I'm Afraid of Men

by Vivek Shraya

  Over the next six months, you occasionally respond to my tweets, but it isn’t until I start seeing you at a monthly queer party that I realize you aren’t straight. This is also when I decide you’re a prime candidate for friendship.

  Despite my fears, I have often wished for male friends, a symptom of my enduring desire for kindness from men. Your unassuming Twitter photo of the back of your head, our similar taste in dance music, and the shy manner in which you greet me are endearing. I follow you back on Twitter and start to look forward to seeing you at the party. After learning you majored in film studies, I imagine what kind of films you’ve made and cherish. When I tell you I’m from Alberta, you share your childhood dream of seeing the Rocky Mountains.

  Six months after first meeting you at Pride, I propose on the dance floor.

  “Would you like to be my friend? I’m looking for something fun and uncomplicated.”

  I’d been single for eight months, and my experience with gay men had not been much different from when I was last single, in my twenties. Any flirtation with or small gesture of admiration toward a man (for instance, commenting “beautiful” on a Facebook photo) was consistently met with the expectation that we were going to fuck. This has always been baffling to me, but it was especially frustrating during this period, because I’d explicitly and repeatedly expressed my intention not to date or hook up with anyone for at least a year. One man even told me he’d made a calendar of the remaining months of my singledom, counting down the days until, he assumed, we would sleep together. Once it finally settled in that I wasn’t going to put out, men would call me a tease, accusing me of sending mixed messages or of giving them blue balls. Any interest in getting to know me outside of a sexual relationship would dissolve. Every time this happened, I would blame myself—for I was the common denominator—for not being more clear.

  You are an opportunity for a clean slate. There will be no flirting, as flirting ruins the potential for friendship. Flirting will also be held against me. This boundary isn’t hard for me to assert because I’m not attracted to you. After all, you wear T-shirts under your dress shirts. But I don’t know how you feel about me, so I’m not sure how you’ll respond to my proposal.

  “Absolutely,” you reply, without pausing.

  For the rest of the night, as my friend and I get progressively drunker, you bring us glass after glass of water to keep us hydrated. At last call, when the bar lights come on and we head toward the exit, you pull freshly baked ginger cookies wrapped in aluminum foil out of your backpack.

  “Want some?”

  Where did you come from? Did you always bring baked goods to the bar?

  Over the next month, we build our friendship, eagerly texting questions and answers about our teenage years, travels, and music tastes. I ask so many questions—because meeting a male always feels like encountering an alien—that you eventually ask, “Who are you? Oprah?” We discover a mutual love for period films and begin watching The Tudors together once a week, the evening punctuated by slices of your homemade Oreo cheesecake.

  Early on, you confess that you’d harboured a crush on me when we first met, but when I proposed friendship, you were happy to change how you saw me, as you too had been looking for new friends. As our buddy intimacy grows, you never once cross a line with me. I never feel like you’re secretly wooing me or waiting for me to change how I feel about you. My friendship with you marks the first time in my adult life when a man not only makes me feel that I can offer what I’ve chosen to offer, but also that it will be welcomed.

  * * *

  —

  IT’S LIKELY THIS UNUSUAL feeling of comfort that does slowly change how I see you and feel about you (or maybe it was all your baking). Although my experience with men in the past had often resulted in the dismissal of my boundaries, which only made me fortify them more, your genuine respect for my boundaries allows me to let my guard down. This becomes a theme throughout our relationship.

  I am charmed by your passion for books, and not just because I’m a budding writer, especially since you’re quick to point out editorial mistakes in my first book. I am soothed by your quiet demeanour, the absence of the masculine obligation to fill space, and the ocean of curiosity in your eyes. Even your most showy accessories, a beanie with a pompom and the yellow shoelaces in your walnut leather boots, are more playful than boastful. Whereas I am perpetually unsatisfied, you easily find pleasure in the underrated and understated—Dufferin Mall, a fridge-cold chocolate bar, a plan-free Saturday.

  Two months into our friendship, I nervously reveal that I’ve started to have more-than-friendly feelings for you. I had deliberated during the week whether to say anything, because I knew that once more-than-friendly feelings were on the table, our relationship would be altered. It could even end.

  I don’t want to ruin what we have, I text you from a movie theatre washroom stall, in between our double bill. Going to see two movies back to back had become another tradition for us.

  Me neither, you text back from another washroom.

  I’m still mourning my last relationship. I don’t know if I’m ready. You already know about my ten-year relationship with Shemeena and our breakup the year before. Unlike most gay men, you never question the validity of my relationship with a woman. You never imply that I was in the closet or that it was just a phase.

  We text about the pros and cons of exploring these new feelings for an hour until you suggest, What if we just held hands?

  Despite your introversion, you repeatedly display a gift for saying the right thing. There is something about the gentle simplicity of this proposition that feels manageable to me. No pressure. Just two men holding hands. Which we eventually do in the second movie, palms moist and knees rubbing.

