Love, Lust, and Sexuality: Experiences as a Gay Man

This poem, written on a sticky note, describes Matias’s closeted sexuality and fear of revealing his orientation.

Matias, like many poets, used poetry as a means to express himself and cope with the struggles of life. From his undergraduate pieces to his published poems, Matias described his encounters with love, lust, sexuality, and experiences as a gay man. He wrote many of his love poems while he was an undergraduate at Trinity, but he continued to document his emotional experiences and relationships throughout his life. Matias’s poems about his closeted sexuality and guilt offer a glimpse into his early struggles with his identity and family. Poems on the wonders of love illustrate the joyous moments of his life, while poems about his sexual experiences show Matias at his most human. Matias’s college poems were the beginning of his poetry journey and serve as a point of comparison subject-wise and stylistically to his later poems. For Matias, this particular age gave him the chance to explore himself and his writing style, cementing poetry as a part of his self-expression.