Are You Okay With Gay PDA?

There exists an imbalance between public displays of affection between lesbians and gays. If you walk down the road and you see two women holding hands you don’t even look twice. You assume they are best friends or sisters, and even if they are lesbians its still kind of cute and you wouldn’t mind seeing them in some soft core situation where they are wearing tank tops and caressing each other’s shoulders in the sunlight. If they are bulldykes you get so scared you switch sides of the street, put on a fake glasses/moustache combination disguise and start talking like a Korean liquor store cashier. If you see two guys holding hands you do a double take so hard you give yourself whiplash, and you think in your head “Those guys are brave for just putting it all out there. Why don’t they just pull their dicks out and get a room? I hope no crazy homeless people try and murder them.”

It is still a difficult thing for me, someone who has been out and proud for 11 years to show affection to my boyfriends in public and every time a guy grabs my hand I immediately go into internal panic mode and start devising ways to disengage without making it appear obvious. It makes me uncomfortable.

Sometimes I feel like being so guarded when it comes to displaying my affection is throwing sand in the faces of all the gays who came before me and literally risked their lives so I would have the freedom to display who I am. Sometimes I feel silly because I live in New York and being gay is such a non-issue here that its almost weird if you haven’t had a dick in your mouth, hand, or the general vicinity of your orifices. Sometimes I wonder why someone who generally goes against the grain and does not really care what people think could be so scared of something as simple as a hand-hold.

Then I remember that everyone has their own comfort zones. And while I may be totally comfortable airing my dirty laundry out for the whole world to see, I was raised in the South. I have leapt and bounded as far away from my upbringing as I could but will always be a Southern Boy at heart, and can’t let go of the fact that down there, we just don’t do that.

You can call me anti-gay if you want. You can call me a coward (I am all that and probably more). But to me, the point of holding hands is to feel good, and connected with the guy who I am cocking around with. I have already proven everything I need to prove to the one person who matters.

That person would rather just hold dicks in private than hold hands in public.

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