I dream of being a hero to my buddy, and my buddy being a hero to me. I dream of a life where we're the best versions of ourselves. We're at the top of our game in the game of life, we got career dreams that fuel our passions at work, we got relationship dreams that fuel our passions at play. We support one another emotionally. We accept our lives and the journey that made us who we are; we vow to make a heroic effort to love on. We're amazed we've made it this far, and we're ready to take a chance and create something new, as individuals and as a duo. We're a buddy duo, like the greatest buddy duos of television and the movies. But we're a new kind of buddy duo for the new century. We're not fags. We're not this so-called “straight” thing either. We're bent. We're twisted. How could we not be?Sure, we bought into this whole “thing” we now know as Gay, but that was because we understood we were lovers of men, and calling ourselves “gay” was convenient. How else is a lover of men supposed to find another man that won't rebuff him in the light of day?
But we're not gay. Gay is a marketing term, a polite civil agreement between the old republic and the gayest among us who finally became empowered enough (and rich enough) to force a truce with said republic, which decided: Okay, you can be gay already! You can have your niches (decorating, theater, hair and makeup, general faggy behavior, empowered lesbians, hot lesbians!), just keep it all rolled up into one neat stereotypical package ... over there.
So we rode the gay wave, said to the world: Okay, I'll call myself gay, and I'll be ... 'gay' ... now can I have my buddy?
But the gay world doesn't necessarily cater to or care about the dreams of our kind (our kind being buddies who are not “gay” or “straight” but buddies who are male sexual animals who just wanna love and be loved by other male sexual animals without it having to mean you've signed on to some preconceived notion of who you are and your “lifestyle”).
So here we are, swimming in an ocean of gay fish but not so happy about the environment. The gay fish aren't excited over us, and we're not so excited over the gay fish. Where do we go? How do we find one another? How do we make a life for ourselves?We made it to the “post-AIDS, other side of Stonewall, other side of Gay” 21st century. Not that there was a bridge for us to cross, mind you. We snuck our way into this new millennium by way of a backwater swap. But we're here, and as much as we've seen in life, as much as we have known and not known, as much as we have felt, cried, died, dreamed, hoped, prayed, bargained, loved, hated .... as much as we have lived, we still need a buddy and we still need heroes.
Where are you, buddy? Let's be one another's hero. Let's be buddies for the glory of love.
