A portrait-mode selfie of me in front of our Christmas tree
The last Daniel Chooses Love (DCL) post was focused on what is real and on my tattoos and what they represent to me. Two of the tattoos mentioned were significant because of the fact that they so strongly represent the importance of feminism to my identity. The DCL post before that one was focused on my gender identity, specifically how I had returned to thinking of myself as a cisgender gay man, and how that was starting to formulate in my head. So here I am, 2 months after the gender identity post and over a month since the last DCL post, and I am largely focused on those exact same topics. In fact, most of my energy and focus for the last three months has been devoted to staying connected to what is real; anticipation and thoughts on tattoos, specifically feminist tattoos; and understanding my evolving gender identity. So it feels weird to come back to Daniel Chooses Love and just write about the same stuff all over again.
But another significant thing about my last post here was the focus on what writing in this blog does for me. The person I find myself to be when I’m writing in Daniel Chooses Love is the version of me I wish I could be all of the time. And so while Daniel Chooses Love is a public facing blog and has, throughout the years, mostly been a way for me to communicate about my life and my inner world to the people who read it, I’m coming back to DCL now with the intention of spending some time with this version of me because of how healing it is. I reread that last post, and was reminded of Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley and the writer that I know myself to be, and I find myself in need of the healing power of being the writer of this blog, so here I am.
Starting with gender identity, I have had this ever present simmering set of thoughts and feelings about my gender that has been constant in the last few months - sometimes under the surface, sometimes as the center of my attention, but always there. I can be an impatient person and often just want things figured out. I’m learning that sometimes figuring things out takes time, and sometimes the passage of time is required for the sake of understanding. I have become really firm in my understanding of myself as a cisgender gay man again. I do not think of myself as “they/them” anymore. For the months of September through almost the end of November, whenever I would hear Russ refer to me as “he/him” (as I had asked him to), I would feel a twitch in my brain, this split-second explosion of, “Wait, is that actually right?! It is. Is it? Is it okay that it is? Should I feel bad that it is?” Now, here at the end of December, that miniature moral panic isn’t happening anymore, and while I do notice the gendered pronouns every time they’re said, those pronouns don’t feel incorrect. In fact, I’ve become confident in their correctness.
I am currently halfway through a book called “The House in the Cerulean Sea” by TJ Klune. I’m loving it (and if you’ve read it and you spoil the rest of it for me I will explode) and I am finding myself relating A LOT to the main character, Linus Baker, who is himself a gay man. Linus is 40 years old; soft and round, especially in the middle; and usually relates better to his cat Calliope than other people. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it (because I am going to be recommending it to everyone I know), but I will say that the socially awkward, tightly wound, middle aged, round bodied, and personal-space-loving Linus is a type of gay man who I can absolutely relate to in a way that I absolutely cannot relate to the protagonists of a show like Heated Rivalry. Softness, sweetness, peculiarity, and awkwardness are WAY more Daniel-ish than hardness, sexiness, athleticism, and celebrity.
I wrote in the October post about men like the characters in The Dissidents, and men like Russ, my dad, and my grand-dad, and about how their version of being a man was a model for me in opposite ways than patriarchal and cultural norms and expectations dictate. I think a factor that was missing from that post but that has heavily influenced my gender is my autism. There is a gender identity called autigender that speaks to how common it is for autistic people to relate differently to gender identity. For me, I think what has been happening for the past several years is that I have felt incredibly distant from other gay men and have thought of that as an indication that I am not a gay man, when the reality is that my version of being a gay man is an autistic version.
My special brand of autism often means that I see things in EXTREME black-and-white. In this case, my understanding around what it meant to be a man meant that to be a man was inextricably linked to the potential to be a predator/be violent. This link was made by both my own trauma history and by society HEAVILY reinforcing concepts like men-only contact sports, action movies, bro culture and Andrew Tate types, men as the predominant military members, misogynistic gender roles and expectations in heterosexual marriages, and on and on. In gay men, I had inextricably linked concepts like sex obsession, promiscuity, self aggrandizement, youth obsession, ubiquitous body dysmorphia, shallowness, etc. - and these concepts were, again, born from my own trauma history and from heavy reinforcement in society and media. I knew that I was completely devoid of the ability to be a predator / be violent, and felt no connection to all of those concepts that I listed above, and so the conclusion that I came to was that I could not be a man, gay or otherwise.
I also knew that feminism was THE most important philosophical and moral concept I had ever encountered. Nothing in my life has impacted me or shaped me the way my Feminism course in college did. No piece of art or literature has ever resonated with me and reinforced what I believe the way Kelly Sue DeConnick’s “Bitch Planet” did (and does on every re-read). Musicians like Sara Bareilles and Hayley Williams have always spoken to my soul exponentially more than any male musician. I have always seen myself (or who I aspire to be) WAY more in fictional characters like Buffy Summers and Wonder Woman.
