Your child says I'm gay. What do you do?

Personally I do not believe so, at that age males are going through so many changes it's really not possible to nail down what ones sexuality really is.

I also believe, based on personal experiences, that some teen age guys will first experiment with other guys, simply because of familiarity, most young guys understand other young guys, way better then they understand young females, for that reason in my opinion, just because a guy experiments with another guy doesn't mean they're gay, they are just going from the known to the unknown as simply as possible.

In addition, I believe most young guys who started experimenting with guys of their age, eventually do have sex with a female and once they do, many of them will never have sex with another guy, others may never have sex with a female again, still others will continue to go both ways.

So it is for that reason and the fact the male mind is not fully mature until somewhere around 24, I believe a lot of guys cannot solidly decide if they are straight, gay or bisexual, I also believe it is wrong for them to label themselves or worse be labeled as being of a certain type of sexually, pigeon-holing a person is never a good thing to do for any reason.

 

well people in that age group are a little more likely to experiment but I think it's pretty well established what sexual orientation that have by that point.

I agree experimenting with someone of the same sex does not mean you're gay. I would say that even if it occurs outside of your teenage years.

I don't really know what people think. So all I can really go by is testimonials

Well this seems to be the complication of labels. People view labels as a form of gatekeeping. "You are not a real man if you don't do X." "You are a good Christian if you believe Y."

Typically we see this from people who have strict adherence to labels. Labels are nothing more than an effort to try and make sense of the chaos that is life. Grouping people based on political belief or skin color. They are also called generalizations or stereotypes.

As long as you don't think you have to adhere strictly to any arbitrary rules somebody has set up for a label by all means use it.

 

[QUOTE="Well Bonded, post: 1070685177, member: 79184”]
When it comes to males there is a truism that applies to way too many of them, and that is, they think with their little head, not the big one.[/QUOTE]
Totally agree. We could probably trade stories for some time but I’ve posted on the forum maybe too often about my encounters with ‘heterosexual’ men over the decades. The simple reality is often when ‘straight’ men rave with hatred against gays they’re talking about a part of themselves they can’t face up to. We are a very strange species .

 

How did the age get extended to the apparently arbitrary figure of 22? Early teenage years are often ambiguous sexually and often not to be taken to seriously as experimentation is all that’s involved. On the other hand I’ve known of a number of cases where men have experienced themselves as straight all their lives until middle age when suddenly they discover their inner gay. There could be an evolutionary advantage in this as older men are more likely to carry damaged reproductive DNA. As a previous poster suggested, it could be due to women frequently losing their sex drive far earlier than men.

 

When it comes to religion, I am a very strange person.

I am religious, I believe in G*d, but I see commercial religion as evil, the idea that one can buy their way out of sinning and be forgiven by placing money in a collection plate on Sunday is in my opinion a fraud and perpetuates the sinning.

No Sir, if someone does something bad to another person something worse will happen to them, it's just the way life works, as for the legal system that's a different story and like commercial religion another rigged system designed to shake people down.

 

you are in good company.

that is one of my complaints with organized regimented religion. But I don't necessarily think it's evil some people find God that way. More power to them.

One of my problems with labels I don't think this is the major problem with labels in general it's the belief that you must adhere to all of the expectations that someone has based on the label. I've run into this where are they speak about being libertarian it seems like libertarianism is just a consolidation gatekeepers.

 

I don't think sexuality is as black-and-white as people would like it to be.

 

Totally agree. We could probably trade stories for some time but I’ve posted on the forum maybe too often about my encounters with ‘heterosexual’ men over the decades. The simple reality is often when ‘straight’ men rave with hatred against gays they’re talking about a part of themselves they can’t face up to. We are a very strange species .[/QUOTE]
I don’t think we're that strange. Most carnivores will eat their young if hungry enough.

 

That's the age I figured out I wasn't gay, I'm sure it varies widely, more so toward one getting older.

Around 13 or so I like many guys became rebellious, one of the things I did in that quest to be rebellious was refuse to cut my hair, in short amount of time it grew very long, eventually down to my waist, I was thin, small framed and as such I looked like a flat chested female causing me to be to labeled by classmates as a "Q."

While painful because at that age one wants to be accepted by their peers, it taught me a very important life lesson, that being never let others control your emotions, it also aligned me with a few other guys in school who where rebelling in the same manner and where also labeled as Q's.

It turned out the label we where given was true, while not gay, we where certainly different, we didn't fit into the standard mould and the ridicule and taunting actually made us stronger and exposed us to what true ignorant so called straight bigotry really was.

