Internatnal OCD Foundatn | How Do I Know I’m Not Really Gay/Straight?

Contents:

• CAN SOMEONE BE HOMOSEXUAL AND NOT GAY?
• AM I GAY OR NOT QUIZ?
• YOU’RE NOT GAY: HOMOSEXUALY ANXIETY OCD
• GOOD LUCK PASSG THIS 6 QUTN TT IF YOU AREN'T GAY
• AM I GAY?
• HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY
• YOU’RE NOT GAY
• 17 SIGNS YOU'RE ACTUALLY GAY (AND JT DON'T KNOW IT)
• HOW DO I KNOW I’M NOT REALLY GAY/STRAIGHT?

CAN SOMEONE BE HOMOSEXUAL AND NOT GAY?

So when we therapists are nonted wh male clients, often married on, who e to wh ep nflicts about their sexual attractn to other men, we often fd that they are willg to e the word “homosexual, ” but chew the “gay” label. Bee “gay” impli an embracg of the gay liftyle — gay bars, gay pri paras, perhaps multiple sex partners, or even anonymo sex. Unfortunately, much of our natn’s polics have long exacerbated the problem as well, shamg and vilifyg homosexualy, leadg legns of men stgglg wh sexual inty to ternalize their homophobia.

I warned them of the pfalls of keepg their sexual orientatn secret: a life of creased prsn, pursug a secret life the gay unrground wh the danger of beg ught, how attemptg to supprs urg n often e them to bee even more obssed wh them. I have treated many men who are of Mormon, Orthodox Jewish, Catholic, and other religns who thk of homosexualy as a pathology. They may need, om time to time, to seek further therapy, but wh the right therapist, one who has thoroughly unrstood the dangers of such practic of “reparative therapy” which the therapist seeks to change the client’s sexual inty om gay to straight.

Bee the labels “homosexual” or “gay” rry such a stigma, some of the men seek help for their “sex addictn” and see their homosexualy as an actg out of same-sex urg. Brandon Ambroso argu that simplistic explanatns have ignored the fluid, shape-shiftg nature of our sir.“You n’t be gay.”She was on top of me.It wasn’t a mand —  was a challenge.

AM I GAY OR NOT QUIZ?

You so obvly nnot be gay, was her implitn, bee this is good sex.It was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop s unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular unrstandg of orientatn was that was somethg you were born wh, somethg you uldn’t change.

I me out at a nservative Christian llege the US and was a gay relatnship for around two years wh a basketball player who end up marryg a woman. Well, you mt have been gay the whole time, some might thk, and bee of some relig shame, you cid to lie to yourself and experiment wh a girl. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this way.Many people may fd their sir changg directn - and n't jt be explaed as experimentatn (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In 1977, jt over 10% of Amerins thought gayns was somethg you were born wh, acrdg to Gallup.

Throughout the same perd, the number of Amerins who believe homosexualy is “due to someone’s upbrgg/environment” fell om jt unr 60% to 37%.The ias reached cril mass pop culture, first wh Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way and one year later wh Macklemore’s Same Love, the chos of which has a gay person sgg “I n’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to.” Vios started circulatg on the ter featurg gay people askg straight people “when they chose to be straight.” Around the same time, the Human Rights Campaign clared unequivolly that “Beg gay is not a choice,” and to claim that is “giv unwarranted crence to roundly disproven practic such as nversn or reparative therapy.”People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backwardAs Jane Ward not Not Gay: Sex Between Straight Whe Men, what’s tertg about many of the claims is how transparent their speakers are wh their polil motivatns. “Such statements,” she wr, “fe blogil acunts wh an obligatory and nearly ercive force, suggtg that anyone who scrib homosexual sire as a choice or social nstctn is playg to the hands of the enemy.” People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backward – even if they are themselv gay.Take, for example, Cynthia Nixon of Sex and The Cy fame.

YOU’RE NOT GAY: HOMOSEXUALY ANXIETY OCD

“I unrstand that for many people ’s not, but for me ’s a choice, and you don’t get to fe my gayns for me.”The blogger John Aravosis was one of many crics who pounced on Nixon. Callg me “idtic” and “patently absurd”, Aravosis wrote, “The gay haters at the relig right uldn’t have wrten any better.”Gay rights do not have to hge on a geic explanatn for sexualy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they thk they were born gay.

