How Porn Helped Me to Better Trust Men
So much of my life would be different if I just knew how to delete my search history. But where's the fun in that?
Note: There may be some triggering elements to this essay, but after a lot of work, I feel comfortable owning these messier aspects of my own story. If you know me personally and wish not to read further or not to engage I completely understand.
Denial manifesting as self-protection caused me to believe that watching gay porn on a cracked 4th generation iPod touch did not count as an act of homosexuality. The medium is the message and all that, and to me, the iPod touch was just for fun.
The iPod touch was too transient to hold any real significance in my conceptualization of self. At best, the iPorn was bicurious if not merely metrosexual. There was something fleeting about this small piece of early tech, it lacked the weighty seriousness of a laptop. Because, and say this with me, watching porn on your computer was almost corporate, it came with a sense of authority. It was binding. There was no way to wriggle out of its Truth. Once you’d closed your browser window and met your own face reflected back in half-started emails and a desktop background of your childhood dog, you had to really sit with what you’d done. At least with your iPod, after finishing, you could do something meaningful like a quick game of Temple Run.
The new personal tech landscape of pornography in the early 2010s, the culture that raised me, was an inflection point. For the first time, young people had near-constant access to pornography in the back pocket of their multicolored skinny jeans. Gone were the days of only bringing in those dog-eared copies of a father’s Playboy, or hoping to stumble upon a DVD in some video store backroom. This was the era of Two Girls One Cup and the folkloric Blue Waffle.
Pornography was entrenched with a different level of shame now. There was a sense that everyone was consuming this media, but that only some of it was acceptable. There was right porn and there was wrong porn. Add to that the acceptability politics and taboo nature already inherent, and you have for yourself an entire generation of young people whose first experiences with sex and sexuality were irrevocably skewed.
I was already finding it challenging to convincingly identify the correct type of woman a straight boy (me) would be interested in (I settled on Sara Bareilles, who I think very highly of, but probably was not many straight boys’ fantasy at the time). Now, I needed to also correctly dictate and imagine the sexual proclivities of a porn appetite created whole cloth. I had to walk a careful tightrope of appropriately misogynistic inclinations, being ever vigilant to not overstep and stumble onto something deserving of ridicule like cake farts, or say something too chaste that would label me as a baby or a prude. All the while, I had no interest in the heteronormative videos that consumed my classmates and propelled their formative sexual years.
“I really like when there’s a lot of moaning.”
This was not untrue, but instead of the vocal fry-laden postverbality of Shyla Stylez, I was envisioning Trent, the baseball MVP who had pulled his “big groin muscle” and needed Coach Roughrider to work him out in his locker room office. These half-lies got me far, just as long as the inquisitions never went further than the rudimentary. Asking anything more detail-oriented than, “Do you prefer blondes or brunettes,” ensured a painful outing for me.
Did I really think I was fooling anyone? To paint a picture, I was a soft effeminate boy who was repeatedly compared to the Wilderness Explorer, Russell, from Pixar’s Up. My only friends were girls who were— or at one time had been horse girls and the highlight of my summer vacation was our theater program production of Peter Pan.
It’s no wonder so many saw through this facade and met me with hostility. Whenever I walked home from school, a lonely boy in a stretched-out Aéropostale polo-shirt, cars would drive by me screaming faggot and throw anything they could find from their cupholders or dashes. This ranged from bottles of soda (always Moutain Dew, you truly could not make this up), a multitude of nameless liquids, and spare change.
They pelted me with handfuls of quarters before speeding off, and once, the metal coins hit me so hard that they left red star-shaped slash marks on my arm and actually drew blood. If someone threw quarters at me today my response would be vastly different. But that’s only because my laundry is coin-op and I can never seem to find time to get rolls from the bank. However, at the time I guess I would call this exchange slightly traumatizing.
Flippancy aside, I was run off the road several times by these drivers, and breathlessly hid in a large tree at a retirement home near my school for twenty-odd minutes. Waiting for the afterschool crowd to finally thin out, just so I could make it home unscathed.
I wouldn’t consider the town I grew up in, whose cultural landmark was a parking lot 99 Restaurant, especially queer-friendly. In fact, in my grade, there was only one boy who had even come out. There were obviously more of us, but like pillbugs, we stayed under our rock too afraid to be in the sun. Occasionally someone would lift us up to expose our squirming secret but we held on fast and tight terrified of being seen fully.
There was a certain discomforting level of public scrutiny that came along with being the sole queer in a grade. A scrutiny, which I was unwilling to subject myself to, selfishly condemning this other boy to suffer alone. After all, it seemed as though everyone in my town knew him, which may sound appealing at first but was actually frighteningly invasive. I certainly don’t think that a twelve-year-old has the framework necessary to deal with this Panopticon or its extent of magnification into one’s personal life.
Yet, his personal life was broadcasted much in the way of someone on a reality show— well-known as a character but not so much as a human. For many, he was a one-name moniker, like Cher or Madonna or Beyoncé (or for boys like me: Sara). We didn’t think it odd that each new year the teachers somehow already knew everything about him, that even my older siblings and cousins knew seemingly all there was to know about his life— about where and when he had his first kiss, and with whom. His lifestory belonged to the public.
I was, deeply rotten to this boy. I feared being guilty by association, that simply being his friend would get some of his gay stink on me, which is funny because now I have a certain fondness for that kind of musk. Even still, I feel as if I threw him to the wolves on more than one occasion— shook loose of his kindness and offerings of friendship like a frightened animal, running from him the same way I’d run home from school.
But I’ve never been much of a runner, and simply put, he was magnanimous. He was always surrounded by friends, a manmade safety net likely created out of necessity. The jaded part of me would say this was because he was so popular, and popularity begets popularity, but truthfully it was because he was a genuine and kind soul who seemed untouched by the hateful experiences he’d lived through. As such, our mutual friend circles began to grow and overlap, our paths crossed time and time again, and finally, I cautiously considered him a friend.
After a while, I even stopped thinking about what it might mean or look like to be acquainted with a gay man. There was a shared sense of camaraderie starting to form that I grew to appreciate in earnest. I was allowed to express more of my softness and my own exuberance— testing the waters of what would still be acceptable while remaining tentative about how much I was willing to reveal. But through the cracks in my fingers, I was able to start to see a life for myself; one where I could be less terrified of men, and of myself. It was one of the first times I felt that closeness to another man, so naturally I squandered it, as I am often wont to do.
In school, we shared a lab bench, which is a bond similar to saying we both served in the army. I believe strongly that the lab benches in a high school chemistry class are the birthplace of all teenage drama and the genesis point for our own personal plot propulsion. And this was no exception.
Our group had just completed some kind of assignment, and I was bringing our table’s finished worksheet to the teacher. When I turned around I realized I had left my iPod on the table, and now saw that he was reading something on it aloud from its shattered screen. I ran cold trying not to show any fear or emotion, afterall what would I have to be ashamed of on my iPod? I couldn’t betray my poker face, so I feigned nonchalance while hurriedly rushing back. Somehow I just knew he was reading my search history, something even more intimate than one’s own medical records, and more affecting as well. Under normal circumstances, this would be a harmless act, but I had landmines just beneath the surface.
He laughed his way through the list of countless inane Google searches— nothing too revealing yet. I reached for my iPod.
“Ok,” I gestured my hands like an Italian mother in an emphatic rush. “That’s enough give it back.”
He didn’t register the urgency in my voice, couldn’t hear the waves of blood rushing to my ears, couldn’t possibly know the knots I was tying in my own stomach. He continued on reading. I was certain he was only one or two entries away from my porn searches, and that he was about to out me. There was nothing I could do anymore, and I began to fold in on myself bracing for the impact.
Then, he double-tapped the home button, wordlessly turned it off, and placed my iPod face down on the desk. Casually he went back to chatting with our friends and didn’t mention a word of it. I grabbed for my device and clasped it together in two sweating hands. My breathing stuttered like the pant-pant-blow of childbirth, and my nose stung like it had been hit so hard I half-expected to see blood.
When I got home later that day I made myself throw up. Once, twice, and then again a third time—a numeric practice that had become somewhat of a habit to me during that stage of my life. He knew my secret, and it was only a matter of time before he told everyone. I thought of the network he had built for himself, the way in which he had access to nearly every person I knew and most of the ones I hadn’t even met yet. I tried to go for a fourth time, but found a dry emptiness beneath that trap door, so I sat there saliva dripping from the edges of my mouth unable to move, unable to cry, unable to change a single thing.
***
The next day I expected everyone to know, but Chemistry was the same as ever. Surely by next week, I thought, but that too passed and it seemed my secret remained. As time went on I began to unclench ever so slightly and find my breath once more.
It’s embarrassing to say, but this may have been the single kindest thing a man had ever done for me.
A kindness, I am aware, I did very little to deserve. I had always treated this boy so coldly and without concern or consideration for his own very human need for connection. How could he not resent me? And yet, even after giving him this bow pulled taut and aimed at my chest, he just held it there for me. Giving me as much time as I needed. I thought of the other men I had known. If given this opportunity would they show me the same grace? Would I?
I’m a long way off from truly trusting men, from not feeling like they all secretly (or not so secretly) want to do harm to me. I’ve gotten better at walking home alone, at sharing my feelings with the ones who can hold me with tenderness. There are some men you can trust, even when it feels like the world is full of examples to the contrary.
After that incident, I grew increasingly distant from my friend. It was too hard to maintain a relationship standing on a mousetrap. I would never blame him for letting go of the tension, allowing his fingers to slip, shifting some of the tremendous weight he’d been carrying on his shoulders alone for years. But somehow, he never did.
Gregg, this such a beautifully and authentically written piece. A true testament to the power of kindness and a reminder of the silent battles so many people are fighting sitting right next to us. Thank you for your vulnerability 💛
Thank you for being vulnerable with us Gregg, and thank you for the reminder to always be kind to others 🌷