Hello again. As a child, I did not start out possessing the integrity expected of adults but was deceptive and manipulative when I felt the need to be. Children’s sexual experimentation or practices, di solo or otherwise, are not shared with their parents or generally advertised. Yet, while I had character flaws growing up, virtues were also being internalized as well. I remember exactly the time I was tempted to put fewer coins than required in the city bus’s mechanical coin collector. Ready to do so, I stopped, saying to myself, “No, I want to be honest.” That was a helpful improvement of behavior.
Reared in a Christian home, I was taken to church weekly. At home I was certain of my step-mother’s intense and enduring religious faith. She sang a lot, country ballads and affirming hymns of spiritual commitment and praise. She believed in Jesus Christ, read her scriptures and often had our minister and the visiting parson to especially delectable dinners. Throughout my childhood, our home centered around church fellowship.
I may have passed for a normal kid, but at my core there were deficiencies that were urging me along a unique path. From earliest childhood I had encountered several of the classic relational traumas that leave one with a major hole in their soul. Mother’s death soon after I learned to walk, Dad’s physical and emotional abuse, being sexually awakened precociously by an older boy (so early I did not remember the first time), toxic humiliation, plus a good dose of body dysphoria had left me not feeling good about myself and starved for masculine affection and belonging. As a high school graduate, I found my way to the big city, driven by grown-up desires for a mate. I yearned for the love of a buddy. I admired other men and searched for Mr. Perfect as most normal guys searched for a soulmate. Actually, my estrangement and sense of being less than those attractive, capable men, even more than desiring them, I would rather have abandoned myself and been them. I did not understand at the time, but my urgency was really a search for self. It was indeed a problem not fixable with sex.
Nevertheless, I searched! Where was he? In D.C., in the early ‘60’s, two gay bars were across the street from each other and another about a fifteen-minute walk away. On peak days of the week, they were all full of men on the same quest, hungry and hoping that he, the man of their dreams, would come. Truly, men, as I had been, are legion! With the weakening of supports for heterosexual marriage and families, millions of gays and other gender-dysphoric individuals continue to increase around the world. Each of these guys will have been hurt, perhaps most by relational insults that occurred in the earliest years of their lives, often than they can be remembered. Much wounding was caused by negative or absent fathers or the effects of trauma that encouraged boys to not like themselves and be distant from their fathers and male peers.
Some gay men do find comforting love in committed same-sex relationships that approximate heterosexual unions. Notwithstanding, there are ways, even when they are older, to satisfy the inner boys’ profound need for masculine love and affirmation. They can have this without eroticism, the symbolic evanescent sense of being valued by another man.
I have undying gratitude for having learned why and how to break free of the demand for same-sex sexuality and focus effort where it needs to be. I encountered the insistent siren song of same-sex eroticism from about age four till my mid twenty’s when trauma required a different path. Over years, I have grown and changed within. I am free of those captivating enticements for genital connections. Convictions of being cared for can come other ways. I have been so richly blessed. Sigmund Freud was right when he identified homosexuality as an arrest of psychosexual development. Same-sex attraction is not a call for same-sex sexuality, but rather a ceaseless urging to continue the path leading to mature manhood. It has little to do with “wearing” a great physique, but rather in gaining a better use of mind, heart, and soul. Principles that promote richer heterosexual male connections and a greater measure of peace and fulfillment are indeed available. I hope to share specific principles that gave me freedom and fulfillment.
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