GOOD LUCK PASSG THIS 6 QUTN TT IF YOU AREN'T GAY

Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Profsor of Psychology at Universy of Tennsee, for stance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexualy is nate still hold negative views of gays. In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic rponnts he studied shared siar levels of belief a Born This Way iology.As Samantha Allen not at The Daily Beast, the growg public support for gays and lbians has grown out of proportn wh the rise the number of people who believe homosexualy is fixed at birth; would be unlikely that this small change opn uld expla the spike support for gay marriage, for stance. “It don’t seem to matter as much whether or not people believe that gay people are born that way as do that they simply know someone who is currently gay,” Allen nclus.In spe of the studi, those who ph agast Born This Way narrativ have been heavily cricised by gay activists.

Siarly, Ward has received her own hatemail for phg agast the lg LGB narrativ, wh some gays tellg her she’s “worse than Ann Coulter,” the ntroversial US thor of books like If Democrats Had Any Bras, They’d Be Republins. And when I published my say on choosg to be gay, an irate Amerin lbian activist wrote me that had “jt been nfirmed” to her that my wrg was “directly rponsible for four gay aths Rsia.”While I n unrstand why some ntemporary activists (and the journalists who seem beholn to their agendas) might chalk up recent gas LGB acceptance to Born This Way’s cultural filtratn, activism mt be found upon facts and tths, or the whole program will eventually turn out to be a sham. Drowng out every voice that dar to qutn domant cultural narrativ is not the same thg as validatg the arguments those voic are makg.As Ward says, “Jt bee an argument is polilly expedient don’t make te.”It is only recent history that we have started to label sexual orientatns wh rigid tegori (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)So what do the science say about Born This Way?There is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejectedLet’s first be clear that whatever the origs of our sexual orientatn, there is a unanimo opn that gay “nversn therapy” should be rejected.

AM I GAY?

The efforts are potentially harmful, acrdg to the APA, “bee they prent the view that the sexual orientatn of lbian, gay and bisexual youth is a mental illns of disorr, and they often ame the abily to change one’s sexual orientatn as a personal and moral failure.” Ltle wonr the therapi have been shown to provoke anxiety, prsn and even suici.In other words, the qutn of the efficy of nversn therapi is a non-issue. — but bee they’re immoral.The qutn of what leads to homosexualy the first place, however, is obscure, even to the experts. The APA, for example, while notg that most people experience ltle to no choice over their orientatns, says this of homosexualy’s origs:“Although much rearch has examed the possible geic, hormonal, velopmental, social and cultural fluenc on sexual orientatn, no fdgs have emerged that perm scientists to nclu that sexual orientatn is termed by any particular factor or factors.”Siarly, the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn wr a 2013 statement that while the of heterosexualy and homosexualy are currently unknown, they are likely “multifactorial cludg blogil and behavral roots which may vary between different dividuals and may even vary over time.”Te, var eye-grabbg headl over the years have claimed that some scientists have found somethg like The Gay Gene.

In 1991, for example, nroscientist Simon LaVey published fdgs that he claimed suggt that “sexual orientatn has a blogil substrate.” Acrdg to LeVay’s rearch, a specific part of the bra, the third terstial nucls of the anterr hypothalam (INAH-3), is smaller homosexual men than is heterosexual men.Try as they might, scientists have stggled to inty any particular gen that nsistently predict the directns of our love and sire (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Read moreYou n spot the problem wh this study a e away: were the gay bras LeVay studied born that way, or did they bee that way? LeVay himself poted this out to Disver Magaze 1994: “Sce I looked at adult bras, we don't know if the differenc I found were there at birth or if they appeared later.” Further, the bras LeVay studied belonged to AIDS victims, so he uldn’t even be sure if what he was seeg had somethg to do wh the disease.Another landmark paper on the origs of homosexualy was published 1993 by a geicist named Dean Hamer, who was terted to learn whether homosexualy uld be hered.

