For most of my life, I've felt like an outsider, like many other gay people. Growing up as an intensely introspective, sensitive boy, I held my desires as a deep, dark secret, and buried them so deeply inside that a lot of my other feelings got buried with them. Naturally, I never felt quite normal, nor that I had much in common with others. My height gave a definite physical dimension to the difference I saw between myself and others. And always doing extremely well in class, I endured the taunts from the athletic majority that get fired off at every smart kid.

I think this explains the resentment I learned towards what I began to recognize as "A-type" gays when I started to come out and explore the gay urban subculture. With their beefy bodies, and perfect tans, driving the right cars, wearing the right clothes, and living exciting sex lives, looking supremely self-confident, I saw them, back then, as being what I was not - insiders. I'd come all the way out, only to feel like an an outsider all over again. How many of us must have gone through that same evolution?

Now, years later, what set me off thinking about this was the other day seeing a bunch of guys who fit the A-type mold all working out together at the gym. Before I could censor myself, I found myself ticking them off mentally as just another bunch of clones when it suddenly occured to me that it would be very easy for others to label me the same way. I no longer feel so much an outsider anymore, but not because, or so I thought, that I've become an A-type gay, but more because such belonging is no longer important to me. But have I taken on some of those A-type attributes?