running gaily(as in joyously) in Long Beach

My roommate and I ran out the other evening into the streets for a jog. We did not wear shirts. We were men ruling the world with late sunshine on our backs and salty wind on our chests. Other men looked at us and thought we were gay(not as in joyous). A small price to pay, though, for ruling the world in the way we did. Joyously, mind you.

It's difficult in Long Beach to not be tagged as a homosexual, particularly living with a roommate. It could be I'm paranoid. Yes, I think I'm definitely paranoid, but there was one man that looked over at us and I KNOW he thought we were gay. And when a man pulls up to you in a car a week after you've moved to Long Beach and asks to buy you lunch or something you can be pretty sure he's hoping you're gay. That only happened to me once.

Really, I guess, there's nothing hugely detrimental to being mistaken for homosexual, it's just that I have the whole MMPI-2 stigma to live down within myself. Getting hit on by other guys does nothing for affirming my masculinity. One day, maybe, I'll be able to take it in stride. But let's face it, there aren't more than a handful of men out there who have that perfect self-confidence in their masculinity to entirely escape their immediate-recognition-of-sexual-orientation-paranoia.

I suppose I should expound. The MMPI-2 is a test that measures a number of your characteristic traits, among them: masculine/feminine tendencies. I don't want to talk about it any more.