My recipe for This Befuddling Gay Love (AKA "How do you know you're gay?").

This set of pork trotters hasn't seen much keyboard action lately because they've been busy wandering the outer limits of the farm seeking solace. The truth is, Porkchop here is in a badly drawn state of mind due to affairs of this pig's heart. A heart that he's seriously considering serving to his readers in a double-boiler, brewed with dried dates, Chinese lycium and aged ginseng.

It might be broken, but damn will it taste good...

The topic of gay love, or rather the question "How do you know you're gay?", is a constant point of interest for the new animals and people this pig constantly meets at his socials. So while in this pensive, lovelorn mood, I think I'll take this mopey opportunity to share with our dear readers--those of non-gay, but inquisitive persuasions--my recipe for This Befuddling Gay Love (AKA "How do you know you're gay").

I shall refer to the first time I fell in love.


Ingredients
1 x Pig A - Gay male, unfeminist and badly drawn pig,
1 x Pig B - Male pig (preferably gay; but unfeminist and badly drawn optional),

(For taste)
A lot of Time
A lot of Patience

Step 1: Discovering Pig B.
One pig has to discover the other pig. This occurs in various permutations: at work, socials, schools, random places, on the Charlotte's Interwebz, etc.

In this case, I met Pig B at work. He used to bother me all the time because he was annoyingly free and needed to skive outside of his own office. We talked a bit but I was always too busy to entertain him for extended periods, so it took months before we became slow and unexpected friends.

Step 2: Getting to Know You
*cue music*

Getting to know you, getting to know all about you.
Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me.
Getting to know you, putting it in my way but nicely,
You are precisely my cup of tea.

Getting to know you, getting to feel free and easy,
When I am with you, getting to know what to say.
Haven't you noticed, suddenly I'm bright and breezy?
Because of all the beautiful and new things
I'm learning about you
Day by day.

Step 3: Think of You, Much?
This is an extremely delicate part of the process, and well difficult to master.

I started to think about Pig B a lot, but with a very curious and serious intensity that I have never cultivated for any of my other close friends--and I have a couple of them, both male and female, porcine and otherwise. It didn't occur to me that it was happening until I began to notice how I'm asking him out a lot, text messaging him countless times a day, and would be surprised or worried if I didn't hear from him at all. The times when we weren't together, I wondered how he was doing.

For the first time, I felt like I irrationally missed someone a lot. It was a very confusing time, not because I suspected that I was in love with him--no inkling whatsoever, but because I already knew when we were going to meet and when we weren't, so what's up with all this anticipation and missing?

Step 4: Figuring out.
This is actually a two-part process.

The first part is talking it out with others. Because I hadn't any experience in this arena prior to this, and I had no particular sexual attraction to either the male or female species, I couldn't recognise the signs. But when my constant minding became apparent to other friends, some suggested to me that maybe I was in love with Pig B!

Good brown chocolate bunnies in the sky!

I R IN LUV!?!?!?11111!ONE!!ELEVENTY1111!!

What does that even mean!?!??! I had to know, so I queried a lot of people from my extended network to tell me their experiences of falling in love, and how they knew when they had non-platonic attraction for someone.

Then you come to some realisation: I have never met anyone else whom I felt such warmth, care and concern for. Never felt like I needed that person so much that it was unbearable not having him in my life. Our casual touch was very different in effect. It didn't give me Porkchop wood, but it transmitted a strange sense of comfort and joy that made me quite unreasonably want to always be some contact.

It never crossed my mind that I'd want to have sex with him at all. I couldn't! The sense of belonging just felt so pure, yet at the same time so different. To say he didn't turn me on is untrue, but he just didn't turn me on that raw, sexual level.

Step 5: Head-on Collision (Optional).
This is not recommended for the faint of heart. Actually, it isn't recommended at all for anyone, although I do think it really does make one confront the reality of the attraction, and dare I say it, of love.

Pig B began his attraction for a pig--not me, some other pig. I couldn't do anything. When I saw them together holding trotters, I quietly left the vicinity for some other place, where I ended up sobbing uncontrollably.

I fully realised then that I wanted to be that pig with which he would hold trotters. With that, I knew I was madly and deeply in love with Pig B.

Step 6: Realising You're Gay
This might seem misplaced a step, but trust me it isn't. You often don't consider the socio-political aspects of your fondness for someone while you're in the throes of it. It took me a long time before I finally came to grasp that all my emotional up's and down's was emblematic of a greater fight for acceptance in a culture that longs to eradicate every trace of experiences others may have similar to mine--not only to prevent the sort of heartaches unrequited love imposes, but even those that actually bloom fairy-tale results of happily ever after.

The realisation of my being gay is sadly fortified by the fact that there will always be people who are never sure that you are gay. Not because you look like everyone else, but for reasons like they think you are just rebelling, incapable of effectively controlling your urges, haven't met the right opposite sex partner, have had a terrible childhood, are perverted, have taken on the wrong path, etc.

Realising that you're gay is realising that there always will be people who don't want you in their families, circle of friends, military, religious institutions, organisations and countries. People don't hate you, they just hate your lifestyle.

And if you can handle all that...

*ta-da*

You're now gay!

(Gotcha!)

Well, not really.

You'd have only figured out somewhat how my gay love works and what makes me gay... My story isn't going to be representative of every gay person's discovery of hir own sexual inclinations. I speak only for me, but I do hope it lends some clues nevertheless that I think the point is this: gay love is very much like straight love, in both its common uneventfulness but brilliant, warm, fuzzy splendour.