u/LongTimeChinaTime

Jesus said “those who seek to save their lives will lose it” and something vice versa. For me, the gay part, it is not a matter of obedience versus rebellion. No, if the most essential part of my heart, my need for intimacy, and my chemistry reaction to guys versus females… isn’t valid or acceptable, if salvation is conditional upon this, then I will not be able to operate to save my own life. I will not be able to champion denial of this to save my own life.

I have terrified visions of dying like a dog to defend myself and my brother’s right to love his own kind if that is how his chemistry reaction and heart operates. Sure maybe one day in the future that orientation could vanish from the human race; but it’s here today, and it is also present in many of our primate cousins.

***I shall not convince a religious man to abandon his heart and operate as a gay man if that is not true to him***. But as far as myself or my brothers whose existential livelihood depends on that intimacy, yeah I would totally die to stand my ground and defend it.

I wasn’t always that way and I tried celibate angles and ideologies, but I couldn’t be consistent. Then after I experienced years of abstinence for other reasons, and experienced what that does to my spirit and overall health, that is what flipped my determination to defend that part of my humanity. My love for men is not a just a vice like chocolate or unhealthy recreational drug patterns (which too actually in some ways factor to my lifelong neurology patterns)… but it is instead something so existential, primal and central to my entire inner universe, that I eventually reach a point where if I shun that part of me to try and save myself, I am lying to you, and while I might endure phases of abstinence, I will always return to it, and the whole time I’m going to be dreaming of guys anyway, both while awake and while asleep. It took 42 years for me to finally decide I need to put my ass on the line to defend it.

Most people either believe strongly and deny homosexuality, or they don’t really “believe that stuff”. Whereas I am a rare archetype, a confirmed Catholic who arrived at a point where I 100% and deeply a believer in God, he is everything and anything around me and inside me, and I was like “dude, I love you, you are everything in its entirety, but if my entire inner universe is unacceptable, then I am already dead, I cannot as of today, exist in the world without that multifaceted reality of being the man I am.

To deny this reality of my human person would violate the deepest aspects of my moral compass in how I understand both myself, other humans, and our primate cousins.” It’s sort of similar to when the military officer orders a subordinate to obey something that violates his moral conscience at a cardinal level.

As a gay man I am now composing screeds about my longing for, and appreciation, of intimacy and sex with other men who are like me.

I learned that this intimacy… is not optional in a long term sense, so that any religious deference is mocking humanity as humanity naturally presents itself, and that my health literally starts to decline if I go years without that intimacy. I was less sure of this human need when I was younger, and sometimes would consider ideologies within my faith. But then I spent several years working on myself and avoiding men or sex.

For awhile this was fine. But after several years my physical and mental health began deteriorating while my internal craving for male intimacy began rising to painful heights until I finally learned how to break through my autism and communicate more effectively to get access to the closeness I needed. I was starting to have dreams about it and also starting to daydream about encounters of years past.

It’s totally a primal thing. One can set it aside if they need to focus on other things for awhile. But long term deprivation of intimacy with whatever your kind is… eventually turns destructive to a person, his or her health and psychology. After about 6 years without significant intimacy, I finally managed to spend some time with a guy this week, and the restorative boost to my mind and body was immense. Metaphorically it was similar to going on a long ass hike in the desert while thirsty and not seeing your family for awhile, then entering an air conditioned house with a glass iced water in hand and your family there.

Given the importance of human intimacy for human beings, in whatever variety that humans come as, a key angle of modern civilization that I am finding myself antagonistic of… is a lot of the performative, bravado, restrictive, social patterns or cultural things that occur in human civilization that can harm certain cohorts of people. Even for heteronormative men or women, there are angles to cultures that can be damaging

Whatever outsider position life has had me in over the years due to my neurodivergence and other minority traits, I’ve found it imperative to try and influence culture wherever I am.. to consider the needs of intimacy and other human functions, and to fight back at all the various chains and cultural quirks that can impede people.

