“Yes,” I smiled at him.
Eli sighed heavily, pulling the bowl of Pirate’s Booty into his chest.
“Most of my friends are a lot more—certainly a lot more sexually active than I am and also just a lot more casual about sexuality,” he began. “I look at them and I’m like, ‘That would be nice to be that relaxed about this,’ but I just can’t seem to be. Honestly, I kind of just avoid the whole thing, which is not very helpful or constructive, but that’s usually what I do.”
“What whole thing?”
“Like if I’m attracted to someone, I don’t do anything or say anything. I don’t know, I don’t really know what I’m afraid is going to happen exactly.”
Eli went on to explain that his first relationship, the long-distance one he had in college, was his longest to date. They were together about a year, but only saw one another a handful of times. Since then, Eli has had one four-month relationship, and one brief sexual encounter with another trans man.
“And honestly, that’s been it,” he sighed out heavily, his shoulders falling as if relieved to have gotten the information out. “If I’m completely honest with myself, I’d like to be having more experiences like the last one I had, where it’s just casual and fun,” he continued. “But the only reason it happened that time was because the other guy initiated. If it had been left up to me, it never would have happened. Not because I wasn’t interested. Just because I wouldn’t have actually done anything. I just don’t know how to get there. I have no idea whatsoever how to flirt with people.
“I had my thirtieth birthday last month and I had a bunch of people come to this karaoke—you know those karaoke doo-wop places? I invited a bunch of friends, and I was talking to my best friend beforehand. I said, ‘There is this guy in this choir I’m in, and he’s bi and I think he’s really attractive and, you know, I would really like to go on a few dates with this guy and maybe just have some fun.’ He’d RSVP’d ‘yes’ to the party and I didn’t even know him that well.
“So I was saying to my best friend, ‘He’s coming to this party.’ Because my friend is so good at this. We were roommates for about two years. The whole time that he and I were living together, he was usually dating two or three different people simultaneously. And sometimes I’d be like, ‘That looks like fun. I wish I could do that.’ And he would say, ‘Well go do it then.’ And I would just be like, ‘But I can’t.’ And he’d be like, ‘What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous. Of course you can.’ And I’d say, ‘It’s not that I’m incapable of doing it. But. I just . . . something in me is just like, “No, but you don’t do that!”’ Even if I consciously decide I’m going to, that it’s totally fine, and if I get myself into a situation that might go in that direction, I just freeze. I said to him, ‘I just want to follow you around and watch you flirt with people until I learn how to do this by osmosis.’
“So my friend was like, ‘Well, you should hit on this guy over karaoke.’
“I said, ‘But I don’t know what I should say. I don’t know what I should do.’
“And—he’s so funny—he was like, ‘Okay, here’s what you do.’ He gave me a list: ‘First you do this, and then you say that, and then you do this, and then you do that.’ It was really specific.
“And I was just like, ‘Okay. You’re hilarious. Sure. All right. I’m going to try this and see what happens.’
“And then . . . I just froze up.”
“You couldn’t remember what he told you to do?” I asked.
“Yes. I mean, what happens is I blank out. I can’t think of anything to say, or I know what I want to say, but I just freeze. I just can’t do it. The conscious thought that I’m having when I freeze up usually is, ‘I’m going to look like an idiot.’ But there’s plenty of other areas in my life where I’ve gotten over my aversion to being embarrassed and looking stupid, and I’m like, ‘Whatever, I’m going to go try this thing, and I’m probably going to look like an idiot, but that’s fine.’ But this, I can’t get past.
“There was no reason for me not to do it. I had, like, six drinks. But I was sitting there at the party and the guy and I were chatting, and every time I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this,’ I would just go blank. My mind would blank out. And I would just be like, ‘I have no idea what to say right now.’ Absolutely none. I froze. And that was it. I’ve never figured out a way, when I have that brain freeze reaction, to psych myself up to go for it anyway.”
“It’s interesting,” I said. “Because researchers have found that shame can actually create a kind of confusion in our brains similar to the freeze that you’re describing,” I said.
Dr. Curt Thompson describes it in The Soul of Shame:
When shame appears, especially in malignant forms, we are often driven to a felt sense of stasis. Our mind feels incapable of thinking. We may feel literally physically frozen in place when experiencing extreme humiliation, and if we are able to move, we feel like going somewhere we can hide and remain hidden without returning to engage others. We don’t necessarily experience this with minor insults, but there is no question that our ability to move creatively in our mind is slowed.2
“So I wonder,” I continued to Eli, “if you are freezing in these moments because you’re approaching doing something that you’ve internalized so much shame around.”
Eli nodded slowly. “Even now, I was just sitting here thinking about—as a manifestation of everything we’re talking about—how awkward it feels for me to even be having this conversation,” he admitted.
“It feels awkward?”
