"A colleague told me today that I'm quite Metrosexual," says boyfriend T to me over dinner recently.
"Well he's kind of right, isn't he," I giggle, "apart from one important detail!"
"Yes, but I'm never going to come out, so I don't like people getting too close to the truth :-(."
"Do you really think he'd mind if you told him that you're gay?"
"I think he'd tell me to Fuck Off," replies boyfriend T, looking quite upset.
"You always say that, but I simply don't believe that everyone who you know is as completely homophobic as you think. Firstly, when a guy is confident about being straight, he really doesn't care if other guys are gay."
Boyfriend T shrugs, not sure whether to believe me or not.
"But more importantly," I continue, "whoever you're talking to about being gay, if you're 100% confident about your sexuality then you're likely to get a good reaction. It's when you're clearly unhappy about it and you tell someone, in that case the reaction might be 'Fuck Off'. But if your attitude is more like 'being gay is great, and by being my friend you can share in my fabulous lifestyle', then that kind of confidence is infectious :-)."
Although I don't mention it in the conversation, a couple of years ago I actually did a post about this topic, which I called The confidence mirror.
"But like me, this colleague is Asian," answers boyfriend T finally, after a short pause, "and he's straight too. He might not react much if I told him, but underneath I know what he'd be thinking and he'd definitely want to run away :-(. Worse, I'm sure he'd tell everyone, and then everyone would dislike me :-((."
It's clear that I'm not going to get anywhere with this discussion so I drop the topic and we start talking about what we're going to do the following weekend.
Later I start thinking about what boyfriend T said, and I realise that although I've met a lot of gay Asian guys, I have no experience in discussing gay life with straight Asians. So I'm wondering whether boyfriend T is right about the reaction that he's likely to get from other Asian guys? Presumably though, guys from different countries might react differently, so perhaps straight Thai guys would have a different attitude to straight Japanese guys? And what about the reaction of straight Indian guys, straight Korean guys, straight Chinese guys, straight Malaysian guys, ...
If any readers can educate me on this subject then I'd be very grateful :-).
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