Tag: homosexuality

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Misshapppen Identities, by Ricky

Many people relate to gay men via stereotypes and pejoratives. Among those epithets are the words “twisted,” “bent,” “weird,” “queer,” “pervert,” “homo,” and so forth. Straight males relate to lesbian women mostly using the words “hot” or “I want to see some action;” a typical male double standard. I don’t know much about the type of problems lesbians face in the post WW2 world except from what the female members of our story group have revealed. However, I do know what damage those pejoratives did to me and other gay boys, teens, and young men.

Called by those names and bullied, some boys, teens, and young men chose to end their lives rather than continue living with the abuse and hopelessness. Unloving parents threw others out of their homes but they survived into adulthood only to face abuse by other adults who did not love or provide them with security. HIV and AIDS claimed many who escaped or lived through the bad times.

I consider myself fortunate. I was very naïve about same sex attraction and its portent for my future. Like many gay adolescents, I was confused as to why I was not interested in girls as puberty began. All my friends were finding girls very desirable. I desired to play sex games with boys more than girls.

My home life was not idyllic but neither was it oppressive. My parents were simply not around most of the time. We never talked about sex at my home although my mother and I exchanged “dirty” jokes once. (Her’s was funnier.) I did not act gay. I like to play sports for fun and not just to win at all costs. In high school, I mostly hung out with two smart friends and I was the oldest boy in my scout troop. I even wore my scout uniform to school one day of each Scout Week while in high school. Nonetheless, no one ever teased me or called me any gay related pejoratives.

My mother must have either known or suspected I was gay. I never brought up the subject of girls or spoke of dating a girl or taking a girl to a school dance. I did have bi-weekly sleep-overs with one or two of my neighborhood peers. I believe she suspected me because twice, without my knowledge or permission, she “arranged” for me to take the daughters of some family friends to school dances I was not planning on attending. Another reason I think she suspected is because she was so surprised when she received our wedding announcement six years after I graduated from high school. The point of all this is that I survived into adulthood and even survived marriage.

However, I did not survive without emotional and mental scars. Very few people survive unscathed from growing up closeted knowingly or unknowingly. At the time, no gay could serve openly in the military. I served 16-years, 9-months, and 11-days while closeted. The stress of exposure within marriage or military service takes a toll on one’s psyche. Whether in the military or not, whether married or not, projecting a false identity warps a person’s real identity into something unnatural. It is like forcing a square peg into a round hole or damming and diverting a river into a constricting canal.

The only way to insert a square peg smoothly into a round hole is to trim the corners of the peg. This can be done with care and concern using something like sandpaper or it can be forcibly hammered. Either method damages the peg and/or the hole alike. While damming a river and forcing it into a new channel or canal can bring benefits, when the levy or canal overflows or breaks, havoc results. It is the same with people. When a person forced to bend or squeeze their identity into someone else’s mold or lock-box, confusion, resentment, anger, death, or a broken “spirit,” can occur. Even one of the foregoing conditions could result in a broken person.

People allowed to have their real identity publicly on display without ridicule, will grow, undamaged, and flower into the person they were born to become.

© 23 February 2013

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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Connections, by Gail Klock

