When I Learned I Love Different: I

Pt. 1 of a series. One of my goals is that some of this ends up on my TV show one day.

Just an early sign I’d have trouble not goin HAM once I loved something.

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Author’s Note & TW: This piece is written through a cisgender heterosexual perspective, retelling messages as I heard them in the 90s and 00s. Some language is not gender inclusive and contains examples of sexism and homophobia—and makes reference to people who committed sexual assault. Also mildly NSFW due to language & references.

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Ever since I was a kid, I always loved women.

I’m talking still a lil BX papi, lil Timb w/ the tag, 59 Fifty sticker fresh on the brim.

Now, I’m sure lots of straight guys say they like women. That’s inherent to being straight, right? Ever since we were young: ‘boys like girls.’ And that evolves to: ‘boys like boobs.’ That’s the ‘formula.’

But I didn’t like girls. I loved them. I’m talking I was thinking about falling in love, finding my soulmate, and my wedding already at 8-yrs-old. No “cooties phase,” nothing. I loved just being around girls I ‘liked,’ even if I didn’t know wtf to say yet.

It felt like I carried this weight of “loving different” as a cis, straight man wherever I went. It wasn’t until recently I realized how important it is for cis, straight men to feel they have a spectrum of being and ways of loving, not feeling like one bloc, one monolith to the rest of society. Without that, I just felt like an unwanted outlier, sorted out of the formula for masculinity. In more basic terms, I felt like an alien for a really long time.

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At 13, I was out here writing girls poems and cards and giving flowers and lil chocolates. I found lots of girls attractive but usually had between 1-3 ‘crushes’ within a year. When I first heard that Big Pun line: “I aint a playa; I just crush a lot,” I thought to myself : THAT’S ME. But literally. I’m wild smitten out here.

(As a kid, I had always associated that line more with Daddy Yankee than Big Pun, actually. This would be my ringtone for my 1st & 2nd girlfriends)

I just want to point out that I am doing all of this in a FUBU coat w/ Jnco Jeans in our Lord’s year of 2004 by the BX1 & 10. I’ll proceed.

My Brother in Christ I completely forgot Fila was an option

And still, even after I got older and started being more interested in the female form—not just butterflies in your stomach and a cute face—I felt the same. Now it was just marriage w/ titties.

Interestingly enough, although homophobia was rampant in a Bronx public school, poetry, thanks to Mr. H, who to this day is a teacher who made a positive difference in my life and many at ‘95, wasn’t really trashed among us dudes. We had poetry programs. It was normal. And if you could write down some rhymes, it wasn’t a big deal if you did it also for a girl you liked. Especially *read - thankfully* because the girl in question we will call ‘LT,’ didn’t share my goofy ass shit with any of the frenemies. I will never forget one line of a card I wrote her that read DO YOU LIKE USHER DO YOU LIKE LIL JON. Next to, like, a Snickers bar.

(Usher’s Confessions & the all-time classic ‘My Boo’ came out that year, and I had two big crushes that year, too— the 2nd coming sometime after LT stopped liking me when we got back from MLK long weekend—yes, I remember the time—and woke up on the side of the bed that meant she gonna come to school all brand new liking my friend AW)

Ya boy was feeling it.

But while all this was happening, I was developing how I am with women. Guess some call it a “love map.” And my version of masculinity, too.

In addition to music influencing my idea of affection, there were movies and tv, too—and…other stuff.

The ‘other stuff’ showed up for the first time when I went to my boy Carlos’ house for his birthday party. At one point, guess it was the “adult supervision over for the boys who ‘will be boys’” time of the function, Carlos goes to the tv and exclaimed to my homies: LOOK WHAT MY DAD GOT.

And low and behold, what me and my day one boy Rudy long knew existed in conception, but was restricted in reality, was there in front of us: The Spice Channel.

So going from the Fred Flintstone rendition of what a vagina (vulva) look like (aka Rudy and I drawing our best guess; yes this is likely somewhere in my house. Yes, we were very wrong), to there it is, along with somebody meat, on a 80lb ‘flat’ screen Panasonic.

I still thought it all was ultimately fake. Because all sex in movies was fake, right? And this was behind a screen—like all movies were; ergo, this is fake. But Carlos was adamant we were seeing up-to-the minute accurate pussy in 480p. Later, Rudy would confirm: the legends were true. Spice actually was “real” sex.

Me & Rudy mugshot after getting caught drawing coochie theory & debriefing re: the recent Spice Network data

But while I did think a vagina is more beautiful than anything Rudy and I could have ever drawn with a crayola marker, the whole scene just looked like…body parts. Even when they zoomed out to the participants—the whole thing still seemed fake. Even if it was ‘real.’

And along with “My Boo,” both song and crush, there was a different image of sentimentality I already had with women, including those I had physical feelings for.

I didn’t really grow up around romance—my parents argued a lot and separated when I was young—and, even as a kid, it made sense to me that they did. But one day, I remember an image of it clicking—what it looked like.

I was watching The Cosby Show, and there’s that scene where Cliff and Clair were laying on the couch, and Cliff feeds Clair an apple from behind her, she slowly takes a bite, and they both smile. It was like that Leo meme pointing to the TV—just me as a kid pointing to the screen: “That!” Whatever ‘that’ is, that’s what I want. ‘That’ looks like the complete package. That playfulness, closeness (intimacy) the Huxtables had—if I could combine that with trust, those butterflies, and the sex, I would have the love that feels just right for me. (Didn’t hurt that crush #1 looked like Phylicia Rashad).

That notion of this layered, ‘combo’ attraction, affection, and sexuality for women just followed how I saw everything else I was passionate about.

Since kindergarten, I was interested in cars, guns (couldn’t get the real kind; thankfully, NYC didn’t have Walmarts, and the closest one doesn’t have a MAC-10 next to the cilantro), video games with guns and cars (GTA), action figures, dinosaurs, Pokémon, GI-Joes, ‘typical boy stuff.’

… And art. And music. And then I wanted an easy bake oven; and then I decided the GI-Joes were lonely, so I got Barbies to keep them company. And then I got into a summer theater program, and we got ballet shoes for dance class. And then I decided I wanted to be a baseball player.

14 but out here lookin like I’m on single A team providing for three families

I never saw that I needed to “pick” any of these things. And I never, for a second, stopped loving girls, being attracted to them, and believing I was a boy. Judgement by others was there, though.

I certainly caught shit for being a short, pale, skinny, hairy mf. And I cut my long hair in the 5th grade, after I got tired of it apparently making me ‘gay’ in school and a ‘girl’ to strangers, including substitute teachers, while still existing as whole ass boy to those who truly knew me.

But, for me, as a cisgender boy, the judgement and gender constraints of elementary & middle school wasn’t as loaded as what was to come. The judgement of whether one is ‘sufficiently’ masculine and ‘dateable’ and attractive enough to women and to get respect from men. A judgement, which in my case, wasn’t so much about who you love but how you love—as a straight man.

That started in HS, and continued, in varied forms, to this day.

More in Part Two.

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