Sexual identity is a personal experience, regardless of behavior, or how others define us.
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Kevin Tipple grew up in the Deep South in the 1970s. His home was chaotic, with an alcoholic father and a mother mostly focused on raising his rambunctious younger brothers. As he entered puberty, he caught the attention of a slightly older teenage boy down the street. Kevin liked the attention. One thing led to another and for the next few years, sexual trysts occasionally followed.
By the time Kevin entered high school, he was dating girls and hanging out with his buddies. When a male friend made an advance toward Kevin, he went for it. The two enjoyed friendship and sex, while dating their girlfriends, attending football games and bumming around town.
Kevin went into the military, where he continued having sex with men when it was available. However, when a young lady caught his eye following his time in the armed services, they married and children ensued. Then he found out he was HIV positive.
“I had never heard the word ‘homosexual’ until I was in the military,and I never thought it applied to me.”
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“I had never heard the word ‘homosexual’ until I was in the military,” Kevin told me, “and I never thought it applied to me. Growing up, it was just expected that men married women and raised families. Since I’d always done what I was told, that’s exactly what I did.”
The truth is, Kevin was never attracted to his wife sexually, though they had become great friends. She appreciated what she assumed was his chivalry, never forcing her to have sex with him and always treating her like a lady whenever they were together. Like most men in Kevin’s situation, acting like a “gentleman” was a great excuse for avoiding sex with a woman.
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The concept of sexual orientation is less than 150 years old. When it was first identified, a heterosexual was “a person…who participates in ‘so-called natural [procreative] as well as unnatural [non-procreative] coitus. They are also capable of giving themselves over to same-sex excesses,’” according to Kathy Baldock, author of Walking the Bridgeless Canyon. A homosexual was someone who “performs erotic sexual acts with a person of the same sex.”
Psychiatrist Loren Olsen, in his book, Finally Out, said, “Men having sex with other men in the early twentieth century was not considered abnormal as long as those men abided by gender-conforming characteristics… Interest in homosexual encounters did not preclude interest in heterosexual ones, as is insisted today.”
With neatly defined sexual orientations in the burgeoning industrial age of the 1900s, people were moving to the cities for work and we required social order. Clearly defined gender roles soon followed. What for centuries had been undefined, was now categorized and labeled. The label was not a positive one in our new puritan-influenced social structure.
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The truth is, sexual orientation is highly subjective and cannot be predicated on self-identification or behavior alone.
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In 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released a report stating that only 2% of people over the age of 18 identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (with a total of 3.4% including everyone who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender). The study received backlash from a number of organizations as being inaccurate. The truth is, sexual orientation is highly subjective and cannot be predicated on self-identification or behavior alone. This makes getting accurate numbers nearly impossible. As Kevin’s story illustrates, there are still people who identify as heterosexual, and whose lives may include all of the traditional trappings, but whose primary sexual orientation and romantic attractions are anything but straight.
As sexuality and gender research has grown, we’ve learned that neither fit neatly in a box. With the advancement of brain research and biology, we know that there are multiple combinations of gender, sexual orientations, romantic attachment, and gender expressions. Society may prefer binary labels – male/female or gay/straight –but it’s just not that easy.
Just because someone has same-sex attractions doesn’t mean that he is romantically attracted to the same sex. Nor does it mean that he has to be in a gay relationship. Right or wrong, social constructs influence a person’s decision to pursue sexual, relational and romantic partners regardless of his or her internal identification.
The tragedy comes when he is not honest about his feelings, cheating on his partner and lying about his actions. One ex-wife told me, “I might have married my husband anyway if he would have been honest with me. Sex isn’t the most important thing in my life, but honesty is.” Instead she was duped to believe her husband wasn’t gay when he was. In her case, the husband decided to dissolve the marriage when he fell in love with another man.
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Jack, from rural Nebraska, had been married for almost 50 years before he came out to his wife. Like so many men in his era, who lived at a time when it was illegal to be gay, he got married. They had nine children together.
“Just being able to tell her that I had truly been attracted to men all my life was a huge relief,” he said. The upheaval his confession caused rocked their family. His wife confessed to him that her deepest fear was that he would leave. Ironically, Jack’s fear was that his wife would call it quits.
“I looked her in the eye and said, ‘Honey, I’m not going anywhere. I love you and I want to stick it out here,’” he said. “We’ve been through so much together and she’s my best friend. I don’t want to throw all of that away just to have sex with another man.”
Not all gay men are able to stay in their marriages, however, when the discomfort of hiding who they are comes to the surface.
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Not all gay men are able to stay in their marriages, however, when the discomfort of hiding who they are comes to the surface. It’s a phenomenon that happens as we age. We have an intrinsic need to be authentic and our minds and bodies know when we’re not. At some point, we will crack. The dissonant internal dialogue begins to wear us down physically and mentally, until we feel like we are going to burst if we don’t own our truth.
In our society, we too often value labels over people. Labels become the point of religious and political contention as we assign behaviors and characteristics to them in order to condemn an entire group of people. The person caught between the label, or who doesn’t identify “correctly” often pays the price through disassociation and shame.
What’s important here, really isn’t whether or not someone is gay, but his ability to live authentically, own his journey and be at peace with who he is.
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Photo – Flickr/bark
personally i aint against gays anymore i enjoy ‘yaoi’ but at just some interesting points if your gay i aint funna stop u u do what he do congrats lol i just i aint gay and i know when i am
HAP V-day
This was a good read but I can’t help feeling as though something is missing from this post; bisexuality! It would have been nice to explore bisexuality as it is thought to be the identity that does not neatly fit into any of the binary categories that have been established. As a society we have a really bad habit of calling a same sex couple a gay/lesbian couple when the correct term is same sex couple. The people in that relationship may not both identify as gay/lesbian & the same is true for opposite gender couples. One may be bisexual… Read more »
Point well taken, J.R. You are absolutely correct. Thank you.
I really liked this one Tim! Great job!!