Welcome to Love, Us, a column for telling queer love stories in all their glory. (And by glory, we mean all the big, beautiful moments and otherworldly little details that make making and falling in queer love so, so fun.) Read more from the series here.
Two things happened when I met Ryan. First, my stomach did that thing where it suddenly moves from the place you know it is in your body to maybe being in your throat and also simultaneously threatening to fall directly, forcefully out of your butt. The feeling wasn’t butterflies. It was more like a kind of violent and erratic gymnastics routine performed by someone who has never tumbled before in their life but is nevertheless dead set on qualifying for the Olympics.
Second, I mourned then and there the relationship I knew Ryan and I would never have. Which is to say, after I fell head first and drowned in his stupid, sweet brown eyes, staring up from below the surface, I knew we’d never be more than friends. Not for any reason other than that, at 18, I’d only ever allowed myself to like boys from the decidedly safe (or, depending on how you look at it, wildly dangerous) realm of my own brain. I was grossly under-practiced in telling anyone I was interested in them, and I’d long since decided I would just die alone.
From below the surface, I could gaze upward and do with my non-relationship with Ryan what I had done with all the non-relationships I’d had before him. With Alex, and with Hunter, and the other Alex, and the other other Alex, and also Damon. I would pine after them, daydream about them, yearn for them. Or, rather, gay yearn for them.
Which is just like regular yearning, only gay. It’s more potent, more powerful. Gay. You get it. However, unlike most gay things, which are traditionally better than non-gay things just by virtue of being gay (it’s science), gay yearning is more powerful than regular yearning because, well, we practice it. We practice it a lot.
The ubiquity of gay yearning lies in the fact that so many homos and butches and femmes and fairies and the like spend the majority of our formative years unable to do much more. Closeted in an unaccepting world, queers are left only with the ability to turn inward and yearn for their would-be lovers. And as such, many of the gay and queer people I know have the most wonderfully romantic internal lives.
Without the ability, safety, or freedom to pursue outward emotional experiences, my younger internal romantic life was wonderful, dramatic, lush. In high school, everyone thought I was a gossip because, well, I was — but also because knowing about all my friends’ crushes and first loves was almost like having my own, too. You see, the safety of yearning is in the imagined. You get to experience emotion without consequence. There is no heartbreak in yearning, or no accidental heartbreak, anyway. Only the self-inflicted kind. Gay yearning meant that I was safe from a two-fold rejection. To want without doing, I was safe from rejection from a world that wasn’t going to accept or understand my desire, sure, but also safe from potential rejection from the person I was yearning for.