Part 3 - Vulnerability and Violence

Monday, August 24, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! I can’t remember the first time I saw one of the reports, when it started to become socially acceptable for local news affiliates and the national news to report on domestic violence in the LGBTQIA+ community, but still acceptable as well to televise photos of abuse victims. That domestic violence would pervade the Queer community, and specifically gay male couples blew my mind. Not that I ever saw myself as an aggressor, I simply made the decision I would never put myself in the position where I could be a victim. That resolution dictated a lot about who I decided to date and how I thought our relationships could unfold.

Last week I named something I’m still working through right now, something that is far from resolved for me: that the strength I actually admired and the position I actually wanted to occupy, wasn’t the dominant one I’d spent so long constructing for myself. It was something perhaps softer, more received, more feminine in energy than I had ever let myself claim. This week I want to talk about why it took me so long to work toward claiming it, and the answer itself isn’t complicated, even though the actual dynamic is both complex and uncomfortable to confess. It’s fear.

I knew, long before I could have articulated it theologically or psychologically, that there was a cost to being seen the way I actually felt myself to be. I watched, from a safe and careful distance, what happened to feminine-presenting men and other male-bodied people who transgressed the gender lines in which I tried to take refuge, though imperfectly. I saw the mockery. I saw the exclusion. I saw, and heard about, actual violence, the kind that doesn’t stay long in headlines but lodges itself in the body of everyone who hears about it and understands, with total clarity, that it could happen to them. We all need to remember that those forces of the patriarchy affect all men while simultaneously granting us privilege. My gender expression might not have transgressed those boundaries, but my near total lack of interest in sports and my role in the group as the “fat kid” still subjected me to forms of bullying until finally, in my mid to late 20s I finally stopped caring so much what other people thought about me.

I resolved early that I would never put myself in the position to be the victim of that violence. If I was going to date men, I would date safe men, men who I didn’t perceive as physical threats. I would meet their masculinity with my own, manufactured and rehearsed as it was, and I would call that masculinity “introversion.”[1] After all, isn’t the quintessential man quiet, reserved, perhaps even a bit bookish? That described my father and the men who were my mentors in college.[2] I called this a preference when it was really self-preservation dressed up as taste.

Visibility as anything other than masculine carried real risk, and invisibility, achieved by performing inauthentic masculinity, felt like safety. I constructed a safer version of me and traded it the truth for it. For a long time, I didn’t experience that trade as a loss, because I didn’t let myself feel what I’d given up. Fear is efficient that way.

I could match masculinity’s energy, posture, and presentation, while something deep down remained unconvinced, unsettled, and incomplete. I was safe in the narrowest sense of the term. Yes, I avoided the specific violence I feared, but I wasn’t safe in the ways which actually mattered, in the ways that allowed my authentic self to shine through and allowed me to feel whole, known, and at home in my own desire. Ultimately, it cost me years of not knowing myself and the potential friendship and love of men I never allowed to get too close.

Somewhere along the way I gave up trading authenticity for the illusion of safety. Several years ago I felt compelled to begin using he/they pronouns because they felt more natural for me. Then, at a recent public event, I saw a friend. Before I could self-correct, I flipped my wrist, waved with all five fingers on one hand, and greeted this very masculine, straight friend as “Hey, love!” And while, no, the rest isn’t history, I also wasn’t shocked or embarrassed. It was natural, so natural that I barely noticed it.

Here’s the part I want to make sure I name plainly: the violence I feared was real, and the caution it produced in me was not irrational or shameful. Yet the wall of silence I built around it had a price that I paid quietly, over decades, without ever fully counting the sum harm. Fear kept me physically safer than I might otherwise have been, but for a long time it also cut me off from the real me.

When or where has fear or violence, of any kind, ever cost you a truer version of yourself, even when the fear itself was reasonable?

Let us pray: You who see the cost of every silence we have kept to survive, we bring you the years we spent in hiding, some of them wise and necessary, others shielding ourselves from our authentic selves. We don’t regret the caution that kept us alive, but we grieve what caution took from us, the relationships, and connections the threat hid from our paths. Grant us the courage to live authentically to ourselves and to others. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

[1] Though I often call myself an “introvert” because I’ve become so accustomed to that label, I’m really an ambivert, a person who experiences parts of introversion and extroversion. One of my former ambivert colleagues described himself as an “extrovert who loves people.” I agree with that description though the degree to which I know a person or the people in a group and my role in that group often dictates which side of the extroversion/introversion dynamic I land.

[2] Remember, I went to Sewanee and was taught by Southern Anglicans and Protestants who were as at home outdoors on a long hike as they were in wood-paneled libraries with a book and a cup of tea.

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