LET'S TALK SEXUALITY: FROM SHAME TO SELF

If you have anything in your life that you feel like you are often asked to explain  or educate others about, this is the perfect podcast for you.  While my particular experience in this dynamic revolves around my sexuality, you could insert any word into that space; Race, Religion, Culture, Gender  - whatever the case is for you.   Our world operates in a binary understanding of most things, which leaves little room for those of us somewhere outside of that paradigm, and that kind of gap in understanding  leaves a lot of room for shame and fear to grow.  Whether you've spent your life feeling misunderstood for who you are or are just coming to understand what makes you the diving being that you are, I feel you.  We all deserve to live a life of acceptance and understanding - that's undeniable. The good news is, once we find those attributes within ourselves, the need to explain yourself  and pull the rest of the world along after us starts to fade away.  And that's when life can really begin to flow and unfold in ways you've only ever dreamed of.  If this resonates with you, stick around and join the conversation - I'd love to have you.  Let's get into it.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Unsided. Unsided. Unsided. Hey everybody, it's Christopher. Welcome back to another episode of Unsided. I'm always happy to be in conversation with you. It's always nice to kind of drop in and imagine that you're sitting here next to me on the couch in my little podcast studio. And we're just catching up. And we're sharing whatever's been on our mind. And this week it was a little challenging for me as I continue to learn to grow into having this podcast. And I continue to kind of figure out what it means to me and what I'm bringing to it, other than just myself. Um it I have bumps along the way where I will record episodes and then I won't air them because it's kind of like writing a bad song before you get a good song. You know, at least for me. The interview is not so much because they are what they are, but these conversations have to stop and feel inspired. And I find that if it's not an inspired thought, that I will stumble through the process or I'll listen back to the podcast and just something will feel inauthentic or won't resonate. So I start over. So here we are today, and I've been thinking as I've been doing some work this morning, what is on my mind? And you know, I'm not I'm not a scientist of any kind. I hold no professional degree in that capacity. I'm just a guy. I'm not here giving out advice. I don't have any grand thing to say, but what I can do is share my life experience. And what seems to be at the front of my life experience lately is my sexuality. And I say lately, and even as I say that inside my mind, I'm thinking, well, that's not true. It's kind of been there a lot for a long time. But I've been in a new phase of my life, a new era of my life, a new chapter, whatever the euphemism is, of my life. And it involves really embracing my sexuality more than I ever have. And maybe embracing is the wrong word. I'm finding words a little limiting as I talk about it. Because I let me go backwards and kind of give you a broad overview of my thoughts around this. I've never had to embrace who I am. I have had to look to the world outside of me to embrace me for who I am. Let me say that again because I think it's true for everybody. If we really look at it, we wake up with ourselves, we are ourselves. We are born into this beingness. Scrap all your ideas of religion or what comes before or what comes after. We're gonna talk about right now in this plane of existence. We are born as the wholeness of who we are. And we go through life sometimes talking about I'm going to embrace this part of myself, I'm gonna learn to embrace this part of myself, I'm gonna learn to be fully who I am. Well, the only reason we cannot be fully who we are and just be, that we have to go through this process of embracing, so to speak, is because the world around us feels uncomfortable if they don't understand something. If something can't be defined. And I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. We have to communicate. Right? We have to have a common language and someplace that we meet. And on so many different subjects we find our way through, and on so many different subjects as a world community, we don't find our way through. And some of those are around sexuality. Can be gender, can be race, can be anything that feels divisive or something that another person can't can't understand. You know, there are some some larger things that I suppose we all could understand potentially. We could all potentially understand what it's like to be at different economic classes. That's possible. We could all potentially understand what it's like to have to have different abilities or to have abilities taken away from us. That's possible. We're not all guaranteed that kind of stability economically or physically or with our health. We could all potentially understand what that's like, but we can't all potentially understand what it's like to have to embrace a part of ourselves like our sexuality or our race or our gender, where we have the burden of embracing that, when in fact it's just that we're trying to regain the wholeness of who we are, because as we grow, as we exist in the world, we realize the world needs to understand us. And so we start putting masks over things, we start uh being less of who we are. And I probably should stop saying we and make this again about myself because I don't want to paint a broad picture for everybody. But as I see it in my life, I've spent my life educating people about who I am. Again, not a bad thing. I kind of think that's what we do. We all tell