The Trouble With Being Homoerotically Troubled

When I confided to a Brazilian friend who is gay that I had always had attractions to and sexual feelings about males as well as females, he suggested that I read a book called "The Third Pillow", (O Terceiro Travesseiro) by Nelson Luiz de Carvalho. The Third Pillow is a book about the tremendous stigma and discrimination associated with being a teen and becoming aware that you are a homosexual. Without recounting too much of the plot, two teen boys who are dating decide to tell their parents about their relationship and their sexual orientation. One boy's father punches him in the mouth seems angry enough to kill him, while the other teen's father stabs him in the belly with a knife. That's just the beginning of their journey.

No wonder, then, that an article in Psychiatric Times says,

In the developmental histories of gay men and women, periods of difficulty in acknowledging their homosexuality, either to themselves or to others, are often reported. Children who grow up to be gay rarely receive family support in dealing with antihomosexual prejudices. On the contrary, beginning in childhood--and distinguishing them from racial and ethnic minorities--gay people are often subjected to the antihomosexual attitudes of their own families and communities (Drescher et al., 2004). Antihomosexual attitudes include homophobia (Weinberg, 1972), heterosexism (Herek, 1984), moral condemnations of homosexuality (Drescher, 1998) and antigay violence (Herek and Berrill, 1992). Hiding activities learned in childhood often persist into young adulthood, middle age and even senescence, leading many gay people to conceal important aspects of themselves.

Closeted individuals frequently cannot acknowledge to themselves, let alone to others, their homoerotic feelings, attractions and fantasies. Their homosexuality is so unacceptable that it must be kept out of conscious awareness and cannot be integrated into their public persona. Consequently, these feelings must be dissociated from the self and hidden from others. Psychiatric Times

Well, that's me right there. After experiences in childhood that made it clear that homosexuality was socially unacceptable and severely socially sanctioned, I decided to simply put out of my mind the idea ever of acting on homosexual feelings, even though the feelings themselves didn't diminish. I certainly have never integrated the awareness of these feelings into my public persona, even though I know a lot of people who have done so.

If and when same-sex feelings and attractions can no longer be kept out of consciousness, the individual becomes homosexually self-aware. Individuals to whom this happens can acknowledge some aspect of their homosexuality to themselves. While homosexually self-aware people might consider accepting and integrating these feelings into their public persona, acceptance is not a pre-determined outcome. For example, a religious, homosexually self-aware man may choose a celibate life to avoid what, for him, would be the problematic integration of his religious and sexual identities.

Individuals who are either consciously prepared to act on their homoerotic feelings or to reveal a homosexual identity to others usually define themselves as gay or lesbian. To be gay, in contrast to being homosexually self-aware, is to claim a normative identity. In other words, defining oneself as gay usually requires some measure of self-acceptance. A gay person may choose to come out to family or intimate acquaintances. Others may come out to people they have met in the gay community while keeping their gay identity separate from the rest of their lives. Psychiatric Times

According to the above, I would be "homosexually aware." Actually I think I'm homoerotically aware as well as hetero-erotically aware. I acknowledge my feelings to myself, but I have not, at all, integrated the homo-erotic feelings with my public persona. I only told my own wife about them a couple of days ago.

Does the fact that I love making love to my wife and would not willingly trade women for men prevent me from being a homosexual? I certainly hope so, because I wouldn't willingly trade women for men.

Would I have had more homosexual experiences if there was no one to tell me not to? I certainly believe that I would have. This is what psychiatric professionals call "fucking well confused".

It can be painful to keep significant aspects of the self hidden or to vigilantly separate aspects of the self from each other. Constant hiding creates difficulties in accurately assessing other people's perceptions of oneself, as well as recognizing one's own strengths. Dissociation's impact on self-esteem can also make it difficult to feel one's actual accomplishments as reflections of one's own abilities. Transparency, invisibility, losing one's voice, and being stuck behind walls or other barriers are some of the terms used to describe the subjective experience of dissociative detachment (Drescher, 1998) Psychiatric Times

Maybe this is why I so often feel like killing myself? Probably not, but I've tried a lot of other things to rid myself of the constantly recurring depressions, and publicly acknowledging homoerotic feelings is just another of literally hundreds of efforts at greater "self-integration."

Over the last couple of days, I have acknowledged publicly for the first time that I have homo-erotic feelings and thoughts sometimes. My brother would be scandalized, mortified, shocked and disgraced. Oh, well. I've spent my whole life caught between what I feel and my brother's onetime reactions (now over thirty years old) to what I feel.