Who am I?

My last post gave you an idea of why I (re)started this blog, and where I am headed. Today, I wanted to start sharing some of myself in earnest. I’m a gay man, living in New York City. This isn’t something my coworkers or family know, and it is certainly not something that I do much to publicize. Amazingly, no one has ever come straight up to me and asked. I do not know what my reaction would be, but I hope to be able to deliver the truth when it does happen.

I don’t believe that sexual preference defines who we are or limits our capacity to love others, family, friends or otherwise. Nor is it the most important thing about me. Yet I chose to lead off with this disclosure because over the last weekend, my ruminations yielded a discovery – that the fear of creating any tangible evidence which may be used to “out” me has sabotaged every attempt I have made in the past to post with a sincere voice, one that is truly my own. Although that fear remains, being gay is an integral part of my person, and by revealing it at the outset, I hope to become unfettered to speak my mind with the same personal and genuine kind of voice that powered Mike Grauer’s photostream which caught my admiration in the first place.

If being gay fosters a fear of social ostracization, then the group that I most define with, the puppy play subculture, only magnifies it. Members of the pup play subculture, a tribe of the BDSM / Leather community, have canine souls that its members embrace wholeheartedly, and not merely as role play. The scene does not involve any interaction with four legged canines, but regardless remains further out on the fringe of social acceptance than members of the “vanilla” BDSM / Leather communities. For this reason, many members of the pup play tribe, like myself, carefully compartmentalize their lives into a facet that is presented to the world at large and one that is revealed only when like minded people are around. In that latter milieu, I am an energetic and playful pup who has taken his bumps through life, but remains on the whole a tail-wagging optimist.

The aspect of my life that belongs to the world at large has been formed growing up in a fairly privileged home in Canada with loving parents who traveled widely with me in tow. My life has steered clear of most of the stereotypical gay dramas – no running away, no abusive parents or such. The closest thing I can point to is when my father passed away when I was already 23 and already in law school. While that marked a turning point for me in that I felt a bit freer to explore my own personality, all the while my mother and I have been and remain very close.

From an early age I was rather introverted not particularly gregarious, As I grew up through high school I became dissatisfied with the person I was, strove towards an evolving mental ideal every time I had an opportunity to start fresh: from High School to College, then the move from College to Law School, and again when I moved to New York City. I have learned that you can acquire the traits you desire, but the ones that you are running from never really disappear. For me, there is still an introverted guy inside that sometimes just wants peace and quiet and a good deal of space to think and digest the world around him.

While I enjoy my work immensely, though times have been tough this past year, my career is not what I thought it would be. My family’s business was in the import and export of ladies fashions from the Far East. I always believed I would end up as a businessman in the family business with my father and mother. If I had followed my heart, I would have been an architect, or fashion designer. However, my parents who wanted the best for me and whose logic I both understood and agreed with, wanted me to be a doctor or lawyer as a point of departure. I could be whatever I wanted after I had gained a degree that would afford a safety net should other pursuits not pan out. When my father died, the dream of working together with him and my mother in the family business died along with it. I spent some gruesome months giving the family business a soft landing, before folding the business – no bank could support a business run by a college grad half out of law school particularly where the talents of the deceased founder were its biggest asset. Those months were a life lesson on what friends are, whom to trust and how business works. After, I finished my law degree and through odd alignments in my resume, I ended up as an attorney in the real estate field with a concurrent role as a land developer.

So this post is a touchstone that lays out who I am to the world, who I am in private and, to some degree, what my personality is. As we wander further, these two compartments of my life will invariably color my commentary on my feelings, ideas and thoughts and will be inexorably linked to these points of reference.