I believe that when we can all speak a boy’s nonverbal language of intimacy, he will feel more respected. When we can help a boy develop his verbal expressions of intimacy in a nonshaming culture, he will grow up healthier. When we can value action as much as talk, we will be stretching our gender values. When we can all hear and speak both languages, our relationships with each other will be richer and more satisfying.
— 9 —
BEING “DIFFERENT”: BEING GAY
“I thought they would disown me. I thought they’d tell me
I wasn’t a member of the family anymore.”
—Robert, age fourteen
“I always knew I was different from the other guys,” seventeen-year-old Bill explained to me. “Whenever I went out to the movies with friends, most of the other guys were just dying for a cute girl to sit next to them. Nobody else seemed to realize it, but I was really hoping a good-looking guy would sit next to me. I don’t think anybody had any idea what I was going through.”
Eighteen-year-old David reported a similar, even earlier memory. “When I was about ten years old, I went to see the school play put on by kids from another nearby school. It was scenes from the musical Oliver. As soon as I saw the boy playing the lead role of Oliver, as soon as I heard him sing about seeking love, about finding himself, I just couldn’t keep my eyes off of him. For months, all I could think about was that little boy. I longed to meet him. I think I wanted to hold him, to have him as my friend. It was such a lonely, sad feeling. I remember thinking there was probably nobody else in the whole world who felt like I did.”
Sixteen-year-old Nigel told another story of isolation and loneliness: “I knew I was different ever since I was about twelve. I didn’t know I was actually gay, but I knew how good it felt to spend time with other guys—and I always dreamed about holding one of them really close to me. But it was really hard. All the guys in my class made fun of me. They seemed to know something was up, calling me names and everything. I knew I couldn’t tell my parents because they’re Baptist—they’re very religious people. I figured they would have me sent away, maybe put me in a mental hospital. I felt like I was the only person I knew who felt this way, so I tried really hard to repress my feelings. It actually made me just want to kill myself.”
Nineteen-year-old Jackson told me a slightly different story. “For a long time I always felt pretty good about myself. I was captain of our high school soccer team, pretty high up in my class, and really popular with just about everybody. At the end of my junior year, I won the ‘best-looking’ and ‘most likely to succeed’ awards. But then I started drinking. At first I thought I was just being cool—you know, one of the guys—but then I knew that I was drinking because I didn’t feel like just one of the guys. It took me a long time to realize it, but for three years I’d had a crush on this other kid on the soccer team. I guess I was really in love with him. If other people found this out, I thought they’d definitely stop liking me. I’ve never really acted like a stereotypical gay person, so nobody’s ever suspected anything. I thought that if I told my friends about falling in love with another guy, they’d start calling me ‘faggot’ and stop hanging out with me. I thought that maybe I wasn’t gay anyway. So instead of telling my friends or doing anything else about it, I just started to drink a real lot.”
Among our diverse male population, among our “real men” of all religions, nationalities, racial and ethnic backgrounds, about 5 to 10 percent will discover as young or adolescent boys or during early adulthood that they are homosexual. Being homosexual, or gay, means, of course, that a boy, when he grows into manhood, will primarily feel attracted, in a romantic sense, to other men. Rather than falling in love with women and longing for a woman as a spouse, gay men fall in love with other men and hope to find a man with whom to share their adult lives. And just as heterosexual, or straight, boys do not “decide” they are going to be heterosexual and, as adults, do not “choose” a heterosexual lifestyle, homosexual boys do not “decide” to be gay and, as adults, do not “choose” to live a homosexual existence. Based on my years of experience counseling adolescents and adults, I have come to believe that being straight or being gay, for boys and girls, and for men and women, is something that each of us discovers about ourselves. It is just a natural part of who each one of us is.
While being homosexual may lead boys, as they’re growing up, to sense that they are somehow “different” from other boys of the same age, we now know that most boys who learn they’re homosexual—if given the same love, support, and empathy we give to heterosexual boys—are equally likely to become happy, healthy, successful men. Yet during adolescence when most young people begin to question their sexual identity, many homosexual boys do not feel comfortable speaking to either their peers or their parents about their fears and confusions. At this age boys feel that they must keep their feelings secret, and often sense there is nobody willing to talk to them in a safe and confidential way about what they are experiencing. Some boys in this situation are harassed by peers, family members, or teachers and administrators at school. Many of them are afraid of what would happen if their closest friends or family knew what they were really going through. Almost all of them intensely fear rejection.
Fortunately in some schools and communities there are now special awareness programs that teach teenage kids about gay and lesbian issues. Some states, such as Massachusetts, have a statewide task force dedicated to developing social and educational programs specifically tailored for gay adolescents. In some school systems, there are after-school discussion groups for students who are gay or who wonder whether they might be. Some of these groups are led by teachers who themselves are gay and stand as role models for their students. Some are led by empathic parents who want to help students struggling with these issues.
