Not Gay Enough

“So you just moved here from Tucson?” Stan asked me.

“Yes, we moved so Dan could see this doctor at Penn for his back surgery.”

I had just attended my first trans guy support group at the William Way Center in Philadelphia. At the conclusion of the meeting, Dan, my then-boyfriend and future ex-husband, suggested we adjourn to somewhere nearby to grab coffee and a bite. The other five guys who had attended the meeting agreed to go along. It was October 2009: the fall air had enough of a chill to make us want to hurry down Spruce Street.

The narrow sidewalks of Center City Philly necessitated us to walk two by two as we made our way to a local diner. Dan, still using his rollator to get around as a result of his recent surgery, was bringing up the rear of the group, talking to a guy he knew from his previous days being involved in the Philly LGBTQ community in the early aughts. I was talking to Stan, the group moderator, glancing back over my shoulder occasionally to make sure Dan was okay navigating the cracks and bumps in the sidewalk.

“So how long have you and Dan been together?”

“Its been about four years. We also knew each other as undergraduates, but we went our separate ways for a while.”

“So you’re gay then?” Stan asked.

“Uh, yes,” I replied, wondering what about the previous conversation had not made that clear.

“But your boyfriend is a trans guy.”

“Yes,” my tone becoming more terse, as I sensed confirmation of these obvious facts was heading somewhere I wouldn’t like.

“So how many gay cis guys have you been with?”

I could feel my cheeks and the tops of my ears start to warm, “I’m sorry?”

“If you haven’t sucked at least one gay cis guy cock, I don’t think you can call yourself gay,” Stan informed me, assuming that my refusal to provide a listed inventory of any intimate acts performed with gay cisgendered men meant I had no such acts to list.

I was shocked into silence. I had not expected such a line of questioning, most especially from a fellow trans guy who had been given responsibility of moderating a support group for trans men. My struggle to be recognized as a gay man had been a long one and to have this precious piece of my identity assailed by someone I had approached as an ally was a punch to the gut.

I fell silent after that, grateful we had reached the diner. I did not speak through most of the meal, listening to the conversational patter of the other guys in the group, most of whom also identified as gay men.

I stared into my diner mug of watery coffee, Stan’s insinuation ringing in my head. I knew he was wrong: I was gay and no subsequent sex act was going to make me more or less gay.  I sat wishing for some way I could “prove” I was just as gay as the next queer: Petshop Boys lip sync contest? Broadway musical trivia? An interior design challenge?  I frowned and watched Dan, who was oblivious to all this, chatter on incessantly with the other group members.

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Trans men who identify as gay men is not a recent phenomenon. Although there are likely dozens of unrecorded biographies of such men spanning human history, the earliest I could find on record via some internet searches was Louis “Lou” Graydon Sullivan, who came of age in the 1970s.

I felt like a gay man before I knew it was possible for me to be one. While a sexual identity might seem easier to cultivate than transitioning to a different gender identity, for me they were critically intertwined. Being a guy wasn’t enough: being a gay guy was who I knew I was destined to be.

It initially surprised me when members of the LGBTQ community attacked my gay identity after my transition, but I am sorry to report it has happened many other times after my run in with Stan.  This is not a phenomenon only I have experienced. Although gay identified trans men participate in all facets of the gay experience, even using gay dating apps like Grindr, trans men not being embraced by all queers has been documented before.

While plenty of cisgendered straight folks might have questions or qualms about my trans identity, I have encountered far less straight cisgendered folks who subsequently try to criticize or invalidate the gay part of my identity.

A main motivator in the discussions I have had with self-identified cisgendered gay men who want to attack my “gayness” is my choice to have other gay-identified trans men as partners, a thought process which seems heavily reliant on the ridiculous yet prevalent “gold star gay/platinum gay” line of thinking.

This rationale also implies, as that idiot Stan did to me once, that our genitalia combined with our sex acts is what makes us gay. This reductionist approach asks more questions than it answers.

Perhaps these cis gay men are motivated to denigrate my gay identity because they feel they have had to work/suffer for their own gay identity and somehow letting a trans guy identify as gay will erode the very foundation of their gayness. You only have to read that sentence to begin to grasp the ridiculousness of the situation.

But why would another gay-identified trans guy seek to tear down my gayness? While I didn’t have the guts to ask Stan then, he spent time making it clear he had gone down on a number of cis guys. As Basil pointed out when I discussed this scenario years later, this narrative suggests gay cis men are magically “granting” lowly gay trans men gayness by being so kind as to let one suck their cock. It also speaks to a deficiency of self-esteem: instead of being willing to define your gay identity on your own terms, you are defining it by whether or not some other person will let you perform certain sex acts with them.

So Stan was saying to me a trans guy dating/fucking/loving another trans guy was not gay, which was implying neither my boyfriend nor I were men. To which he was saying he was not really a man, either, or was only a man when he was sucking a cis guy’s cock. Which is just silly, unless you plan to spend your whole life with someone else’s phallus half-hanging out of your mouth.

While I was tempted at the time to challenge Stan to a “gay off”, which I envisioned would be something like the walk off scene in Zoolander, I did not. Instead, I have chosen the life-long gay off of getting up every day and living life as a gay man. Because that is what I am.