My So Called Life

What Sexuality Means

2007-04-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

(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."

The Deceit

2007-04-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

(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.)

I was part of a support group for a while after I came out to my wife. We had been talking about coming out and how people would blame us for deceiving them their entire lives and this was what one of the respondents said:

"When anyone says anything about deceit, tell them YOU are the one who was deceived. You were deceived by your family and friends and community and church and society and culture into rejecting who you really are. You were deceived into believing that if you are yourself you are somehow invalid. This deception was at a time in your development when you were very vulnerable and needy, when you were an adolescent. You needed to believe you could be what they told you were the terms for being acceptable to them, because in that liminal stage of not still being a boy and not yet a man, you felt they were right and that YOUR feelings were not right. You were deceived into trying to be something you were not, and in their deception of you, they deceived also your wife and your children and themselves."

The Stigma of Being Gay

2007-04-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

(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.)

I had a bunch of notes I took a while back when I was struggling with coming out, and this is just one of the things I copied down off the Internet. I can't remember where it even came from and I really would like to credit the author. If you know who the author is, please don't hesitate to email me and let me know.

"When you attach a stigma to being gay (as social conservatives do), when you make it nearly impossible to have healthy, mainstream gay relationships (as social conservatives have done and seek to do again), then don't be surprised when people enter into unhealthy, outside-the-mainstream gay relationships. Two generations ago, society made it practically impossible for gays to find each other anywhere other than behind park bushes or in public toilets and then expressed shock that gays were having sex behind park bushes and in public toilets. It was a Riisian trap, steering people into pathetic existences and then chastising them for their patheticness."