This is an extremely
difficult topic for me to write about because it reaches into the deepest
places of pain within my psyche. There have been many times in my life when I
have felt extremely isolated, lacking a connection to anyone. I was the little
child in kindergarten who chose to work on jigsaw puzzles during chose time
because it was the only activity which involved no interaction with others, all
the time hearing the other kids laughing and playing and wanting to be with
them. In college, when on a camping trip with a class, I laid awake all night
feeling totally isolated with others all around me, I felt like I was losing my
mind. It was one of the longest nights in my life. The terror I was feeling was
due to the fact I felt isolated, but I was too afraid to admit it. In both
instances, and others like them, if I had only been able to reach out and say
help me, I would have been okay. But I had learned to lock my fears away, I
knew they were not to be hung out like dirty laundry. I came from a very stoic
German family which mistakenly didn’t ask for help, even when it was needed.
There was instead a false sense of pride in handling, or appearing to handle,
all life’s trauma’s by ourselves. The reality was we all needed help,
especially when Karl died at the age of two. Of course back in the fifties this
type of help was not advocated or available. My dad’s yelling at my mom not to
cry on the way to Karl’s funeral was not because he was a heartless bastard, it
was because he was such a sensitive man, who loved this little child so much
and his wife and his other children and he couldn’t deal with his own pain,
much less take on and help the rest of us deal with ours, which he felt was his
responsibility because he was the man of the house. These feelings never left
him, they choked him until the day he died. When he was in hospice, a few weeks
after my mother had unexpectedly died, he lamented to me he felt so guilty and
helpless because he wasn’t there for her when she passed away. He was referring
to the evening of the night when she died in her sleep. She had collapsed in
the bathroom and he didn’t have the physical strength to help her up so he had
to call the neighbors to help him get her up and to bed. He didn’t realize he
had been there for her; he had nearly died the day after Christmas, just a
month before, but after a week stay in the hospital he unexpectedly made it
home. She had told all of us that she was not going to let my dad die first,
she couldn’t handle the death of another person she loved so much. She prayed
nightly, and I think quit taking her heart meds, for this to be the case. She
died precisely as she prayed for, in her own bed, in her own home, next to her
husband. My dad was there for her, by making the call for help to the
neighbors, he provided the means to her prayers.
It was as this four year
old child that I began to surmise that when in pain you don’t cry and you don’t
ask for help. This was solidified further by my mother’s inability to provide
emotional support to me or my brother due to her own debilitating grief. This
was the point in my life when I began to experience a lack of connection with
others. This was triggered once again when I was in college and became aware of
my homosexuality. I instinctively knew, as did my girlfriend, not to reveal our
relationship to anyone else. And in the hiding of who I was I was once again
isolated from society, I could sense the darkness beginning to overtake me but
I didn’t want to ask for help and I doubted there was any to be found. After
all I had learned in my psychology class that homosexuality was a mental
illness and I couldn’t face the label of being mentally ill. This was further
exacerbated by the fact my grandmother had been in the state mental hospital in
Pueblo and no one in the family understood why. None of us ever knew the
diagnoses – but I did know from my visits to the hospital with my mom that I
didn’t want to be sent there. It was very frightening to me as a child to
realize my grandmother was locked up. So to avoid a similar fate, I ironically
locked myself up, tighter and tighter. The longer I stayed in the closet the
more I felt disconnected from mainstream society.
When I experience this
feeling of disconnect I am unable to feel, it is as though I am locked away
from everything, including myself. It is sometimes difficult to access the key
which frees me from my emotional shackles and allows me to deal with the
feelings which I am blocking. I have learned through years of therapy that I
need to let myself feel the underlying feelings, which are either sadness or
fear. It has taken me years to learn this and also to learn these negative
feelings are not permanent and that it is normal to experience them.  I know this and most of the time I can do it,
but I wish I could do it all the time and more quickly.
I have also learned that
life presents us with lots of self-fulfilling moments, that is to say if I go
into a situation expecting it to be enjoyable and thinking people will like me
and want to connect with me, they do. And likewise if I anticipate the opposite
I generally leave thinking I had been right, I was going to have an unenjoyable
time, I wasn’t going to connect with others, and I didn’t. It’s that old bit of
seeing a group of people laughing and looking at you. You might think, “They’re
all looking at me and think I look fat in my outfit”, or you might think “They
look like a fun group of people who like to laugh, I think I’ll join them.”
Sunday mornings for the
past twelve years, minus a few months here and there, and Monday afternoons for
the past two and a half years, have been an immensely important source of
connection for me. I know when I walk into the Golden Recreation Center on Sundays
and the Center on Monday afternoons I will feel connected with whomever I
encounter there, be it a woman with a basketball or a fellow storyteller with a
story. Feeling a sense of connection and the inherent sense of acceptance by my
friends is what makes life worth living.
© 17 April 2017 
About
the Author 
I grew up in Pueblo, CO with my two brothers and parents.
Upon completion of high school, I attended Colorado State University majoring
in Physical Education. My first teaching job was at a high school in Madison,
Wisconsin. After three years of teaching I moved to North Carolina to attend
graduate school at UNC-Greensboro. After obtaining my MSPE I coached
basketball, volleyball, and softball at the college level starting with Wake
Forest University and moving on to Springfield College, Brown University, and
Colorado School of Mines.
While coaching at Mines my long-term partner and I had two daughters
through artificial insemination. Due to the time away from home required by
coaching, I resigned from this position and got my elementary education
certification. I taught in the gifted/talented program in Jefferson County
Schools for ten years. As a retiree, I enjoy helping take care of my
granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the
storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT
organizations.
As a retiree, I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter,
playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling
group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.
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How Being Lesbian Has Directed My Spiritual Journey – A Journey to Serenity, by Betsy

