Rambling Ranting.

I never read “Men’s Health” magazine. Maybe the fact that I eat a completely unhealthy diet, only enjoy reading fitness articles to see who has good bodies yet never apply the teachings to myself, and have no need to read about finding the female erogenous zones limits the magazines appeal to me. Yet there I was sitting backstage a week or so ago and found myself stuck in a room where the only choice of magazines was a “Playboy” and “Men’s Health,” both obviously things I subscribe to. So I picked it up and started flipping through only to find that ten minutes later I had tears building in my eyes and shivers all over my body.

Now before you start laughing too much let me explain a little. Amidst the articles about weight loss and sex tips there was an incredibly touching tribute written by Craig Ferguson (host of “The Late Late Show”) to his recently departed father. Along with touching anecdotes about his time spent with his father he discussed what it means to deal with loss and the different stages of life. Ferguson himself has a son that is almost five and it was extremely important to him that his son got to spend time with his father. Three generations in one room, and me reading it backstage at the Met as if it were my life story, crying in the men’s lounge. There was something so relatable and intimate about the way he paints the meeting between his father and his son in a hospital in Scotland as the torch is passed from one man to the next. He makes himself so vulnerable in the writing of this article, I only wish I was able to lay my thoughts on the page as candidly.

One of the most beautiful things in the world to me is the idea being able to share your family with each other as it grows. I know personally I will always be sad that I never got to meet my mother’s mother, or spend a little more time with my father’s parents. I can only hope that one day when I have children they will be able to experience what I never got to.

In the corner of this article there was a box that laid out the “5 Moments That Define A Man,” and something about it made me incredibly sad. Of course there are milestones that the majority of people will go through that could be said to define them, but when one of those events is legally denied to me, how am I supposed to handle that? Will I ever be able to share Ferguson’s type of experiences with my family?

Number one on his list is “Choosing to Marry,” obviously a major step in anyone’s life, but as a gay man it is something that in our current constitutional crisis is denied to me. We all want the same things, the same joys, and people there to share our pain but sometimes I just get so depressed by the state of our world. If these are the five steps that define a man then what does that make me if I can’t legally do one of them.

Now I am not foolish enough to think that this list is definitive or that just because the country doesn’t recognize my love for a man that makes it any less real. Yet it still reflects the mindset of a large majority of this country, and possibly even people that are reading this right now.

Number Three on this list is “Receiving Your First Real Defeat,” and it talks about things that cut “really deep” such as divorces or job loss. Yet as I read this it again prompted the idea that in a way I had already been defeated out of pure denial of who I am as a person. This is such a scary thought to me and as the tears built up I realized just how scared I was of all of this list and for varying reasons.

“Becoming a Father” is number two and is something that I look forward to and yet another thing that by being a gay man adds difficulty to an already difficult milestone. Tying into the article number four is “becoming an orphan” and realizing that after your parents’ death there is nothing to fall back on anymore. You truly stand on your own. Having never dealt with death as an adult it honestly isn’t something that I think about very often but I think everyone carries around this unspoken fear of the unknown at all times.

Sprawled at the end of this list is the vague idea that “you don’t know everything” which probably scares me more than anything. Of course this fear comes with a sprinkle of excitement in anticipation of what is to come, good or bad. As my eyes scanned the last sentences of the article I couldn’t help but be bombarded by the words “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” over and over and over again. I don’t know how I will handle these events, I don’t know how to handle the fact that I am denied some of these “rites of passage,” and I don’t know how to handle the state of things right now. Bringing up Yahoo every day and finding headlines declaring that gay rights are being denied left and right, state after state, I don’t know what there is that I can do to help. I don’t even know if I believe that everyone together can make a change. Sometimes I just feel so disheartened.

Yet somehow we all keep going, through the unknown and through that fear, finding our way past the headlines and the guidance of “Men’s Health” articles.