To Be Young and Just About Anything Else

In May, someone paid for four conservative posts. Then of course someone else paid for eight liberal posts. I have not forgotten that person; these things have to be spread out and I've not spent much time online since Yahoo's fouled up my e-mail.

But here's one...inspired by a correspondent who's maintaining a low online profile. Although in the United States a rich young man proclaiming "I'm 'gay'" can be accused of trying to steal sympathy from real victims of ethnic or gender prejudice, there are places where he'd still be risking his life. This correspondent is a visitor from one of those places. If he told people in his home town some of the things he tells his e-friends while he's working in the U.S., he and any school friends suspected of having been too close just might be lined up against a wall. Or even just denied the right to go home and be quiet after their U.S. work permits expire.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for rich White guys trying to pretend that their not being offered top-salaried positions in church groups is comparable even with lower salaries for women, but I do have sympathy for people who face consequences far worse than unpopularity if they're even suspected of having feelings they can't help having.

The young man shared the publishable part of a memory of "dancing wildly" with another young man and "running through" the morning errands, about a year ago. And where they might be, and what they might be doing now, if things had gone differently.

Has anybody out there not been twenty-one? Well, yes, actually some of the intended readers of this web site aren't there yet; that's why this web site operates under such a tight family-filtering contract. Well, you're all over age twelve now, so you're starting to know the kind of feelings this post is about. They'll get worse before they get better. It will feel as if you've been saying no to what those feelings have been urging you forever, and as if the moral and ethical beliefs you've always held are there to make you say no to them forever, and as if the only choices you have are to be a miserably frustrated young person who will grow into a miserable, bitter, lonely, prematurely old person, or else to wallow in sin, shame, and guilt.

And if you hadn't had the great good fortune to be born in the United States the shame and guilt might be even worse: The author of one book this web site has reviewed, Sultana, claimed to have had a friend who was willing to be caught in a "sinful" act and "die for love," because after all the person felt that life under the applicable laws in Saudi Arabia was not worth living anyway, but under some countries' repressive laws, both or all of those tainted with the suspicion of Immoral Feelings might be in danger. A person who felt willing to "die for love" might ruin his or her loved ones' lives too. Relatives' property and social position, as well as those of known or suspected bedmates, or the lives of the bedmates, could be at risk.

Older people do understand, if we let ourselves admit it. Even if you were fully asexual at 21, which very few people were, you have to remember the running and dancing. It wasn't only sex (although, for most of us, most of it certainly was about sex). It was life itself surging through your body during the final phase of growing up. It was about work and friendship and family too; it was about God, hunger, thought, battle, and all the wonderful things in this world, but mostly it was about sex.

Such a lot of emotion poured itself into relationships that were, or might have been, or were not, after all. If the emotion was mutual and circumstances allowed us to "fall in love," maybe even fall all the way into bed, we usually regretted ever having met the person, six months later. If that didn't happen, who knew what heights of joy and beauty might have been lost forever...when you lost or threw away the address, or dutifully left the party with the person you'd gone with instead of throwing yourself at the person you'd just met, or kept the address but decided none of the letters you'd started to write had said the right thing because, after all, maybe there was no right thing to say.

I'd gone to a church college carefully selected as the best place for a seventeen-year-old to practice celibacy. At eighteen I'd had a nice age-appropriate commitment-phobic romance with a boy. At nineteen I'd anguished over the problem of whether it was worse for people to think I had that kind of feelings about any of the boys who were still at that school, or let their filthy minds latch on to the fact that my best female friend had admitted being bisexual.

All teenagers' feelings about their personal relationships are messes and my feelings about her, that year, were a fine example of a mess: I thought, in theory, political lesbianism eliminated some problems from the lives of those who could choose it, and also, in practice, the idea of anyone thinking I could ever choose it was insane, except in the context of thinking I'd ever consider profaning real friendship with that sort of thoughts, which was sort of nauseous. That is, she was an attractive person, but sex with her was a disgusting idea because she was such a close friend as to feel like a sister. Most of the boys weren't close enough friends to feel like brothers, but sex with them was a disgusting idea because they were half-grown boys. The young can go on and on about this kind of thing. Most of them do. I'll spare you because, like most middle-aged people, I see no reason why anyone but the twenty or fifty closest friends of a young person should be expected to put up with it--the endless analysis of the very sensitive and private feelings of the young, which always get hurt because the young can't stop talking, writing, thinking about them, and nobody else wants to know.