I was recently reminded of the
huge respect I have for the 12 Step Program when I attended an Al-anon meeting
as a guest.  I had some knowledge of the
12 steps from some previous experiences, but have never actually worked the
program. 
I was amazed to hear a member
share that he was thankful for the alcoholism in his family as it is because of
that that the man had been introduced to the 12 steps program.
For the next couple of days, I
attempted to draw parallels in my life to what I had heard in the meeting and
to apply my experiences to some of the steps. 
It finally occurred to me that I could make an analogy with my
experience of growing up gay and coming out.
Consider the first step, for
example.  “We admitted that we were
powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable.”  Apply this to coming out, I mused.  I acknowledged, accepted that I was
homosexual and powerless to change that fact.”
Growing up pretending to be
straight, living the life-style of a heterosexual person can be seen as
resistance to nature itself. A self-imposed resistance put in place by societal
norms and the culture around sexual behavior of the time.  Admitting, that is, giving in to the reality
that I am homosexual, not heterosexual, accepting this fact and being totally
aware of it could be seen as the first step to take in managing a large problem
in one’s life. Clearly I prefer using the word “acknowledge” or accept” to the
word “admit” in this context. Making others aware of our true self reinforces
one’s resolve and strength to manage that life and to live honestly.
Being gay, of course, is not a
direct parallel to abuse of alcohol. Although there are those who may see
homosexuality as an addiction and something of which one should diligently work
to deny him/herself and to be rid of.  Fortunately,
it appears that most people today know better. 
Today we are anxiously waiting to see whether our Supreme Court wants to
be included in that majority group.
Step 2: “We came to see that a
power greater than ourselves restored us to sanity.”  I see my sexuality as part of my Being and my
being represents, according to my belief, the power of God within me.  This is not something I control any more than
I can control the color of my eyes, the shape of my face, or any other aspect
of my tangible or intangible form.
Steps 3, 4, and 5 further
reflect the healing effect of acknowledging who I truly am both in word and
life style.
I’m going to skip step 6—“We’re
entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character.”
However, I can see
interpreting this as a supplication to God to forgive me for not honoring my
true self at an earlier time in my life.
The rest of the steps are more
directly applicable to issues other than coming out/being out. However, I see
them as very powerful concepts to put into practice for any one any time.
I also was reminded of the
Serenity Prayer which is used to open and close the Al-anon meetings.  I have a miniature of the Serenity Prayer on
my bedside table.  It’s been there a long
time and I usually forget it is there. I am very happy to be reminded of its
powerful words—very appropriate for GLBT’s—and I hope to remember to utter them
or at least think of them every day.
“God, give me the strength to accept what I cannot change,
The courage to change that which I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.”
© 10 Jun 2015 
About the Author 

Betsy has been active in
the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old
Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been
retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major
activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a
volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading,
writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage.
She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren.
Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her
life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.
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The Gayest Person I Ever Met by Gillian

How the Hell would I
know??
I could pick one of
several who are the gayest-seeming people I have ever met, but that’s just
appearance, the outward expression. Exactly how gay someone is inside, I
absolutely cannot know. No-one else can ever know how gay I am. Only I know;
and perhaps even I am not sure. Perhaps my gay quotient changes throughout my
life, or maybe it stays exactly even forever. I suspect members of the GLBT
society differ greatly in this, but for certain nobody else can know. You may
know what I say. In my Monday writings I tell you how I feel, as honestly and
openly as I can, but that does not mean you know.
I have often equated
being gay with being left-handed. If you is, you is. If you ain’t, you ain’t.
What sense would it make to talk about the most left-handed person I’ve ever
met? Sure, there are ambidextrous people just as there are bi people, so you
could use the same 1- 10 scale that Kinsey used for the range from
heterosexuality to homosexuality, with bi resting at five. Completely, one
hundred percent, right-handed people at 1, with the same values for
left-handers at 10, and completely ambidextrous at 5. But what number you land
on depends entirely on what you tell someone. No-one but me really knows how
hard it is for me to write my name with my left hand, anymore than they know
how it feels for me to have sex with a man, or share my life with a woman
instead of a man.
So. Sorry. Back to
where I started.
How the Hell would I
know??
© August 2014 
About
the Author 
  

 I
was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to
the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the
Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised
four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting
myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25
years.
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A Few Words about Sex and Relationships by Phillip Hoyle

At times I am a thinker. So here is a summary of “I used to think…, but now I think…” although it really is “I used to do…, and then I thought…, and then I did a lot more, and then I thought some more, and now I think….”

