Tight Fit Jeans

I wear V-neck shirts. (I'm in a pink V-neck right now.)
I wear skinny jeans; most have rips in them. (I have a white pair... well, two actually.)
I have seven belts, five of which are studded.
I have a three by four foot poster of Adam Levine next to me.
My favorite musician is Kelly Clarkson. (I mean, "Miss Independent"... My girl Kelly knows what she's doin'. Her poster's right next to Adam.)
I have every Britney Spears single.
I've sang "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion at a karaoke night in front of 200+ people(... three times)
I've watched every episode of Glee. (And I have 543 Glee songs on my iPod...)
I'm a Gender Studies major.
I'm Co-Moderator/Co-President of our LGBT Alliance.
I'm an active member of our campus's V-Day group.
I have a tendency to carry books on one side of my chest.
I have nine piercings.
There's a picture of me, age seven or eight, on a couch with four girls, my best friends at the time.
My friends have always been almost entirely female. (Those who aren't are other gay men.)
I went to Studio 13, a gay club in Iowa City, with one of those friends for his birthday at the end of last semester. (It was a "Magic Mike Night" which included two drag queens and five male strippers.)
I own Magic Mike.

Yeah... so I'm definitely gay, right?

The Magic Mike DVD case is turned backward, showing only the black, indented edge.
I refuse to say what song I sang yesterday in the car(out of embarrassment).
When I got my haircut the other day, the hairdresser asked if I'd had many girlfriends and I told her, "A few, but only back home."

I fight off the stereotype even when I fall almost entirely beneath it. It's a conscious decision.
These aspects of my life and personality that fall under the stereotype of a gay man, on the other hand, have hardly been conscious decisions. They're mostly natural. So by hiding the image of a shirtless Channing Tatum and by singing... that song... I'm defying my nature.

I say "hardly" conscious and "mostly" natural because they're not entirely natural qualities - at least not originally. I decided to start wearing skinny jeans senior year of high school. V-neck shirts got a place in my closet a few months later, during the summer before heading off to college. I wore these jeans and t-shirts because they were what gay men wore. I was starting to get exhausted from hiding anything, so I began to try to make it obvious - to make officially coming out the following year easier, to make it known to potential partners/boyfriends that if they asked me out, they had landed in that ten percent chance of potential success at getting a date.

I hide the fact that I work out as often as I can. I don't think anyone in the world knows. Well, maybe you do now, but I don't care. Why should I? I almost always go up and down six flights of stairs instead of using the elevator. I do push-ups just about every day. Pull-ups too. I don't even know why I do? Maybe because working out is a gay thing. Or maybe because it's a straight thing... Or maybe I just want to be fit.

I always wonder how I managed to fall under the stereotype. It's clear that nature, a willingness to conform, and an eagerness to be acknowledged as who I am combined to get me here. And, simultaneously, there's always been some semblance of defiance of that stereotype working against these three entities. That's why there are so many different types of gay men and women. Everyone experiences different levels of each of these, perhaps in different combinations, and maybe there are other aspects of our personas and of the world that affect some further.

But what if there was no stereotype to conform to and none to be afraid of and if I had been stripped of my eagerness for a same-sex romantic relationship? Who would nature have a gay man be? Is there some biological difference between me (and other gay men) and straight men?

It's impossible to imagine right now, isn't it? There's always been rejection and conformity to flamboyancy and the visual and hidden attributes of homosexuality, hasn't there?

Why does it even matter? It doesn't. But it's curious.