Discovery and dissimulation

Conference tea-break. "Hi, how are you?" I said to her. She was a young woman, maybe early twenties.

"Fine, thanks," she replied. "I'm really amazed by your talk; I learnt so much."

Well, somehow she knew flattery would earn her frequent flyer miles from me.

I had just given a very very basic lecture about gay issues. What I called "Gay Studies 101". I had absolutely no idea beforehand how it would be received by the audience. In fact it was a very difficult audience to cater to. Among them were many gay men, for whom Gay Studies 101 would be something they figured out for themselves by age 19. There were well-read academics, who would find this laughably rudimentary, but then again maybe not -- some of the most learned people on this earth are still terribly ignorant about homosexuality (though they may also be too proud to admit it). However, perhaps half the audience at least were straight-looking non-academics, and so if I made some impression on them, it would have been well worth it.

Talking to this young woman, whose name I must admit I forgot within minutes of the introduction, it seemed I did make an impression. But I wasn't out to fish for flattery. I really was interested in what she thought, what she managed to absorb, and what questions were still lingering.

She had a few, and generally, I had encountered those questions before, so answering them was a breeze. But one question -- well, it was more like a remark -- was significant because I hadn't come across it before, at least not quite in that form. And it compelled me to think a bit in order to craft an intelligible answer for her. You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to craft an intelligible answer for straight people trying hard to think about homosexuality for about the first time in their lives. They have very few references to navigate by, and enormous shoals of misconceptions to avoid.

Her remark was, "You know, you said 'gay people don't choose to be homosexual, they discover that they are.' " and then added, "I'm not sure what that means."

You could see immediately that she was trying to overcome the widespread idea that homosexuality was a choice. She was taking me at my word that it wasn't, but she couldn't quite figure what it was if it wasn't a choice. She was also trying to grasp what that process of 'discovery' felt like.

I think I managed quite well to give her an answer, and if any reader finds himself confronted by the same question, I will record it here. I won't claim a patent on the answer, not that it's all that original anyway; use it for educating the world:

The process of discovery is usually spread over a few years, typically in a person's late teens. Of course, when I say 'you discover that you are homosexual', it implies that the orientation or the condition (and that sounds terribly clinical and so I don’t like it), pre-exists. Exactly how that pre-existing orientation arises is a subject of considerable research today. There are theories involving genetics, hormonal balance in the pregnant mother, hormonal balance in the homosexual person, early socialisation, or some complex combination of these and maybe other factors. But the bottom line is, at this stage we don't know.

This orientation is latent in the person for many years, and it needs a trigger for the process of discovery to unfold. This is analogous to somebody with musical talent, or a gift for languages. The talent or the ear for languages can lie dormant until the person takes music lessons, or begins to learn a foreign language, and then the talent begins to affect the course of events.

For homosexual orientation, as for most sexual awakening, the trigger is often puberty. Like teenagers all over, he suffers any number of crushes, and gets aroused by even the faintest hint of nudity, except that for the homosexual teenager, the object of the crushes or visual fascination is always of the same sex.

Now even at this point, he may not realise he is homosexual. For example, the boy with the musical talent, or the girl with a flair for languages, would not realise that he or she had that gift when they first began lessons, because talent is relative to others' lack of talent. It would take a passage of time for it to become obvious that they had something that others did not have. It would gradually dawn on them that they were different from their peers.

Similarly with the homosexual teenager. He would not recognise himself as homosexual from his first crush. He would need a whole series of crushes and a few years of gawking at men's bodies before he realised that, heck, my track record is completely different from the others'. Then depending on his access to information about homosexuality, he would finally come to some conclusion that he was different, and begin to put it into some kind of mental framework and nomenclature.

At no point was he making a choice. All this while, he was merely coming to terms with a reality, just as the boy in the violin class and the girl in the French class gradually but inexorably discovered that they had that something extra which others didn't.

Now while writing this, a further thought occurred to me. It has been reported, I don't know how reliably, that most boys get a mix of crushes and arousals in their teenage years in respect of men and women. The conventional explanation is that the raging hormones of youth have not settled, but with time, they 'grow out' of their homosexual phase.

(This neat explanation has the very convenient -- for the homophobes -- implication that homosexuality is arrested development, like dwarfism or the mental impairment, but I won't belabour the point here)

Is that really the right explanation? Is it not possible that a far larger number of males than hitherto admitted, are by nature bisexual, and that what is happening is that the majority of them are then made to feel guilty about their homosexual side, so that they disavow that side of their nature within a few years of puberty? They don't 'grow out' of their homosexual phase. They suppress their homosexual half. [1]

There was an interesting study reported last year which correlated men's views about homosexuality with their arousability from images of nude males. It found that those holding strongly anti-homosexual views correlated well with arousal. The heterosexual males who were not aroused by images of nude males were in fact the ones that were least homophobic.

I don't know if there's a connection between these homophobic arousable males and the teenagers who 'grew out' of their homosexual phase, but it certainly looks like we should at least ask the question.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. See the article Where straight men come from

Addenda

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