LETTERS TO AN ADONIS

Maybe I don’t love you. Maybe I never loved you; maybe I just wanted to be you. I wanted you to crush me so hard to your chest that I would become part of you. When I imagine you taking me in your arms, it’s not the sensation that I imagine, the exciting touch of something new, but the taut skin, the steely muscle, the dormant power of your biceps.

I see your brazen masculinity, your cocky swagger, your broad shoulders and my heart pounds faster. I would kill to know what it feels like to be you, even if it’s just for a day. Do you look at people and think “They could never love me”? Do you look at people and wonder what they think about you? Do you even see me or am I just another prancing faggot with a schoolgirl crush?

I watch you in the common room, talking about the size of your cocks, pulling down each other’s trousers, fighting like lion cubs. You urge each other to “Man Up”, to drink more, to shag more ugly girls, to throw harder, to catch better, to tackle more violently, to fight with more tenacity, to win. No one says these things to me. I am urged to read more, to write with more fluency, to put facts across more succinctly. When I was taught drawing room etiquette, you were probably rolling around in the mud with your friends. When I was taught how to make the right kind of compliment to the mother of the woman I am supposedly going to marry, you were spitting chewing gum onto the floors of shopping malls. Whilst I spent my time trying to become a charming conversationalist and an intellectual, you were lost in boyhood dreams of football championships, video games and what you’ll teach your children when they grow up.

But I have had enough of my coffee-table life. I don’t want to sit with the Lady Bracknells of the county, discussing my own eligibility for marriage, my lineage OR THAT FUCKING VIRGINIA WOOLF NOVEL. I want to be free. I want to be outside. I want to be in touch with my own body, my own manhood. I don’t want silk gloves and bone china anymore; I want mud, hammers, A PENIS. Let me be male, not some woman’s idea of what it is to be masculine, I WILL NOT BE A BOW-TIED DECORATION ANYMORE. I will build houses, I will fend for my family, I will fight away the darkness.

But then my own damned faggotry gets in the way again. How can I be masculine, when I am defined as weak by my very orientation? My flaws are not my fault, why can you not see that? I am effeminate, but I am not a woman. I am flamboyant, but I am not an actor. I admire beauty, but I am not an artist. I have no wife but I am not a widower. I am homosexual, but I am not evil.