A Personal Reflection on the Implications of Generational Dynamics

This past weekend I had the enjoyable opportunity to be able to just hang out and spend some time with one of my best friends. During the course of the evening she invited over a guy who she had just recently met. Just for the sake of context, it should be noted that he was a straight guy.

Flash back almost two and a half years from today. I had just come out, and I still attended a deeply conservative high school that was maintained by and affiliated with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (I want to make it clear that in no way do I want to give the impression that I’m bashing my former middle and high school, although I may disagree intensely with many of their social and theological interpretations of the human experience .  I received a wonderful, solid, comprehensive, and thoroughly enriching Christian education there which I shall cherish for the rest of my life, as well as meeting most of the people who I would probably consider to be some of my best friends). Consequently, the majority of my peers who attended the school were consistently conservative in their political as well as their social beliefs.

Even before I formally came out, and although most of my inner circle of friends knew already, I made it a point to wait until after graduation to do it officially. I was on several memorable occasions mocked and teased because of my notable, slightly flamboyant personality; which I never really made any attempts to hide because it’s just a futile effort, why hide who you are? Basically, the premise behind all of these jabs at me was that I must be and obviously was gay because I didn’t act or conduct myself in the stereotypical way that the rest of my male classmates happened to do. Essentially, it seemed that these guys, as is the case with a significant portion of heterosexual men, feel very threatened by the inherent notion and subsequent implications of homosexuality; namely, that being attracted to other men or in any way having the same mannerisms or characteristics of women, when it comes to being attracted to persons of the same-sex, severely weakens and subliminally destroys what it means to be a real man.

Advertisement