Column: Second Chance Adolescence

My first boy-on-boy kiss occurred when I was eighteen. I was on Hamilton Street in Albany, NY, standing with the other boy behind my mother’s tan colored minivan. It was winter and snow was just beginning to flurry from the night sky. Aside from the presence of the minivan, it was a romantically clichéd moment.

That first kiss set off a storm of fluffy ideas. I spent the next six months flooding my new boyfriend with cheap Hallmark sentiments and roses from the local grocery store. As an older teenager, I began living my life as a young adolescent who epitomized the notion of puppy love. I regularly doodled hearts in my school books with my boyfriend’s name etched inside of them.

While I had fantastic ideas of what love is and what needed to be done to cultivate a relationship, my approach to these two things lacked maturity. The few relationships I had when I first came out always dissolved soon after they began, and mainly because I was acting like a twelve year old girl.

As I flitted about town buying flowers and cards, I neglected my responsibility to develop a deep relationship that went beyond the superficial with any of the boys I dated. It was not until a guy dumped me in an email after a few dates, that I began to question how I was going about things. He essentially told me that he felt I was stalking him and he never actually considered us to be dating in the first place. Ouch!

It makes sense that my skills at building a relationship at the age of eighteen were at a preadolescent level. After all, I spent all of my preadolescence and most of my adolescence single or dating girls.

Like many gay men, I came into the gay experience with the knowledge that I like boys. Beyond that, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into. While the straight boys and girls got to “play house” and learn the basic ins and outs of relationships during their formative years, I spent those years trying to make my girlfriends believe I actually enjoyed the times they indecently exposed the naughty parts of their anatomy for me.

Most of the relationships I have had since I came out have been completely dysfunctional. I do not put all the blame on myself for these past fumbles, because I know that most of the boys I have been with have had about as much experience with relationships as I have had. We were basically coming to the table as strange man-child creatures. Our expectations were age-appropriate, but the experience we had between us to help us meet those expectations was sorely lacking.

In terms of relationships, adolescence for many gay men probably begins the day they come out of the closet. From that day forward there is a lot to learn.

With an understanding of this experience deficiency among newly minted gay men, some gay and lesbian community centers have begun holding workshops specifically to address the issue of healthy relationships.

I attended one of these workshops for multiple sessions over a period of weeks. I went to my first session as a college student with the intention of taking notes on and studying the workshop’s participants for a sociology class. However, the facilitator of the workshop insisted that I participate in the session.

It would have been easy to distract myself from the purpose of the workshop and mentally make fun of the other participants. Many of them had interesting quirks that made them easy targets for ridicule. But after choosing to turn off my snarky internal monologue for a bit, I realized that there was potential to learn something beneficial from my forced participation.

And I did learn quite a bit!

Mostly I learned from the experiences of the other gay men in the room. Many of them had been out of the closet for years, but most of their time since coming out had been spent single or in dreadful relationships. I learned from their stories what to avoid as I started my own experience as an adult adolescence. I also learned good, basic interpersonal communication skills from the facilitator.

I started to employ the insights I learned from the workshop immediately. I had an actual conversation with my boyfriend at the time about communication. And even though he was not really receptive to anything I was saying, I knew I was on to something. I did not find a silver bullet in the workshop, but I did find a path toward relationship maturity.

I realize that a lot of the tools I learned in the workshop were basic things I learned in high school health class, but I never thought as a gay student that anything I was taught about relationships in high school applied to me. I missed that period of adolescence because I consciously tuned it out, but I am happy that I got a second opportunity to learn what I missed the first time around.

I am currently planning to move into a new apartment with my dog and my boyfriend of about six months. And while my boyfriend and I are moving faster than a couple of lesbians rushing to get a pair of tickets for a Lilith Fair revival, at least we are heading somewhere that is somewhat functional. Now we just need to learn how to communicate about decorating.