This even includes cultural developments that can be negative like the dom/sub culture in gays, or the early 20th century in which women had way less rights than men did. Or even today where men have been demonized across too many nodes and too intensively, an era today where many of men’s basic needs or behavior traits are demonized or considered automatically suspect.

Ok let me see here. Chart topping artists have been narrating me every which way for decades, and you’re lapping that up like a dog, while I’m mostly toothless, minding my own business, and staying out of trouble most of my life. And people have the nerve to complain they don’t like the attitude I have at various times. I mean dude you’re treating me like a super villain I mean you should be grateful I am not actually doing supervillain type shit. I dont wanna hear it.

Early in my life, I was highly visible.

People watched. People judged. Some of those people were influential—industry figures, A&R, decision-makers—who saw potential and, at times, positioned me as someone who could become something more.

At the same time, I became a target of a different kind of attention.

In a culture that emphasizes personal responsibility above all else, I was turned into a symbol—someone to point at as an example of poor judgment, wasted potential, or failure. A caricature. A cautionary tale.

For years, the narrative was simple:
If I had made better choices, the outcome would have been different.

So I tested that premise.

I put in the work. I stabilized for long stretches. I produced a large, polished body of music—work that meets professional standards in both sound and structure. I maintained employment, logged thousands of hours in day jobs, and built a track record across multiple domains, including adult film work where I consistently performed at a high level.

And still, the expected outcome didn’t materialize.

At that point, the explanation shifts.

It can no longer rest solely on personal failure or bad habits. Because even when those variables are reduced or managed, the result remains largely the same.

So a different reality comes into view:

We are operating in a system where the number of capable, driven individuals far exceeds the number of viable positions of success.

This is true in music. It is true in academia. It is true across many fields that promise upward mobility but cannot structurally deliver it at scale.

In that environment, outcomes are not determined by effort alone. They are shaped by timing, access, network effects, and increasingly narrow margins for error.

When the margins are that thin, even small interruptions—health issues, neurodivergence, periods of instability—can have outsized consequences.

In my case, I live with conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder. My life includes cyclical health disruptions. These are real constraints, but they are also intermittent and, at times, manageable.

They do not fully account for the outcome.

What they do is interact with a system that already has more participants than it can meaningfully support.

That’s the part people resist.

It is easier to believe that failure is always personal, always preventable, always deserved.

But that belief breaks down when enough people meet the stated requirements—talent, effort, persistence—and still cannot secure stable or prominent positions.

This isn’t an argument for abandoning responsibility.

It’s an argument for recognizing structural limits.

Because if a person can do the work, produce the output, reduce the obvious liabilities—and still not “make it”—then the explanation cannot live solely inside that individual.

At some point, the system itself has to be part of the equation.

There’s a common story people like to tell:

If you’re talented, if you work hard, if you clean up your life and commit fully, success will follow.

That story doesn’t hold up under scrutiny—especially in the era I came up in.

By the 2000s, the landscape had already shifted. Barriers to entry dropped, but opportunity didn’t expand at the same rate. There were more people than ever competing for the same limited number of meaningful positions. Talent alone stopped being a reliable differentiator.

I was operating inside that environment.

At the same time, I was navigating a nervous system that doesn’t align cleanly with how that system distributes rewards. Living with conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder means operating in cycles, dealing with sensitivity to overload, and not naturally fitting into fast-moving, socially-driven pathways that often determine access and advancement.

So the equation wasn’t simply effort → outcome.

It was effort, filtered through a crowded system, further shaped by traits that made it harder to convert ability into recognition or stability.

That doesn’t mean I made no mistakes. It doesn’t mean communication couldn’t have been better. But it does mean the outcome I reached isn’t surprising when you look at the full context.

The odds were never neutral to begin with.

And this is the part people often resist:

Many capable people do not fail because they lacked talent or discipline. They fail because they are operating in systems where the number of participants far exceeds the number of viable outcomes—and where certain traits are structurally disadvantaged.

Understanding that isn’t an excuse.

It’s an accurate model of reality.

No, seriously my catalog of 103 bangers would make Freddie Mercury and Madonna blush. If that doesn’t cut it; nothing will.