“Yes. But it’s not because of anything that you said or did. It’s just because I don’t know how to talk about sex or sexuality. It feels really uncomfortable to even just say, on a recording, ‘There’s this guy I’m really attracted to and I was conniving with my best friend to try to figure out how to get him into bed.’ That feels like such a weird thing to say. It’s really hard to just admit that’s what was happening. Just to even say that feels like I’m breaking some weird rule of, ‘You’re not supposed to talk about these things. You’re not supposed to want that. You’re certainly not supposed to discuss it with people. What a shocking thing to do!’ I tense up and get that feeling of, ‘Uh-oh, I’m breaking a rule right now. And everybody else is going to see me breaking this rule. And they’re going to judge me.’ ”
“But—help me understand this,” I said. “Because you’ve already made all these public declarations about who you are and who you are attracted to that feel so big. You came out as lesbian, then came out as bi, you transitioned genders, and you are not secretive about any of that—”
Eli crinkled his nose and pursed his lips. “It is definitely possible to come out and say, ‘I’m this and I’m that’ while avoiding talking about sex. Especially now that everybody knows what these words mean. I’m like, ‘I’m bi,’ and they’re like, ‘Okay,’ and then that’s the end of the conversation. Like the Christian singer you were telling me about earlier—”
“The one who I was told had said it was easier for her to come out as a lesbian than it was to come out as someone who had sex outside of marriage,” I said.
“Yes. I think that in the church, there’s a lot of shame about having a sexuality at all. There was this sense that I was bad and I needed to punish myself for having sexual feelings, and also having wrong ones, because they were toward a woman. But also, if I’m attracted to anyone I should be falling in love with them and thinking romantic thoughts about marrying them or whatever, not thinking about having sex. Do you know what I mean? And that message is everywhere, not just in the church.
“In the gay community, there’s an aversion to talking about sex in external messaging because the people shaping the messaging want to make it more palatable to people. They make it totally about falling in love and wanting to get married. And it’s worked! That’s the thing. I think that’s the thing that makes more people accept it now. Like, ‘Well, I understand falling in love
and wanting to get married. Falling in love and wanting to get married is good. So how can I judge someone because they just fell in love and wanted to get married with someone of their same gender?’ But the sex part, they leave that off. Nobody wants to talk about that part.
“And I think that is a big thing that is driving me to continue to feel bad about myself. Because I’ve come to the realization that I’m not really interested in having a serious relationship right now, and I’m not interested in getting married possibly ever. That doesn’t mean that I’m not still interested in having sex. But in my mind, if you don’t want to get married, then the appropriate response is to not date anybody and be a hermit.
“I am just beginning to realize how much my upbringing has had and still has all these effects on my personality and my approach to life that I don’t even notice a lot of the time. I still have this urge to be the kind of person that I think this community would have wanted me to be, even though I don’t believe in the religion part anymore. Just trying to be this very respectable, appropriate, wholesome person who follows all the rules and does everything right. And the most respectable and acceptable alternative to serious monogamous relationships in the evangelical frame is to be totally single, and I don’t know, get ten cats. No relationships. No sex. Either you get married or—” Eli searched for the right words.
“You get a lot of cats.”
He laughed. “I have one cat. I’m working on it.”
* * *
Eli isn’t the only one I’ve spoken to whose sexual shame triggers are so sensitive that simply brushing the triggers with something as small as a thought can activate them. Whereas my own body didn’t react until I began making bold sexual choices, some other people’s bodies react long before such a choice is even on the table, preventing them from ever being in the position I found myself in in my early twenties.
Some of my interviewees have tried to get around this by turning their brains off using alcohol, drugs, overworking, and so on.
I’d been saving myself for marriage, but with this increasing ambivalence, which is entirely—well, I’m sure a huge part of what my drinking is about. I have several female friends who did this thing too, who sort of became drunks so that when we had sex for the first times we didn’t have to choose it. You know. Because, to choose to have sex is almost impossible. The way that—for me—the way that my mind was set up, the way that the world was set up for me, I couldn’t do it. I would either have to decide to do something, consciously and deliberately decide to do something that I was absolutely certain was completely wrong, which is a really hard thing to do. Or I would have to somehow change what I believed before doing the thing, which is also really hard. It’s hard to change your beliefs in the abstract. You know. So. So I drank. And then I didn’t have to decide. (Simone)
I had to stay busy all the time. If I stopped to think, I knew I would go back to the way I was raised, because I was taught so many ways of justifying believing the way I had and I hadn’t yet developed enough of an argument away from it. I knew it didn’t feel right anymore, but I didn’t know why. So I didn’t ever slow down. I would run myself to the point of exhaustion, which also helped with the nightmares. The nightmares were still there, but they started to go away just because I was so tired all the time. If I was exhausted when I fell asleep, I wouldn’t dream, and then I also wouldn’t have time to lay there and think either. So it was kind of this perfect solution in my mind to get away from thinking about any of it. I’d either be really busy or I would drink a lot, so I wouldn’t think very much. (Holly)
But not everyone is able to find a way around their sexual shame triggers.
I am reminded of the story of a young woman named Jasmine, who is in her early twenties, about the age that Eli was when I met him as Elizabeth nine years ago. Jasmine was raised an evangelical Christian in the rural Mountain West. She studied abroad in Europe for a year in high school, where many of the religious ideas with which she was raised fell away. But not the shame.
