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Homosexuality clearly results from loss and need. There is a loss of a secure sense of oneself as a male. That loss becomes a driving emotional need to find and replace the male loss. I have described this as Gender Emptiness (GE) and Gender Attraction (GA); two critical stages in the development of homosexuality in a male. They have to do with the loss of gender identity, or it's lack of adequate development, and gender intimacy. First some definitions:
When there is a foundation of LSE, the child is emotionally vulnerable in many ways. If a father calls his son a sissy, rejects him, and refuses to associate with him; when male peers tease or make fun of the LSE boy, or he fails at male-related activities and develops a fear of male aggressiveness, GE results. GE is a gender identity and intimacy insecurity.
The young child begins to develop an inner insecurity and uncertainty that he is male or masculine enough. Because he experienced humiliation, intimidation, fear, anxiety, embarrassment, shame, criticism, poor modeling or insufficient modeling, lack of opportunity to experience success, acceptance, belonging with his same gender parent and peers, gender identity security is arrested.
Because the young preadolescent is GE or gender identity-intimacy insecure, he carries an emotional deprivation or vacuum which makes him very needy or hungry for other males to accept, approve, and be close to him. While he may feel quite comfortable and even secure with the opposite sex in a social sense, he continues to feel somewhat both remote and hyper-interested in the same gender. The young male looks to other males for identity and intimacy since his own was not adequately secured. He forms an attraction and an attachment to other same gender persons in an intense way.
What most boys take for granted and assimilate as a matter of ordinary development, through affiliation and friendships with other peers, becomes an absorbing preoccupation for the GE boy. Instead of companions, associations, and friendships with other boys, peers become objects of intense interest in terms of physical attraction (male features such as build, aggressiveness, confidence, anatomy, etc.), and emotional attachment.
The GE boy has intense emotional feelings about other boys. He feels an emotional dependency characterized by jealousy, hurt, comparisons, intense closeness, falling in love, and emotional excitement. He wants another boy to love him, single him out, and make him the object of his exclusive attention and affection. This need for emotional intimacy and attachment becomes a major underlying dynamic of the homosexual preoccupation.
John writes:
"I was so fearful about certain male things. Sport was one of them. I may be good at kickball and volleyball, but striking out at bat over and over again was so humiliating. I tried to avoid any competitive activities. I was also very afraid of black males. I grew up in a white neighborhood and anytime I found myself in a black environment I assumed I would be beaten up because in my thinking and experience all black males were aggressive and hostile. I remember getting dropped off at some kind of school event in an all black neighborhood, and having to catch a bus, being frightened and shaken when some black boys approached me aggressively. I remember trying to bribe one of my classmates who I found aggressive and threatening, going out of my way to avoid him after school, taking the long way home so that he would not catch up with me. I also didn't have the strength, aggression, physical endurance and skill needed to do the things my brother or father did with cars. I wasn't even interested in such things.
After awhile I was becoming aware that I had developed stereotypes of what a real male was like and of masculinity, and I just didn't meet the standard. That sense of poor male identity coupled with shame and embarrassment about sexuality generally caused confusion. Sometimes I become extremely sad about my life and this loss of masculine security. I see males who are so fortunate that they can take their masculinity for granted. For the, it just happens and operates. For me it is so contrived and artificial. This makes me sad.
Also I keep asking what is this intense curiosity and interest about male sexuality about? Why was the male body becoming so fascinating? Why wasn't I half as excited about the female body? I would ask myself these questions but really afraid to admit that they were realities."
One can see that John was not forming a comfortable male identity and that he was not having the kind of inclusion and acceptance experiences with the males he considered masculine. Thus he judged himself as dis-identified, an outsider looking in on what he doesn't possess and felt inadequate as a male.
All of this involves losses. You lost a sense of secure male gender identity. You lost a sense of secure intimacy with males. These are real losses. How can you begin a process of facing and "replacing" these losses?
-Recall some "gender-loaded" experiences you had that effected your sense of yourself as a male.
-Recall attacks on your gender identity
-Try to capture how distant, detached and remote you were from other males.
-Try to review some over-attachment and attraction you experienced for males.
Write about these things or share them with me.