Tag: Feeling Different

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Feeling Different by Phillip Hoyle


As a young adult in seminary discussions I realized that sometimes students and professors alike didn’t know what I was going on about. A professor would listen to my ideas and respond, “Very interesting, Mr. Hoyle.” I took it he had no clear understanding of my perspective. That was okay, something I had encountered most of my life. I was talking about one of these seminary “interesting” instances with my mentor Katherine Williams. “They must think I’m strange,” I concluded.

“You are strange, Phillip,” she replied without hesitation.
Strange was not new to me. Although I didn’t feel particularly unaccepted or unacceptable as a teenager, I was aware that my sexual yearnings were unusual enough that they could get me into a lot of trouble or at least make my life a problem to other folk. Besides that, I was mildly nerdy but found my niche in music. If any musician fits in, I fit in easily enough singing in church, school and community. I was a reluctant leader in a couple of school organizations. I felt different; I was different: for instance, I didn’t know any other kids my age who organized music groups; I didn’t know very many guys who studied as attentively as I did although I admit I didn’t over-do it; I was physically rather uncoordinated, but not so much as to be made into a fool; I had good humor; I was independent and happy to be so. My feeling different didn’t make me feel particularly bad since I was easily entertained, easy going, and tolerant of groups and different kinds of people. By that time in my life I was reconciled to the fact that I was quite different and that the difference was acceptable to me if not to anyone else.

In college, I felt attracted to three guys: Todd, Dirk, and Chad. Todd and Chad seemed straight. I assumed Dirk was but now wonder if he was bisexual. He seemed somehow attracted to me as if he knew I was do-able. We never went beyond touching disguised as wrestling. Straight Chad was rather needy, and I fell for him. He was the first person I ever lost sleep over. But I was on an earnest straight road toward marriage. After seven years of marriage, I had a one-night stand with a gay friend. Our friendship continued. After nine years of marriage, I fell in love with a man and forged a friendship that after five years added a sexual element. The sex was sporadic, yet the love and interest remained constant.

While living in Albuquerque, a mid-life crisis led me into two homosexual affairs. I conducted these contacts with less care than before as I explored an increasingly gay world. The feelings had changed; my feelings.

Around that time a gay friend said to me, “No one can grow up gay in America without developing some neurosis.” His assertion would mean all gays need psychiatric help. I objected to the notion but then recalled hearing a lecture by a psychiatrist who reckoned ninety per cent of his patients didn’t really need his help. He judged they needed trusted friends to talk with. He laughed at himself saying he was a highly paid substitute friend. The neurosis, if that is the accurate term, subsides when one is accepted in love.

My Albuquerque affairs seemed that to me: the friendships that could sustain me and my sanity. They also were sexual. The first one would never be more than sex play, play I found exciting and that helped me understand so much about my own needs. It afforded the sexual contrast, the complement I desired. The second affair had an emotionally complicated excitement the first did not proffer yet it was sexually boring: the techniques my partner initiated were always the same. I realized sex in my marriage had measures of all these experiences, but the feelings of the homosex offered an amazing contrast. I discovered needs and joys that thrilled me when with these two men. (No, there was never a three-way. Oh well.)


Much of my life I have felt different. I continue to feel different. I’m sure it’s not just because I am gay or that I was always homosexual. It’s the whole package of my life, my different and strange life. I love it. I love myself. I love life.


© Denver, 2011

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.” 

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot
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Acting by Gillian

I have often said that members of the GLBT community are the best actors around. Most of us played a part for at least some of our lives after all: a few for most or even all of it.
I’m not so sure it was acting though, in my case at least, and I can only speak for myself.
I don’t know what it was, and I have never tried to write about it before so who knows what sense it will make.

But here goes.

I’m tempted to say, I was two people, but that’s not quite right; not what I understand, and admittedly that’s very little, schizophrenia to be.
It was not that I had more than one personality and they were interchangeable, coming and going on some undisclosed schedule. 
They certainly were not equal partners.
Rather, my body was off doing its own thing while the real me, whatever form that took, was separate, flitting about somewhere, watching what my body was up to.
I mean, how weird is that?
I have described this, verbally, to a few other GLBT people, but have yet to hear anyone say
Oh yes I know exactly what you mean …… it was just the same for me ……. anything like that.

But anyway ……. Back to my body and soul. Not that I pretend to grasp the meaning of the word soul but it’s the best I can do given the situation; something other than, quite apart from, my body.
My body went on its merry way: working, marrying, raising kids.
I watched. Rather like watching a play.

