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January
Adolescent and Gay
A very small percentage of males discover
themselves to be homosexual or bisexual as they
grow up. For them, sexual maturation is a
particularly demanding, sometimes hazardous,
process; as many as a third are physically
assaulted by gay bashers inside or outside their
families before they complete adolescence.
Adults often exhibit a degree of amnesia about
their sexual awakenings. For both heterosexual and
homosexual boys, the experience of this awakening
is something shared mostly with each other. Adults
say very little about the experience itself. Every
boy finds it mysterious, exciting, confusing, and
frustrating. Many boys who will eventually have
well-established heterosexual orientations have at
least one homosexual experience as an adolescent,
either with another boy or with a gay adult testing
their orientation. As many as half of the males who
eventually establish a homosexual orientation have
experienced heterosexual sex, either during the
period when they were uncertain of their
inclinations, or as an attempt to adopt the
predominant orientation, only to have it prove
unsatisfactory to them.
Both heterosexual and homosexual males like to
think of their orientations as destinies
foreordained at birth, but it isn't quite that
simple. Some adolescent boys, either because of the
strong cultural preference for heterosexuality or
because they were somehow sexually different then,
establish heterosexual orientations in adolescence
lasting into early or middle adulthood, and then
change orientation and identify themselves as
gay.
A sense of being "different" assails many
homosexual males while they are still in elementary
school. In some instances, this sense of
differentness is mainly an internal perception, but
in other instances a boy may be perceived by others
to be different and singled out for teasing or
taunting at school or at home, or both-as lacking
masculinity.
Researchers are very much divided on the origins
of homosexual orientation. Perhaps tolerance of
homosexuality would become a less divisive issue in
our society if indisputable evidence could be found
linking sexual orientation to genetic inheritance.
No such evidence, no gay gene or heterosexual gene,
has yet been clearly identified. There is some
evidence that male homosexual orientation is more
closely related to maternal than to paternal
lineage, but even that evidence settles very
little. The fact that identical male twins are more
likely to share the same sexual orientation than
are fraternal twins also suggests a biological
component.
For every geneticist looking for a biological
link, there is a behavioral expert offering an
explanation involving the childhood experiences and
environment of the boy. When I was growing up,
homosexual orientation was often blamed on
overprotective mothers who didn't encourage their
sons to develop heterosexual relationships with
their peers. More recently, cold and distant
fathers have received much of the blame once heaped
on too protective mothers: the homosexual boy, in
this formulation, seeks the acceptance and love
from other males that his father never offered him.
As with the biological explanations, there is
something plausible about the various behavioral
explanations, but none has won acceptance as a
comprehensive and solidly confirmed hypothesis.
For every biological or social scientist who has
addressed the etiology of homosexuality, there are
several moralists lamenting what they believe is
the perversity of homosexual practice. Many of them
base their intolerance of homosexuality on their
reading of the Christian and Hebrew Bibles, but
there is no more scholarly consensus about how to
interpret the few biblical references to
homosexuality than there is consensus among
scientists about genetic or interpersonal factors.
Such attitudes, however, are influential. The Boy
Scouts of America, citing the organization's
private rather than quasi-public standing, does not
now permit acknowledged homosexuals to take
positions of leadership or accept known homosexual
boys as scouts.
A homosexual youth lives in a glass-house
environment in which sexual orientation is
exaggerated far out of its proper perspective in
his life. A heterosexual boy is deeply affected by
his sexuality, thinks about it, dreams about it,
talks about it—especially with his
peers—and expresses it in personal or
interpersonal action. Yet his sexuality, central as
it is to his identity and life, doesn't stimulate
the same constant sense of vulnerability. He isn't
teased in a hostile way about being heterosexual.
Everyone makes so much of homosexuality that it's
difficult for a gay adolescent to get his sexuality
in proper perspective. Difficult, too, to
anticipate where rejection will lie. Sometimes
adolescent classmates are relatively tolerant and
parents are completely intolerant.
There is enough uncertainty about parental
response, linked to the need most adolescents have
for continuing financial and emotional support from
them, that parents are not generally the first
recipients of male homosexual disclosure. Siblings
or other peers are usually the first to hear. A
large proportion—half or more—of gay
adolescents do not disclose their orientation to
parents until they have left home for college or
other pursuits. Even so, most males anticipate a
higher level of acceptance of the disclosure to
parents than they receive. In one recent study,
half of both mothers and fathers reacted to their
college-age sons' disclosures of homosexuality with
disbelief, denial, negative comments, or silence.
