THE GAY RELATIONSHIP MANUAL WE WROTE FOR OURSELVES - PART 1: THERE WAS NEVER A MANUAL FOR US

 

Four posts about how Seunghoon and I built a relationship that fits us, even when almost none of the usual advice did.

So many people have asked questions about my relationship with Seunghoon that I finally sat down and answered them. The answers became fourteen pages long. Apparently, we have a lot to say.

I first imagined this as one post, but there was no honest way to compress our ideas about love, sex, jealousy, autism, conflict, commitment and ordinary life without flattening them. So this became a four-part series.

It is not a manual for other gay couples. I do not care to tell anybody else how to live. People should build whatever kind of relationship makes the people inside it happy. This is simply how Seunghoon and I live, what failed for us, what works for us, and what we had to invent because the usual instructions did not fit.

Some of it may sound romantic. Some of it may sound strange, intense, unhealthy or completely wrong to other people. That is fine. It was not built for them. It was built for us.

Because I write openly about other men, people sometimes ask what that means for Seunghoon and me. The short answer is that sexual exclusivity has never been the thing that defines our relationship. Seunghoon is not simply one man among several to me. He is the person my life is built around. I can want other men, sleep with other men and still know exactly where my heart is.

Terminology note: throughout this series, when I say “man” or “men,” I mean people born biologically male. When I say “gay,” I use the traditional, sex-based definition: biological males who are romantically or sexually attracted exclusively to other biological males. I want the reality I am describing to be clear because it is my own.

A few people have also asked whether Seunghoon and I might make a vlog together. We have it in mind and would like to do it when time allows. Right now, though, we both need to concentrate on our books. Seunghoon is writing a crime novel. I am writing my memoir, working on short horror manga for an anthology, and beginning the second Sticky Shorts album. The vlog is not forgotten; it simply has to wait until our projects move on.

 

THE GAY RELATIONSHIP MANUAL WE WROTE FOR OURSELVES PART 1 OF 4 — THERE WAS NEVER A MANUAL FOR US

People speak about relationships as though somebody already wrote the correct instructions.

I think most of those instructions are wrong.

Wrong with capital letters.

I think many of them are wrong even for heterosexual couples, but they become especially absurd when people try to impose them on gay men. They were created around a particular story: one man, one woman, fixed roles, sexual exclusivity, respectable adulthood, marriage, family and a lifetime spent pretending not to resent the person sitting beside you.

Growing up, I saw this story repeatedly on television and in other families. I spent parts of my childhood in Korea and Germany, and despite the cultural differences, the script often looked remarkably similar.

But I didn’t grow up inside that structure myself. My parents were never a couple and were never a family in that sense. I was conceived through a surrogacy arrangement handled by doctors, so there was no marriage or romantic relationship between them for me to grow up treating as the natural starting point of a family. I mostly encountered that script from the outside.

And what I saw was this: the man complained about his wife to other men. The woman complained about her husband to other women. Both performed the clothes, behaviour and responsibilities assigned to their gender roles. Hostility was treated as normal. Misery was turned into comedy.

I never understood why people called this love.

My father never presented that script as normal or desirable. He pointed out its hypocrisy whenever it appeared, and that taught me very early not to accept it as the natural shape of love.

That kind of casual hostility has no place in my relationship with Seunghoon. I can become furious with Seunghoon during an argument, but I do not enjoy humiliating him to friends or complaining about him for entertainment. If I discuss a problem with somebody close to me, it is because I want help solving it.

The princess before I knew what a boy was

I knew I wanted men from the time I could speak. At three, I announced that I would marry my father. Later it was one actor, then another. I did not yet have a real sense of myself or understand what being a boy meant, but I already knew what happened in my body when I liked a man: heat, sweating, my heart racing and the absolute certainty that he was the most beautiful person in the world.

The stories available to me were fairy tales, cartoons and films in which a princess wanted a prince. When I played theatre with my father and siblings, I was usually given the female roles. I was feminine, and adults noticed that before I understood myself. I had no clear identity yet, but I had a very clear attraction to males. So I placed myself in the only romantic position those stories had shown me. I thought I was the princess.

When I met Seunghoon at eight, I called him my prince and said I wanted to marry him. I was not carefully imagining a relationship. I saw him, my body reacted and I wanted him. My body knew before I had the words to explain it, and I trusted my body.

He was handsome, clever, fearless and capable of almost everything. He never seemed to be performing coolness for anybody. He simply existed in his own way, which made him much cooler.

As I grew older, I realised that I did not need to take the female role in the story the world teaches by default. I did not need to translate my attraction into a heterosexual script to make it understandable. I was a boy who liked boys. The script was irrelevant.

Neither of us was “the woman”

Neither Seunghoon nor I needed to become “the woman.” For Seunghoon, it was never even a question. He was always quite manly.

