Gay lifestyle confidence (1st installment)

Back in May, I wrote a post titled the gay lifestyle black belt. The idea that a person goes through various stages when they come out as gay is certainly not new, but perhaps no one had suggested before that parallels can be drawn with martial arts grading hierarchies. I didn't intend to take the idea any further, but since then several guys have asked what the grading criteria are, most recently close encounters in a comment to my original post.

This is a serious subject, because most people find the coming out process quite hard. There's also a lot of academic work on the subject, for example the Cass Identity Model which defines six stages in coming out. If I have any academic point to make, I reckon it's that these models don't go far enough.

The final stage in the Cass Identity Model is Identity Synthesis, which I reckon corresponds to what I was calling the gay lifestyle black belt. At that stage, the person is 100% comfortable being gay, although the gay label is usually an important part of their identity. I reckon that one can go further than that. In the words of my previous posting, I reckon that "At the highest gay lifestyle competence level one has forgotten that one is gay because it's identical to being alive!"

Like most of what I write here, the comparison to martial arts grading was meant to be a light-hearted idea, and given that this is a serious subject it might not be appropriate to think about grading criteria. Having said that, as long as no one takes it too seriously, it reckon it might be fun to think about this topic :-). But I don't have a monopoly on wisdom so rather than asserting the grades and grading criteria, for now I'm only going to make a few suggestions and pose a few questions. If people can leave comments and suggest answers to some of the questions, I'll do a follow up post in a second installment next month when it should be possible to be a bit more definitive.

First, what should the grades be? Close Encounters made a suggestion in his second comment to my original posting, which was as follows:

• White Belt
• Yellow Belt
• Orange Belt
• Green Belt
• Brown Belt
• Black Belt
• Blue Eagle
• Silver Tiger
• Golden Dragon
• Grand Master

but I don't think we need to be bound by existing convention here. In particular, should there be a Pink belt somewhere along the path? Although it was me who suggested that to Close Encounters, I'm not sure about the idea now, because I think Pink is often associated with the more effeminate type of gay guy so maybe it's not appropriate for everyone. Or perhaps there should be a rainbow coloured belt somewhere?

In terms of establishing the grading criteria, I reckon that it's just a matter of identifying all the important milestones in the coming out process, ordering them in terms of difficulty, and then grouping them to form the criteria for each belt. In a martial arts context, I believe that the 'white belt' does have to be earned, so as I said in the original posting I reckon the 'white belt' corresponds to 'Coming out to oneself'. In between 'white belt' and 'black belt', I can think of the following milestones, but can anyone think of any others? Or perhaps some of my suggestions below aren't important enough to be on the list? I've listed these milestones in the approximate order that they happened to me, but everyone is different so maybe this isn't the best order?

• Tolerance of being gay. Initially one may well hate oneself, so I think this does comes after white belt
• First attempt to meet other gay people (non-sexual)
• First gay sexual contact
• Comfortable in a gay social environment
• Acceptance of being gay
• Coming out to old friends who don't know you're gay
• Coming out to family
• Large circle of gay friends
• Coming out at work
• Comfortable in a gay sexual environment (e.g. Gay sauna, gay orgy)
• Looking for long-term gay relationships
• Proud to be gay

Beyond these suggestions, perhaps the following are sensible candidates for milestones in the Dan ranks:

• Maintained a long term gay relationship for 5 years
• Maintained a long term gay relationship for 10 years
• Immune to homophobic insults, whereas a guy at the black belt level might be eager to trade insults
• Maintained a long term gay relationship for 20+ years
• So comfortable with being gay that one actually forgets that it was ever an issue

Anyway, as I said above, I don't think I can work all this out on my own. So I'm looking for help here, does anyone have any good ideas on this subject?