Post 85

One of the major reasons males loose themselves in the world of women is that bonding opportunities with their fathers were not available or what there had been was unacceptable. Psychiatrist, Irving Bieber’s research group repeatedly found that absent or otherwise destructive relationships typically existed between fathers and their sons who became gay. The following, gleaned from clinical notes or autobiographies of prominent homosexuals, is evidence which supports either lack of opportunity for boys to bond with their fathers and peers or disruption of relational bonds previously formed.

1. Claude Hartland (pseudonym) wrote his memoire, The Story of a Life: For the Consideration of the Medical Fraternity.This was the first gay autobiography in America. Claude related how his fingers had been severely burned when he was four years old. He was required to remain indoors with his mother and sisters for several years while his fingers slowly healed. This prevented him from working with and learning from his father and older brothers. Socially and psychologically, he grew up in the female world. He agonized and struggled, pleading for help to be relieved of his same-sex compulsions.

   
   

   2.    One of my clients was unable to competently participate in sports because of congenital problems with his eyes. ( It is amazing how many gay men never learned to throw and catch a baseball or football securely.)

   
   

3.    In his memoire, Breaking the Surface, Olympic gold medal champion diver, Greg Louganis, told of his childhood. He had been adopted when very young. Greg rejected  his adoptive father because of his authoritarian control, frequent criticism, and physical abuse. (Many adoptees become gay.) The parent/child emotional bond with the natural parent is broken and the child becomes sensitized with his bonding inclinations inhibited. Early biological trauma or broken relational bonds lead to the approach/avoidance bind that gays experience. They want to connect fully with their gender tribe, but are apprehensive and discouraged from doing so.

4.    One couple was blessed with monozygotic (identical) twins). When the twins were very young, one nearly died from a severe accident. Abruptly, all the concern and care of the parents were focused on this damaged and needful child. It was the healthy twin who was bereft of his parent’s loving attention who became gay.

5.    French writer and Nobel prizewinner, André Gide, wrote that he received very little of his father’s time. He wrote about his being raised mostly by his mother and grandmother and that in his childhood and early youth, he had no “play fellows.”

6.      Sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey was bisexual and engaged compulsively in deviant sexuality He hated his staunchly religious and harshly authoritarian father.

7.    Scientist, Simon LeVay, credited with discovering a gay gene, reported that he always hated his father for criticizing his mother to whom he was deeply attached.

8.  John Reid, (pseudonym), author of The “Best Little Boy in the World, complained that he was not allowed to hammer, paint, or saw with his dad and that there were no playmates within miles. He wrote plaintively of his gender-role estrangement and coming to grips with his sense of inferiority and encroaching same-sex attraction. “…oh, what I would have given to be Tommy’s real best friend. God, how I wanted to be like him, to do the same mischievous, self assured things he did, to have muscles and blonde hair had a smile like his. Nothing in our relationship would be disgusting, nothing unmentionable. Just like the Hardy boys, two blood brothers, two Cowboys... that's it two Cowboys.”

9.    Professional football player, David Kopay, reported in his autobiography, The David Kopay Story, that he never heard a kind word from his father.

10. Alan Cumming, Scottish actor and writer, penned Not My Father’s Son, wherein he described dreading his father’s frequent maniacal rage. Alan was fearful that he might die at his dad’s unrestrained, abusive hands.

11.As a boy, William Aaron, author of Straight: A Heterosexual Talks of His Homosexual Past, saw little of his salesman father while growing up and thought him inept and vastly inferior to his attractive, “consistently interesting” mother. Willie was also smitten by his ancient piano teacher, Charlotte Frederick, whom he described as “more than a teacher. She was my window on the world. Crochety, arrogant, quixotic, brutal, profane, exacting and hilarious.” (Parenthetically, One straight writer expressed his opinion that all great pianists were either gay or Jewish.) It takes a lot of time to gain the knowledge and develop the sensitivity required to master that instrument. Those were many hours taken away from outdoor play with other boys. And, it was intimate time shared with a female teacher.) Taking personal responsibility, for some estrangement with his brother, he reported, “my unkindness to him was calculated. He was at one and the same time my idol and my nemesis. Trim, muscular, masculine, and capable, he set the standard I could not live up to.” Willie also wrote, “I felt out of place and incompetent in a man’s world, I was so acutely aware of my own feelings of inadequacy.”

