What’s better? To be loved or to be desired?
They feel adjacent, but they are wholly different. Love comes from every part of you being seen, accepted, and appreciated. Desire is an agenda. I want something; anyone that helps me get closer to it becomes a means to an end.
In the presence of social desire, the gays are reduced to the function of a catalyst, a stop along the road, not a destination.
The “trophy gay” is sold as flattery, a prized eccentricity in an otherwise homogenous friend group. A gay is noticed, singled out, interpreted and judged long before anyone they are surrounded with.
Our uniqueness exists because we fought for it; the confidence our triumph through hardship has lent us, the style we expertly sharpened, all coalescing to give us a hard-earned sense of self. We didn’t wake up unique and self assured, we fought for that right and won.
People are unsettled by what they can’t immediately understand; what resists being labeled and filed neatly into societies predetermined categories.
The instinct is to neutralize the outlier, blend them back into the majority, make the unfamiliar familiar. It’s a real law of science: when something moves against the concentration gradient, the majority neutralizes the outlier. Standing out then puts the gays in a constant place of working against the forces trying to make us digestible. We are tossed into the metaphorical ocean of society and forced to sink or swim. We find it in us to swim, society made us earn the right to be unique, so thank you for noticing.
That impulse: to domesticate, to categorize, to make us palatable, is exactly how gays become the means to someone else’s end. We’ve grown tired of being digested, decoded, and deployed.
It’s time to reposition.
Offer nothing for acceptance. Let acceptance be the gateway to what you choose to offer.
Even from atop this highest of horses, I’ll admit that I’ve contorted myself more times than I can count. And I will again. Comfort often disguises itself as belonging; appeasement can feel safer than authenticity. Despite wanting to show up as my full self, I still notice how quickly I shapeshift depending on who I’m with, and what I assume they expect of me. Whether that be an introduction to one of my friends they think is pretty, a new social circle, or something extracurricular. The moment I present the worth of my friendship to be what I have to offer and not who I am, I make myself a means to an end.
Here’s the shift:
Your network is not your shield.
Your visibility is not your liability.
In your own uniqueness, you possess the rarest social currency: the ability to connect without needing to conform. That alone gives you leverage, so use it.
Love, true love, should be rooted in who you are, not what you can provide. Not everyone will like you. That’s a structural fact, not a personal failure. Let it refine your circle. See who desires your proximity and who cherishes your company. Protect your network from the former and invest it generously in the latter.
Reclaiming your power has never been easy. It isn’t meant to be. But uniqueness is power. Individualism is power. People already know you’re different. There’s your leverage, use it.
So, to answer the question:
Fuck desire. I choose love.
Now it’s your turn to choose.
Kisses,
Nicky Reich
