Fear of Rejection

I think it’s an ongoing process, overcoming the homophobia. The programming is always there. You have to keep overriding it. I recently turned 49, and just the other night, I had a disturbing dream about my father. As many know, I like to share sweet, romantic images depicting young men in love. Images such as this were simply not available to me when I was growing up in southern West Virginia, so it lifts my spirits in a significant way when I see them now, and it makes me happy to share them with others who appreciate them. But in my dream, such pictures were illegal, and my father—my dream father, not my real father—discovered that I had a collection of these images. They were hard copies inside of a crinkled brown paper bag because, I guess, the dream was set in the early ‘80s. And he intended to turn me in, so I was desperate to get rid of these illegal images of young men in love. I feared I would spend the rest of my life in prison. So I ran along a path into the woods with the intention of burning the photos once I was far enough away for the fire to go unnoticed. However, my dream father saw me running with the bag of “evidence,” and he came after me. I was scared to death, and I ran as hard as I could, but I was unable to get away. My dream father grabbed my arm and forced me to stop. I considered punching him, but I looked into his eyes, and I felt defeated. I had done something that wasn’t allowed, and I had been caught. My dream father didn’t care that I was his son. I had broken the law, and I had to be punished.

My actual father would never have been that heartless, thank goodness, and gay romantic images, however scarce, were not illegal when I was growing up. But they didn’t have to be illegal. Societal disapproval was so extreme, so nearly universal that most were too terrified to produce or share simple, sweet romantic images of men in love. Everyone talked about the “queers” and the “faggots,” and once in a while you saw a gay character in a movie, but there were no out gay people where I lived, and I never saw any examples of men in love. Straight romance was all around, but gay romance was invisible. So I learned to keep my feelings hidden. All these years later, I have to fight against that instinct. I think the dream shows that there’s still a part of me that fears I will be rejected and punished if I let the truth out of the bag.