Magician. Warrior. King. Lover.
Enneagram 6. Myers Briggs INFJ. Virgo with the Moon in Drag Queen.
Sometimes we'd really, really love to find the Captain Midnight Decoding Ring.
When we're casting around trying to make sense of our lives, trying to find a center that will hold, it's comforting to think that in some universal archetype, finally, lies the deep truth of who I am. The deep truth of who I've always been, of a destiny that's mine to fulfill. The truth of who other people are as well. Cut through the vagaries of my history, the random stuff that's happened to me, and underneath I'll strike the archetypal bedrock that makes sense of it all.
Except it doesn't.
We want there to be something solid down at the bottom. We're drawn to the possiibility of some universal truth. But we won't find the truth of our lives in some eternal verity that's waiting to be uncovered. The truth of our lives is in the random history of how we came to be who we are. Peel away a layer of the onion, and you'll find the onion inside. Except that there's another layer to peel away after that. And another layer after that.
It's not always easy to look with clear eyes at our own histories, with their joys, their traumas, their wounds, their experiences of grace, and their sheer accidents. Sometimes it's hard work to see ourselves as the entirely particular beings that we are. So we start projecting our experience onto some transcendent realm, instead of facing the specific, precious randomness of who we've become and are still becoming. We start making outrageously overgeneralized statements about the universal nature of men's experience, or gay experience. We imagine we're including everyone, when what we're doing is marginalizing those whose experience doesn't conform to our own formulation.
Men don't, as men, have some core essential nature that makes us protectors or warriors, kings or magicians or lovers. Gay men aren't, by some innate gift of being gay, nurturers or tricksters or shamans. We may have some or all of these qualities, but none of them sets us apart as men, or as queer men. None of them is a secret handshake that admits us to the Boys' Club or the Queer Boys' Club. None of them makes us esssentially different from women or straight people or gender-fluid folks or anybody else. And all the other components of our identity--our religion, our class, our race, our cultural background, and on and on, just as importantly make us different from one another.
What we have is the particularity of our experience. We need to dive deeper into it, not impose on it the template of some imagined realm of essential identity. Use whatever images, whatever boxes, whatever labels, you need to make sense of your story. But they're only tools to use for as long as they're useful.
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