The gayest a straight man will ever be is when he is going through puberty. There wasn’t a night with my middle school group of guy friends in 2012 that didn’t involve touching each other, sometimes sensual and secure, sometimes aggressively, confusingly occasionally both- you see this with football players, smacking each others asses, exposing their feelings underneath layers of abstraction. You probably have seen this before in school, on the bus, heard it from your friends; you’ve almost definitely experienced this if you grew up trying to conform to a group of male peers. Most people know about this phenomenon as a general truth to masculine men, but the extent of it surprises those that didn’t experience it themselves.
So I would hang out with a group of 3-5 other boys in middle school. Mostly playing airsoft, going into woods, playing video games, wrestling, drinking soda, very typical male activities. This was the crux of my repression. I could barely fathom the thought of being gay, much less being trans, and the criticism of my masculinity from my friends and my dad was unending and threatening. I adopted the social tendencies of men from this group of friends much like I must re-adopt the lack of it now. I feared not fitting in, and my feminine natures of a boy at that age meant that I didn’t fit in anywhere- the group of friends found me weak, whiny, and easily picked on, and most women were just confused by my presence. Play fighting was common with the group and I developed a flinch alongside my gay tendencies.
On top of this my parents were getting divorced and listening to them yell daily subdued me in multifaceted manners. This is why my years in middle school were the worst in my life (did junior high break you down?). This is why I spent most of my time on the internet and why my parents nearly found me in their bedroom, spread out on the floor with grey matter splattered against the wall. Social exclusion is hell and I got through it coping two ways. One was dating women, which I now understand was due to a need of “accessing femininity” as someone I know puts it, and the other was homoeroticism.
small note: beyond this I played a lot of video games to cope but it's not really relevant.
Do you know how excited I was when I started noticing that my male friend group were kind of fags? There was a light at the end of the tunnel with my identity and it involved a group of sweaty dudes. The way these groups act alone, together, is vastly different from how the same group acts in public. I think everyone knows about guys saying “no homo” after doing something homo, but it’s not taken as seriously as it really should be, because these guys are ACTUALLY homo.
There was a night I had a sleepover at my parents place where 5 men were all in a single bedroom, and at the time we enjoyed playing a game coined “General Grievous”, where one person would go outside the room, we would turn everything off so it was pitch black, and hid wherever we could. Then the general would crawl into the room (like Grievous) and search for us, the punishment being an unseen wrestle before the general moves on to the next person. We did this shirtless and other than the thrill of being found, the only other real part of this game was some good old skin on skin contact and a subtext of sex. After we were done playing we partnered up and just cuddled on each others chest. I had never felt so secure in my life, so natural and fitting, I belonged here more than anywhere else.
Another night, we did an activity which consisted entirely of trying to peep on everyones dick. The energy in the room was equally split with genuine curiosity and fear. One thing I found consistently interesting was the dual nature of intention that these activities usually had, there had to be some plausible deniability to an action that would absolve us of being gay, because of course these people were NOT gay, not even in the slightest, they were good old country boys. But this façade fell apart eventually.
One birthday party, there was a literal circlejerk: A group of puberty aged men under covers jerking off to porn that we were collectively watching. In order to “prove” if someone was faking the activity, or not, we would climb next to one another and put our ears to the others chest to confirm high heart rate (I participated and enjoyed it overall). There is no plausible deniability here. This was never talked of again afterwards. Slightly related, even in the other friend group that I was in at the time, all of my friends who were male would discuss their porn preferences and masturbation frequency. I even did a impromptu survey during lunch once of random people and 90% of the boys interviewed gave an answer when asked if they masturbate, and all but one of those responses was yes. They're very open about it and I'm not sure what this says about society but I'm going to blame testosterone.
Finally – one of the last things I remember before this group outgrew the age of 14 and we all drifted apart – I spent the night with one of my best friends in there at the time. We had just woken up in bed together and he started incessantly requesting to suck my dick, all in all a total of 5 requests before he gave up and said he was totally just joking. This scared me more than anything, why was this man burning down the shade? Wasn’t this just a joke? I would have said yes but I was too shocked. He had let loose the small secret that we had built up and all but confirmed to me that this phenomenon was not just my imagination, not a pop culture cliché, but just repression. It took years for him to come to terms with it and I probably ended up pushing it away forever. I’ve recovered from the trauma of having my essence offset by violence. Today, he’s not gay.