MONDRO

I am – as are many of the people who send their stories here – gay, non-binary, and living in Bangladesh as well. I’m from a lower middle-class family at best. And I live in a rural area.

I’m saying all that to let you know you that I know how it feels like. I haven’t got any force field made of money to protect me if sh*t ever hits the fan. Finding any other gay guy to date seems pretty implausible here right now as well. Homophobes often try to paint LGBT people as privileged rich kids from urban areas, it’s funny. Although I am admittedly pretty damn privileged myself, compared to many others. I’ve never had to get a real job when I was a kid to support my family and I received a fairly decent education growing up from many of the people around me even outside school and college, so there’s that.

But anyway, getting back to the point, I know how it feels like to be gay and hopeless and all that. And I’ve developed crushes for many of my friends too. But one thing about it though, I don’t dwell on those crushes for too long. I know how to get over it. And I know I am being a d*ck for judging people whom I don’t know, but I feel like some of you who send their stories here pine over someone so hard and so long in a way that it sounds pretty obsessive and creepy.

It’s damn hard having to live life without love and it’s okay to feel sadness and frustration and self-pity about it but don’t turn into the gay version of an incel is all I am saying. If your feeling of romance directed at someone is unrequited, then move on. It’s almost impossible to live a happy life without love, but it’s extremely possible to live it without the love of whatever specific individual one may be dwelling over. Blame the system for being so homophobic that all of us have to remain closeted and unable to connect with other gay people. But don’t blame whatever person you’ve got a crush on who doesn’t like you back for “not getting it”.

A large number of the media we consume romanticizes creepiness and to build a better community we have to be self-aware about when we might be crossing the line over to becoming creepy. And it’s not just the cishet media that romanticizes things like eve-teasing and creepy age gaps and sexual harassment and whatever other creepy sh*t they come up with. Gay romantic movies like Call Me By Your Name, for example, romanticize sh*t like someone going over to someone else’s room to sniff their clothes and underwear. It also romanticizes sh*t like a 24-year-old adult diddling a 17-year-old kid.

So yeah, this whole post is a reminder to whoever needs it, that the healthy and decent thing to do is to move on when someone isn’t romantically or sexually attracted to you and to not replicate in real life whatever creepy sh*t written by hacks that you see on romantic movies, be you LGBT or cishet.

(Also drink a lot of water. Hydration is necessary. We forget to drink enough water especially during comparatively cold weathers.)

Source: BAH ( Bangladesh Against Homophobia )