As a child I was open to sex with my friends. I never had it with my siblings and was unaware of any of my friends having sex with their siblings. Nor was I aware that any friend or acquaintance was having sex with an adult. The play happened occasionally over several years, with a number of kids around my age.

When I was fourteen, an older man molested me as it is defined by law. I wasn’t upset. What he did felt good, but I was not interested to spend time with him and within a year my family moved to another town.

Then at age fifteen I had quite a lot of sex with a friend a year younger than I. With him, the sex came complete with all the pleasures afforded by increasing hormones—that double testosterone fix as it were—and some things the other guy had learned somewhere else. His family moved away the following summer, just before I turned sixteen. I didn’t have another boyfriend for years.

What did I think of all this? I wasn’t bothered by it and since I also had girlfriends, I reasoned it might be a sort of phase I was going through. I did not have sex with my girlfriends although we did dance and hug and kiss on occasion.

Upon graduation from high school I went to college and applied myself to my studies but found no girlfriend or boyfriend. As a sophomore I met and started dating the young woman who would become my wife. Unlike some other students in our church-related school, we were conventional in our expectation to wait until the wedding before having sex. At the same time I read books on the matter. I learned about hymens and pain and how men and women often have quite differing relationships with sex and differing expectations related to the interactions. I found helpful the ideas about how to have sex and how to sustain the loving relationship for years and years. I paid attention. I taught my wife what I had learned and we commenced our marriage with gently-approached, though vigorous, sex. We continued that exploration for twenty-eight years and the sex was an important feature of the way we communicated and loved one another.

At the same time during these years that were characterized in our nation by the sexual revolution, I evaluated ideas of sex and relationship. Not being very ceremonial, I came to think that if a man and woman get together sexually, they become married—at least in terms of the religious universe in which I lived and, of course, state statutes of common-law marriage. I was not at all concerned about premarital sex assuming it was just that. When one of my sisters and her boyfriend talked with me about their pregnancy, I was accepting and reassuring, a fact that surprised her ROTC boyfriend who was sure I’d beat him up. I laughed when he said it. He was the soldier and quite a bit bigger and stronger than I. I had no judgment against them for I was aware that I had been sexually active as a child and teen. In fact, co-habitation followed by marriage after pregnancy seemed to become the norm in American society around that time.

When at age thirty I fell in love with a man, I realized I had a few more things to consider. I had no idea of leaving my marriage and family. My only fear related to what the other man might think or desire. I would have loved having sex with him but he, too, was married, and I valued marriage. So that relationship didn’t go sexual for several years. By the time it did, I knew him well enough to hope he’d never want to leave his marriage. While I was somewhat crazy for him, I didn’t want his debt or his expectations regarding what he owed his offspring. By that time—in my mid-30s—I knew about men getting it on and sometimes living together in committed love relationships. (I had kept reading!) I knew about lesbian relationships also. I started wondering about even more complicated relationships.

The churches I worked in often had more conservative views than I. As clergy I conducted weddings—rituals with simple Hollywood-like vows—ones I found realistic given what I had learned over the years. Still I wasn’t interested in counseling couples and some years later felt relieved when I was out of the marriage business altogether. Perhaps that’s why I argue for the adequacy of civil union services for all kinds of marriage. For me it’s kind of like this: People who willingly make babies together must shoulder the responsibilities. But I know well that a union or marriage certificate has little correlation with folks’ behaviors or their ability to shoulder the burdens. I have become more European in my assumptions about marriage and extra marital affairs and have let go of all fairy tale assumptions about romance and royalty and marriage. No man’s house is his castle. No woman dolled up in a long dress adorned with flowers is Eve or a princes or a queen, and the man she is marrying is not prince charming however good looking. For me, the same sorts of things apply to all marital-type pairings, with or without children.

Oh—I remember—we live in a democracy. I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to see laws change toward more tolerance and equal rights for all citizens. I’m happy to define my own relationships. I’m happy to work out my relationships in ways that to me seem moral, helpful, and loving. That’s what I think now about sex and relationships.

