Real Boys

by William Pollack

  Indeed, if we accept that homosexuals, by definition, are predominantly attracted to people of the same sex, it is implicit that some homosexuals—or perhaps some small part of almost every homosexual—feels attracted to a certain extent to people of the opposite sex. Likewise, if we accept that heterosexuals, by definition, are predominantly attracted to the other gender, it must also be true that some heterosexuals—or some small part of almost every heterosexual—feels drawn in one way or another to members of the same sex. Determining our sexual orientation, at the end of the day, is not about finding simple black and white answers. Our sexual identity is almost always complex, unclear, confusing. And if it’s difficult for us as adults to discover our genuine sexual orientation, our prepubescent or adolescent boys must experience substantial apprehension, ambivalence, and uncertainty.

  A big part of the confusion that many people experience stems from the widely held belief that one’s sexual orientation can be determined simply by looking at what sexual acts one chooses to carry out. This is misguided because being gay or straight, in reality, has to do mostly with what a person feels rather than with what he or she does at any given time. Just as a heterosexual person is not less heterosexual because he or she does not actually have sex with people of the opposite sex, a homosexual person is not less homosexual because he or she hasn’t actually had sexual experiences with somebody of the same gender. The reason this becomes so puzzling for a boy (and often for his parents) is that in many cases a boy may do one thing, but feel another. When this happens, he is bound to become unsure about his true sexual orientation.

  Take, for instance, Scott Schindler, a seventeen-year-old whose mother, Arlene, discovered that he and Benson Hawthorne, another teenager who lived just blocks away from the Schindlers, had been getting together in the afternoons, drinking beer, and then masturbating each other. Several years ago Arlene came to my office for a preliminary meeting. She came without Scott and implored me to “do whatever it takes to get Scott to stop this inappropriate behavior.”

  While I explained to Arlene that I would be happy to help Scott examine the feelings he was experiencing, I emphasized that I was not willing to try to change Scott from being whoever he truly was. “If your son is gay—which it’s not at all clear he is—I’m not willing to try to make him become straight.”

  “That’s all right,” she replied, “I just want Scott to work through this because neither I nor my husband, David, know what to make of it. David and I just want Scott to have someone to talk to so that he can figure things out. And I admit that I don’t want Scott to continue these encounters with Benson.”

  “If Scott agrees that meeting with me would be a good thing, then I’d be happy to try to see him,” I replied.

  At the meetings with Scott, he at first seemed nervous and not terribly interested in talking to me. But as we developed a rapport, he began to open up and share what his life was like. He spoke to me about what he enjoyed and didn’t enjoy about school, about girls he had tried to date, about his relatively moderate consumption of alcohol, and about who his closest friends were. In our third meeting, Scott initiated a discussion about Benson: “I know why my mother sent me to see you. She caught me and Benson fooling around and now she’s all freaked out about it.”

  “Are you feeling worried about it too?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Scott replied. “I mean, we’ve only done it a couple of times and it’s no big deal.”

  “So you feel positively about your experiences with Benson—you haven’t felt down about it at all?”

  “Well,” Scott confessed, “the first time we got together and fooled around, I thought I might be gay. I felt really weird about it. But the truth is, when I hang with Benson and we do stuff together, it’s fun and everything, but I’m definitely into girls. I mean, I’m thinking about girls when he and I are together.”

  While at first I wondered whether Scott might have been unintentionally suppressing the truth—that perhaps he might actually be gay—it turned out, after weeks of meeting together, that Scott primarily felt attracted to girls. While he had explored touching Benson’s body and had let Benson touch him, the experimentation had more to do with a general need Scott felt to let out his “sexual energy” than with a true physical attraction to Benson. All of Scott’s fantasies were about women. When the junior prom came along, Scott unequivocally decided to take Sharon, a classmate he had “had his eye on” for several months. Scott’s encounters with Benson stopped prior to the end of his junior year and, the last I heard, Scott was living happily with a woman he’d been dating for several years. Scott, as far as I can tell, is heterosexual.

  When I remember my work with Scott, it’s hard not to think too of Samson Kim, a thirty-two-year-old patient of mine who worked as a radiologist at a local hospital. Samson came to me while he was still seeing Susan, his live-in girlfriend of six years. For his entire life, Samson had had sexual relationships exclusively with women. He enjoyed the feeling of being with women, he explained, “but I never feel entirely complete—I always feel like something is missing.”

  As a teenager and a young man, Samson recalled feeling “a real pull” toward other men. “I guess I’ve never been ready to admit this before,” Samson added, “but when I think back on it, I’ve only really fallen in love with guys. I’ve loved many women—I’ve loved them dearly—but I’ve never really been in love with them, I haven’t really yearned for them the way I have for some of my guy friends.”

  “Did you ever tell any of these men how you felt?”

  “I tried to,” Samson began, “but I always got too afraid. Besides, I figured that since I seemed to like sex with women, I probably wasn’t gay. I figured I just felt ‘warmly’ towards these guys—but that I was basically straight.”