According to Freudian psychology, which many people still took seriously in the 1980s, being grossed out by any sexual possibility meant you were unconsciously turned on by it, so you were probably doomed to become obsessed with it unless you could be saved by being consciously and intensely attracted to some other sexual possibility. So I had church-college-type dates with boys at the church college: you went to free cultural events subsidized by the school, together, and if you'd really enjoyed the classical music or whatever, when the boy walked with the girl back to her front door, you expressed your feelings by shaking hands. Then after giving a little serious thought to the possibility of one of those non-romances getting serious, next year, I went to university. Well, I was interested in some of the undergraduate courses the four-year church college didn't offer.

This was how I got to be part of a "Michigan Group" of anything. The university was in Michigan. The first week, as required by Michigan state law, I had the mandatory measles vaccination and proceeded to become sicker than I'd ever been from actually having measles. People were always asking, as a polite way to make conversation, "So how do you like Michigan?" and I never felt that I'd seen enough of the place to answer the question fairly. What I remember about Michigan is that I always felt tired and chilly and, in retrospect, as if I were fighting a virus infection, which I was, for ten of the eleven weeks I was there.

But I did manage to feel a sexual attraction to someone there. We weren't in any of the same classes but people started to notice that, as a student groundskeeper, he always seemed to clear snow off the paths I used first. I liked that, so some days we even managed to take twenty-minute lunch breaks together. If I hadn't gone home with mononucleosis the possibility of actual church-college-style couplehood was in the air. Running, dancing, hat-throwing moments had not only occurred, but been mutual.

I probably wrote two or three dozen letters to that boy. I never mailed one. The schoolmates with whom writing letters seemed easier told me which other people we knew had mononucleosis, or "chronic mononucleosis," or "myalgic encephalitis," or "chronic fatigue syndrome." After a year or two news reports and medical journals became more useful than writing to people who reminded each other of a year I don't think anyone really wanted to remember. The distinctive feature of mononucleosis is that it's the most boring disease that can be imagined. You have boring little symptoms that don't get much worse and don't get much better, and everyone else becomes bored with hearing about them, and you naturally become even more bored with having them. After a year or two the only thing you want to hear about it is that it does eventually come to an end; if you keep pushing yourself to take just enough exercise to keep your liver working, but not overdo and make yourself worse again, eventually you recover your strength and resume growing up.

I usually remember my twenties in terms of work and family. Building an odd jobs service into a real business, building a relationship with a friend's problem student into a real sisterhood. For several years after mononucleosis I really was asexual; so was one of the more glamorous-looking young men I knew. Both of us had been paid just to pose, modelling clothes and objects, looking young and cute. Both of us joked, somewhat bitterly, about being premium-grade sex workers, with modelling and other odd jobs that exploited our youth and cuteness. "You mean you and he spent a week alone together on the beach and nothing (sexual) happened?" Yes. Exactly. When beautiful young people have had mononucleosis, what happens during a week on the Eastern Shore is that they walk, swim, sail, don't have relapses and feel ill again, and that becomes what they do happy dances and throw their hats in the air about. We did things that sounded like temptations if not positive sins, because we were beyond temptation. (Which is not to be confused with the spiritual virtue of chastity.)

And I never touched a lesbian, but I did knowingly join, and march with, and raise funds for, and let my teenaged sister join, and publicly hang out with, a group led by some very overt and public lesbians. Their immediate cause was just, and I never had thought anybody needed to discriminate against those women. They were living in flagrant violation of the rules of most churches. So what? They weren't members of any of those churches.


Eventually I recovered enough strength to be considered heterosexual rather than asexual again; there was a nice wholesome romance with a man who was probably perfect for someone else, and then a marriage with a man who seemed perfect for me at the time. And even a public, socially recognized, marriage does not make sexuality anything but a source of problems for humans, because, as Christians have traditionally put it, we are a fallen species cursed with a certain fundamental distress about the whole idea of perpetuating the cycle of mortal life. You still worry that your spouse will be tempted to cheat, or that you will. You still are separate people, living together in separate bodies; each of those bodies is still doing its own thing on its own cycle. I think accepting that sexuality is a physical phenomenon we have to make a conscious effort to bring under the control of love, rather than being a source or effect of love, helps a lot; you can reach agreements about what to expect from each other, when, but that still does not make everything smooth...neither everything about sex, nor everything about showers, or television.