  With one foot still planted in my previous relationship, I am a nightmare to non-date date that first year. I initiate several breakups, and every time, you ask, “But can we still be friends?” No man has ever valued my friendship more than sex, and every time you do, I feel compelled to turn around and return to you.

  Because of my discomfort with my body, casual sex has rarely been an option for me. And even within romantic relationships, it takes me a few months to feel relaxed enough to be naked next to someone else. Most of the men I’d encountered didn’t have this kind of patience, so I keep waiting for you to lose interest in our slow-building intimacy, and in me. In this particular relationship, the process of exposure is especially protracted by how jarring it feels to see my skin against your pale white skin, the skin of the oppressor, especially after ten years of affection and self-discovery alongside Shemeena’s sienna-brown body. One night as we lie cramped on my couch, your shirt off, my clothes on, I even lose patience with myself.

  “Aren’t you bored of this yet?”

  “Are you kidding me?” you ask.

  “Just be honest. Wouldn’t you rather get back on Grindr and meet a normal guy?”

  “I’ve already done that, though. I like what we do. I like that we’re taking our time. It feels exciting and new.”

  * * *

  —

  IT TAKES ME NINE months to say “I love you” because giving that phrase (along with “I miss you” or “I want you”) to anyone besides Shemeena feels like a betrayal to her and what we shared. Those words belonged to her. When friends accuse me of stringing you along, especially after you said “I love you” six months in, I decide to confront my apparent withholding one night in bed.

  “Does it bother you that I haven’t said it?” I ask, as you lie with your head on my chest.

  “Said what?” Your face turns up to look at me.

  “You know. The three special words.”

  You lift yourself off me. “Oh. I didn’t say ‘I love you’ because I wanted you to say it back.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. It kind of bothers me that ‘I love you’ is treated like the destination in a relationship. I told you because that’s how I feel and I wante
d you to know.”

  * * *

  —

  FALLING IN LOVE WITH another human is terrifying. As our language insists, romantic love is always preceded by a fall, the necessity of losing control and potentially hurting yourself in the process of connecting with another. Despite the risk of injury, I have always taken that plunge, even when love hasn’t looked or felt the way I’ve been told it should, even when people around me have criticized my choices.

  Falling in love with you—not just a man but a white man—is one of the scariest things I have ever done. For months I guard more than just my body, performing my best, most masculine self for you, continuing to drop my voice and suppressing the stories about myself I don’t want you to know. I don’t want a love that knows all my faults and sees all my blemishes. This love will be one in which you adore the photo of perfection that I present to you, not just for your sake but so that I too can hold on to my idealized self-image.

  But that isn’t love. Nor does this impeccable vision last as long as I would have liked, given my contemptible inability to self-censor. The night I tell you the ugliest truths about myself, I face the wall the entire time, weeping in your arms. I finally let myself fall.

  Four years later, when you reveal that you’ve cheated on me, my body almost collapses to the floor in shock. By this time, we’ve become a daily, if not hourly, “I love you” couple who share a home. For the first time I’ve allowed myself to imagine a future in which I don’t eventually kill myself. I want to live to see your collection of maps expand with every new city we visit, to witness each hair on your chest turn white, one by one.

  My first instinct is to not tell any of my friends what you’ve done, because you’ve become the embodiment of masculine hope to all of us, an anomaly that we’ve grown attached to. I don’t want anyone to think less of you. I don’t want anyone to lose hope. I’ve also come out as trans this year, and, despite my various growing pains during this process, the sense that I’m being ushered into a universal rite of passage by being cheated on by a man (to the soundtrack of Beyoncé’s Lemonade), and then insisting on protecting him, feels insurmountable.

  As your disclosure continues to sink in, I’m hit by a more distressing concern. Perhaps I don’t want to lean on my friends because this incident is proof that I was the one who wasn’t an anomaly. I had been cautioned that “few relationships survive transition” and that “Nick ultimately wants a man.” I tried to brush these warnings off, telling myself that we were different somehow. Every time I shared what other people had said to me, or discussed my own feelings of undesirability now that I was no longer the bearded, muscled guy you fell in love with, you reassured me, saying, “You are the most beautiful person I have ever met.” How could you hurt me so sharply, at this particular time, when you knew I was feeling more repulsive than I had ever felt?

  “I guess you aren’t that special after all,” I say in response to your disclosure, as I balance on the arm of our loveseat, unable to sit next to you. “You’re just like every other man, and you made me just another stupid bitch.”

  I’M AFRAID OF MEN not because of any singular encounter with a man. I’m afraid of men because of the cumulative damage caused by the everyday experiences I’ve recounted here, and by those untold, and by those I continue to face.

  None of these stories are exceptional. I’m afraid of how common, if not mild, my experiences are. Many people have endured more savage forms of violence inflicted by men. I’m also afraid that the most prevalent response these stories will elicit is pity. Even worse, I’m afraid of the necessity of eliciting pity in order to generate concern or to galvanize change.

