Homosexuality In America,” -- or-- How I found out I was “gay” at age 16, 1964.

[MikeW]

I’d grown up feeling shame and guilt about my sexual feelings, not to mention fear of exposure. Being this way certainly wasn’t something I would have “chosen,” so I often wondered, “Why me?”

So, here it was. This magazine is telling me, and people like me, -- not to mention everyone else -- that science says we’re psychologically f**ked up. I didn’t know whether what they were saying about homosexuals being miserable was true or not but I could believe it. I certainly was much of the time.

As for having a psychological disorder, well, how else was I supposed to think about it? NO ONE I knew was saying anything positive about being a homo, when they said anything about it AT ALL. Which was like never. Not about this.

So I didn’t know it but at that very moment I was very vulnerable, very susceptible, impressionable. The words in this magazine sitting there in my lap, and my own inner conflicts, were all that I knew about being “gay.” It was easy for me to think, wow, maybe these feelings really are some kind of sickness . . .



I’m not going to go through the whole article in detail but it is truly a mammoth mind-fuck. It talks about how no one chooses to be gay. Except there might be some lazy good looking young guys who fall in with the wrong crowd and get “taken care of” by homos.

Well, that was a career choice I hadn’t thought of till that moment! :eek:

It goes on to say that homosexuals specialize in seducing young boys. :eek: :eek: :eek: It says “Zoologists observe homosexual behavior in nearly every species of animal; anthropologists find it in human societies in New York City to the South Seas, and historians find records of it in the civilizations of the past.” Hmmm… well, that’s interesting. It mentions some of the, “noted confirmed homosexuals of history . . . Plato, Michelangelo,, Leonardo da Vinci, and probably Alexander the Great.” :eek: Like everything I’m reading here, THIS IS ALL NEWS TO ME! Woah, no shit?!

My blood ran a bit cold as the good Dr.’s outlined how “nature and society combine to encourage homosexuality.” Boys being boys and all, which I knew a little something about, being one myself, and their not having access to girls, well, and given those nasty adult homosexual men who prey upon and exploit their horny adolescent urges -- yeah that all made a totally creepy kind of sense.

By this time, I was feeling like I needed to hurl.

One Dr. is curious how come so many young guys play around with other boys but so few of them actually become homos. Well, now there’s a question I’d like to know the answer to! What’s with THAT, anyway?

At first this expert says it is largely random chance… like whether one has a bad case of acne or a stutter and can’t get dates with girls. Then he goes on to say . . .

. . . Some boys feel so guilty about any kind of homosexual feelings or acts that they feel forever ostracized from the rest of society and can only cling to the gay world. Some come under the community’s suspicion or are actually caught: then, after they have been branded as homosexuals, they find it impossible to get a date with a girl and cannot return to the standard pattern of sexual and social life. But over and beyond the influence of happenstance and society, says Dr. Gebhard, there seems to be little question that some boys are predisposed to homosexuality. All medical and psychiatric authority agree.

Born that way, yup!

Our great-grandfathers, when they dared think about the problem at all, believed that homosexuality was inherited: some men were just born “queer,” with a woman’s disposition in a man’s body: they constructed a “third sex” which was an aberration of nature. This view was based largely on the mistaken notion, still held by many people, that all homosexuals have effeminate, “swishy” manners and would like nothing better, if only they could get away with it, than to dress like women, pluck their eyebrows and use lipstick.

Well, true, I had played dress-up in one of my mom’s old dresses and put on lipstick and stuff, but it wasn’t like something I wanted to do every day or even at all NOW! :eek: . . .

In actual fact, there are many effeminate men who are not homosexual at all -- and indeed the Institute for Sex Research has even found that some transvestites, men who like to dress in women’s clothes, are happily married and lead perfectly normal sex lives.

Wait, “transvestites?” WTF? :eek:

On the other hand, says the Institute, fully 85% or more of homosexuals look and act very much like other men and cannot be spotted for certain even by experts. [b]Often the only signs are a very subtle tendency to over-meticulous grooming, plus the failure to cast the ordinary man’s customary admiring glance at every pretty girl who walks by.

Well this right there; so THAT’s how you can tell someone is queer! :eek: And I’m thinking, who do I know who is really, really, really neat? OH, YEAH, of course, James T.! He always comes to school wearing a white shirt, tie, dark trousers, penny loafers and his hair neatly parted. Cute too. Sure, I could believe he was queer. But, on the other hand, I wasn’t particularly “meticulous” myself, so, this can’t be all true. Still, I thought, don’t forget to glance at girls!

So, I’m reading how “gay” might be genetic in some way but they don’t know for sure although there is some evidence with twins. But now we’re getting into the deep psychoanalytical stuff . . .

The psychoanalysts, who have observed and treated many homosexual patients over the years, believe that homosexuality represents a form of arrested development. Most children, though born with an indiscriminate impulse toward affection that does not distinguish between men and women . . . soon learn to concentrate it on another human being of the opposite sex. Some do not. Sigmund Freud, the founder of analysis, theorized that this could happen in a number of ways closely related to the stages of growth through which ever child must pass.

The article goes on and on about a lot of stuff I had no idea WTF they were talking about, narcissistic periods that don’t get out grown, something about an Oedipus which looked like “octopus” and so I had no idea what that could possibly have to do with anything.

Freud believed, the boy may grow up wanting to be exactly like his mother -- in other words, to play a female role in life. Or he may become so frightened by his feelings toward his mother, and by what he conceives to be his father’s jealousy, as to remain afraid of women all his life. (A common cause of homosexuality, Analyst Sandor Rado once declared, is “hidden but incapacitating fears of the opposite sex.”

