The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

Time: 26 minutes
Distance: 2.36 miles
Top Speed: 6.1 mph
Calories: 244


Today I was approached by one of Jehovah's Witnesses. I could see him from a block away; he was a sharply dressed black man who kept looking up like someone who was unfamiliar with his surroundings but confident just the same. We made eye contact at about thirty feet, and he rushed in quickly to make his pitch.

I had on my iPod, so I was trying to turn it off and listen to him at the same time. He mistook this for frantic disinterest on my part and waved it off amiably. It took us a while to sort each other out and settle into a conversation, and when we did I told him that I used to be one of them.

"Used to be!?" He was incredulous. "What happened?" I told him I was gay, and he was just as surprised. I'm always interested in exchanges with Jehovah's Witnesses, because I've seen how these things work from the other side as it were; I can tell who's putting on a very public face and who's being genuine, and this guy was totally legit. If this were forty years ago, perhaps, he would be the sandwich-board street preacher; I could tell he was doing this in part because he just loved people.

What was most interesting, though, was his response to my admission of faggotry: "You should come back to us. You were born a man, you're still a man! Unless you've made changes I should be aware about!" We laughed, he gave me a booklet, and I went away annoyed. (I'll admit to ego here, but you really don't convert people by indirectly attacking their manhood.)

There's a perception amongst a lot of my straight coworkers here that because I'm gay, I must be interested in "playing the role" of a woman. One of them even goes so far as to call me 'one of the girls,' which is actually a secret handshake that lets me in on all of the best office gossip and frank womanly discussions that are really too much information for my poor gay brain to handle. This same coworker insisted that I answer who's the man and who's the woman in my relationship with Ryan. She excuses this behavior by saying she had a gay friend in high school and he was completely fine with this.

It's rapidly growing to be a pet peeve of mine that I'm somehow viewed as a 'woman' just because I'm gay. Most people who know me probably think I skew that way anyway, but it's for a wide variety of reasons. I'm comfortable enough in my masculinity to accept the label if people *have* to give it, but I'm not comfortable being an outlet for someone's confusion between homosexuality and transgenderism.

I like my penis. I use it often. (What was I saying about too much information?) I've never been aroused by fantasies of losing it, or gaining woman-parts, and I don't have a fascination with breasts and vaginas. I'm a guy who likes other guys. It's really that simple. There's nothing wrong with men wanting to be women, or women wanting to be men, but I'm just not one of them.

This perception exists, I think, because gender roles are so strongly ingrained into the way we view the world. Men exist to perform a certain function and so do women, and a lot of our cultural ideas about the attributes and niches either gender tend to inhabit stem from these biological functions. I think this is natural to a certain extent; women are viewed as being better with children because their initial involvement in child-rearing is so much more extensive than a man's. Men are viewed as liking violence and physical activity more partly because we tend towards being more physically solid than a woman. These stereotypes are stereotypes, but they exist for a reason.

What's really fascinating to me is how complicated and all-encompassing these gender roles have become. Saying you're a man comes with certain baggage, and even though that baggage might look different depending on what culture you're in it's all made of the same stuff. You should not be very emotional, you should be aggressive, you should like sports and you should most *definitely* appreciate the female form. Admittedly, I don't fit the gender role in a number of ways. But not assuming the socially-accepted role of being a man and not actually *being* a man are two different things.

What does being a man mean to you? Do gay men automatically seem more feminine to you? Why?