Ultimate Fantasy 93 Joy of Discovery
Let me begin by telling you my ultimate fantasy. This is not a story about coming out or coming out late. I never came out. One night, at the age of twelve, I came out. I did not know it. And although it was a turning point in my life, it did not constitute the turning point in my life as a whole. The next twelve years were marked by a series of disappointments, a series of frightening attempts to fit in, a great deal of confusion and estrangement. At last, in the summer of ‘89, I came out. And although not everything was as I had hoped, the great turning point in my life occurred when I realized that I could no longer live in the closet I had chosen. It was then that I knew I had chosen the right way. And I am eternally grateful to H.G. Wells for that revelation.
I am a homosexual. Yes. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, there is a scene in which a young man is decked out in masculine attire and is being led to the opium den by a maidservant. The scene is a perfect allegory of modern-day living, in which the heroic individual alliance between man and man can no longer be denied.
A fantasy. What I mean by that is that what I have chosen to be, or try to be, is not the same thing as what I am. My heterosexuality has never allowed me to completely separate what I consider my true self from what I call my fantasy, or what I would like to be called if I were able to face the enormous challenge of becoming a person of authentic gay identity.
Well, I can’t tell you the joy of discovery! In my early thirties, I began fooling around with other men. Even at the age of sixteen, I was still attracted to girls. At first, it was fun. When we first hooked up, it was purely an excuse to get laid. But as our relationship developed, and particularly after I graduated from college, it became more than just an excuse. We spent nights cruising the gay-girl websites, watching videos in which young boys performed sexual acts on college-aged girls. Soon we found that the teenage boys in our group of friends were not only monogamous, they were also sexually adventurous as men. Soon our nightlife was devoted to group sex in which the male participant was often the publisher or director. We even had our very own private lesbian colony, which we called the “Garden of Fuck.”
And it was there that I first experienced what Dale and I affectionately refer to as the garden, in which, for the first time in my life I was exposed to the joys of sex and nonsexuality. Although, admittedly, we were still somewhat in the dark about the real-life risks involved. Fortunately, our home life was so filled with mature conversation that we were able to adjust to the “Wild, Wild West” atmosphere of the affair without becoming instantly paranoid. At the same time, our sense of adventure was growing.
Seed
In this chapter, I share a number of stories from my experiences of becoming-queer, of methodological anarchism. these stories are not true, for I am in agreement with the notion that there is ‘no such thing as a true story’. Nor do they follow a single line of direction or desire; they connect to each other in many ways. they form a rhizome. In sharing these stories, I do not have a simple message or a particular argument to convey. Like Ursula Le Guin, ‘I wish, instead of looking for a message when we read a story, we could think, “Here’s a door opening on a new world: what will I find there?”’
Let me begin by telling you my ultimate fantasy. . .
Corpus
- Queer AI
- Trained Model
- Perplexity 0.9
- Seed 947
Credits
Prompt adapted from Queer Methods and Methodologies