“Even as a child and a teenager,” she explained, “I wouldn’t even be able to say that I liked someone to my closest friends. I couldn’t even say it to myself.” Jasmine went on to tell me a story about a crush she had while studying abroad at the age of sixteen.
“There was this other foreign exchange student who was Australian or something, and I think I liked him a little bit. Not a lot, but a little bit. Nothing ever happened, but my friends kind of knew. We were flirting, and—” She stopped talking suddenly. “Even now, I can barely talk about it, because I’m so repulsed by my own feelings.”
“What does it feel like?” I asked her gently.
“I don’t like to talk about him, or any of the guys or girls that I’ve even had anything with. Even those I’ve had nothing with. Just mentioning them, I cringe. I start fidgeting. I get really, really hot. I start laughing because it makes me nervous. I feel repulsed and I feel really nauseous.”
“What are you repulsed by? By the fact that you liked this Australian guy?”
“Yes,” Jasmine answered. “This is how I feel a lot. It’s weird because on one hand I’m very liberal socially. I totally believe that people should be as sexual as they want. But at the same time, I can’t be like that. It’s like, physically my body won’t allow it, and I’ve never been able to figure out how I can think one way and feel another way. I don’t know how to start. I really want to be able to. But I always feel this disgust. I don’t even know how to explain it except disgust. It’s like, you see a plate of worms. I feel like I’m being forced to eat a plate of worms. I feel disgusted and disgusting. Disgusted at myself. This is even hard to talk about because I just feel gross. I feel bad. I feel ashamed. I feel really ashamed even having this conversation.”
But Jasmine continued.
“Once people started saying, ‘You like him, this Australian guy?’ I just woke up and I was like, ‘I hate him,’ ” she continued her story. “I started hating him. I just felt so much hatred toward him and hatred toward myself for ever putting myself in that position, and that’s kind of how it always manifests. I think my body just doesn’t allow me to do a lot of things. I identify as bisexual, but there is no reason for me to say that, because I am never in a relationship, so it doesn’t come up.
“I feel like my body even controls the way I think. So not only would I not ask somebody out, but I wouldn’t even allow myself to think about it. If I ever have a thought, ‘I like that person,’ immediately, my body will shut that down: ‘Don’t think about that. Don’t even do that.’ Whether that takes just not thinking for a while, or physically removing myself, or going over and talking to someone else about something else, I don’t allow myself to think, so action cannot happen.
“For a long time, it’s been easiest for me to use the ‘I’m a strong independent woman and so I can’t’ excuse when I’ve really always known that that’s not true,” she continued. “I’ve always known that I wanted it. I wish I didn’t, because then I wouldn’t really have to deal with this. But I have a deep aching for a relationship. And at the same time, I can’t touch it.”
* * *
“I’m thirty and I’m just now reaching a point in my life where I’m realizing how negatively the church affected me,” Eli told me near the end of our conversation. “For the longest time I was like, ‘No, I’m fine.’ Because I didn’t go to some big, scary, hellfire church where I was overtly traumatized and left. I’m not having panic attacks and nightmares about going to Hell and whatever. Because I didn’t have those experiences, I thought ‘I’m fine. My church was harmless. They were kind of homophobic, but whatever. Other than that, they were totally harmless.’ I’ve looked back on this community with all this fondness. I would talk about my old church, about how great it was, not realizing that they had raised me with this message that made me feel I had failed to be what I was supposed to be. I had failed to be a good Christian and be part of this community. And that the reason that I h
ad to leave was because of that failure. I hadn’t been able to fit in. I hadn’t been able to just do what I was supposed to and believe the right things and remain part of this community. I wasn’t good enough. That’s something that the church did to me. But for a long time I didn’t think of it that way. I was just like, ‘I’m fine. I’m not traumatized. I’m not scarred for life by this.’
“I look back and I think of the ex-gay thing as a really, really short period of my life. I’m like, ‘That was this weird thing that happened, and now it’s over.’ But I look back at the religion in general as this huge, all-consuming part of my life. A lot of the other things about my religious upbringing and community seem to have had more of a continuing impact on me than that. I’m trying to figure out how to explain this.” He paused and thought for a moment.
“Ex-gay ministries and things like that sound extreme,” I suggested, “and like they would have a bigger effect on a person than everyday shaming messaging.”
Eli nodded. “Those were the things that you would think would be the most traumatic things. That would continue to haunt me, or whatever. But a lot of the things that I feel still affect me go back way further, like things that I just grew up with and that were an ongoing part of my life. I’m kind of curious whether anyone else has said similar things.”
“Well, I’m not always hearing about cataclysmic experiences in my interviews if that’s what you mean.”
“What? They don’t have those experiences, or they just didn’t have that big of an effect on them?”
“A lot of people don’t have those experiences at all. Some do. But for the most part, I’m talking to people about these really small, intimate experiences that influence their lives more because of their frequency more than their size. I’m actually glad you brought this up because it’s easy to scapegoat. To be like, ‘Well, ex-gay camp, that’s the only problem,’ right? ‘It’s not the deep sexual shaming that is laced through almost everything.’ ”
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