this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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I'm a pansexual man married to a pansexual woman. We're both millenials.
Basically, when we were growing up, there was a perception that men who were ever attracted to other men, in any context and for any reason, were considered fully gay, which at the time meant bullying, being ostracized, threats of violence, and generally being treated as a lesser by your peers.
This waned somewhat as we got to high school and disappeared for the most part some time in the mid 2010s (so, well after graduation), but the cultural scar is still there.
Even now I'd call myself mostly-closeted. People from my generation and older will treat (or at least historically have treated) a man as if he's gay and in-denial even if he's like a solid 2 on the Kinsey scale. That's annoying in-itself, but the scars of how our culture was when I was growing up make it a deeply frightening prospect. I have no idea how many friends I'd lose. I hope it'd be zero since I try to pick good people, but who knows?
Being old sucks. Don't let the olds lie and say the culture was better back in the day. It wasn't. They either floated by with crazy privilege or decided their emotionally stunting trauma was a good thing.