This was just too weird. The idea of being “exactly like my mother” was totally freaky -- I mean, I liked my mom and we did seem to have a special relationship, far better than the one I had with my dad that was for sure -- but I didn’t want to be “exactly like” her. And as for fearing girls, there were only three girls I was ever afraid of. Pat, Linda and Tracey were *the hot girls* in my old school and they all three carried switchblades, they said to protect themselves from the boys! :eek:

WORKED FOR ME! :O

The article went on to say that basically the shrinks had come to the conclusion that being a homo wasn’t so much hereditary as psychological. What it boiled down to is we were all nutty as fruitcakes. Ultimately it was turning out that this was all my mom’s fault!

On the one hand, the homosexual’s mother kept him utterly dependent on her, unable to make his own decisions. On the other, she pampered him, catered to his every whim and smothered him with affection. Often she openly preferred him to his father, confided in him and, in Dr. Bieber’s words [[color=”red”]LOL at “Bieber”[/url]], “acted out a romance” which had obviously sexual overtones.

:eek: :eek: :eek:

Ok, I don’t know, I’m reading this and it is like, ok, yeah, my mom dotes on me and who knows maybe she does love me more than my dad -- can’t say that I’d blame her, he is such a mean old fart! -- but a “romance”? Really? With my momI?

:eek: :eek: :eek:

Even with such a mother, Dr. Bieber says, a boy can grow up to normal adulthood if he has a warm, affectionate father to set an example of masculinity and counteract the mother’s influence.

Ok, wait, so now it’s my dad’s fault? For sure “warm and affectionate” was not how I’d describe my dad. It was more like he hated my guts for something I never knew quite what other than just existing.

But the typical father of the homosexual, far from liking and supporting his son, turned out to be either totally uninterested in the boy or actively hostile.

Yeah, that sounded like my dad, alright.

Often the father was jealous and given to disparagement and ridicule. The boy feard his father and often intensly hated him

Well, DUH, how was I supposed to feel about a man who this one time used me for target practice with his 22 rifle?

He was always shooting things and he wanted me to become a good hunter too. I thought the whole thing was totally dumb but w/e.

So this one time we were target shooting with his rifle and some tin cans and he says to me, “Boy, why don’t you go over there, get up on the stump, put the tin can on yer head and let me see if I can shoot it off.”

Now I wasn’t at all sure whether the “it” in that last was the tin can or my head but I also figured he was just playing a game of “chicken” with me and he wouldn’t actually DO IT so why the hell not? So, dumb me, I go over, get on the stump, put the damn tin can on my head and stand there figuring he’s going to call the whole thing off any second. No, instead he says, “Stand REAL STILL now,” and “BLING” I feel this bullet fly inches from my scull and feel the tin can get knocked off my head.

:eek: :eek: :eek:

Not exactly the kind of father/son bonding experience the psychologists had in mind, I’m sure.

SO… mom and dad had f**ked me up. Well, that was no real big surprise.

Oh but this fucking article ain’t over yet!

In Dr. Bieber’s view, of course, homosexuals are psychologically sick: the emotionally disturbed offspring of emotionally disturbed parents. He believes strongly that the homosexual society is “neither ‘healthy’ nor happy,” and that indeed the very term “gay world” is only a flippant and rather pathetic attempt to cover up deep and chronic feelings of pathological depression . . .

Well, THIS is sure depressing as hell.

. . . Most analysts, psychiatrists and psychologists tend to agree. (A well-known psychologist and sexologist once began an address to the Mattachine Society with the comment, “I used to think that all homosexuals were neurotic.” His audience greeted his apparent change of heart with applause -- but he immediately chilled them by adding, “I now believe that homosexuals in most instances are borderline psychotics.”

Psychotic sounded REAL bad.

So, you see, I’m reading this trying to *understand something about myself* something that is very important and very mysterious to me. And what I’m getting is I’m totally f**ked up. And, apparently, so are all the other thousands and thousands of gay guys written about in the previous article. We’re f**ked up and unhappy and so of course we make ourselves even more f**ed up and unhappy by *even attempting to* give ourselves and some other guy pleasure.



The article goes on to site how, despite almost unanimous opinion in the psychiatric field, Freud himself didn’t believe that homosexuality was a sickness. It mentions the Kinsey report that indicated, “homosexual conduct was simply too widespread, in our own society and others, to be considered neurotic.”

I didn’t know what “neurotic” was for sure although I’d heard the word used now and then, like on some TV comedy or something, and I could see how I might be neurotic -- especially after reading THIS!

The article talks about how many homosexuals there are and how nobody can say exactly 100% for sure but there is A LOT, like millions. So however f**ed I am, at least I’m not alone. It’s just that everyone else is as f**ed up as me!

The article concludes:

. . . About the only effective way to discourage homosexuality at that crucial [[color=”red”]horny adolescent[/color]] stage, Dr. Gebhard believes would be “to encourage heterosexuality.” But such an idea would be utterly at odds with our culture and our moral code -- and therefore it seems inevitable that a considerable number of boys in every generation will continue to experiment with homosexuality, as in the past, and that some of them who were born or grew up with a predisposition will adopt it as a permanent way of life.

Many optimistic students of our society believe that we may some day eliminate poverty, slums and even the common cold -- but the problem of homosexuality seems to be more akin to death and taxes. Even if every present-day American with the slightest trace of homosexuality could be deported tomorrow and forever banished, Dr. Gebhard believes, there would probably be just as many homosexual men in the U.S. a few generations hence as there are now.

To be continued . . .