insight about gender atypical behavior

[meridannight]

I really don't feel that I've tried to emulate my mum or dad and I find the concept offensive in the sense that it depicts all gays as having been in love with their own dads. I know I haven't been. Just like I was never in love with my best friend, roommate, brother, teacher or whatever other dirty little secret you can imagine.

this isn't a theory exclusive to gays. in psychoanalytic theory there's this thing called the Oedipus complex. this means to say that heterosexual boys are sexually attracted to their mothers as children. it is part of the theory of psychosexual development according to which people have sexual instincts from birth (and i agree with this). it is no more directed toward homosexual men, than it is directed towards heterosexual men who are said to experience attraction to their mothers in early childhood.

what Isay proposed actually humanizes gay men's development. it's not offensive. you can react to it whichever way you do, but in the large psychiatric perspective it actually serves to normalize homosexual males' development.

in the past, homosexuality was thought of as an arrest or failure of normal heterosexual development, it was consequently held that homosexuals could be converted or changed to being heterosexuals (this within professional psychoanalytic/psychoterapeutic setting). psychoanalysts/psychotherapists held the view that homosexuality resulted from an overbearing mother, for example, who didn't let the boy detach from her and become a normal male (i.e. identify with his father, or with being a male), or alternately, that homosexuality resulted from a weak father who didn't assert himself enough to enable the boy adequate identification with himself/with being a male. (this is a past theory and shouldn't be given any credibility, i am only posting it to illustrate the difference). Isay argued against all that.

Isay, through his work with homosexual patients, (Isay was homosexual himself, by the way) argued that aberrant relations with his mother or having an overbearing mother results instead in adult men who have difficulties forming stable intimate relationships. this is true for both, homosexual and heterosexual men. and that crucial point in gay men's development is the childhood attraction to their father/father figure and his relations with him.

in my own case that father figure was my mom's brother, my uncle. i felt attraction for him as a kid which was sexual in nature. i remember the thoughts that went through my head about how i wanted to be with him, and what i wanted to do with him. i wanted to be near him, touch him, hold him, be held by him, and kiss him. i fantasized about him like that. as a result of this, i do think Isay is right and the whole thing makes sense to me.

it's also nothing to be ashamed of, or anything to be thought of as offensive. if you didn't experience it, you didn't.

i also want to point out something -- Isay was actually the pioneer in the psychiatric field that challenged the view of homosexuality as a pathology. he presented and worked out a normal model for gay men's development. when nobody else in the American psychiatric field dared to speak up he did, he wrote papers, presented clinical cases, and opened up about his own homosexuality. homosexuals were prohibited from becoming psychoanalysts till 1991! and it was directly thanks to Richard Isay's work that that got changed. he worked hard and succeeded at getting homosexuality recognized as an innate natural expression of sexuality rather than a pathology in the psychoanalytic community in the USA. it is not to be underestimated what he achieved, and the institutional bias he had to fight against.

[meridannight]

you can read in more detail about this guy over here:

Richard Isay

Being Homosexual was one of the first books to argue that homosexuality is an inborn identity, and the first to describe a non-pathological developmental pathway that is specific to gay men. It is widely considered a breakthrough in psychoanalytic theory and an important, historical work.

In Becoming Gay, Isay recounts that with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, he threatened to sue the APsaA, due to their discriminatory policies. As a result, on May 9, 1991, the APsaA adopted a non-discrimination policy for the training of analytic candidates and changed its position statement on homosexuality. 1991 was also the year that the APsaA agreed to allow gays and lesbians to become training analysts, and to promote gay and lesbian teachers and supervisors.

This fundamental change in position by the APsaA created a ripple effect that was felt throughout the profession. The ApsaA was and is the preeminent psychoanalytic organization in the world. These changes of position and practice by the APsaA became a stimulus for reform. They were slowly copied by psychoanalytic, psychiatric, psychological and social work organizations internationally. A few years later, these changes were adopted by psychoanalytic groups in the UK

Isay was an early proponent of gay marriage. In 1989 Isay told U.S. News & World Report: "If the time comes in which there's a change to society's attitude toward homosexuality - when, for example, gay marriages and adoptions are possible and gay couples reap the same social benefits as heterosexual couples - I believe there will be a corresponding change in the behavior of gay men, with much less emphasis on the sexual act and more emphasis on relationships". This was long before gay marriage had become an issue within the mainstream, LGBT community.

Subsequently, the ApsaA became the first national mental health organization to support gay marriage, in 1997; a policy that was spearheaded by Isay.

i don't want to make this thread about Richard Isay, but i feel the need to post the above passages because he has been an eminent figure in the history of homosexuality, and has left behind a huge influence and legacy, which i just want people to be aware of.

these are the three books by him:

[meridannight]

Its just when I hear about atypical behaviour of gay men in youth, if it doesnt match my own, I feel like they are saying im not qualified to be gay, like how all the time I read gay men are the youngest of brothers, I cant tell you how sick I am of hearing this, it also validating the theory that its a choice

it's a statistical difference they are quoting. i don't know what it is you've read, but if it's newpaper articles or some n^th person's account on the internet you should take that with a grain of salt. i've read the statistics (i have a book that brings out a lot of statistics on the homosexual population in my library somewhere) and i think what they say is that homosexuals are more likely to have an older brother, rather than a younger brother. also, if one of the identical twins is gay, there is a 50% likelihood that the other is as well, which, it is thought, points to at least some genetic influence in homosexuality.

i was the first child, by the way. i have no older brothers.

[meridannight]

I dunno, my feelings towards my dad range bewteen annoyance and aversion. The single most horrible thing about holidays like new year is that he feels the need to hug me cause, hey that's tradition right....I tend to avoid that like a plague.

Never been feminine nor masculine (at least masculine like one is supposed to be here)

feel free to deconstruct me if you want

i'm not a psychoanalyst and i don't have enough information about you. i couldn't deconstruct you if i wanted to.