Why is it easier for most of us to get naked than express our feelings? I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time writing these lines. I’ve sit here staring at my laptop screen many times. I’ve handwritten several ideas – all linked between them by irregular lines. I wrote about my childhood. I wrote about my present. I’ve done it in my mother tongue and it haven’t worked. Neither has it in English.
Maybe I’m afraid of being too narcissistic, too obvious, too cliché. Perhaps it is because my life is in motion where everything seems to be changing, acquiring a new meaning still unknown to me. Probably it’s just that I’m terribly scared of being emotionally exposed.
“Let it flow” says Chris when I text him about my blockage. His words comes in to help me get loose as parts of his body did during the shoot: a hand here, a foot there, and I started to feel more comfortable, more myself. The truth is that I had a weird but yet familiar feeling while being in front of the camera. A mix of desire and discomfort. It felt unnatural at the beginning because, even though I consider myself as a shy and not very social person, I am not. Especially when I’m naked, I tend to talk a lot as if words could distract the attention from my body.
Instead, the photoshoot was silent. I wasn’t myself in this sort of body-monologue so Chris intervened and it worked. Or I think so. Suddenly it was less solitary, more organic and it reassured me – or it does it now – facing one of my recent deepest fears: the feeling that, as a result of the hyper-sexualization I’ve experienced last years, sex has lost its social dimension to be only about me, about my pleasure.
At the same time, it felt familiar because it’s pretty much the way I’ve always related to sex and with my identity. Queer kids grow up in this uncomfortable feeling of not recognizing themselves with their peers, expecting for something unknown that has yet to come and trying to go unnoticed until then. Some stronger personalities develop earlier their identities, accepting themselves and adapting smoother to the real world. It wasn’t my case.
I was the kind of kid that keeps hiding behind his mother’ skirt. Always afraid of the other boys. Growing up, coming out and – unexpected twist plot – starting to feel attractive and desired happened so fast. And it blew my mind. Best drug I ever had. But as it happens with any drug, everything that goes up must come down. And the fall is especially hard in a city with 5 million fags where sex is always an option. Where desire is so unavoidable.
That was the moment Chris reach me and even if I always joke – with a certain disdain of my “former” misfitted prejudices – on how it seems that any gay men needs to dye blond or pink, get an STD and do a naked photoshoot to get the gay ID, I did it. I enjoyed it and I’ve learnt from it. Maybe because things are the way they are for some reason. Perhaps because it has forced me to put it down in words some of my ideas about how I relate with sex. Probably because I’m narcissistic and a cliché. Surely because it’s a necessary step towards the balance I’m looking for.