I suppose I ve been lucky. For a good few years there, I had a plan. Not many of us have plans, so it felt good to have one. It was one that scared the bejaysus out of me, but provided a deep, and potentially satisfying, challenge, something that would bring out the best in me by the time I turned forty. Or so I thought. I was asked whether I would like to be the father of a child, by a lesbian friend of mine. After she asked me, I went away, took a deep breath and a HIV test, and came back and said yes.
She s changed her mind now, four years later, for reasons that are personal to her. But I m left this week with a void that I hadn t realised was there. When I first realised I was gay, I didn t really think about the significance of my not having kids as a result. I was young, I wasn t put under any pressure by my family to breed. Children just weren t on my agenda.
It s the same for most men. But heterosexual sex, for most people, has a knack of constantly reminding you about babies, if only because so much energy is spent preventing them from happening. With homosexual sex, the concept simply doesn t arise. There are other things to worry about, of course; but being responsible for new life is not one of them. And so, the idea fades away, until your friends begin to have children.
Going mad with lack of sleep, stressed about money, they look at you with withering condescension as you say how lucky they are, as you bounce their little giggling bundle of joy on your lap. Well, that s how it was for me, until I was asked to consider co-parenting myself. I found it one of the most terrifying offers of my life, for when I was asked, I realised how little responsibility I had taken on in my life before, and was freaked out at the prospect of anyone looking to me to be responsible for them.
It wasn t that I was living a life that was markedly different to plenty of other single gay men in a big city; but I felt that if I were ever to have someone look to me as a father, there was no way I could carry on having the sort of sex life that I was having then. It suddenly seemed too sordid; I felt ashamed. I would have felt fine about myself if I was in a stable, loving, monogamous relationship. But you can t make that happen. And it didn t happen for me. But I learned about not feeling ashamed, and about treating myself well, respecting myself. I may not be perfect, but I m doing the best I can.
Queer legends
Send in the clowns. Mythology fascinates me, for I believe the stories resonate with the psychology of the culture they re part of. Homosexuality doesn t feature much in Celtic mythology, interestingly enough; but the classical Greek stuff is full of it. Even the king of the gods, Zeus, was liable to fancy a young buck every now and then, much to the displeasure of his queen, Hera.
One of the youths he fancied was called Ganymede, a young beautiful prince. In mythology, Zeus swooped down as an eagle from the heavens, and had his way with the boy. He then gave him a job, as cup-bearer to the gods, and eventually was cast into the heavens, where he became the Zodiacal constellation of Aquarius.
Now I m not suggesting that all Aquarians are young passive princes, waiting for a swarthy claw to grab them away into the sky; but I do think that it s interesting that one in twelve of the signs of the Zodiac, supposed to represent twelve different aspects of being human, is definitely homosexual. It corresponds, roughly, with the incidence of homosexuality in the general population. The word catamite, meaning a sexually passive homosexual youth, comes from the word Ganymede. We don t know much about the gay prince, really. He d had a weird trip previously with a woman, who d been bewitched to become sexually obsessed with young men; so obviously, poor Ganymede wasn t sure at all whether he d been shagged for his looks or for his personality.
In another myth, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Ganymede is mentioned once in passing; Eros, the god of love, is discovered playing dice with him, and cheating at every throw. Poor Ganymede. Not the luckiest in love, it seems. He s condemned to eternal disappointment, for the king of the gods is a hard act to follow. But he s unavailable, married to a woman who can offer him a home and a family. Such things are not on Ganymede s agenda, apparently. He doesn t grow old. He achieves immortality by being placed in the stars, as gay men have done for millennia, by leaving behind a legacy of creativity, in place of offspring. So much for fairy tales. n