stories, we share information about who we are. You know, as a father, I tell my children often, listen, one of the things that I'm here to do, the primary reasons I'm here as your father is to give you a safe space to exist while you show me who you are. But as far as I can see, I have spent my life kind of shifting and dodging and weaving and learning to quote embrace these parts of myself, not because I wasn't okay with them, but because the world needed to understand better. So as it relates to my sexuality, let's just clear a few things up. Not because I think any of you guys actually have questions, and maybe some of you do, but because one day my daughters will probably listen to this, my family will listen to this, there will be people who know me who will listen to this, who will think they have an understanding, and maybe they've just never asked me the question. And I can also say maybe nobody cares. But this is what's on my mind today, because as I live in this phase of my life now where I am married to a man and I am very much out and living my life, I have been reminded recently that I could stand to embrace my queerness even more. These are the words I hear. You could embrace your queerness even more. You can, I guess the other word would be lean into it. Whatever. And it's got me thinking because I wasn't ever really that thoughtful about whether or not I was queer when I was a kid. I was born and raised in Oklahoma in the middle of America. I didn't really know. I'm trying to think. I I think the first queer person that I met was in my teens. Actually, it may have been, you know, like early, early teens or 12 or something like that. When I was younger, my dad had a couple of friends, uh, two women. I can't remember the names, I wouldn't say them if I did, but anyway, two women who had stayed over. They were, they were my father liked to hang out with people who liked to party and have fun. And they would party. And, you know, I don't know. I thought that they were just fun, normal, interesting people. Uh, and these two women slept in my bedroom one night, and I slept on the couch. And I remember the next morning my dad or somebody said, but I think it was my dad, you can't sleep in there or we have to change the sheets. And I was like, why? And they said something to the effect of, you know, they're lesbians. They were together, and that's gross. And I remember that sticking with me and thinking, oh, oh, that's weird. Like, I think at that point I knew what a lesbian was, not because we had the internet or I could talk to anybody, but because my dad had a book on human sexuality. My dad wasn't really a closed-minded fella, but he was born and raised in Oklahoma and Texas. So, you know, he had whatever kind of understanding of sexuality came with that. Um in fact, I wouldn't say my dad was closed-minded at all, at all. But in any event, that was my first kind of understanding of there being something negative. And that kind of occurred around the same time that I was uh staying for my staying for the summer with my grandmother, and she went to work at as a security guard at a meat packing plant in Amarillo, Texas, and I stayed in her trailer in her trailer park, which I loved, didn't know any different. You know, we lived in a lot of trailers and apartments when I was a kid. We were not wealthy by any stretch, but we were fine. And um, but I stayed by myself because we were latchkey kids, and I watched the uh her soap operas, her programs, as she called them. And I remember there was a soap opera called As the World Turns, and there were two characters, Craig and Sierra, and Sierra was beautiful and sweet, and Craig was handsome and tall and blonde. And that was the first time that I remember thinking, oh, I think he's attractive, and I also think she's attractive. But I was too young to associate any sort of sexuality with that. I just registered the attraction. And then all of my first kind of uh loves were my first infatuation, the first time I couldn't get out of bed because I wasn't sure if someone liked me. They were girls. It was never a guy. I think as I look back, there were guys around me that I found attractive. I remember one time I went to a sleepover, and there was this uh a friend of a friend on the soccer team, and I remember thinking he was really cute and like I wanted my sleeping bag to be near his, but I didn't think of it sexually, obviously. And I had experienced in my childhood, I had experienced some sexual abuse. And so I was aware of sexuality and not um necessarily kind of an open positive way. And I I only want to leave it at that because I think it's important to know that that informs that like there was definitely something going on, you know, in my life that I was having to work out. But I don't remember being particularly I was stressed about that happening, but I wasn't stressed about what it meant about my sexuality, oddly enough. And I don't know if I attribute that to my mom or just the way that I look at life, but I certainly I had all these strong women around me. I was not a super masculine guy and I wasn't into sports, I was into the arts. I sang, I acted, and I had all these people, you know, supporting me. My father made fun of me sometimes. I definitely got bullied in school a little bit, but you know, none of this came back to me as like, oh, I'm so sad or depressed or scared about my sexuality. Number one, we weren't talking about it a lot. So, like my kids and their friends, there's a lot of conversation about sexuality. There's a lot of conversation about the stress of it because there's a lot of conversation in the ether on the internet, on social media. So they have a different experience than I did, for sure. So I go through high school, I've I fall in love with a girl. I