It has been around 90 days since my last diary, and I am still not out of the closet to anyone who doesn't know my screen name here besides my completely awesome pastor. For those who didn't read my previous diary, I've been personally identifying myself as being somewhere in the less extreme, and therefore more privileged, section of the asexual spectrum since a few weeks before Coming Out Day and fumbled my way through coming out here the night before that day.
This diary is intended as a response to "Why do gay people always feel the need to tell people they are gay?" by RfrancisRFollow or, rather, an elaboration.
Because so far as my existence is going right now, as someone who a half-year ago was secure in what she believed was her heterosexual privilege and has now realized just how many ways I can out myself as not quite heterosexual in a given day even with my heteroromantic privilege fully intact, RfrancisRFollow's little dare didn't actually go far enough.
See, signals of sexuality aren't just the little things you intentionally do, like wear a wedding ring in a state that doesn't even have civil unions or have a photo with your significant other on a desk or in your wallet where other people can see it. It's also the things you don't intentionally do and even some things you intentionally don't do.
So even if a heterosexual individual taking the challenge to live in a majority-homosexual neighborhood without intentionally letting anyone know he or she is heterosexual actually managed to do so, chances are the neighbors would still figure it out.
It's the things like having your eyes track someone you find attractive - one of my friends managed to technically out himself that way once, and if his mother who was with us hadn't already known he was gay, it would have been far more than a technical outing.
It's things like having others around you discuss famous people they find attractive and hope that they never realize you keep your mouth shut or have identified everyone someone of your presumed orientation might be attracted to as 'not my type' until there's really no one left for you to be attracted to - unless your orientation is something else entirely.
It's things like having friends from another school spring their yearbook on you at a get-together when you're teenagers, open it to a random page, and ask you which of the people on the page you'd most want to have sex with, and you have to either fake an interest in someone you'd never be interested in at all well enough to pass (and hope they don't try to set you up for a date with the random person you picked) or refuse to answer and take the risk they'll start wondering. (Even if they'd made it open to all people of all genders on that page, I still would have 'failed' that 'test': I just don't get attracted, romantically or sexually, to people I don't already know fairly well.) And adults can still do that, with the classic "Which actor/actress would you most want to have sex with?" question.
It's things like having to fudge the nature of a current relationship so no one figures out who you're interested in or make up excuses for not looking for a relationship when well-meaning people want to 'help' you find someone, because of course the assumption is that everyone wants to be in a relationship of some form or another. You don't just get to hide that you're in a relationship, you have to do even more work on top of that.
All that is constantly going on around you the entire time you are around anyone who might have even the slightest passing interest in what your orientation is. Which, as with gender, is just about everyone.
And once you're old enough to understand you're different in some way from the norm in an area, which can be quite young if the differences between the assumptions and the reality are striking enough, you're aware of that. You know what people expect - they only spend every day modeling it out for you - and you either have to be out as different or pretend. Constantly pretend. Or you find explanations - acceptable explanations - early enough that you deceive yourself about who you are even better than you deceive other people (this being more pertinent to people on the asexual spectrum of orientations, but it's still worth mentioning here - there's a reason I was over 25 years old before I figured out who I really was).
And you still can't kill the microexpressions. Someone may still catch enough of a flash of desire or disgust to realize the presumed orientation is a lie and you can't do a thing to stop it. Your brain does those automatically without consulting you first.
And this is your life, day after day after day. No end in sight but the possibility that there's someday, maybe, a chance you won't have a reason to hide the difference anymore.
That's another thing RfrancisRFollow's dare, even the extensive 90-day version, just doesn't simulate. A heterosexual hiding that orientation while living in a primarily homosexual area for three months 1) knows there is a set end date when the ordeal of hiding will be over, 2) knows that all it takes is hopping in a car or bus and traveling away to get back to a place where he or she is a member of the locally privileged group, and 3) doesn't have a chance of violence (physical or sexual) occuring if the masquerade drops at the wrong moment. And there's no way to simulate what all that knowing for so long does to someone's personal psychology.
I've been in the closet for maybe six months now, honestly and actually in a non-simulated closet I can perceive for myself, and I can't imagine what it's like for people as old as I am who have been there since puberty or even earlier and have felt the walls the entire time.