My Teenage Dream

Remember the Glee episode when Kurt visits the Dalton Academy and meets up with Blaine, who sings him Teenage Dream with all the other boys of the school? I liked that. After that show aired, my friend Ansley sent me this review of that episode. Tom and Lorenzo, the authors of the post, discuss that as fantastic as the "It Get's Better" project is, it only goes so far. Unfortunately, kids get their cues on what's normal and acceptable from the media. Here's what T&L have to say:

To the straight people reading us: remember high school? Remember your favorite songs and movies, TV shows and music videos from that period? Imagine if all of that media bombardment telling you what to like, what to wear, and how to be attractive, popular, and cool, imagine that all of that aimed for and addressed everyone else but you. Imagine what it's like when every sappy love song (or angry breakup song), every rom com, every trendy TV show and blockbuster movie, even every video game, imagine if they all depicted a form of romantic love that simply isn't available to you. Imagine going through high school without even so much as a hint of yourself reflected in any of the things you watch and listen to, any of the things that literally every other kid is talking about. Imagine the one thing you want more than anything in the world: to be kissed, please god, just to be kissed, imagine you have never seen that depicted anywhere or referred to in any way but as something to be mocked and shunned.

This is why the "Teenage Dream" sequence was so incredibly powerful. I remember getting lots of chills when I watched it, but the strange thing is that it didn't fully occur to my why it was giving me the chills it was until after I read the blog post above. But it's true. It was thrilling to see something depicted that I could actually relate too. I think I was also kind of annoyed that it was giving me chills and that I liked it so much because it was so damn cheesy. But it was allowing me to experience, by proxy, unlived teenage dreams.

This point was driven home even further last night when several Mormon young single adult congregations in the Portland area had a joint activity that was what they called a "Charity Date Auction." The title is a little bit misleading. It was actually a date auction for charity and not an auction of charity dates.

Anyway, I wasn't really planning on going. I meet with a trainer on Monday nights, so I wouldn't have been able to get there until well after it started. Plus there's the fact that I would have probably just ended up being annoyed by the whole thing. Lately though, I've been learning to experience such things while wearing the hat of a cultural anthropologist. When I do, these experiences become more interesting and somewhat less annoying.

So I went and caught part of the auction wearing my anthro hat. Sadly, it was a silent auction. I think a live auction (is that what they're called?) would have been so much more entertaining. I was envisioning something more along the lines of the date auction in Groundhog Day. It was interesting though to go and listen to what I was feeling. There was a sense of interest on my part to witness what was going on and to just sit back and observe in a fairly detached way.

I realized though as I left that I had this semi latent feeling of jealousy and longing. The energy in the air from good natured, sexually repressed Mormon twenty-somethings having a forum to express possible romantic interest in each other was incredibly tangible. Pretty much any Mormon young single adult event is infused with this energy: the excitement of possibly meeting someone you might like, or learning about someone who might be interested in you, the dread of having someone you're not interested in try to hit on you.

The energy is there and it's thick and I've almost never been able to experience it personally or feel a part of it in those settings. Early on, before I came to terms with my attraction to men, I probably would have just identified the inability as me being different somehow and that it was my problem that I had a hard time fitting myself into those scenes. It didn't occur to me that maybe those scenes weren't providing what I needed or hungered for, or that maybe I was so lost in what I was supposed to like and do that my own God given instincts and internal voice (the spirit) was getting completely drowned out.

I also realize that this experience of not feeling like you fit in, whether being a gay Mormon at a young single adult activity or anything else, isn't exclusive to gay Mormons. I'm curious what other experiences people have had with not feeling like you fit in with what was being portrayed around you, whatever the circumstance. How did you process it, grow from it or learn more about what your actual needs are, etc.? Or maybe you're still in the stage of being able to identify that you don't feel like you fit in somewhere that you think you should, but you can't exactly put your finger on why that is. How do you go about getting in touch with yourself enough to be able to start to understand where the discomfort comes from and what it can tell you about who you are and what your needs are?