In the United States our government now recognizes same-sex marriages. Many churches do not. I personally think recognizing same-sex marriages was a mistake, not even because anybody's reasons for getting married or anybody's preferred way of consummating marriage is worse than anybody else's (although, theoretically, I'm sure that must also be true) but because the whole idea of same-sex marriage was held out as bait to get people to accept discrimination against the unmarried, which at least 51% of all people who have been married are still going to be at the end of their lives. Fewer than 1% of all couples die at the same time, so more than 51% of people who were married and were never divorced are still going to be widowed. I am a widow and my concern throughout the whole flap about recognizing same-sex marriage has been that it's really all about allowing more harm to be done to people like me.

Identifying oneself primarily with a sexual persona is a luxury of extreme unearned privilege, and it's also one whose appeal is necessarily based in a certain immaturity, a feeling that the whole world is concerned about me-me-me-and-my-little-feelings. The world doesn't know or care about your little feelings, twenty-somethings. Most of the world cares about whether you can stop yapping on about your little feelings and do your job, a small minority of the world cares about whether you're attracted to them, and your parents care about when and how you're going to promote them to grandparenthood. That's all.

The privilege factor makes American "gay" men almost unique, or at least part of a small and widely scattered global minority. Ethnic minority status is usually visible and always audible, and thus easily used to keep people away from unearned or even earned privilege. Femaleness is also visible, audible, and easily used to perpetuate inequities, even though a few of those inequities do work in favor of females. Individual quirks can certainly be visible, audible, and used to perpetuate inequities; today's Twitter stream also contained tweets from someone who identifies as autistic, although when people my age say "autistic" we're not talking about people who are ever going to learn how to talk, much less type, and also tweets from several people who identify as nonconformists, freethinkers, "creatives" and/or introverts. Now those categories still guarantee discrimination. "Gay" men, on the other hand, are super-privileged rich White males who achieve victim status only when they choose to publicize things society has traditionally given them the privilege of keeping private. This level of privilege is annoying--especially to women, many of whom are still fighting for our right not to tell everyone we have or have not even met what goes on in our bedrooms.

That the American left wing has strategically exploited "gay" men, not only for the abundant wealth and free time many of them have poured into any cause they've endorsed, but also for the immaturity that makes some of them willing to be exploited and the annoyance so many people of good will feel about this exploitation, is very annoying.

The latest? People who claim they were discharged from the military service because they couldn't shut up about their sexual kinks are now screaming for attention to their emotional problems--ahead of actual combat-wounded veterans. If the actual veterans were younger or less likely to be missed, by now, one would like to drag some of these screamers out to tell their problems to someone who stepped on a grenade, or picked up a serious disease during actual military service. If they dared. I suspect that just a look from some of those old failing eyes would shut'em up.

Or they could at least consider the plight of "gays" other than themselves. I touched on this while reading a book called In This Desert There Were Seeds, last winter. In e-mails with another person who liked that book I'd been trying to work out exactly why I liked one of two stories in that book that are about female widows, and why I didn't like one that's about a "gay" man in liberated Australia. Oz Dude (the author didn't give the character a name) is free to be as "gay" as he likes with the worst consequence being that another young man, e.g the character Otis (does Oz Dude like Otis?), won't be his friend. Er. Um. Oz Dude obviously, under the rules of fiction, can't know that he's a character in a collection of stories half of which come from a country, Singapore, where overt homosexuality is still a crime, but one would think he could spare an activist thought for the feelings of "gay" guys who live there. The book had been published and we were e-mailing about it while another country, Bahrain, was publishing news about overt homosexuality still being a capital crime.

As an independent female widow I still do have to be a bit of an activist about the rights of my kind of people, even in the United States, but I do bear in mind that several countries' laws still make being an independent female widow much more difficult than ours do. If there were still countries where it was legal, normal, and commonplace to shove widows onto their husbands' funeral pyres, I might still fret about the possibility that someone--maybe a client whose big lucrative job I really wanted--didn't liiike me, but I think my fretting would show some awareness that at least nobody's scolded me for letting my husband be cremated all alone without my company. That English-speaking people usually at least pretend to sympathize, and keep their fear that bad luck might be contagious to themselves, is an improvement. Some days it's felt like a very small improvement. Nevertheless.