And so the formula that my unconscious put together was:
“Complete disconnection from the things I thought intrinsic to maleness” + “Deep connection to feminism and women” = “Daniel must be non-binary”
In actuality, I think the real equation that has been at play is:
“Daniel’s black-and-white thinking about what ‘men’ must be” + Trauma-history + “Deep connection to the people in society who are constantly othered (perhaps because of Daniel’s autism, Daniel’s gayness, and Daniel being empathetic) such as women and trans people” + “Daniel’s frequent inability to separate his own feelings and experiences from those of people he loves” = “Daniel’s lack of clarity around his own gender identity”
My being gay makes me different. My being autistic makes me different. In feminism, I found an entire field of thought/study/philosophy dedicated to the rights and empowerment of the “different” half of society. My being gay and autistic has almost always made me feel “less than”. Feminism is an entire framework that centers those wrongfully deemed “less than”. Society constructs expectations and norms around man-ness that are so pervasive and constantly reinforced that they are almost never questioned. My autism means that I can often see expectations and norms, see how useless and made-up they are, and disregard them for myself. And I would always do that, long before I was formally diagnosed with autism, and I often got in trouble for it. I spent 38 of my 40 years unaware of my being autistic, and have been going through the process of unmasking for less than 2 years now, and so am still early on in that journey. At this point in my unmasking journey, I think I can recognize that I can disregard those useless and made-up norms and expectations of being a man (and being a gay man) and claim the Daniel-version of being a feminist, autistic, gay man.
It’s actually pretty exciting. I thought of the process of figuring out my gender identity as hard work that had a “right result” at the end of it. And I was constantly worried I wouldn’t end up at the “right result”. Now I feel like I’m at the beginning of a new way of understanding myself as an autistic gay feminist man. It doesn’t feel like work, it feels like an exciting thing I get to do. And so while I can look at some amazing people who are non-binary as role models, and continue to feel a ton of love and solidarity and empathy for them, I can also recognize that the way I was perceiving myself as non-binary no longer feels like it fits. Who knows where the journey will end up? Who says there’s a static, fixed identity that you “achieve”? I now see myself as an autistic gay man, free from the norms and expectations and standards that constrain men in general and gay men specifically, and I feel excitement around the journey of unmasking and charting my course. Russ says that what I’m experiencing right now - forging my own identity regardless of what’s expected - is what a lot of people think of as the essence of being queer.
What is particularly exciting is that I believe I am about to have a very exuberant, validating, and grounding experience as a feminist, autistic, gay man. In my last post, I talked about how both getting tattooed and having tattoos remind me of what is real to me. I also talked about my phoenix tattoo, and how the process of getting that tattoo was pretty painful, both physically and because of the extended amount of time spent around toxic cis-het masculinity. By the way, I still absolutely love that tattoo, and it feels extremely fitting that a symbol of rebirth was created in a particularly painful way, and I love looking at it now and thinking about what it represents to me.
Well, I already have my next tattoo scheduled. While I was in the process of getting my phoenix tattoo, I did a Google search for LGBTQ+ and feminist tattoo artists in the Cleveland, OH area. I ended up finding the information for Melissa Martell, owner of The Glass Cat Tattoo Shop. I fell in love with the shop description, fell in love with Melissa’s description of her artistic inspiration, and then found Melissa Martell’s Instagram and became OBSESSED with her aesthetic and her art. I reached out to her about her doing a superhero tattoo, and she has been so kind, warm, and wonderful in our emails. She will be doing a tattoo in her signature style of three of the most important-to-me female superheroes: Captain Marvel, Squirrel Girl, and Ms. Marvel. After the experience I had with my last tattoo artist, I needed to have a truly feminist and queer-welcoming tattoo experience. The fact that I get to have it with someone whose style is as charming and unique and incredible as Melissa’s is icing on the cake. To get to be fully myself - gay, autistic, feminist, and all the other parts of me - while getting reminded of what’s real - both by getting tattooed and by having a tattoo of these meaningful figures - is a kind of healing and celebration I really need right now.
Now I’m at the end of this post. And as I suspected, writing a Daniel Chooses Love post did a ton to help me. My head feels so much clearer. My heart feels so much lighter. I feel like I understand myself in a new way, and I see myself for who I’ve always been. Instead of feeling confused and muddled like I did before I wrote this, I feel excited and joyful. The fact that people who love me will be reading this and taking the time to understand me feels like a true privilege. I believe that knowing who the people who usually read DCL are is a huge part of why it’s so healing to write here. You, the person reading this, are a gigantic reason I can be happy, healthy, and whole. I don’t take it for granted. As always, thank you.