  For a decade I conducted anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia workshops at a Toronto college. Because the workshops were not mandatory, many of the participants were liberal, well-intentioned staff members. Many of them arrived with a kind of “what can you possibly teach me that I don’t already know?” or “I’m a good person” attitude. Despite this, when I would begin discussing the need for all-gender washrooms, many participants revealed their biases by expressing concerns about their own safety. As a facilitator, my job required me to listen patiently to these concerns and to delicately, calmly provide alternative perspectives, so that participants felt comfortable. My job required me to privilege often homophobic and transphobic remarks made by respected staff members and professors—including “Can’t they go to a separate washroom?”—over my own experience and comfort as a colleague.

  But when I would describe stories about actual students and staff at the college who’d been harassed in washrooms, or had either not eaten or relieved themselves in their pants due to the stress of not being able to safely use a washroom because of their gender expression, the mood would shift dramatically. Filled with outrage and sympathy after hearing these stories, the participants were often more receptive to engaging with the rest of the material. They more willingly reflected on their privilege and considered how they could be better allies.

  I have always been disturbed by this transition, by the reality that often the only way to capture someone’s attention and to encourage them to recognize their own internal biases (and to work to alter them) is to confront them with sensational stories of suffering. Why is my humanity only seen or cared about when I share the ways in which I have been victimized and violated?

  * * *

  —

  IN SPITE OF MY many negative experiences, I’ve maintained a robust attachment to the idea of the “good man.” A common theme in my encounters and relationships is my certainty that the men I have admired were “good,” a synonym for “different from the rest.” This attachment to the promise of goodness is what left me bereft when, in various ways, I discovered that each of these men wasn’t “one of the good guys.” How might my relationships with these men have been different if I had not expected them to be “good” or better than the other males I’d encountered?

  The pressure to be “good” is not exclusive to one gender, nor is it applied equally to all genders. To be clear, the stress on girls to be “good” far surpasses any stress men might feel to be “good.” This disparity is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that when a girl does something “wrong,” few mourn her goodness. We rarely hear, “I thought she was one of the good girls.” Women who behave “badly” are ultimately not given the same benefit of the doubt as men and are immediately cast off as bitches or sluts. Men might be written off as “dogs,” but their reckless behaviour is more often unnoticed, forgiven, or even celebrated—hence our cultural fixation with bad boys.

  Looking back, I regret telling Nick that he wasn’t special. I also regret all the times in our relationship that I told him he was a good man. I regret this not because he isn’t a good man but because good is a nebulous standard, and our desire for something that can’t really be measured outside of religious teachings and morality only sets us up for disappointment, and sets up every gender for failure.

  In order to reimagine masculinity, the quest for a good man—for an anomaly, an exception—must be abandoned. The good man is a fiction. Instead of yearning for a good man, what if we made our expectations for men more tangible? What if, for example, we valued a man who communicates? Ultimately, what hurt me most about Nick’s infidelity wasn’t the act itself; it was that it took him a month to tell me about it, and that he might have opted not to tell me at all.

  However, as much as I’ve found strength in adopting the phrase “emotional labour” to name all the work I pour into communication in this relationship (and others), it’s been equally important to recognize labour that often goes unrecognized and unnamed. As much as I initially wanted to write Nick off, I began to recall, just in that year, how often Nick had been present for me and held me together.

  During the week when I publicly came out, Nick returned to our roots and baked me a different treat every day, from macaroni muffins to rocky road squares, to help ease my anxiety. Nick is one of the only people i
n my life who never mixed up my pronouns after I changed them to “she” and “her.” Before every gig, Nick helped me choose which dress, what lipstick colour (I taught him my favourite shade names: Russian Red, Diva, Morange), which shoes, and what jewellery to wear. At the gigs, Nick often worked as hard as I did, setting up and later packing up my projector, selling my merch at the table, running back to the hotel if I’d forgotten my razor or deodorant, and taking photos of me for my Instagram. When I was suicidal, Nick ran my social media accounts for two weeks, posting the tweets or status updates I emailed him, and forwarding me only the most pressing messages or responses. When I dropped the back of an earring or lost my bank card, Nick searched every corner and pocket until he found them. For the three years we’ve lived together, Nick has single-handedly managed our home, washing the dishes, changing the sheets, making the bed, sweeping, and doing the laundry, showering me with kisses and praise the whole time.

  Reflecting on this broader picture of Nick and our relationship, I had a choice. I could either mourn the loss of the idealized man I had thought Nick was, which somehow rendered me both powerless and at fault, a victim of my own imagination, or I could see Nick for who he is—dependable, devoted, and also fallible.

  Parsing and naming these specific characteristics, as opposed to clinging to “good” as a universal and aspirational qualifier, proved to be instrumental. First, it allowed me to see that one of these characteristics didn’t necessarily cancel out the others, unlike “good” that must be relinquished if one does something “bad.” Second, letting go of “good” restored Nick’s humanity, as he was no longer forced to sit upon a superhuman pedestal. Third, it returned agency to me. Some “mistakes” are unforgivable, some are not. It was up to me to decide whether to forgive this time, and to act on my decision.