But probably in most school systems and in most communities there are no special programs, no task forces, no after-school discussion groups, and certainly no openly gay teachers. Either these school systems or communities do not have the resources to provide such programs or, more likely, they haven’t yet seen the need for them. Regrettably, in many communities, there is still a stigma attached to being homosexual, and feelings of bitterness, even pure hatred, are still directed toward gay people. Many young people who are gay (or heterosexual but perceived as gay) report receiving threats of violence or actually getting beaten up, sometimes severely. For the adolescent boy who begins to wonder whether he might be homosexual, living in this kind of community is inordinately difficult.
“I felt like I had nowhere to turn,” recalls Eric, now a freshman at Harvard, “I grew up in a small town in Iowa where people probably didn’t even know how to pronounce ‘homosexual.’ When I first thought I was gay at about age thirteen, I just started to go crazy. There was only one person in our whole town who was thought to be gay—this guy who worked at the local video store—and he was ridiculed by everyone beyond belief. I didn’t dare tell my parents about what I was feeling, and I figured I couldn’t talk about it with any of my teachers, since they would probably just turn around and tell my parents. At our town library, there were no books about gay people. I really thought I was the only guy in my whole school who had these kinds of feelings. There was just nobody I could talk to about it and nowhere to go for the support I needed. I remember coming home from school each day, going into my room, and just crying by myself for hours at a time. It was a really traumatic time for me.”
The profound feelings of isolation, fear, shame, and self-hatred that boys like Eric feel when they think or know that they are homosexual—especially when they sense there is no place they can go for nonjudgmental love, encouragement, and support—lead many of them to seek out their own solutions to the pain they feel. They may run away from home, get involved in drugs or drinking, misbehave at school, get involved in fights, engage in promiscuous sexual relationships, fall into a depression, or, worst of all, contemplate or commit suicide.
The
suicide rate for gay teens is particularly distressing and, in my opinion, cannot be ignored. According to one recent study, gay youths account for up to 30 percent of all teenage suicides. And in another study of gay and bisexual adolescent males, nearly one third of them reported that they had attempted suicide at least once.
When we hear these staggering statistics, when we begin to appreciate how lonely and frightened so many gay youths feel, some of us may be quick to conclude that being homosexual must be the primary cause of these problems. This kind of knee-jerk assumption—the assumption that if these adolescents are facing such tough problems, the problems must be caused by their sexual orientation—is perhaps only natural. But what I have come to understand—and what I tell parents who ask me—is that these problems are caused not by homosexuality but rather by society’s misunderstanding of homosexuality. The stereotypes and stigma that burden gay people—which I have come to believe are not that different from the stereotypes and stigma attached to other minorities such as Jews, African Americans, and Asians—lead many adults to develop irrational fears about gay people and even to hate them for no rational reason. I have found that this homophobia—not homosexuality itself—is what makes the lives of gay people so difficult.
If we want to help boys when they are uncertain of their sexuality, if we want to show them that we love them no matter what they discover about themselves, if we want them to feel positive about who they are as young people and as adults, I believe that the most helpful thing we can do is to teach all of our boys, gay or not gay, that homosexuality is nothing to fear and nothing to hate. We need to help our sons, in particular, to puncture old myths about homosexuality and teach them that no matter what their sexual orientation may be, they can be successful, strong, happy, “real” men.
While teaching their sons these truths feels difficult for some parents because they themselves have fears and doubts about homosexuality, failing to impart these messages to boys can place our sons in serious psychological if not physical danger. I will never forget the words of Susan Wallace, mother of Jessicah, age twelve, and Alex, her only son who hanged himself at the age of fifteen: “I just wished Alex had told us what he was going through. If he had, I would have told him that his father and I loved him very much. And Jessicah loved him too. We would have loved him no matter what. As long as he was happy, we would have been so happy too.”
HOMOSEXUALITY: A NORMAL VARIATION OF HUMAN SEXUALITY
For generations, experts in psychology and psychotherapy did not entirely understand homosexuality. During times when being openly gay was extremely difficult if not impossible, it must have been quite challenging, too, for psychologists and psychiatrists to get to know and fully understand gay men and lesbians. Because they were largely ignorant about what it meant to grow up as a gay person or to live adult life as a gay man or woman, psychologists and psychiatrists for years made assumptions about homosexuality based on very limited information or knowledge. Many of these assumptions, with the new psychological and biological research we now have, have been shown to be incorrect.
Based on numerous studies by top scientists in the United States and across the globe, we now know, first and perhaps most important, that homosexuality is not a psychological “disorder” or “disease.” Although, as early as 1935, Freud himself argued that being homosexual “cannot be classified as an illness,” for years most traditional psychoanalysts, based on the core belief that what is “healthy” is whatever is most “socially adaptive,” decided that since being heterosexual was more common or “normal,” homosexuals were “abnormal” and should be “cured.” But most mental health professionals (including less conservative psychotherapists) began several decades ago to revise their opinions about homosexuality, and by 1980 homosexuality was deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association when psychiatrists decided it could no longer be seen as a behavior disorder. Today, even the most conservative psychoanalysts are beginning to accept that homosexuality is a normal part of human life and that being gay is not something that mental health professionals should attempt to change (or that they can change).