think we're gonna get married. Thank goodness we don't get married. I go to college, and I remember starting to notice more that guys were attractive, but I was still like the first people I was attracted to at school at Northwestern were girls. Genuinely were girls. I wasn't awakened to that part of myself yet. I had been called all of the names gay, fag, feminine, you know, other pejorative names that I don't need to say. Somehow it, you know, I think it I felt like, oh, maybe they know something about what happened to me as a kid. But whether or not I'm gay or straight, like I'm just not thinking that much about it. I at that point, sex and sexuality still felt predatory to me, which I think makes sense. But I remember between my freshman and sophomore year, or maybe it was early my sophomore year, I went on, I don't want to say it was a double date, but two girlfriends and and me and another guy went out, and then the two girls fell asleep, and me and the guy were in the front room, and our feet started touching, and then the next thing I knew we were being sexual. And then the next night, I went to his apartment kind of stealthily, and it was like this part of me had been unleashed. Now we didn't talk about it, but we definitely kept it hidden, which I guess, you know, is some sort of internalized homophobia. But that to me feels like a natural part of coming out. It feels like I was just kind of understanding my sexuality. It just kind of broke through. That doesn't feel that different to me than anything else. If I were, if it was, if that was a straight story, it wouldn't be that interesting. It would just be a guy and a girl discovering their sexuality. But I remember the second guy that I was with before we were actually together, uh, we were just spending time together and he was deeply shameful. And all I know is that now I was starting to experience shame. So I went through college and I kind of worked out my sexuality, and I guess I didn't think that much of it in college because I did go to school with a bunch of very open-minded, kind, good-hearted people, all of whom were figuring themselves out. I was surrounded by a bunch of theater people. We were much more expressive. I I left college feeling really good about who I was, and by that point I was out and I was like, yeah, I've got a boyfriend and I'm gay. I guess I'm gay. Like I came out, I told my family. Um, I told pretty much everybody. I wouldn't say I told my extended family, but I I told my mom, I told my my friends all new. I guess maybe I didn't tell my dad until after I graduated college. But so now I'm dealing with these feelings of shame. And now I move into my 20s. And in my 20s, I here's what you gotta know about my sexuality overall, or what I'd like for you to understand, is that I am realizing now that I am very fluid when it comes to the idea of attraction to people, and it's not always physical. In fact, most of the time I'm attracted to a person's mind, I'm attracted to their energy. The physical is fun, the physical is good, and obviously the pheromones and all that have to be there, but I don't have a particular type of person that I'm looking for, and it doesn't also have to be sexual. There have been many times in my life when I own sex was not really on the table, and I would spend time with men or women, and here's what I think is interesting as I look back at it now. I was really struggling with am I a self-loathing gay man and I just don't want to say it, or am I actually bisexual, but I don't feel totally bi because I'd like men more, but there are certain things and certain women that I'm very attracted to and that I've had deep feelings for. And if I had just been left to my own devices to kind of figure that out, and you know, I had been parented by the world, if you will, the way I parent my children, which is okay, what are you feeling today? Okay, Christopher. Yeah, that's cool. So you're seeing that guy or you're seeing that girl, but that's not the case. Because people were afraid, and I was afraid. And you know, maybe and maybe in reflecting on it, if I had just been more comfortable with this is who I am, then the rest of the world would have just had to deal with it. I think that's probably actually the case. But remember, I was raised where I was raised, how I was raised. So even though in my mind, as I'm living my life as a kid, I'm not thinking that much about my sexuality, things are being imprinted upon me from religion, from community, from expectation. So I spent my 20s really struggling to understand who I was. But if you put me alone, you know, in a room without all those influences, thinking about my sexuality. I mean, it's so hard to say because there was so much shame, but it just didn't matter to me. When I was alone with my partners, when I was having time with my partner, whoever it was at the time, or whoever I was dating, or if I was with my friends and we were out at a gay club, like I didn't have shame around that. What I had was these kind of mixed ideas in my head about needing to answer to people to explain to them why I might be more fluid, why I might still be figuring things out, um, why I could kiss a girl and I could kiss a boy, why it was more important to me to talk to somebody for a long time than just to jump into bed, you know, in my 20s, why I was who I was. I just started feeling more and more and more pressure. And then in my early 30s, I started to kind of, you know, feel myself a little bit more. My hormones were calming down a little bit. I had left acting. I was working in healthcare administration, and I, for whatever reason, ended a short, very short-lived uh relationship with a guy. I don't even know if relationship's the right word, but with an older guy, very, very nice guy. We're still