Begng om his observatn that there are more gay relativ on a mother’s si than a father’s, Hamer turned his attentn to the X chromosome (which is passed on by the mother). He believ there’s about “99.5% certaty that there is a gene (or gen) this area of the X chromosome that predispos a male to bee a heterosexual.”A 2015 study sought to nfirm Hamer’s fdgs, this time wh a much larger sample: 409 pairs of gay brothers.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE GAY

“It’s not.”And as Allen pots out, there have also been studi that found no “X-lked gene unrlyg male homosexualy.” Perhaps predictably, the studi haven’t received as much media verage.Bis the dividual criqu leveled agast each new study announcg some gay gene disvery, there are major methodologil cricisms to make about the entire enterprise general, as Grzanka pots out: “If we look at the raveno pursu, particularly among Amerin scientists, to fd a gay gene, what we see is that the ncln has already been arrived at. All science is dog is wag to fd the proof.”The other problem wh Born This Way science is summed up nicely by Simon Copland: “Scientists are askg whether homosexualy is natural when we n’t even agree exactly what homosexualy is.”Grzanka agre. How then uld they be rooted our genome?” Our sir may exprs themselv many different ways that do not all nform to existg notns of ‘gay’, ‘straight’ or ‘bisexual’.This is one of the bt takeaways of Ward’s Not Gay, a peratg analysis of sex between straight whe men.

Gay men make up only a actn of the US populatn — yet Ward says that there are many men not clud that number who engage homosexual behavr. That’s bee terms like ‘heterosexual’ and ‘straight’ and ‘bisexual’ and ‘gay’ e wh all sorts of cultural baggage attached. Ccially, she argu, “whether or not this baggage is appealg is a separate matter altogether om the appeal of homosexual or heterosexual sex.”Even if you accept that sexual sire may exist on a kd of spectm, the predomant ia is still that the sir are nate and immutable – but this ns unter to what we know about human taste, says Ward.

“Our sir are oriented and re-oriented based on our experienc throughout our liv.”Gay or not, our sir are oriented and re-oriented throughout our liv (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In fact, the straight-intified men Ward studied for her book sometim found themselv suatns that sparked the sire for homosexual sex: aterni, ployments, public rtrooms, etc. Ward thks this qutn is the next ontier of queer thought.When I first said I chose to be gay, a queer Amerin journalist challenged me to name the time and date of my choice.

YOU’RE NOT GAY

All of our sir are ntually beg shaped throughout our liv, the very specific ntexts which we disver and rehearse them.I’m claimg that at some pot durg llege, my sexual and romantic sir beme reoriented toward menThkg back to my llege romanc wh women and men, I n beg to unrstand how my own experienc might have helped me to ‘cultivate’ my sire for homosexualy.

I want to be very clear: I’m not claimg I simply began to ‘grow to’ my homosexualy, or that as I beme more fortable wh beg gay, I allowed myself the eedom to exprs what had always been latent wh me.

17 SIGNS YOU'RE ACTUALLY GAY (AND JT DON'T KNOW IT)

This new inty turn helped rerce and grow new gay sir wh me.Granted, none of this means that there were no geic or prenatal factors that went to the nstctn of my or any other sexual orientatn. But that’s not the whole story, and to engage disurse that pretends is — regardls of the nobily of the tentns — uld have “profound and very negative nsequenc” for the LGBT muny, says Grzanka.“Limg our unrstandg of any plex human experience is always gog to be worse than allowg to be plited,” he says.Early gay rights activists pared sexualy to relign - a ccial part of our life that we should be ee to practise however we like (Cred: Ignac Lehamann)So what are we to do wh the Born This Way rhetoric?

We should stop pretendg that do.Sendly, the entire search for a gay gene is predited upon the assumptn that homosexualy is not the natural or ‘flt’ state of a velopg human.

HOW DO I KNOW I’M NOT REALLY GAY/STRAIGHT?

‘Somethg had to happen to make that man gay!’But why ce such enormo ground to those who believe somethg has ‘gone wrong’ si gay bodi and bras?

“That’s a very narrow unrstandg of what jtice looks like,” says Ward.What about the ncern that homophob will want to ‘enurage’ gay people to be straight if there’s no blogil basis for sexualy?

It don’t take too much creativy to image a scenar which homophobic parents, upon beg rmed their fet has ‘the gay gene’, choose what to them may seem the lser of two evils: abortn.Fally, I would argue that the Born This Way narrative n actively damage our perceptns of ourselv. We’d never accept that story.”Acrdg to surveys, ls than half of Generatn Z intify as "100% heterosexual", suggtg more and more people have embraced their sexual fluidy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Perhaps is time to look to the begng of the gay rights movement. “They were anized around sexual liberatn, and the radil notn of challengg heteronormativy.”Gay and lbian activists, says Ward, ed to draw on relign parallels to argue for cln.