I fully agree, I have a good friend who forced himself to be straight, got married and produced 2 very nice children.

Problem was he was fooling himself and that had him on a path to destroy the marriage, we had many conservations, he actually at one time considered killing himself, he was not sexually attracted to his wife, she was part of the façade he put on for his parents and sex was a duty he had to perform.

After 7 years of living a lie, he pulled the plug, his wife didn't hit the roof, I think she had an idea of the truth and was living with it, they had a non-aggressive settlement, but afterwards his parents did go through the roof and basically disowned him.

Sad but true.

Women lose their sex drive because of menopause, because of that they lose the natural desire to procreate, therefore they can no longer get turned on, they will try, but eventually it becomes for a number of reasons, that any form of penetrative sex is painful and not possible, think total dryness, it also doesn't help that many times the husband gets out of shape becomes overweight, develops hypertension and is prescribed medications that make getting an erection almost impossible.

And that is when the marriage gets strained and that is not exclusive to straights, I have 2 good friends who are gay in their late 60's and they are having the same problem, sex for them is waning and like too many straight relationships, they put too much emphasis on sex and too little on love.

 

Very true, sexuality is very complicated and fluid as life moves on.

I believe with most men they have it figured out by 24, but while the acceptance of homosexuality as being normal, which it is, will because of peer pressure push forward a façade of being straight, even though they know they are not.

And that is where things got out of control and feelings get hurt.

 

Yes it's a reflection of what they know they are, but continue to deny.

I'm straight and have no problem with that, conversely if a person is gay, I have no problem with that either, we each have made a personal choice and no one has the right to judge us because of that choice.

However what really p's me off are the thumpers, who will wave a bible in my face while claiming homosexuality is a sin, because so and so in the "Good Book" stated it is.

I have a 2 now ex-friends who pulled that crap when I was involved in trying to get gay marriage (same partner) legalized in Florida.

Being a Neoconservative I am supposed to be anti-gay, but I cannot go there because that is unnatural, ones choice of sexuality is no one else's business's, what men and women do in private is of the record, unless they are engaging in criminal activity.

 

My problem is the reverse. Always had a powerful sex drive and now at age 73 I wish it would just go away. I’m wary of becoming a ‘dirty old man’ so don’t ever push myself on younger men. The chances of finding a partner my age with similar drives is slim plus I’m not sure I could fall in love with anyone as wrinkled and wobbly as me. However, we live in hope.

 

This may not be popular and I may get some flack for saying but I think a lot of people actually do choose their sexuality to some degree. I think if there were no cultural taboos sexuality at all we would probably think heterosexuals and homosexuals were bizarre. But I think the regiment of culture Rick's people identify themselves one way or the other and makes them stay true to that. Rotten phenomena I discovered when I was in the process of coming out I took the bisexual step. I came across a lot of bisexual men. And there is a lot of bigotry coming from both sides toward bisexual men. Gay men and straight men take issue with them. I don't understand why. Maybe this causes gay men in general to identify as gay. I know a lot of gay men that are to some degree attracted to women. I am not.

So it makes me wonder if most of us are not bisexual at least to some degree.

 

My problem with bi-sexual men is a simple one. Even if I made the mistake of falling in love with one I just knew I could never give them everything they needed.

 

Well if you aren't everything they need it will never work. Bi men don't necessarily need a man and a woman. That was my experience talking with them at least.

 

Not mine.The only time it worked for me was in my early teenage years when I experimented with bi-sexuality and found myself involved in a four way scenario with another male teenager and two bi-sexual girls our age. (if you’d called us boys/girls at the time we would have been seriously offended) .We lived happily together for a few years until one of the girls died of a rare lung disease and soon after the other in a fatal car accident. The two of us left behind found being together just too distressing as there were always two ghosts in the room.
That was the last time I found myself attracted to women. I’ve no idea if I’d changed or if the trauma of that episode lived on with me. Maybe both.
40 years after this I bumped into Kevin again. All we could do was cry on each other’s shoulders so maybe we never recovered. He went on to be exclusively heterosexual & I’ve been 100% gay ever since.

 

I've never been involved with someone who identifies themselves as bisexual but I think my current partner is to some degree. I seem to be enough for him. And he's a lot younger than me so he's plenty for me.

 

Damn that’s horrible, I’m really sorry that happened to you.
Trauma like that, especially in quick succession, does great harm to a person.

I’ve always wished I could even be remotely attracted to females — never have been. Tried a few times in glorious embarrassment and failure.

