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tomwambsgans · 2 months

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that gay brother/little sister post you reblogged was soooo juicy so now i wanna ask your thoughts on gay roman (i’m absolutely a gay roman truther)

so i'm not attached enough to roman to have TOO many pre-formed thoughts on this but i'm gay enough i can't not have thoughts, so. another disclaimer, due to my lack of attachment i'm not whatsoever married to the notion of either kendall or roman (or shiv for that matter) being gay as opposed to bi. however i have eyes and a brain so i know they're all not straight, like that much is basically textual.

but anyway. when it comes to any of the roy siblings and homosexuality, i'll say my very first thought is this monologue from Angels in America. not that they would necessarily have that exact ideology about it, but those notions would greatly inform their attitude about themselves. imo roman, with his inclination toward fascistic masculinity in particular, would be the most likely to overtly think these things, and i do think he kind of does. roman knows that he's unable to get off with normative sex, but he also explicitly derides "liberal butt-love" and implicitly (sometimes explicitly) all the non-conforming and gender-bending stuff that goes along with it. that's at least partially because he's talking about a category of people that he does not belong to, due to being far above it. it's often the case for those who are rich and powerful and condemn the same "deviant" practices that they themselves engage in, whether it's gay sex, or just generally non-normative sex, abortion, etc. it's okay for me, but not for you.

but that's just one piece to roman's puzzle because there's also clearly shame wrt masculinity (logan's masculinity) and also some sexual trauma involved. i think kieran and/or one of the writers has said something about not wanting to pin Why Roman Is Like That on anything in particular, like not wanting to definitively say that something happened to him as a kid, but honestly i think it's extremely unlikely that he'd be like that about sex if nothing did. maybe it was very complicated and it not any singular event, but there's got to be something. some sexual depth to his childhood abuse that never got explicitly touched on. other people much more invested in roman than i have done really good meta on the roys' relationships to their bodies (like w the Summer of Competetive Eating Disorders), so i'm not gonna try to rehash those other ppl's thoughts, but in short that's the sort of thing i think of when i'm trying to imagine what the fuck happened to roman. like just over-arching themes of The Boot throughout roman's life, the lack of ownership over his own body in a way that reflects femininity and strips him of manhood, whether at home or at military school, etc.

i mean, we (as in the audience) are definitely at least supposed to wonder, like when it's implied that Mo's pederasty wasn't exclusive to girls (Don't Get In The Pool With Him), but also, if anything of that nature happened to him and informed roman's relationship with his sexuality, i have to also think that roman doesn't actually remember. his whole thing in austerlitz where he jokes to connor "i'm gonna tell them you diddled me" gives me the sense that maybe roman just kind of wishes it was that cut-and-dry, because then he'd have something specific to blame his whole deal on.

anyway. this is about roman being gay, not specifically sexually Weird - i just think the context of all that is relevant to how he'd conceptualize himself and any gay feelings he has. and i do think that if and when roman has ever had sex with men, he probably does lump it in with the fact that he can't have Normal sex. i think roman would have to undergo a lot of character development to ever consider it normal sex. honestly, simply recieving a handjob from his personal trainer was likely "wrong" enough for roman to get off despite how the average gay man would see it as extremely vanilla compared to roman needing to be degraded or fantasizing about necrophilia. growing up with logan "i didn't figure you for a faggot" roy would have, of course, really reinforced the ideas about that being Wrong.

(speaking of logan dropping the f slur, i think it's interesting that despite how roman acts anti-woke in front of others, he's shocked when logan says it. it's clearly crossing a line even for him, almost certainly because he's been abused with this word throughout his life. :'/)

so yeah i don't think roman would ever call himself gay (or even bi or queer) even if he is. and as for the matter of if he is, like as in, if tabitha and gerri are exceptions... i honestly don't know, but i don't think roman knows either. i think the relationship he has with love and sex, his own body and others, the very concept of desire and the love and affection and closeness he seeks out... are genuinely so gnarled and complicated, and wrapped up in all the aforementioned shame and abuse, that figuring out where gender factors into it would - once again - basically require years of therapy on his part.

it's definitely very plausible to me that kinky, non-normative sex is something he only needs in order to get off with women because he has no innate desire for them even when he loves them (and roman definitely has a lot of love inside of him that he will bend over backwards to give and recieve). but it's just as plausible that roman's association of feelings of wrongness with sexual pleasure is in fact unrelated to whatever gendered desire he has or doesn't have. his attraction to men is, funnily enough, more undeniable to me than his attraction to women is, but i do think that how it's portrayed in the show emphasizes roman's role in the world more than desire he holds inside of him. i always think of that one tweet that's like "whenever there's a guy that needs to be seduced, instead of shiv or some other hot woman they send roman." and his role as the Desired One (aka Practically A Woman) is likely a sort of spite factor in him wanting to deny overt homosexual interest too, since it's kind of imposed on him before he has a chance to say anything about who he is.

it's funny bc roman is the one male character where like... i simultaneously like the idea of them being gay and enjoy their relationships with women. he's just so complicated that he kind of exists outside the constructions of sexual orientation? like not in the "he's closeted and he's never coming out so even if he's gay, he's also not" way, but "this guy would not be able to figure out how to define attraction or desire to begin with." gerri being the love of his life and the notion of him being gay are not whatsoever mutually exclusive in my mind, because he's just that complicated.

finally i wanna say, again, that i'm not extremely attached to roman. nowhere near to the degree that i care about tom and greg. which i say because yknow.. i want to kill and maim when i see anything implying that either tom or greg are anything but gay. idk how you feel about it but i'd totally sympathize if you were the same about roman, lol. and i wanna emphasize that it's very likely the only reason i'm not necessarily a gay roman truther is because i haven't thought about it enough. i'd love to see anyone else's gay roman meta if they have it.

#roman roy #anonymous #meta #mine

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