um in touch today. And I thought, no, you know what? It's time that I settle down and really, you know, like focus on my life. And it just so happened that that awakened a real attraction to a couple of women. I I think I went a long, I think I probably went five or six months without dating anybody. But then I met I met a couple of women at the same time, one of whom I ended up marrying. Now, the woman that I ended up marrying knew from almost the beginning about my sexuality. It's a fine balance when your sexuality is not on the right or the left, so to speak, of figuring out when to tell people, you know, in the dating, in the dating world. I mean, that was for me 20 years ago, 20 something years ago. So I don't I don't really remember exactly how hard it was. It was a different age, but I remember that I felt it was very important to tell her straight away or as early as possible. Once I was developing feelings, I wanted to tell her what my sexuality was. Because I had had a couple of women that I did have feelings for, one especially, whom I let go on too long without a clear understanding that they could hang with my sexuality. And I ended up getting my heart broken. So I told her, I gave her kind of like a movie moment opportunity to leave. I said, I'm gonna go in the bathroom. I've I know I've told you all this. If you're under here when I get out, then I know you're in. Uh, and if you're not, you're not, and we'll figure it out together. And she obviously stayed. And we had two beautiful children, and my sexuality was never hidden. Now, almost as soon as I got married, I went and started a show called Jersey Boys. And there were so many cool guys in it, most of whom were around my age or younger, and they all had girlfriends, or they were just getting married, or maybe I was one of the first to get married. But one thing that happens when people in musical theater get a job altogether that's gonna last for a minute, they settle down and have kids. I mean, I guess that's true of any time in life we find ourselves with stability and we're young, that's the opportunity. So, kind of without thinking about it, I went back into the closet, not with my wife and not with the people in my life who knew me, but here we are in 2007, and I've married a woman, and I'm suddenly a part of a community, and I just let time go by without telling anybody about my sexuality, because then I was always like, wait a minute, do I owe the people I'm getting to know and working with? Do I need to sit them down and be like, hey, by the way, before I met my wife, this is who I was, this is what we do in the privacy of like that's nobody's business. But was also really an easy way to fall back into the closet. So I started developing even more shame because even though my wife knew and the people close to me knew, I had all this these groups of new friends who didn't know. And as silly as it sounds, when when you've lived your life in a certain way, or maybe it doesn't sound silly at all, but having lived my life in a certain way, and now suddenly I'm around a group of guys and I can't comment on another guy being attractive, or I can't let on that I'm that I'm you know not totally straight or whatever the case may be, that I'm queer. I don't think I even ever used that word then because it was still a negative word. Um and I know this is self-imposed. I am not saying the world did this to me. I'm just recounting what the experience was like for me as I was trying to fit into this role as a straight guy. That started to really mess with my head. Because my wife and I didn't have any sort of real hangups around sexuality. That wasn't an issue, and it's certainly not what drove us apart. Contrary to probably a lot of people's thinking, because now I'm married to a man. And so it's easy for people to look at the ending of that marriage and think, oh, well, he just came out, or whatever the case may be. That woman was a very particular uh experience for me. That relationship was very particular. I think it was blessed and meant to be in many specific ways, especially for having those children, and then that ran its course and things happened, and I moved on and I fell in love with a man. It's easier to tell that story now, even than it was four years ago, three years ago, after we had separated, my wife and I. And I guess that's what brings me to the conversation today, this idea of embracing sexuality. I just gave you a bunch of backstory. But when I when I did finally, when my wife and I separated and we moved on with our lives and we were both in other relationships, I wasn't dating women. I dated men because I was now in a place where I think, first of all, I had ended a marriage with a woman and I didn't want another woman. I wanted that woman. It was so super specific for me. It was super specific for me. And I didn't understand this about my sexuality because I if I had understood, if people had done that gentle parenting again and checked in with me, or if the world had checked in with me and said, How are you feeling now? I could have just said, Oh, interesting. So I guess that my feelings for that woman were very specific, this relationship. And now I I kind of want to be over here and I want to do this. And I'm feeling, and it would have been, you know, okay, great. Well, you know, I hope you're happy. But it wasn't. It was now like, oh, I have to make a choice. Oh, who was I? Oh, was Christopher lying? Oh, was no, that's who I've been my entire life. And I guess that's what gets me back to this conversation here with you. You know, I've shared with you kind of the evolution of my sexuality in kind of short form. I could talk about it a lot more, but it would just get redundant. The point was I grew up, I had things happen to me as I grew up, but I really was just experiencing my sexuality as I experienced, and the shame grew and multiplied as I went out into the world and I had to experience more people in relation to my sexuality and more opinions in relation to my sexuality and more boxes that I needed to try to fit in and closets that I needed to go in and out of. Not for myself, but because either my agent or someone in my family or one of my friends or someone I was dating needed to understand my sexuality because we are raised with this kind of binary thinking. That's what's comfortable for us. It's either A or B, black or white, left or right. And that doesn't fit me. And it doesn't fit a lot of people, and we're realizing that now. So now as I live this next phase of my life, I'm in a world where I can talk about this. And there are gonna be a lot of people who either experience something like this or who have people around them experiencing something like this. It's a real freedom, but for me at 51 years old, it's it's like coming out for the first time, even though I came out when I was 19. Because now I'm living my life fully. I'm married to a beautiful man. My children are integrated into our family. They have a stepfather they love very much. I'm out in the world as a queer man. And so, in essence, as I'm embracing my sexuality now, what I'm embracing is not my sexuality. What I'm embracing actually is I don't care so much what you think. I'm embracing a feeling of authenticity that is not in any way connected to anyone or anything outside of me, needing to understand me or approve me. And I guess that extends beyond my sexuality because you know, going through many of the changes I've made in my life the past few years, I've had to embrace a new way of being, a new way of living. But my sexuality has been something at the center of my life that has been so balled up, so constricted, so filled with fear and shame. And I know I wasn't born with that. None of us are born with that. I know that because I'm a father, and I know that if I wanted to, I could instill fear and shame in my children about anything. That's how much power a parent or a community has over their children. And then as they get older, you know, my job is to make sure they know who they are and they're so clear about who they are and the fact that they don't have to care about what other people think, that I keep hitting that home for them because every day at school, in the many, many hours, that they're not with me. The the their school community, the world community comes at them with that shame because not everybody, not everybody is parenting or raising or guiding people in a way that says, hey, figure it out. I'm here, you got a safe space, figure it out. There's no shame in the figuring it out. And you don't have to come to a specific answer for me to make me feel safe. The greatest awakening I think anybody can go through is moving into a space of being so wholly grounded in oneself, of being so wholly clear of who you are, that you can then move through life with everything that life brings in a much more stable, peaceful, calm way. At least that's the goal for me. Some people like chaos. I don't like chaos. You know, I don't know how you feel about your sexuality, I don't know how you feel about this podcast. And frankly, I think subjects like this, you could take the word sexuality out and put other words in. Any place that we feel like we have to bend to make the world understand us. That's why queer communities flock together, that's why religious communities flock together, that's why racial communities flock together. Because we find people, groups of people who understand us and with whom we can put our guard down and stop explaining ourselves and not be seen as someone embracing their life, but be seen as someone who's living their life. I'm living my sexuality, I'm living my spirituality, I'm living my physicality, I'm living all of the things. I'm not embracing anything other than the courage to be authentically myself and not care how many questions there are around me. I'm living a good life. And for so long I didn't think my life was worth very much because it felt to me like my sexuality was flawed or broken. I dreamed of not having anything to be ashamed of around my sexuality. And now I'm there. And I realize it's not because the shame has gone away that that the world might have me feel, but because the shame was internalized the whole time. Because I felt the need to answer questions, because I felt the need to justify myself. Even if shame comes at us, even if questions come at us, we don't have to choose shame. You already are exactly who you've always been. God, whatever you want to call it, made you that way. No mistakes. Everybody else is just catching up. Well, that was one of the more personal episodes I've ever done. And I if you're still here listening, I hope that something resonated with you. Uh, maybe at least made you feel like you're not the only one. And maybe just made you realize that really it's not that big of a deal. Sexuality or whatever you're dealing with, whatever word you put in there other than sexuality. You got this. You truly, truly got this. You've had this since the day you were born. You don't have to be any less than who you are. Just live. The world is yours. You're entitled to it. You're entitled to be your whole beautiful self, the very way you were born. And the rest of us get the opportunity and the pleasure to watch you share with us who you are. That's that is a pleasure and a privilege. And wherever you are, I hope that you experience a lot of love and joy today. And if you don't experience it externally, take a moment and give it to yourself. You deserve it. I look forward to talking to you again very soon. Take care. Uncided.