What Sexuality Means

(Imported from my previous blog in a series about being gay in Wyoming - Recreated here to show a little bit more about who I am.)

This comes from the notes I took when I was getting ready to come out. It comes from the first chapter of a book by Daniel Helminiak called What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality. Daniel Helminiak's website is at http://www.visionsofdaniel.net/. I recommend going to the site and reading the first couple chapters and possibly finding a way to get the book at your local library. Very enlightening.

"Sexuality means much more than physical arousal and orgasm. Attached to a person's sexuality is the capacity to feel affection, to delight in someone else, to get emotionally close to another person, and to be passionately committed to him or her. Sexuality is central to that marvelous human experience, being in love: to be struck by the beauty of another person and be drawn out of yourself, to become attached to another so powerfully that you easily begin measuring your life in terms of what’s good for someone else and not just for yourself. Sexuality is part and parcel of the human capacity for love. For we are not just intellectual beings, making calculated decisions to cherish somebody. We are emotional and physical, too. All this is what it means to be a human being, and all this comes into play when human love is on the scene.

To have to be afraid to feel sexual is to restrain that noblest of human possibilities, love. It is to short- circuit human spontaneity in a whole array of expressions: creativity, motivation, passion, commitment, heroic achievement. It is to be afraid of part of one’s own deepest self.

This is not to say that sex acts are a necessary part of every human love. This is not to say that people cannot live without having sex. It is only to say that people who are afraid of their sexuality are constantly in hiding from their own selves. As a result, they are handicapped in all their dealings with other people and especially in their capacity to love deeply. All interior growth is stunted when people repress their affection, for heartfelt passion is the engine of human achievement."