There are probably two major factors that brought about this critical shift in how the world’s scientific community looks at homosexuality—and thus at how we must look at what boys and young men should be taught about being gay. The first factor has to do with science and with what we have learned about homosexuality. The second factor has to do with society and sociology, with what we are learning from and about gay people as they become more open and fully integrated into society. While scientists have not yet determined the genesis of homosexuality in a definitive way, there is broad consensus that homosexuality is “constitutional”—in other words, that being gay, like being straight, is a natural, unchangeable part of who a person is inside. This is very important because it suggests, among other things, that in raising our sons, there is nothing we as parents can do or not do that will somehow cause our child to “become” either homosexual or heterosexual. While environmental factors, such as parenting, can of course influence the developmental experience of boys both gay and straight, they seem to have relatively little impact on what his genuine sexual orientation will ultimately be—that is, on whether as an adult he will feel primarily drawn to a man or a woman as the healthy object of his love and affection.
These scientific findings, as I’ll explain a bit more later, are joined by society’s changing attitudes about homosexuality in general. As more and more men and women “come out” and share the ups and downs of their lives as homosexuals not only with one another but also with their heterosexual friends, families and co-workers, many of the prejudices we’ve felt about homosexuality have begun to evaporate. Many of us have come to know gay people in professional and business settings: perhaps our family physician, political representative, postman, plumber, priest, accountant, lawyer, or nursery school teacher is openly gay. Some of us have family members or friends who are homosexual: our brother, sister, mother, father, aunt, uncle, son, daughter, best friend, college roommate, or neighbor might happen to be gay. Others of us have not yet become close to a person we know to be gay, but have learned of a celebrity who is openly gay—such as Ellen DeGeneres or Elton John—or who openly supports gay people—such as Whoopi Goldberg, Richard Gere, or Elizabeth Taylor. Throughout the world, it seems, more and more people are learning not only to tolerate but to accept and embrace gay men and women. In fact, in a recent study of over seventy-six societies from around the globe, researchers Clellan Ford and Frank Beach discovered that a majority of these societies considered homosexuality either socially acceptable or normal. Today even the Catholic Church is offering words of support—in a recent press release the National Conference of Catholic Bishops encouraged parents to show love to their gay sons and daughters and to accept that “generally, homosexual orientation is experienced as a given, and not as something freely chosen.”
Indeed as we learn that being gay probably has much more to do with a biological given than with a psychological development or choice, and as we get to know and become friends with gay people from all walks of life, I believe we also need to begin to change what we are teaching young people about what it means to be gay. In my work with parents, I’ve learned that most of them, even if at first they have to struggle, sincerely want to give their full love and support to their sons whether they turn out to be gay or straight. When they believe their boy might be gay or when he himself tells them that he is gay, most of the parents I advise find it best not to dwell on how they might possibly be able to change him. Instead, once they feel ready, parents usually discover it’s more helpful simply to focus on listening to what their son is saying about his relationships, on giving him their full empathy, and on helping him, as best as they can, to grow into an emotionally strong, confident, masculine young man, to feel proud and good about who he really is—gay or straight.
WHY IS OUR SON GAY?: THE ROOTS
OF HOMOSEXUALITY
In discussing what makes people either gay or straight, perhaps the best place to start is by reviewing what we now know are not the root causes of sexual orientation. One misconception that has now been largely dismantled is that homosexuality is usually caused by some sort of developmental disturbance or pathology—that boys become gay because they suffered from some kind of mental or psychological disease. This misconception is understandable because for years many of the gay men who actually went to see psychotherapists probably had in fact been abused, endured trauma, or suffered from severe emotional distress. Many of the therapists who counseled these men logically assumed that these kinds of disturbances were what had led their patients to become gay. But what the therapists did not realize, and what we now know to be true, is that in most cases it was not the disturbances that led to the sexual orientation, but rather the sexual orientation that, indirectly, because of society’s attitudes toward homosexuality, was most probably the cause of many of these disturbances.
Specifically, because of the historical bias against homosexuals in many societies, for years boys who were gay—or who were perceived as “acting gay”—were mistreated by their peers and by society in general. Because they felt hated, because they felt shame about who they really were, these boys—only some of whom were actually gay—became susceptible not only to abuse and trauma but to a whole gamut of emotional and psychological disorders. Many of these disorders—such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse—only got worse when men went for psychotherapy because the therapists, far from helping these men accept and feel good about who they really were, instead tried to push them to disavow their genuine experience, to try to “become” heterosexual when in reality they could only feel happy and fulfilled—in fact could only really be—homosexual.
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