” my sister offered.

“Yeah,” I said, and started sobbing.

*

At first, I naively assumed that self-actualization simply followed the act of announcing my sexuality.

Defiantly, I approached my early dates with men exactly as I’d approached heterosexual dating. My go-to first date spot didn’t change—a wine and beer bar with bunk beds instead of chairs down a side street in Hayes Valley. My date and I would unfailingly be the only queer pair in sight. I’d offer the fact I was newly out early on, thinking if I treated it as no big deal, he might, too. But my eagerness betrayed that even then, I was starting to understand that it was a big fucking deal.

My first Pride month came and went, a June like any other. A gay friend I’d reconnected with from college asked about my Pride Weekend plans and I told him about the Swedish Midsummer party I was hosting with my (all straight) roommates. I didn’t understand his shocked, and unmistakably disappointed, response.

I met my first real boyfriend—a thoughtful, kind-hearted boy with wavy, shoulder-length hair and proper New England sensibilities. Our connection resembled my past straight relationships in every non-anatomical sense: We were monogamous, came from similarly privileged backgrounds, ate out a lot, traveled, and hung out with our almost exclusively heterosexual friends and family. We lasted for eleven months.

I loved him, but gradually it dawned on me that the only significant change in my life since coming out was that I now had anal sex. Even though my friends and family saw me as gay, changing how I saw myself, and my place in the world, would take time, and real work. That’s when I started doing things a little differently, taking my first gayby steps in what felt like the right direction.

I became obsessed with my first queer record—Blonde by Frank Ocean. On my lunch break, I’d put in my headphones for the fifteen-minute walk to Whole Foods, invariably tearing up when Frank sang, “I thought that I was dreaming when you said you loved me.” I suspected his disbelief was as much about finally being in a position to receive the kind of love he wanted, as it was to his lover’s feelings.

Even though my friends and family saw me as gay, changing how I saw myself, and my place in the world, would take time, and real work.

I started deliberately piecing together my patchwork, imperfect queer identity starter kit: I reached out to an older, literary gay friend I knew peripherally from college and asked him for a syllabus of queer theory, history, and literature. I finally downloaded Grindr. I Googled ‘best gay movies,’ and eventually found a list of non-porn films that included The Weekend, Carol, Paris Is Burning, and We Were Here. I sang “A Whole New World” for my San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus audition. I started understanding the relative ease of coming out as a cis, white man. I followed queer artists and activists (and thirst traps) on Instagram. I started going to therapy. I started a non-profit with a group of friends to support queer youth in highly rejecting environments around the country. I became part of a gay text thread, and spent hours on the dance floor at Toad Hall. I challenged long-held beliefs outside of the realm of sexuality. I stopped cutting my hair. I started understanding that these hallmarks of queer culture in aggregate don’t make someone gay, but devoured them anyways as meaningful entry points into a community that was starting to feel like my own.

As I began to feel this internal shift, my surroundings remained mostly static. I still biked to my same job every day in the Mission, ate at the same restaurants, surrounded myself with mostly the same friend group of nearly a decade—people I loved who were genuinely supportive, open-minded, and encouraging. But around them, I still found it difficult to be the person I was becoming. For all the meaningful internal changes I’d made since coming out, the city and space and circles I occupied were keeping me tethered.

*

Five days before my Big Gay Move, I drove with coworkers to a beach on the north-easternmost tip of San Francisco for one final swim in the Bay. This part of town had been a second home for my first few years in the city, but I’d avoided setting foot here since coming out. A few blocks south of the beach was Sara’s apartment.

Associations with my “straight” life abounded all around the city, but were amplified tenfold in her neighborhood. Every corner held some memory from our lives together—there was the basketball court where she’d planned a date night picnic of pasta, fruit salad, and one-on-one. (I won.) There was the café where she would write her book on weekdays and get the occasional free artichoke salad for her loyal patronage.

There was the intersection where we’d taken shots at six in the morning, onesie-clad, on our way to a Bay2breakers pregame. There was the restaurant where we ate subpar pad thai the night after she moved into the neighborhood. And there was our favorite Italian restaurant we chose for our fourth anniversary, also the night we broke up.

There was her apartment where I de facto lived for the majority of my first four years in San Francisco. And there was her bed where I slept most nights. And there was her couch where we’d occasionally have sex and where we sat on opposite sides the night I came out to her.

“I can only sit this close to you right now because you’re a completely different person to me than you were at the start of this conversation,” she said. “It would’ve been too hard if you were the same Harry.”

With that, she voiced what I still resisted admitting to myself, because doing so would mean finally reckoning with how fundamentally I’d avoided a part of myself for so long. In order to fully embrace this transition, I needed to create even more distance from who I was when she loved me, a me that didn’t fully embrace myself.

To say that I moved away from San Francisco because it’s where my ex lives isn’t entirely true, but it also isn’t entirely irrelevant. It’s where she lives, but it’s also where I lived for a long period of time in denial of myself, at a time when I couldn’t imagine joining gay singing groups or experimenting with fashion; doing drag or building out my library of queer literature; speaking or acting freely as myself; finding queer community; owning the impact that being closeted had on me and the people I was closest to; allowing myself to date, be vulnerable with, or love men.

San Francisco is where all of that is true, and it’s also where I started putting in the work to make it less true. It’s where I began deconstructing the walls of my closet, and where I got closer to understanding that being queer means so much more to me than who I sleep with. Closer to understanding what “right” feels like after so many years of feeling like allowing myself to do so would be wrong.

Growth for me has been as much about acknowledging and accepting the less happy chapters in my life as it’s been about learning to write new ones. And though I wish (physical) distance weren’t necessary for this growth, I’m working to accept that it’s what I need right now to feel at ease.

Growth for me has been as much about acknowledging and accepting the less happy chapters in my life as it’s been about learning to write new ones.

My Big Gay Move still feels new. New York doesn’t yet feel like home in the way San Francisco used to—but how could it in less than a year? The hard work of feeling grounded and comfortable with my identity remains ongoing, unimpacted by a new time zone and greater concentration of skyscrapers, three a.m. pizza joints, and subterranean musicians.

With my one year New York anniversary approaching during this pandemic, I’ve found a very small, meaningful silver lining in the time the current state of the world has again afforded me to consider the (non-pandemic-specific) ways my life feels different today than it did twelve months ago. And most days I can say that I’ve done what I set out to do—I’ve started to build a genuine, meaningful, queer existence from the ground up, with intention, and as much integrity as I can muster.

Distance hasn’t been a salve, or a quick fix, or any sort of guarantee of happiness or authenticity, but it has meant that I have a new degree of agency, and that all the decisions I make in this new chapter—good and bad—feel considered and significant.

The move certainly hasn’t been perfect, or without its moments of doubt, but most of the time I can say it feels like the closest I’ve ever been to where—and who—I want to be.

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