I distinctly remember quite a few years back where a contestant on Project Runway was toting how dark wash jeans were hip and and more formal looking and that, in turn, slapped me hard in the face with a memory growing up where I was ridiculed for wearing exactly that. In the time of acid wash jeans and cross colours, I was wearing prewash 501 jeans. My parents didn't have two pennies to rub together so I got the ones that were stiff as a board and bled indigo on the racks that they laid on. It took about a year before they were washed enough to fade in color and another year before they were fashionably distressed and by the time I discarded them, they were cut into shorts, paper thin, but still held my shape without me in it. But as unfashionable my clothes were, I think my body type was actually kinda the "in" thing. I was really twinkish back then and the whole clean-cut thing was all the rage. I mean, even Metallica cut their hair and people were still oogling Zack from Saved by the Bell. Incongruously, though, what I was attracted to were the 30-something scruffy-faced, hairy leather white guys and the thuggish thick/beefy latin types with shaved heads... and they were kinda hard to find. Now, though, I'm walking into a club and the demographics of guys with scruff has totally changed and the ratios of those that have touched a razor and those that haven't have drastically changed. Kids that aren't even old enough to drink are sporting nifty beards. And I'm totally perplexed by my reaction to this.
So I mentioned race earlier because that was a source of big discomfort with me. I was just coming out and making sense of things and I took great pride in stripping out all the bullshit and making sure that I was me, not some fucked up social construct that I thought I had to be. And it really felt awkward that my attractions were stated in my head along racial lines because it just felt like more bullshit coming from the outside and influencing me... And it also seemed to point to me having some unresolved issues of my own ethnicity and possibly even an extension of a warped body image and sense of self. If asked, I would tell people that I was born in the midwest (which was true) but I would get so irritated when people then followed up with, "No, where are you really from?" No, really, douchebag. The midwest IS a real place. I swear! But I couldn't tell if that reaction was me getting irritated from their ignorance or me getting called out on and buying into this assimilationist and nationalistic response that promotes disassociation from my heritage. Basically, in my head, I was wondering if the reason I liked white guys is because the prevalence of media images that are informing me so. And my only saving grace was that the guys that I could identify that I really liked were in the margins, a niche outside of the twink and jock group that was all the rage.
It was still a small and narrow niche. And I should be ecstatic that the pool has broadened into a massive lake. All this fuzziness that surrounds me makes my dick perpetually hard. At the same time, something feels off. The past creeps up and I search myself again for the authentic. Am I not happy fishing in a bigger lake because deep down I wanna be swimming among them? Even worse: After all this time, did I just hype this up just because it was different than the social norm (sorta like those guys that run away from the campy gay stereotype that they adopt comical affectations of the polar opposite that make you just shake your head... just be you, dammit!)?
I gotta say though. Even though this question is coming up again in a different form, it doesn't consume me like it used to... Cause either way, I still feel like a badass.
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