(In the book, for those wondering whether to read it, both of the stories about female widows indicate that their situation in India is less appalling than it used to be. Well, one of the widows is old and dies, and one is young and lives; obviously it's more fun to read about the one who lives. All of the stories were prompted by the idea of writing about something the writers feared and finding hope. If you like short stories you'll probably like Seeds.)

So there's this young male correspondent, living in New York, where he's free to be "gay" but ironically unfree to run and dance because of coronavirus...being young. In the summer. In the city. Does anyone my age not remember the tune to which those words go, and the mood that tune expressed? Being young throbs in the summer, in the city, even when you're happily-for-the-moment "in love" and even when you're free to go to the beach after work. It's a pleasure and a pain at the same time. It makes it dang hard to shut up about your feelings and do your job.

Being young also irritates a certain kind of older person. I read the correspondent's memory and felt grateful for the way it evoked mine. Some of us, unfortunately, do not enjoy being reminded. Some middle-aged people really do grow bitter and mean, and instead of smiling nostalgically they scowl, and try to make life harder for the young.

(My local newspaper is now featuring daily devotionals for those who miss going to church. Hmm. Let us now pray, or consciously meditate, or whatever we do, that we'll never become the mean kind of older people. Or, if we have become or suspect we are becoming that kind, that life will snap us out of it.)

The hormone levels do subside, after the body finishes growing up. The emotions throb less noticeably. You sleep through the night more often, after age 30; or, if not, your sleep is disturbed by different feelings. Reactions your body used to have with little warning, sometimes in embarrassing ways, come to require some conscious planning, even conscious effort...most of the time. Whether there's any way to predict which Highly Sensory-Perceptive individuals will continue to enjoy those reactions after age 50 remains unknown. I would guess that most of us still feel the urges to run, sing, and do happy dances, between ages 30 and 95, but become more aware of when the urges are likely to strike and find more ways to enjoy those feelings in places where they won't trigger envy from the less fortunate. That is the benefit of shutting up and doing your job when you are 25. Eventually you may feel like cheering on some socially recognized occasion of good cheer, along with people who are 30 or 50, and shutting up about the fact that you also happen to be 70 or even 90...We can be cheerful without singing out loud. We can cheer for a sports event or a fireworks display without rubbing people's faces in the other things we're happy about.

The content of those gleeful moods does change, I suppose. On Saturday I mentioned waiting eagerly for an elder to share the good news about his and some other elders' good health. Today, when I think about it, I'm still feeling pleased. Yes...pleased. At 50 you can contain the urge, even while passing by the home of a neighbor who is active but miserable at 70, even if that person is also annoying, to say "My friend or relative who's 80, 85, even 90, is looking better and having more fun than you are!" I'm still pleased by the news they shared over the weekend--someone who had a stroke in May was cleared to drive again, in July!--but I was able to do the happy dance in decent privacy.

It's possible to say that what I've always said, and am still saying, to young "gay" people (or even just to young people) is not the most liberal message. It is, however, a liberal message. It is still based in the ideals of freedom and tolerance and live-and-let-live.

Yes, discretion is still a good idea. If we learned anything in public school, was it not that, if the grouchy math teacher everyone hates has just made a big speech about its being possible to give only one passing grade, it's a good idea not to let the rest of the class know exactly which of your friends got that C minus? (After forty years, I will now tell fellow sufferers in that class: I was not the one. So who was? I'll never tell.)

Yes, whether you meet all the qualifications for a big white wedding in the most fashionable "upscale" church in town, with cameras popping and whirring even in the sanctuary, or feel obliged to settle for "At least this state recognizes our marriage," there are still people who would prefer not to know that you made it through enough "in love" days and "out of love" days to have Taken The Plunge, and that you still feel like running and dancing just because you're still together--after a week, or a year, or thirty years.

I've been blessed to know people who still felt that way about each other after fifty years. I knew because I was in the rota of younger relatives who hung out at their houses after one of them had been ill. They'd lived long enough, and so had we, that they didn't need to tell us why they were still looking at each other and saying "Why don't you go home and leave us alone," at two o'clock, on the day after they'd asked me or some other relative to stay at their house until four o'clock. The one who'd been ill wasn't running or dancing any more, though the other one probably was, out in the back where other people wouldn't see. Their eyes still lighted up. We could still tell.