Eighteen percent responded with acts of rejection
including attempts to convert the son to
heterosexuality or to cut him off financially and
emotionally. Parents often feel guilty: What did I
do wrong? It is indicative of the differences in
relationships that mothers are usually informed
face-to-face while fathers are as often informed in
writing as in conversation.
Many issues young homosexual males confront are
embedded in the life of Dan, a sixteen-year-old. He
remembers feeling attracted to men as early as age
five. When he was in fourth grade in California, he
watched a gay actor on a talk show recount that
getting turned on by Calvin Klein male underwear
ads made him realize he was gay. "And I said,
'That's me, too,'" Dan recalled. "But I kept
thinking, of course I'm straight. I'm going to grow
up and have girlfriends and have kids. I began
dating girls in fifth grade. In seventh grade, I
dated a beautiful girl who kept pressuring me to
have sex—she wanted to know what made me
horny. What I realized was that there's a big
difference between finding someone attractive and
being attracted to them sexually and emotionally.
That was when I knew that I was at least
bisexual.
"The summer after seventh grade I came out to
most of my friends that I was bisexual, and they
were cool about it. There were other guys out at
the high school, and some in the middle school,
too. I was afraid of what everyone would think, and
I didn't tell my parents. To deal with my anxiety I
started using drugs—a lot of painkillers, some
codeine.
"Just before eighth grade started, my parents
moved separately to Connecticut." That year was
Dan's worst year so far: "absolute hell"
"Immediately I was labeled a faggot, and I had
never been called that before I moved. I would get
punched and spat on by people passing in the hall.
There were gay teachers who would get made fun of,
and wouldn't respond. So I really didn't feel
comfortable. If gay adults weren't safe from
taunting, I certainly wasn't going to be safe."
I asked Dan how he explained the abuse by other
students. "They're just not sure of themselves," he
said. "A lot of them have grown up with a hatred of
gays. I find that many guys are threatened by how
comfortable I am with my sexuality. That's not to
say they're gay, but they're questioning their own
sexual confidence."
In ninth grade, Dan began sexual activity with
men, some in their twenties, others in their
thirties or older. He meets many of them in gay
clubs. He also feels confident initiating contact
with strangers in public, in stores, for example.
He is diligent about safe sex and careful not to
make himself vulnerable to sexual exploitation by
drinking too much, but he has a considerable number
of sexual contacts during a year. His sexual
experience and self-confidence are beyond the reach
of his gay, and also many of his heterosexual,
schoolmates. Dan has had only two brief
relationships with schoolmates. His insistence that
boyfriends be as open as he about sexual
orientation is too public for their comfort.
Lacking heterosexual friends, he has no schoolmates
he spends time with outside of school.
His family circumstances and his homosexuality
have pushed Dan into a kind of premature adulthood.
"I think of my father as my roommate;' he said.
"Isn't that a lonely way to live?" I asked.
"I really enjoy my independence;' he replied,
"and there's no way I could go back to having a
curfew."
The pronounced—but not as rare as one might
think—detachment of Dan's parents from his
life accentuates but doesn't define the
consequences of Dan's homosexuality. The
depression, the loneliness, and, indeed, the danger
attendant to his sexual relationships is in part a
consequence of homophobia, but his perception of
his parents' preoccupations with their careers, his
hypersexuality, and his self-destructiveness are
themes in many boys' lives, whether or not they are
gay.
There aren't many self-acknowledged male
homosexuals in any high school class, and if their
sexual orientation is considered socially
unacceptable or even contagious by heterosexual
age-mates, they will not have a very large pool of
potential friends. Homophobia is exhibited by some
women, but by and large it is a sentiment
perpetuated by males in our society. It incites
crude and cruel behavior in middle schools, and
even more frequently in high schools.
©2007 Eli Newberger
Eli Newberger,
M.D., a leading figure in the movement to improve
the protection and care of children, is renowned
for his ability to bring together good sense and
science on the main issues of family life. A
pediatrician and author of many influential works
on child abuse, he teaches at Harvard Medical
School and founded the Child Protection Team and
the Family Development Program at Children’s
Hospital in Boston. From his research and practice
he has derived a philosophy that focuses on the
strength and resilience of parent-child
relationships, and a practice oriented to
compassion and understanding, rather than blame and
punishment. He is the author of The
Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture
of Male Charaacter
and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife
Carolyn, a developmental and clinical child
psychologist." www.elinewberger.com
or E-Mail.
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