12. In 1971, Novelist, Merle Miller, published details of his life in his small book, On Being Different: What It Means To  Be a Homosexual.  He reported, “As a child I wanted to be the girl my mother had in mind ––or else the All-American boy everybody else so admired.” … I clearly couldn't be a girl, so I tried the other. I ate carloads of Wheaties, hoping I'd turn turn into another Jack Armstrong, but I still could neither throw nor catch a baseball. I couldn't even see the thing; I'd worn glasses as thick as plate glass windows since I was three.” Merle was picked on by third graders when he began kindergarten when he was four. He related that they “took one look at me and said ‘Hey look at the Sissy,” and they started laughing. It seems to me now that I heard that word at least once five days a week for the next 13 years, until I skipped town and went to the university. Sissy and all the other words – pansy, fairy, nance, fruit, fruit cake, and less printable epithets. I did not encounter the word faggot until I got to Manhattan. I'll tell you this, though. It's not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it's words that break your bones.”

13. Multiple blighting facets of James Humphry Morris’ early childhood encouraged him to reach a much higher plane of gender-role dysphoria than men searching for men. His early conviction was described in the first sentences of her (Jan Morris’) memoire, Conundrum.: The Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism. She wrote, “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” James knew that his mother had wished him to have been a daughter. “It is true that gushing visitors sometimes assembled me in their fox furs and lavender sachets to murmur that, with curly hair like mine, I should have been born a girl.” James had two older brothers, and the family was soon to be fatherless, a casualty of war. This urgency to be or sense of being female remained an enigma through James’ life. Why had he felt driven to “wear the body of a woman?” Although James married and sired children, the force within required more. It grew stronger till it drove him to Casablanca where a physician helped him attain a greater measure of peace ––by the surgical removal of his primary insignia of manhood, his genitalia. Through subsequent years, Jan Morris appeared and reported being happier living as a woman. Morris remained a transsexual until the end of (his/her) life.

14. In his book entitled Faggots, New York author and playwright, Larry Kramer, forthrightly warned his gay brothers during the AIDS epidemic that their promiscuous sexual behavior was killing them. He also remembered and wrote of his childhood being “incredibly miserable” because he was “shunted aside” by his father, who resented his mother “making  a sissy” out of young Larry. “He did it quite often. It was like being punctured by a nail, over and over again. But it didn't make me change. Our entire relationship, all we did was scream at each other.” Larry died of AIDS, realizing that his sexual pursuits had been a search for the father he never had.

15. The bond  had with my mother was broken when she died very early in my childhood. And, I rejected my father because he was moody, unpredictable, and occasionally emotionally and physically abusive. There were a lot of man things I failed to learn.

Young boys can be fatherless, neglected, or abused by them. Some either adore or resent their mothers whom they find to be smothering, controlling, or overshadowing of their fathers. Some boys condemn both parents. English poet,  novelist, and author of World Within Worlds, Sir Stephen Spender, expressed his lament regarding his over-protective parents in his famous poem, titled “My Parents.” He believed had he been allowed to be part of the neighborhood toughs, his life would likely have turned out entirely different.                   

MY PARENTS 

My parents kept me from children who were rough

Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes

Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street

And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron

Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms

I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys

Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.     

They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges

Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud

While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.

I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

The list could go on, but the pattern should be apparent. None of these boys who grew up gay avoided early trauma of some sort or were warmly fellowshipped into the masculine world and enabled to solidify their male identity. The social-emotional dash between themselves and other men was damaged. They were different, outside their gender tribe, wanting and needing to be in. Unfortunately, many gay men fail to consider their past and the subconscious forces that constantly influence their thinking and behavior. As a well-informed insider, Mark Thompson, wrote:

The gay pride movement has worked hard at rebuking bad fathers: from the sins of the patriarch or to the deficiencies of personal dads who didn't provide the nurturing we needed. Those bad fathers live within us still, but we're too shielded against all the rage and pain that poor fathering wrecked to see it. We look for this lost love in others who are similarly wounded and therefore are just as blind, only to wonder why it doesn't work out.