"I think if your parents hadn't got divorced when you were young, you might have turned out straight," says boyfriend T to me over dinner last Saturday night while we were in Paris."Really?" I reply with a bemused tone in my voice, "how do you work that one out??"
"Well, you've got a few straight characteristics," answers boyfriend T, "so you probably could have gone either way."
"So what made me gay then?"
"You've told me before that you'd do anything to help your mother. So I think that because you were brought up by her, you didn't ever want to have a girlfriend because loving another woman would have felt like you were betraying her. So you ended up gay :-)."
"But I never ever thought that having a girlfriend would have been betraying my mother," I reply, feeling confused, "and I'm sure that she'd have wanted me to find a nice girlfriend, preferably one with good child-bearing hips that could have ended up providing her with grandchildren! I even tried to be straight for a while, before I decided that I was gay :-)."
"I don't doubt any of that, but my theory is about what was going on in your subconscious!"
I've blogged before about how some gay guys had strong women in their lives while they were growing up, so I guess boyfriend T's theory could be true. The only problem with the theory, though, is that it's completely untestable! In any case, at this stage in my life, I'm very glad that I did end up gay :-). If I'd turned out straight, I'd never have met boyfriend T, and I can't bear the thought that I'd have ended being the boyfriend or husband of a female person instead of him!
Posts
6 comments:
People are gay because they're gay. A more interesting question might be why some people are straight. I'm glad you are happy with your sexuality because it allowed you to meet your boyfriend. For myself, I'm glad I'm gay, full stop. When I look around at the narrow lives and cramped relationships of so many heterosexuals, I'm glad I'm not one of tham.
What makes one gay or straight is complicated so I get rather annoyed when people continue to push the "strong mother, absentee father" bullshit.
I agree with boyfriend T based on my experience. I also grew up being very close to my mom. My mom kept her marriage to my dad, but my dad had lots of issues. Mom on the other hand has the greatest personality. Since my dad always made my mom cry on many many issues, I never liked him and I got disgusted with every aspect of him. To date, I do not like men who look like or act like my father, and I like guys who are opposite type of him. As a result of having terrible father, I became very close to my mom. I also felt I had to protect her. I still talk with her 5-10hrs a week on the phone, I go on vacation with her a few times a year, and I try to support her the best I can. She is like my best friend also. I tend to like girls for 30% of the time and men for 70% of the time. (Used to be 50/50) But, if things were different when I was growing up, I might have just dated women, and I might be married with kids by now.
With all the viable research that points to a genetic rather than a societal basis for gender assignment I find it rather odd that we're having this conversation at all.
It's a bit like the old joke: "My mother made me a homosexual / If I give her the wool will she make me one".
For myself, I am a gay man with masculine qualities. I think like a man, I have the ego of a man and the stubborness of one, but I undoubtedly like cock and male lovers.
I should put my hands up and say that I was once 'straight' with girlfriends and eventually in a marriage, but that was a question of denial more than confused signals.
We quit the womb with a big part of our future life mapped out for us in our DNA and that includes our sexuality.
Where confusion can
occur sometimes is in the interpretation shall we say, but really I'd aver that it was very little to do with Mommy.
I'm more inclined to believe in physiological predisposition. Whether or not someone chooses to act on their preference may come down to upbringing.
Most studies into this are flawed or biassed by the researcher, though there have been some interesting findings in humans, such as where identical twins have been separated at birth, raised in very different environments yet still both come out as gay etc.
Asian guys always have the most bizarre and semi-freudian theories about why people are gay. It's one of the things that attracts me to them.
Post a Comment