I didn’t judge.
I didn’t advise.
I observed.
I felt nothing.

That body was not me. At least the life it lived was not.
The bodily me was not unhappy. The bodily me felt very little.
It was not happy, neither was it unhappy.
It just was.

This continued until around forty, when I was swept away in an avalanche of emotion and came out. 
To myself, and that was all that mattered.
I will never forget that moment when I knew, unequivocally, what and who I was.
The two parts of me came together.
They had never been joined.
Not as long as I could remember.
Now they were.
Now we were.

I have been one ever since.

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Feeling Different by Donny Kaye

In the poem, Self Portrait, by the Irish poet David Whyte, the verse invites; “it doesn’t interest me if there is one god or many.  I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.  I want to know if you are prepared to live in a world with its harsh need to change you.  If you can look back with firm eyes and saying, this is where I stand.  This is where I stand.”

I don’t think that I started out feeling different but it seems that the world often exists with a harsh message and need to change a person.  To have me be something other than what I am.
  • Men don’t kiss men,  my brother declared when I was ten and he was thirty
  • Don’t sit like that-you’re sitting like a girl.
  • You sissy!
  • Ok, Donny you can be on my team says the leader of the pick-up sandlot game as he selects from the two remaining kids to be chosen, the other being a girl.
I’ve existed with a sense of feeling different since about the age of ten.  I began searching for ways for me to feel accepted.  My interests served to be too much for others, after all, who really cares if it is a ‘55 or ‘56 Dodge Royal Lancer or that the Buick Roadmaster has four holes and not three.

Because of my feeling different, I always worked to overcompensate. I was determined to cover up the differences that were felt.  So, I wasn’t the best ball player, I put my energy into achieving—always working harder for an A or A+ to earn my mother’s praise, which she wasn’t capable of giving me in the way I needed it—other than in a sideways kind of way; always wanting to stretch my performance to be even better.  My achievements only seemed to reinforce my feeling different.

I polished my perfectionistic skills with the intent that the world wouldn’t see my imperfection, after all I was different.  That word I had heard said once too often, you know the one—sissy – yeah that one, I was different.  I felt it inside.  Unfortunately my perfectionism only served to separate me even more, after all who wants to be around someone that strives for perfection to the extent I was capable.   

Feeling different has served to develop some essential life skills.  My sense of being different resulted in a successful career serving others.  An impressive resume and on top of that, I’ve enjoyed happiness and fulfillment raising three children and being Papa to seven incredible grandchildren and as a life partner in a married relationship for  forty-two years.

I also recognize that the truth about me, as a result of feeling different, has been denied and repressed.  It’s interesting at this point in my journey to realize that I owe a lot of my happiness and success to withholding the truth.  It’s typically thought that the truth will set one free—when in fact the truth has served to imprison me.

Feeling different?  Yes, I am—Different and yet the same as any other being existing on the planet.  Before this experience called human life, I came from a place where there was no sense of difference, only oneness.  This life experience has been about allowing me to know the attributes (if you can call them that) about feeling different.  In coming to know different, I better understand not being different, or what I call the quality of unity or oneness with everything.  Not separate.   

The change?  The truth.  Accepting me, all of me.  The good and the bad.  The up and down.  The in and the out.  These opposites allow me to recognize the qualities of just being who I was created to be.  Realizing the longing to not feel different is merely the longing for a return to the place of oneness with everything and everyone.  This seems to be the heart of life’s lesson for me, this sunny day in mid August.  Might I finally be realizing the lesson? Enough with feeling different and into the differences that make me this individual experience called Kent. 

About the Author

Donny Kaye-Is a native born Denverite.  He has lived his life posing as a hetero-sexual male, while always knowing that his sexual orientation was that of a gay male.  In recent years he has confronted the pressures of society that forced him into deep denial regarding his sexuality and an experience of living somewhat of a disintegrated life.  “I never forgot for a minute that I was what my childhood friends mocked, what I thought my parents would reject and what my loving God supposedly condemned to limitless suffering.” StoryTime at The Center has been essential to assisting him with not only telling the stories of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood but also to merely recall the stories of his past that were covered with lies and repressed in to the deepest corners of his memory.  Within the past two years he has “come out” not only to himself but to his wife of four decades, his three children, their partners and countless extended family and friends.  Donny is divorced and yet remains closely connected with his family.  He lives in the Capitol Hill Community of Denver, in integrity with himself and in a way that has resulted in an experience of more fully realizing integration within his life experiences. He participates in many functions of the GLBTQ community.