Coming Out as Straight
By Phil Fox Rose
June 9, 2006

I have not written anything on gender in a couple of years. The main reason for this is that I've had a strong sense that my understanding of it as it relates to me was in flux. Though as a nonfiction writer one must be willing to commit to paper your thoughts of the moment, with full awareness that they will change and probably embarrass you down the road, there are times when you feel your current thought-state is so obviously immature that it would be imprudent to proceed. Such has been the last two years.

Recently, though, things snapped into focus and I've been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the already-published work being my latest words on the subject. So, the point of this is: I'm a straight man. There, I said it. I'm not a lesbian in a man's body; I'm not a post-gender-non-gender something-or-other. I'm a guy. Of course, I'll always be queer in the sense of rejecting society's rules on this subject, and I still don't get most "regular guys". But that doesn't make me a girl. The personal statements that follow are not meant as a challenge to anyone else's choices involving gender identity. If anything is a personal matter, for God's sake, gender identity is it. That said, I'm not going to bar any holds in describing how my thoughts have changed, and some may not like a few of the conclusions I've arrived at. Hope it's …

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