National Coming Out Day, 2023.
- Southern Suitor
- Oct 17, 2023
- 4 min read
This is a consolidated Mastodon thread I posted last week.
I spent much of my 20s and 30s convinced that, as a suit and tie fetishist in the southeastern United States, I was utterly alone. I hope this post reaches the eyes of the younger suit and tie fetish guys. I hope y'all feel seen and affirmed. And I hope y'all realize that there is no one right way to move forward in a queerphobic, kinkphobic world. There are many ways to go, and the journey is lifelong.
Enjoy.
I have three brothers. Brother number one is the straight one. I'm brother number two.
I came out to Dad back when I was seventeen. He said it was "against god's law." He made me come out to Mom, then tried to explain to me that I "could change." I spent the next few years believing that, and believing that I was going to go to hell.
Then Brother number three came out. And Dad had to do some rethinking. Dad came around. He showed up to my wedding, and supported me, and I respect him immensely for that. He is continuing to work on himself, and I support him in doing so. But I also know that other folks have not been so lucky.
I joined a gay men's group that was affiliated with my local branch of the Human Rights Campaign in Charleston, South Carolina. It was meant to be a community organization for gay men ages 18-29 to meet outside of the context of bars and dating. My experience with this group proved instrumental in my loss of faith in Christianity. One man I met through the group still had PTSD nightmares of when his family sent him to "conversion" camp. His family was Presbyterian. Another was disowned the moment he came out to them and confessed that he had HIV. His family was Baptist. These stories further convinced me that Christianity is not a force for good in the world. And so I learned that part of my coming out required me to abandon a religion that had such a poisonous influence on my life, and the lives of others.
I'm an agnostic now: the only thread binding me to spirituality is that I still ardently believe in the existence of the soul, and that art and nature supply us a fulfillment that reason alone cannot. Mainstream atheism is less concerned with welcoming people in, and more concerned with mocking Christians. A truly rational position is one based not on anger, but on acknowledging and accepting what we do not know.
In 2007, South Carolina passed one of its so-called "protection of marriage" bills by voter referendum. A few queer graduate school friends and I dutifully voted, then drank at a bar as we watched our rights get voted away. We suffered no delusion about the way things went that day: the referendum passed by a vote of 77%. And I remembered feeling deeply alone, abandoned by supposed "allies."
I met my husband later on when I was 24. He's still a Baptist, just barely. We dated long distance while I was in graduate school. I ventured a few times to the Episcopal church that baptized Faulkner. Like Wilde and other gay men before me, I was drawn to the mystery and the ritual, even if the words rang hollow to me. Later, I moved to Georgia. My husband still sings in the choir at our church, so I attend on occasion to support him. I later had to join our church in order to be married there, and I did so out of respect of my husband's wishes. I am not the only non-theist in the congregation.
My trip to Chicago last year revealed to me the need to seek out queer spaces of my own. I connected with several suit and tie fetishists, one of whom is involved in the leather community. The tribal, close-knit nature of leather has grown increasingly appealing to me these last few years. I have always lived in the south, where our queer community is certainly present, but is always widely scattered, spread thin. We don't have bars or districts. Many of us are just starting to get our own pride parades. But most of the time, it still feels like the conservative, Christian wilderness, where we have to look over our shoulders before venturing to hold hands with our partners, and hope for our safety.
Even in the supposedly enlightened Ivory Tower, I've bumped into plenty of homophobic scholars. In Dallas this year, one of them remarked that it "must be easy being an openly gay man these days." Even in the supposedly liberal conclave of my city in Georgia, my husband and I were approached on the street by a drunkard who asked which one of us "is the wife." And even when we walked our block the other day and asked folks whether they had seen our missing cat, we meet a plumber who claimed that he "had no problem with gay people," and was puzzled at why we "felt the need to be so cautious."
Last fall, one of the organizers of our LGBTQIA+ student advocacy group reached out to me to serve as faculty advisor. I accepted. I attended their meetings, including their meeting for National Coming Out Day last year. I listened to their stories, but I withheld my own. I felt the need to let them fill the space they had created for themselves. I was just a guest.
I humbly hope I can provide for my students the kind of acceptance and safety that I never really felt I had. And I continue to seek out further circles of queer community. I have white male privilege, and I see this privilege as a responsibility. I want to help. And, as I continue making strides towards the leather community, I find that meeting kinksters in person opens up these possibilities for political activism and genuine belonging, much more so than any of the online suit & tie fetish spaces. And so I take my first booted steps further into leather. That's where my journey is leading me right now.
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