I am naturally more feminine than he is. I sometimes do drag, and when I dress that way people may assume I am female until they hear my deep voice. I am also the bottom in our relationship. None of that makes me “the woman.” It means I am a feminine male, sometimes dressed in drag, who prefers a particular sexual role. That is all.

Being the bottom does not tell me to cook, behave softly, organise the home, earn less or sacrifice my interests. Seunghoon being more masculine does not automatically make him the leader of everything. A sexual position is not a household role, a personality or a life plan.

Seunghoon is the cooking master and usually cooks for me. At other times, neither of us wants to cook and we order food. I care for him in some areas; he cares for me in others. We do not calculate whether a task belongs to the masculine or feminine side of an imaginary chart.

We are also immature. Full stop. We are always much more like children than conventional adults, and neither of us wants to change that. Our private life is full of games, obsessions, nonsense, excitement and strange sleeping hours.

People can call that irresponsible. They are probably right. We do not care. It makes us happy, and this life belongs to us rather than to the people judging how adults are supposed to behave.

Choosing the actual man

I never wanted a boyfriend in the abstract. I wanted Seunghoon.

Of course I idealised him when we were young. I thought everything about him was perfect. I did not yet understand his autism or some of the more difficult parts of the way his mind worked. His mind can become very dark. He becomes hard to reach. He can come across as a cold boyfriend even when he is very sensitive underneath. He conceals stress until he is close to collapsing physically or emotionally because he believes he can handle everything alone.

I learned to watch for the signs: the sleeplessness, the excessive silence, the way he disappears into his phone or notes. I try to notice before he reaches the point where he can no longer manage.

He had just as much to learn about me. I am spoiled because my father pampered me. I have borderline personality disorder, anxiety, autism and a very high sex drive. My emotions can become extreme, and my jealousy can be irrational and paranoid. I insisted that I would not live monogamously. Loving me required him to understand a great deal of chaos.

I do not believe love should feel like a permanent job. Our relationship is not difficult at its foundation. The good is so much larger than the bad that dealing with the bad feels like the obvious choice: we want the life we have, so we solve what we can.

I can hate a behaviour without loving Seunghoon less. Irritating habits are one thing. A basic conflict about how life should be lived is another. If his deepest values were the opposite of mine, that would be a real problem.

Everything, but not every activity

People often say that one partner should not be your entire world. I understand the warning, but for me Seunghoon is my everything. Whether he likes that phrasing or not, he is. And I am his.

I do not really know how else to explain it except physically. I have a body that belongs to me, but somehow my heart feels like it belongs to him. I gave it to him a long time ago. Maybe because it was too heavy for me to carry by myself. I do not know. I was lucky because he valued it and put it beside his.

We share sex, friendship, companionship, comfort, encouragement, practical care, philosophical conversation, shared obsessions and the particular joy of doing strange autistic things together without having to explain them.

That does not mean nobody else exists. I ask my father and close friends for advice. Other friends help me make music and finish projects. My other male lovers can satisfy me when I am horny or absorb some of my emotional drama, so Seunghoon does not have to carry every part of me all the time. Seunghoon has friends for the detailed food conversations I find boring and for daredevil activities I would rather watch from somewhere safe.

Separate interests are not sacred by themselves. Shared interests are one of the strongest forms of glue in our relationship. But when one of us loves something the other does not, neither should abandon it. He can enjoy it with another friend or alone. I can do the same.

We do not fear being consumed by each other because our personalities remain very different. We are close enough to feel like one unit without becoming identical people.

What success means to me

To me, a successful relationship makes you happy inside. It gives you a life you enjoy and teaches you more about yourself. I do not mean success as something you can prove from the outside—money, status, property, milestones and photographs showing that you are doing adulthood correctly. I mean emotional growth and knowing yourself better.

Gay couples often receive less guidance, and that can be frightening. But less guidance also means greater freedom. There is no reliable manual waiting for us, and I think trying to force the heterosexual one onto gay men is one of the worst possible solutions.

Seunghoon and I had to invent almost everything. Being gay was only one reason. Our autism, my anxiety and borderline personality disorder, our different emotional languages and the specific shapes of our desires made most general advice useless to us.

My father gave me some advice that genuinely helped. Much of what the wider world offered felt like trash.

So we wrote our own rules.

The first major rule we had to question was the belief that love and sexual exclusivity are the same thing.

They are not the same thing to us.

That is where Part 2 begins.

 

How Pale Blue Moonflower Got Her Name

 

A few people asked me to write about my drag persona, Pale Blue Moonflower, and where she came from.

The name sounds like something I spent a lot of time inventing.

I didn't.

It started with me looking out of a window.

But I should probably go further back.

When I was little, I used to perform a lot with my dad. Not professionally and not at school. We would play at his house, sometimes with his bodyguards or his butler involved too. We acted out things like the story of Chunhyang and different fairy tales.

