In the mirror there is no face peering back. On the stage there is only a performer, a pale, homeless body parading about wearing a myriad of masks stretching the confining terms of tragedy and comedy, history and romance, so that each melds into the other, and all that remains is a theatrical show that renders the spectators confused and laughing to hide that confusion. This is the drama of being a gay male. I cannot speak for a lesbian or even a heterosexual male or female, but for only my own self, or rather, for my absence of self. There is a reason, a remarkably valid and coherent reason behind the cliché as to why gay men always end up in the arts, whether as cosmetics artists, actors, singers, artists, or authors. Each of these invokes a performance, an actively, consciously constructed experience of self that in itself is entirely absent from our being.

A make-up artist enjoys painting not just their own, but other faces as well, to put off the constant terror of their own lack of self; they are the purveyors (and literal wearers) of the mask and the artificial face. Actors, simply enough, eliminate the illusion of the self to put on and perform another equally artificially constructed self, a character. Singers are the only performance artists that convey the absence or confusion of self that exists in every human being. Yet, the question remains, how much is performance and mask, and how much is really a presence of their own humanness on stage? Artists and authors hide behind their art and their language, behind their painted canvases and sculptures, behind their poetry and their fiction. Artists and authors painstakingly construct these forms to mask the absence of self, and deflect their own panic over this absence. The looming question haunting all minds that dare peak behind the veil and gaze into the abyss is, “What is the source of a gay man’s absence of self that is more readily experienced in their lives leading them to become performers in the arts?”

Why do gay men become creators and performers of a self or selves that are themselves illusions, blatant exposures of artifice and the unreal? In a word, the answer is gender. For some it is in their early childhood, for others it is from the onset of puberty that their first experiences of gender and sexuality convey a message not wholly decipherable until later on in university life or even in emerging adulthood. The notion of difference from the prescribed norms of gender and sexual behavior that highlight the historic and global conquest of heterosexuality is the germ of this message. Teenage and college boys see not only in their families, but in their fellow male students, as well as all across the media, the constant, contrived reference to the joys and exploits of heterosexuality in contrast to the trials and tribulations, as well as equally, if not more so, contrived emasculation and effeminizing of the homosexual. This consciously controlled social distortion of the homosexual causes a severing in the mind of the natural sense of self in the young gay male that should be supported and developed but is rather depicted as unnatural, demonic, and diseased instead. Thus, this creates a self-perception of one’s natural, by which I mean biological (DNA-encoded) and psychological, self, as other. Consequently, the gay male must eliminate or at least disguise this new experience of the self as other. Hence, the ease with which a gay male can put on and off a mask of the self, further conveying the objective truth that all selves are constantly changing impressions actively constructed to guard against, in this case, a witch-hunt that seeks to parade the homosexual as an abnormal and one who participates in socially aberrant behavior.

Gender has ruined the homosexual male’s chances at discovering, fostering, and maintaining a natural biological and psychological sense of self as a homosexual rather than as an “other”. The history of civilization and culture has enabled all heterosexual men and women to discover and develop their own natural biological and psychological sense of self as heterosexual males and females, however skewed it may be because of the sociology of gender and sexuality. Socially constructed and prescribed codes of gender and sexuality have injured the human race’s chances at developing and maintaining the biologically and psychologically natural sense of a sexual self that is their God-given right as human and sexual beings. It is humankind’s warped sense of what is natural and unnatural that has permitted the dissolving of a gay male’s sense of self that leads him to become a theatrical performer of an artificially constructed self to mask his literal absence or lack of a natural sexual self. A gay male’s theatrics only serve to mask the deeply ingrained perception of this terrifying loss of self as a human being with a natural sexuality. His humor, his language, his made-up face, his passionate voice, his paintings, and chosen characters are all an act, an act consciously created to ward off the terror of the self-less abyss that he has become because society has questioned, crushed, and denied the validity of his natural sexual self.

Dominick Montalto is a freelance copy editor pursuing full-time work in the publishing industry in an editorial capacity. His educational background is in Literature, Art History, Philosophy, and Religion. He is a poet and critical prose essayist, with several publishing credits in both genres in print and on the web. His literary field specialization is the long 19th century from the French Revolution through the early Modern novel, with particular focus on the evolutionary changes of the Gothic, British Romanticism, French Symbolism, British and French Decadence and Aestheticism, and Orientalism. His religious and philosophical interests focus on the various sects of mysticism, as well as Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Overall, he continues to hold a strong interest and love for the different aspects of the arts and humanities.