A lot of the time between the ages of 20 and 30 feels, even if you're married (and you were far too young and now you realize that, etc. etc. etc.), as if you're going to spend your whole life waiting to be with someone you can't be with right now, and if you have to wait your wonderful hormone mood will shift and it won't be the same, even if you have to wait only a few hours, etc. etc.

That specific feeling, I was glad to discover, does pass. You learn with experience: Hormones go away, and then they come back. By the time person can get off work, tonight, your mood's changed. You still get to be together and have a different mood. The mood that feels as if the sight of person were setting you on fire will come back another time.

Love, marriage, and sex are worth waiting to get right, even when hormones are screaming that settling for something that may be less but is here-and-now "feels so right," and even though life offers no guarantees that what you think you're waiting for will ever come out quite right.

I never really expected to marry the boys I liked in high school or college. I never even had a date, even a church-college-type date, with the boy I liked at university. I never married the man whose mother, soon to become a professional social event planner, was just itching to give us the big church wedding of the decade, either. I settled for "In D.C. we're married; the rest of the States will have to recognize that." Well, the U.S. Constitution doesn't specify that, and Maryland didn't.

People I knew and respected might have refused to recognize our marriage because he was divorced. People we didn't know personally, but whose violent tendencies he feared, might have refused to recognize our marriage because our skin colors didn't match. None of our own immediate families would have refused to recognize our marriage, but some of them might have fretted about it, because I wasn't on a career path that led to the level of income to which he'd been accustomed, and/or because he'd actually gone bankrupt. Most of the people we knew would have recognized our marriage, but treated it as a joke and refused to believe it could last, because our religious and political affiliations didn't match. The state of Maryland refused to recognize our marriage because nobody had bothered to give them money to do so. This really makes me wonder whether the state of Maryland has any moral right to receive any money from anybody, and whether the government of Maryland should sink in a pit.

Anyway, I know firsthand that there are worse things, a lot of worse things, than having people refuse to recognize that you're married. If you are, you are. The Bible plainly says that "one man, one woman, for life" is the ideal. The Bible plainly says that people have been blessed by God while living together, practicing good will, in arrangements other than the ideal. The Bible says nothing about anyone being spared from opposition to arrangements they may make that conflict with the arrangements other people think they ought to have made. The Bible does mention some of those other things that are worse than people's not understanding how we feel.

However we feel about either same-sex marriage or the Bible, I would hope that all who read this web site can at least agree that the choices people make about how they deal with the feelings of being young are their own choices, and should not be treated as crimes. At least, if any sexual choice young people make is anything like a crime, making babies and then failing to rear those babies would be the closest. And even that could hardly be as much of an offense against humanity as, say, failing to pay people for work they've done.

Pray that the young men who wanted to be in New York so they could safely admit they had feelings about each other, and now can't act out those feelings because older people are afraid of catching a cold, will be allowed to stay in the United States as refugees, marry each other, and live together in a gorgeously decorated house with a big back yard where they can run and dance in privacy? How would I know whether that's even what they'd be happy with, ten years from now? Maybe it will, maybe it won't. For now, I can pray that they'll be able to make choices now that won't make them miserable ten years from now.

Scroll down if you missed it: This web site just reviewed a book in which a woman describes in painful detail how unhappy her mother was after an early marriage. Then when she grew up, this woman, the writer known as Brooke Lynn, also married early, felt unhappy, felt that she might have been happier if she'd married someone else, but she chose to work through those feelings and stay with the father of her child, and they stayed together and felt blessed. Sometimes long-term happiness, blessedness, bliss, comes from learning to say no to what "feels so right, now" and yes to what will continue to feel right later on.

Yearning is part of our human experience. People yearn to be together, they yearn to be apart and free again, and then if and when they outgrow yearning for one kind of sexual experience or another they start yearning for their lost youth. (In middle age I find that, though all the different kinds of yearning are still possible at 50, the proportions shift; I spend more time missing older people who've died relative to the time I spend missing living people I expect to see in the near future.)

What I do wish for, and pray for, for young people is that they can appreciate that the capacity to yearn and throb, to cry real tears because you can't be together right now or to run around grinning and giggling because you can, is what keeps all of us emotionally alive. Feelings come and go. Some feelings are more fun than others. At least we can all hope not to become the grouchy, emotionally dying, kind of people who feel a need to act out hate toward those who still want to dance.