Denver, © 2014

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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The Essence of GLBTQ by Lewis

Wiktionary defines “essence” — in usage relevant to this topic — as 
     1) “the inherent nature of a thing or an idea” and 
     2) “a significant feature of something.”

Therefore, the “essence of GLBTQ” might be otherwise stated as, “What is it about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer people that makes them unique from everyone else?” The inclusion of the terms “transgender” and “queer” complicates the answer to a degree that makes generalizations meaningless. In fact, the word “queer,” when appropriated to describe oneself, seems intended to obviate any attempt to characterize it in any meaningful, shorthand way. “Transgender,” because it has nothing to do with sexual attraction but is rather gender identity related, seems to me to also lie outside any attempt to describe the “essence” of the first three letters — GLB — which are primary referent to an individual’s sexual attractions.

Those who condemn homosexuality invariably do so on the basis of same-sex erotic behaviors. Those behaviors are not the “essence” of homosexuality but the manifestation — or “womanifestation,” if you prefer — of it. The essence is the innate part of our nature that is drawn to members of our gender, rather than the opposite gender. This seems to fly in the face of everything we know about Adam and Eve and Charles Darwin’s theory on the survival of the species. Consequently, it is subject to accusations that we are operating against the Will of God and Nature and, therefore, must be deviant, if not evil. It is as if we are the ugly duckling whose ugliness is on the inside and, therefore, never changing.

What distinguishes gay and lesbian individuals from heterosexuals is our being forced into the position of having either to conform to erotic behaviors that are unnatural — even repugnant — to us by repressing those desires that are such a vital part of who we are in order to appear “normal” or to act on our own natural inclinations at the risk of being ostracized by a significant portion of society. Our “essence,” in my opinion, is the strength of our characters that has developed during what is an existential struggle to be both true to ourselves and successful members of an intolerant society.

There are many gay men and women who have never allowed the prejudices of our society to interfere with what they see as their own natural and true behavior. A tip of my hat to them. They have displayed a courage and self-knowledge that I can only admire from a distance. Their “essence” has been knowing their own heart and following it wherever it might lead. This is a rare quality, even among those who have never experienced self doubt and the fear of social opprobrium.

For some who count themselves among the “GLB,” however, finding some sense of authenticity has come only with the undertaking of behaviors that are in themselves self-defacing — drug or alcohol abuse or unprotected sex, for example. For these, “essence” might well be overcoming addiction or dealing with the life-long consequences of HIV/AIDS.

Others of us have “gone along to get along.” We married in the traditional way, perhaps even had children. For these — and I count myself among them — our “essence” might be qualitatively analyzed in how we have related to our opposite-gender spouses and children, how we “came out” to them, whether or not we were faithful during the marriage, and what kind of relationship we have with them after moving on toward a state of greater authenticity.

I’m certain that there are gay men and lesbians who do not fall into any of the aforementioned categories. That is why I do not think that the notion of a “GLBTQ essence” is all that pragmatic. If anything, there may be an added layer or two of “essence” on our psychological auras. But, at the same time, we are all 99-94/100% pure human being, with, perhaps, a few more rough edges and/or a more highly-polished-surface here and there. I think the rest of the world is coming around to this view … and fairly rapidly. May it continue to be so.

We, the GLBTQ members of the most remarkable species of animal in the known universe have been granted a very special charter. We have been commissioned by the Great Mystery of All Existence not only to share our very special talents with the world but, in order to do so, to first learn to look in the mirror and see, not the “ugly duckling” that some of those we have loved may have so ignorantly and, perhaps, unknowingly branded us, but ourselves as whole and wholesome human beings whose lives will encompass a level of adventure that will make for many wonderful stories that beg to be shared.

[Everything that I have said above about “GLB” people would also apply to those on the “third rail” of sexual attraction discourse — men and women who are attracted to juveniles of either sex. Unfortunately, this subject is so fraught with phobia and loathing that merely to state that the sexual attraction toward children is akin to same-sex attractions to adults tends to elicit reactions one might expect from confessing to mass murder. I merely would state that none of us picked the type of persons to whom we are sexually attracted from a list like choosing the color of our next car. There are still perhaps 40% of Americans who believe that having same sex attractions is immoral. Those of us with a “glb” orientation should be the last to condemn anyone for attractions over which they have absolutely no control, unlike actions taken on those feelings, which are properly proscribed, just as statutory rape is properly proscribed.]

© 15 July 2013


About the Author


I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.