 

Horrible yes but I have more fond memories than bad ones. I suspect however it’s twisted my view of a lot of things and made me at times warn others never to underestimate the random cruelty of the universe. I admit though music associated with this period of my life I simply can’t listen to without falling apart ,especially Pete Seeger’s rendition of Guitanamera .

 

Back to the original poster’s question. It’s hit me the differences between coming out at 16 to be immediatly thrown out of home and today are so vast it still makes my head spin. If you’d told that 16 year old about legal gay marriage I’d have thought you were mad. My father’s words still ring in my ears to this day “No pervert is a son of mine. You’re not staying another night in this house". I walked into the night with nothing more than what I was wearing. Luckily I’d been very precocious in having mixed with a bohemian crowd on weekends made up of gays, artists, academics, poets, architects, bikies, junkies - the list goes on. A prominent family of architects, artists, writers etc took me under their wing, found me a job in a warehouse and paid for me to attend night school. I never looked back.
Many decades later the phone rang; it was my father. I eventually got around to asking why he’d contacted me after so long and was told his second wife (I didn’t know he’d re-married) had died and he was lonely. Somehow I managed not to tell him what I really thought of him.
Now I have two close gay friends who have two sons. I recently overheard them discussing how they’d feel if one of their boys told them he was straight. How things have changed.

 

I'll pop in on this, and say that while a sexuality may already be innate and established, it doesn't mean outside pressures can cause one to doubt themselves or to attempt other than their nature to please others. We typically see it in those who are gay but try to be straight. We also see it in straight people who are different from "gender norms" and think they must be gay because of that. What we almost always see is that until they accept the truth about themselves, they remain depressed regardless of how much support or how little bullying they have around them. We can also see this same pattern with people who are naturally monogamous or polyamourous.

 

Knowing or not knowing your sexuality varies with age, culture and personality. I didn’t know there was such a thing as homosexuality until 14. In the 1950’s such things were seldom spoken about. The closest I heard was hearing my Uncle described as ‘Not quite all man’ which I took to mean he might be part martian or something. When I look back on my childhood though I identify behaviors that could have told me what I was if I’d known there was such a thing. Even at the age of approx 8 I’d sit on the bluestone sea wall and stare at a man who sunbaked winter to summer. He wore tight swimming trunks that in the 1950’s were spoken of as immmodest. I simply couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was fascinated but didn’t have the slightest idea why.
Then at 14 I joined the local life saving club and discovered a smorgasbord of young naked males in the showers. I knew then what I wanted even though I didn’t know immediately ‘what I was’. Today it’s almost impossible for children to be so naive. In some ways it’s sad children don’t get to live a real childhood as they’re aware of everything from nuclear war to the sex industry from too early an age.

 

Yeah there's a lot to be said for discovering things like that on your own. These days there's too much pressure to conform.

 

About time I revealed my bias. Others who’ve noticed my intolerance for Christian theology and found it disturbing need read no further.
I work as a volunteer for a phone counselling service with a high percentage of callers being suicidal teenagers. Two years ago our supervisor completed a PH D whose subject, when she started it, was the relationship between violent sex crime and religious affiliation. A year or so into collecting statistics and interviewing convicted sex criminals she made a discovery that shocked her and led her PHD research in a different direction. Her methodology had involved producing maps illustrating % of religious affiliation, region by region, with violent sex crime.
To her horror she soon learnt there is a perfect match in a large number of regions with highest percent of the population being fundamentalist Christian and youth suicide. Further inquiry revealed a large proportion of these suicides were committed by 'gay youth'. A sub group of that cohort committed suicide during or after being forced by their families into ‘cure by prayer’ facilities.
Discussing this with our staff psychologist I learnt many of those who survived attempts on their own life were passing through a common state of sexual experimentation yet eventually settled into heterosexuality.
All of this became a little too close for me when a Jehovah’s Witness neighbour's 15 year old grandson was caught ‘messing around with the boys’ during a common early teenage game of daring in Australia called ‘sticky biscuits - I’ll spare you the details. He was forced into ‘cure’ by prayer therapy. A few weeks later he was found hanging dead in the facilities garage. His parents and grandparents still claim ‘He didn’t fight Satan’
Cure by prayer therapy still occuers in Australia even though it’s illegal in most states. It continues underground, often camouflaged as drug withdrawal therapy. Anecdotal evidence suggests the suicides continue.

 

@Dissily Mordentroge ...

yes it is, yes it is...