I played the female roles.

I was a very elegant boy and somehow those roles came naturally to me. I was also very particular about costumes. If we were going to play different people, then obviously we needed to look like those people. At the time I didn't think much about why I needed things to be that exact. Knowing I'm autistic now, some of it makes more sense.

Then school took over and I stopped having enough time for these little performances.

Years later, after my military service, they came back into my life in a completely different form.

I had gone through a breakdown and was still trying to recover. Seunghoon was in the army, my dad was spending more time with me, and I was finally starting to leave the house again. I went to my dad's place often.

Around that time my hair had grown out from the short black military cut and I dyed it blond.

That changed something.

It wasn't that blond hair made me feel like another person exactly. It actually felt more like me. Just a new version of me. I think I needed that separation from the person I had been immediately before.

One day I was going through some of the costumes from when I was younger. My dad saw me doing it and told me he could buy me new ones if I wanted. He sometimes had small game nights with a group of male friends and suggested that I could sing for them.

I thought, why not?

So suddenly there were clothes and wigs again.

I had already watched some documentaries about drag and was curious about it. Since I had spent part of my childhood dressing up to perform female characters, trying it in an adult and modern form didn't feel particularly strange to me. It actually felt like a natural next step.

One combination stood out immediately.

A blond wig and a blue velvet dress.

The dress was short and fitted, but comfortable. I remember looking at myself and thinking it worked. It had a personality already.

Strong. Seductive. Charming.

I didn't want to create something campy. Nothing against camp drag at all; it just wasn't what I saw when I looked at myself.

What I had in my head was closer to a modern princess.

Elegant. Mysterious. Seductive.

A beautiful creature.

Something like a night ghost or a dream.

But she didn't have a name.

One evening I was in my dad's projector room trying the clothes again. I was wearing the blue dress and looking outside. It was already dark.

There were moonflower vines growing in my father's garden. He had white ones, but there was also one unusual pale-blue one that I always thought was especially beautiful. My dad thought it might have been a rare variety or some kind of mutation, although neither of us knows exactly what it was.

I was staring at it through the window and eventually asked my dad what the flower was called.

He told me it was a moonflower. A flower that blooms at night.

That was it.

I loved the moon. I loved the night. I loved that pale blue colour.

Pale Blue Moonflower.

It just sounded right.

Her first audience was my dad and the men at one of those game nights.

I sang Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt, 외로운 가로등 (Lonely Streetlamp) and Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte.

My dad was clapping constantly. His friends kept praising me and telling me I should become a singer and that I had to perform for them again. My dad looked extremely proud.

So Pale Blue Moonflower stayed.

She has changed since then, although probably less visually than people might expect. She became more confident, more sexual and bolder. But the basic idea is still the same. Pale blue also stayed her colour. Whatever the outfit, she almost always wears some version of it.

The strange part came much later, when I started learning more about the flower whose name I had borrowed.

The classic night-blooming moonflower, Ipomoea alba, opens in the late afternoon or at night and closes again around dawn. Its large pale flowers are fragrant and are visited by nocturnal moths, including sphinx moths. The individual flowers last only a very short time. They belong to the night and are gone again with the morning.

I didn't know most of that when I chose the name.

And when I read it properly for the first time, I found the similarity slightly unsettling.

Pale Blue Moonflower exists when I become her.

Then she disappears and Wonsik comes back.

There is something different about the way people react to me as her too. Men can find me attractive as Wonsik, obviously. But Pale Blue Moonflower seems to attract them differently. There are more stares. Sometimes they seem less like they're looking at a cute or sexy guy and more like they're trying to work out what they're looking at.

Strangers sometimes mistake me for a woman when they see me dressed as Pale Blue Moonflower, especially if my muscles aren't visible.

Then I speak.

My voice is very deep.

That usually changes the situation again.

Even my boyfriend reacts differently to Pale Blue Moonflower. He finds her very attractive and sometimes asks me to perform privately for him.

So learning that moonflowers open themselves to the night, release their scent into the darkness and attract nocturnal creatures toward them felt almost too appropriate.

Especially because I never planned any of it.

Then there is the blue.

Pale blue has been one of those colours that has followed me for a very long time. It was one of the main colours of my hanbok when I was little, and I loved it long before Pale Blue Moonflower existed.

Blue is also genuinely unusual among flowers. Fewer than ten percent of plant species have blue-pigmented flowers.

The classic night-blooming moonflower, Ipomoea alba, is normally white or greenish-cream rather than blue.

I actually like that. It makes the unusual one in my father's garden feel even stranger to me now.

Pale Blue Moonflower came from a pale-blue flower outside my father's window, a blue velvet dress, blond hair and the night.

I asked my dad what the flower was called.

Moonflower.

And Pale Blue Moonflower just came.