Are you smart enough to be gay?

In high school, there was talk of a suicide of a fellow student because it was said that he was gay and, presumably, came from a conservative household. Of course, those were different times. Knowing that I could be gay, I took it as a sign that functioning as a gay human being, which honestly didn’t really exist (at that time) where I come from in China was a bit of a game with really high stakes. My high school consisted mostly of middle, upper-middle-class Asian Americans, and, in hindsight, I image that the experience would be a little different if I were, say, at a high school with a more variegated racial distribution. I also image that it’s really different now being that it’s been almost 20 years since high school for me.

But I knew for certain that I didn’t want to die, and also that I had two opposing, metaphorical directions to go in life: either up or down (because I didn’t want to stay where I was). Since I wasn’t really dating in a serious sense, and I’ve never been a particularly social creature, I decided to focus my time and energy on my career and put my efforts toward a noble cause. As a teenager, I set my sights on pursuing medicine because I knew I was smart and hardworking and I wanted to help people. The stable, respectable salary was also a plus and I did genuinely have family on my mind.

Yet, in medical school, I was diagnosed with an “illness” that I probably experienced a bit in childhood, and was prescribed medication, which, coupled with my condition, more-or-less impelled me to come out of the closet and start dating. It also just felt like it was time with the legalization of gay marriage happening just one day after my 26th birthday: “happy birthday”. I wasn’t planning on being openly gay, to be honest, but then, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. All of a sudden, I was thrust out of my comfort zone and forced to improvise a new life as an openly gay man.

Since officially coming out, I think around 2015-ish, I’ve learned a thing or two about being a gay man. I’m a doctor–not a physician–but a doctor nonetheless, and I’ve always had an analytical mind. Being gay, much like being straight, has its own set of unspoken rules. It’s up to you to discover them because, at this point in time, there are few examples (i.e. successful couples) to emulate. We are all still learning what it means to be truly gay in this day and age.