The year was 2012, and I was in the United States on an exchange program as part of my master's degree. The professor assigned to mentor me was a gay man in his sixties who, over the next few months, would become a role model for the type of adult man I would like to become: intelligent, welcoming, and free. During the time we spent together, he shared many stories about his life with me, including one I would like to tell you today.
From a young age, my professor understood himself to be gay and lived out his sexuality through numerous relationships and experiences, many of them marked by the need for secrecy and silence that characterizes the lives of so many people who identify on the queer spectrum. Around his thirties or forties, he met someone he fell in love with and began a relationship with. To everyone's surprise, it was a woman.
They spent the next twenty years together, got married, and had children. Eventually, as the relationship dissolved its sexual aspect and transitioned into a form more akin to a traditional friendship, they ended the marriage. They remained friends and, together with their children, a family.
From that point on, my professor returned to relationships with men. Throughout his life, he continued to identify as a gay man, even when married to his partner. For him, the surprise of falling in love with and becoming intimately involved with a woman was not enough to dissuade him from the clarity of his identity.
Needless to say, many people around him doubted his homosexuality, insisting that if he was capable of falling in love with a woman, he was at least bisexual.
Many people believe that words exist to explain reality in a definitive and unchanging way, rather than serving as approximations for something that can never be entirely summarized. In fact, this is something that everyone who aspires to play with the art of writing needs to know: words are not enough.
The same is true for identities. They help outline the contours of the people we meet and the ways we recognize ourselves, but they are just that, quick guides. When an identity gets in the way of what we are feeling or living, it is not reality that needs to bend to the identity, but quite the opposite.
I remembered this story after reading the text Transitions, from
, about how we continue to change throughout life, including in terms of our interests and sexual desires.And while writing this text, I listened to this song (in Portuguese) and thought the lyrics were quite fitting.
The song goes:
She will fall in love again
Again and again
And even unintentionally
And realize that it's not about others
It's about realizing everything she is
For so long she had to live
In the shadow of what others will understand
And there is no right
And there is no wrong
It's about being
Everything you are
And with these words, I end my letter for today.
With love,
Tales
Why end a marriage just because it’s turned into a friendship? Isn’t that the ideal?
Monogamous relationships are as common as unicorns