Frank Ocean made headlines last week when he came out. Something he said about his first experience falling in love with a man took me down memory lane. Ocean wrote on his personal blog:
“It was my first love. It changed my life. Back then, my mind would wander to the women I had been with, the ones I cared for and thought I was in love with. I reminisced about the sentimental songs I enjoyed when I was a teenager… The ones I played when I experienced a girlfriend for the first time. I realized they were written in a language I did not yet speak.”
A number of years back I had a similar experience: dating women, I thought I knew what it felt like to be in love. I thought I could relate to all the sappy love movies and love songs. When I allowed myself to start figuring out what being gay was all about I realized that wasn’t the case. As I started dating men, I realized I had never really been in love before. And I definitely couldn’t relate to the pain others experienced when they went through break ups until I went through my first break up with a man. It hurt like hell. I finally understood why people would lay in bed listening to the same song over and over and over again; that’s what I did, that’s how I coped, and that’s how everyone around me coped. Here’s an accurate description of what it’s like.
It’s pretty pathetic, I know. But at the time, it was revelatory. Just as Ocean described, falling in love (and breaking up) opened me up to a whole new language: the language of love. I was suddenly able to identify with friends and peers on one of the most powerful human emotions, something I had never experienced with women. The conversation I was having in my head (the things you think and never say) about friend and family going through break ups changed from “you wimp” to “Yeah, that sucks. I get it.”
And this revelation works the other way, too. Straight people who don’t get the gay thing realize what it’s all about when we relate over the shared experience of falling in love (or breaking up). A friend told me about the moment when his mom became an ally. She just didn’t get it until he told her about a guy he had fallen for. As he described his feelings, she stopped and said something like, “WAIT A MINUTE! That’s what I feel about your dad. You must be in love.” Revelation.
To sum it up, sexuality isn’t really all that significant or important. Love is love. It’s universal. Or, as Ocean puts it in one of his songs, marriage is between love and love (not man and woman).
Listen to his music and see if you can catch him sneaking in clues about his sexuality.