Monday, August 10, 2026
Happy Monday, my friends! Size matters, some people say, whether it’s the size of your bank account, your social media following, your physical prowess, your sexual anatomy, or the many options men use to compensate for a perceived lack of size in one or more of those areas. Growing up I always marveled, at a distance, about the groups of men who were wealthy, influential, athletically gifted, and likely well endowed, though my experience with that last dynamic was lacking until much later in life. I wanted to be one of them, but I quickly learned that whatever potentiality I might have toward that goal, I lacked the commitment and psychological drive to do what it took to be part of those groups. I could neither participate in their conversations (ethically and because I had no experience with or desire to have sex with women) nor could I totally condone the attitudes of some people in the group in order to stay a member of the group. Eventually, I did or would fall out and remain out of the group.
Last week I wrote about my strange love for contact sports and my discomfort with the cultures that so often surround them. I ended that essay unresolved. I still can’t put a tidy bow on those thoughts. However, that consideration opens up something in me which has consistently remained in the background, unexamined, my entire life.
For as long as I can remember, I wanted in. Don’t we all? I wanted to be one of the guys. Not just respected by my peers. Not only admired from a distance or only tolerated as the quieter kid on the edge of the group, but actually in; trusted, easy, unremarkable in the way that belonging is unremarkable when you have it. I studied the other boys the way you study a language you’re trying to learn just by listening. I learned the jokes (though I didn’t like them), the postures (which seemed very rehearsed), the correct way to care about a game and the slang used instead of the official terms. I was, by most outward measures, pretty terrible at this performance, but I kept trying.
No one usually said it out loud. It was more of a low hum underneath everything, the sense that I was doing an impression of belonging rather than actually belonging, and that some of the other boys could tell, even if they couldn’t have named what they were sensing. I was included, technically, and lonely, actually. Those two things lived in me at the same time for years, and I didn’t yet have language to understand why.
I used to explain the loneliness to myself as a personality problem. I was too sensitive, too introspective, too interested in things the other boys weren’t interested in, all of which was true. If I could just toughen up a little, loosen up a lot, want the things they wanted a little more convincingly, the gap would close. I spent enormous energy on that project. I don’t think I ever once questioned whether the goal itself—full, effortless belonging among straight, hypermasculine boys and men—was actually mine to want in the first place, or whether I was chasing it because everyone around me made it look like the only thing worth having.
What I didn’t let myself consider, for a very long time, was a much simpler and much more frightening possibility: that I didn’t actually want to be their friend in the way I told myself I did. I wanted to be near them. I wanted their attention, their approval, a certain kind of closeness with them. But increasingly, and with a clarity I could not afford to admit even to myself, what I actually wanted was to date them. Please don’t misunderstand. I already knew I was gay and I had known that for years. Even after I came out, I just wanted to be one of the masculine guys in a way that I knew gay men could be. Proving the depth and reach of patriarchy, I fashioned myself a masculine, dominant, top who would naturally be attracted to a bottom who might be a little more feminine, maybe even submissive. That’s how this worked for gay men, right?
I’m somewhat ashamed to say that was my mindset from when I came out almost 20 years ago until very recently. In fact, I’m anxious writing these words today. I’ve spent so long trying to be the masculine gay man that admitting even the most natural alternative for myself produces shame. Wanting to belong is a story I could tell without shame. Wanting to date them in a similar way to how their girlfriends and wives interacted with them is a completely different story. I told myself the first story, over and over, because it let me stay close to something I wanted without having to name what I actually wanted.
This realization deserves more room than one Monday Moment can hold. For now, I just want to name the thing plainly: what I called friendship, was very often something else entirely, hiding in the shape I allowed myself to say aloud.
Where in your own life have you mistaken one desire for another because the true one felt too dangerous to name?
Let us pray: God who knit us together and knows us more fully than we know ourselves, meet us in the places we have been too afraid to name, even to ourselves. Forgive us the years we spent chasing a disguised desire because the true one felt too dangerous to speak. Give us patience with our younger selves and with our older selves, who were doing the best they could with the little safety they had. And give us courage now, in whatever new naming still waits ahead of us. Amen.
Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben +
