{"id":4006,"date":"2022-06-16T12:52:06","date_gmt":"2022-06-16T20:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/?p=4006"},"modified":"2022-06-16T16:55:08","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T00:55:08","slug":"and-not-falling-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2022\/06\/16\/and-not-falling-down\/","title":{"rendered":"And not falling down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walking my bike through the fine sand to meet friends on the beach, Tuesday night, in an interlude of heat between storms, I found my eyes lingering on the beautiful bodies of the men and the women and everyone else around me. It made me think about one of the early entries I posted to this blog, nineteen years ago: a little scanned photo<\/a> of two famous musicians, and a “joke” about having a crush on each of them. (It was also the post where I announced that I had successfully added permalinks to my homebrew software. Most of those very first entries are among the ones I have since set to private.)<\/p>\n

I had been making those kinds of jokes since I was a teenager, attempting to forestall criticism and mockery of my own uncertain masculinity<\/a> by beating my peers to the punch. As with so many things in my youth, I did not pause to consider that in my self-protective spin moves I was just enacting another form of homophobia, or what effect that might have on other people around me.<\/p>\n

But I’m not a youth anymore. I know a little more in general than I did then, and a lot more about myself. So I thought about that old reflex, and how many gentle people have helped me move away from it, and I thought about the sweat and skin and bodies of the people at the beach, and I thought: I can call this feeling what it is, without justification or apology. The name of the feeling is attraction. I’m a forty-one-year-old man, and I’m attracted to some women, and some men, and certainly some other people too.<\/p>\n

Here I am, a different person than I was nineteen years ago, and the same person I have always been. Happy June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walking my bike through the fine sand to meet friends on the beach, Tuesday night, in an interlude of heat between storms, I found my eyes lingering on the beautiful bodies of the men and the women and everyone else around me. It made me think about one of the early entries I posted to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,92,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boys","category-girls","category-swimming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4006"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4016,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4006\/revisions\/4016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}