Comic Strips

Cool. Thanks for sharing. I guess I can see how it might sound a bit skeptical on reading with a certain intonation, but that wasn't the intention. The thing that has me curious is really someone that I used to know when I was in the Navy. I worked in security department on an aircraft carrier for about a year, and we were a really tight-knit group. We hung out outside of work and everything. One of the guys was openly gay, and we all supported him just the same. This other dude, who all just call Waters (because I've never had occasion to use a pseudonym before), was easily the weirdest motherfucker I have ever met in my entire life. Same as the rest of the group though, we're all friends and I trusted him to watch my back in a reaction Force scenario. We loved him, but he was just a freaking weirdo. His hobbies included playing World of Warcraft about 18 hours a day while off duty, really rare and esoteric whiskeys and scotches that I was happy to sample with him, and sneaking up behind people in dark engineering spaces give them a shoulder massage and growl at them, then laugh hysterically at the response.

A number of years ago, I managed to get into a chat with one of the other guys from our roving team, and I was asking him if he had any contact with some of the other people. Everybody I asked about moved on to pretty normal things, but I asked about Waters, and he said "oh yeah, he's gay now" and apparently he turned into a completely normal, well adjusted grown up person who happens to be gay. There was literally nothing holding him back from saying so at the time, but either due to social pressure from his family, and assumption that he made about himself as a child, or who knows what else, it just never occurred to him that he was gay. It seems like after he accepted that, and his mind didn't have to be constantly running some kind of error correction about how he really felt compared to how he assumed he should feel, it completely changed his personality for the better, and he was able to be a functioning adult in a professional setting (as fun as he was before). Ever since, I've wondered how many other gay people have had a similar experience growing up, where they just assume that all guys think that dicks are kind of cool to look at, and it takes them a little while to realize that the default setting of heterosexual is not what they really are. Anyway, that's why I ask.

Curious questions and honest discourse are the most important thing that we can engage in as people I truly believe. White people have no experience being black, straight people have no paradigm for being gay or bi, and I can't even fathom what it would be like to feel like I was born into a body with the wrong gender, but I would love for someone who's lived it to tell me what it feels like, because that's the only way I'll ever know. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.