Pride and the Pin Drop
In this episode, I go back to the very beginning, to a Catholic middle school in the seventies, where I sat next to two of the only openly gay kids in my class and had no idea yet that I was looking at my own future. I trace the years that followed: a marriage that, in hindsight, mirrored exactly what I refused to face in myself, a nine-year engagement to another man, and the slow, underground recognition of my attraction to women that I kept refusing to acknowledge, even as I pointed at everyone else's contradictions instead of my own.
I talk about meeting my ex-wife, the relationship that followed, and the decade we spent together before divorcing. I also talk about what came after: a string of relationships with men that, on the surface, looked like a return to old patterns, until one relationship in particular forced me to finally name what had been driving my attraction to men all along. The moment I saw it, I could feel that lifelong pull simply fall away, not because anything was wrong with what I'd felt, but because I had finally separated what I actually wanted from what I had been unconsciously chasing.
I share this story because I believe someone else's seemingly unrelated experience can be the exact code that unlocks a part of you that's been locked behind walls you didn't know were there. That belief is part of why I do this work at all.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In seventh and eighth grade, I remember going to a boy's house with another boy, and we would listen to Elton John records after school. These two boys were the only two identifiably gay kids in my Catholic middle school class in the mid-seventies. The father of the friend whose house we were at was a prominent basketball coach, and was not proud of the fact that his son was gay. I am imagining that the shame my friend carried probably contributed, in no small part, to his death from AIDS in the early eighties.
Though there were signs all over the place, I had no awareness of my own sexuality at that point. Not long after college, I had gotten drunk once and made out with a roommate, and then another time, after drinking, made a pass that was rebuffed. And then I shut the door on that closet and walked away for quite a few years.
I moved to New York City, perhaps ironically on the same block as Stonewall, and then ran back to Ohio to marry a man. But again, I was pointing fingers when there were fingers pointing back at me that I still refused to acknowledge. I followed that relationship with a nine-year relationship with another man. We were engaged, and when that broke off, I knew finally that it was time to deal with my underground attraction to other women.
I moved back to New York City. It was an Easter Sunday. My ex-wife and I very possibly met on that first Sunday when I arrived. It took until June for her to convince me to go out on a date. It was a fabulous dinner in Midtown, followed by a very romantic dessert at the River Cafe in Brooklyn that overlooks the entire Manhattan skyline. When we came back to my apartment in Chelsea, we made out for a little bit. And the next day I woke up and asked her to never contact me again. I was so freaked out by what had just happened that I had to shut it down.
Despite that, I did end up dating another woman that summer. But I think on an unconscious level I knew there was no long-term relationship potential there. It felt safer somehow. Come fall, I agreed to go out again with the woman who would be my wife, while still dating another guy. He and I had planned a snowboarding trip during the holidays, but just a few days before, my back went out. For the very first time ever, I was so incapacitated that I could not even walk down subway steps. I couldn't even walk up the steps of a bus, and definitely couldn't manage the stairs of my walk-up apartment. So the woman who would be my wife swept in and offered her space in her elevator building.
By the following June, we were moving across the country to San Francisco for her new job. And no surprise, I broke up the relationship in the middle of that move. So she took our apartment in San Francisco, and I ended up in Mill Valley, across the Golden Gate Bridge. We slowly got back together again, and our relationship ultimately spanned ten years before we got divorced.
I dated a guy for three intense, passionate months, until my former wife pointed out that he looked like my father. Yikes. That relationship was then followed by a three-year relationship with another lovely man. I ended up renting a cottage behind the house of a man a couple of decades younger than I was, and the energy between us was intense. He kept inviting me over for wine or dinner, and I kept refusing. And it was at that point that I finally allowed myself to recognize that my attraction to that man in particular was in large part due to the provider energy that he represented.
Once I made that association, it's as though something broke open, and I could feel this lifelong attraction to men fall away. This is not to say that anything is wrong with that dynamic, but for me, that attraction was based on that element of the relationship. And when I let go of that as being the piece of attraction, everything else fell away. Not just for that person, but for the desire to be with men in general. I love men. And that pin drop was a recognition that I couldn't unsee.
I was living with unconscious patterns, as we all do, that were driving me until I was ready to let go of them. I share this all today because I have seen that some seemingly unrelated story that someone tells can be the code that unlocks something for somebody else. A code that kept things locked behind walls and doors that never had the freedom to express itself.
We never know the impact we can potentially have on another by sharing our stories, by being honest and vulnerable and real. And I know for me, it's part of my mission and purpose to bring these stories forward for whatever benefit they might provide for someone else.
If you have done the work and still feel the pull of something unnamed, The Through-Line was designed for exactly that. A three-month private container. Four sessions a month. No framework imposed. Just the one question that makes everything else irrelevant. The first step is a 30-minute alignment call. No obligation.