  Samson was propelled to come see me after he met Jason, a handsome, talented heart surgeon who worked at the same hospital as Samson did. Samson’s feelings for Jason were so overwhelming that he felt he could no longer simply hide them away. What emerged in our sessions together was that Samson was in fact gay. Because he was a sincere, loving man who cared deeply for the women he had dated, he had experienced a series of important sexual relationships with these women. But when it came down to his real core self, to what truly gave him the greatest joy and satisfaction, Samson longed for men. Samson ended up forming a committed partnership with Jason, while continuing a close friendship with his former girlfriend.

  As we think about how to help boys who feel confused about their sexual orientation, Scott’s and Samson’s personal stories are important in that they reflect how common it is for people to engage in sexual relationships that do not actually follow their genuine longings. These relationships, in some cases, can last a lifetime. If for some people this results in only a small sense of loss, for others it pushes them to seek secret outside relationships, become anxious or depressed, or suffer other acute physical or psychological problems, such as migraine headaches, insomnia, eating disorders, or substance abuse. It is generally exceedingly painful and unhealthy when human beings suppress their true yearnings. Thus while it is not at all uncommon for a homosexual man to get married and embark on a life in which the world thinks of him as heterosexual, it would be highly unusual if he was completely happy and fulfilled in living that life. By the same token, if a heterosexual man falls into a primary sexual relationship with another man even though his essential yearnings are for women, it would be unlikely he would feel entirely satisfied and whole in that same-sex relationship.

  When parents ask me how to address the confusion boys may feel about their sexual orientation, I encourage them to help their boys talk not only about whom they are attracted to or involved with sexually, but also who their sons like—or love. Our boys can only come to the truth about their sexual orientation by examining what the truth is about who they yearn to love—not simply by looking at who they are dating or experimenting with sexually. Because sexual orientation is trul
y about what is in our hearts, we can help our boys most by encouraging them to be honest with us and themselves about where their true passion lies, who they truly love, and what they really want.

  WHAT DO I SAY WHEN HE TELLS ME HE’S GAY?

  For a teenage boy who discovers he’s gay, perhaps one of the most difficult steps he may have in accepting his own sexuality is mustering the courage to tell his closest friends and family. Because society still has not universally accepted homosexuality, because the gay teenager cannot ignore the hateful homophobic messages he hears around him, he is bound not only to suffer extremely low self-esteem but also to become exceedingly nervous about how others might respond to his revelation. When he first comes to realize that his primary sexual attraction is toward other males, he may decide to suppress his own feelings in the hope they’ll go away. He might turn inward, try to cover any outward signs of his orientation, or engage in acts of self-destruction. The fear that his closest friends and family will reject him is often overwhelming. Telling his parents is especially terrifying, since these are the people he depends on the most—not only for love and approval, but for the very home he returns to each day.

  “I thought they would disown me,” fourteen-year-old Robert told me. “I thought they’d tell me I wasn’t a member of the family anymore.”

  “Just before I was going to tell them,” Peter recalls, “I drove my bike to this bridge on the Charles River. I got off my bike and stared out at the river for what seemed like hours. I really thought it might be better to just end everything right there and then, to just plunge into the river. It seemed like it would be easier than having to tell my parents.”

  “I didn’t find it in me to tell my dad until he got cancer,” Jerome explained. “When he got sick and we knew he was going to die, I wanted him to know who I really was. I was almost eighteen years old, an honors student, and headed for Bates on a scholarship—and I was totally in love with Skip Thompson, another guy in my high school class. Dad knew Skip and liked him a lot. I didn’t want Dad to die without knowing how happy I was and how close Skip and I had become.”

  Richard remembers how tough it was to tell his mother that he was gay: “When I came home from school in tears one afternoon, my mom asked me what was wrong. The truth was that I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew that I was gay and I hadn’t told the two people I loved the most in the whole wide world. My mom is this really great social worker and my dad’s a minister who everyone just loves. They both are really cool about gay issues, but I knew they’d be disappointed if it was me who ended up being gay.

  “But when I saw my mom that afternoon,” Richard continued, “I just couldn’t hold back the tears. When she saw how hard I was crying, she seemed to know just what to do. She sat me down in our living room, put her arm around me, and told me how much she loved me. When I told her ‘Mom, I’m gay,’ I just started crying uncontrollably. I guess I was afraid she’d tell me to leave the house or something. Instead she just held me tight and said, ‘We love you so much, Richard. We’ll always love you no matter what. We’re very proud of you.’ ”

  While there’s no one perfect way of responding to a teenage boy when he first tells us that he’s gay, perhaps there’s nothing more important than reminding him, as Richard’s mother did, that we love and cherish him, that we’re proud of who he is, that nothing will change in our relationship with him. What a boy fears most is that we will in some way try to shame him, punish him, or send him away. In my opinion, responding in any of these ways would be terribly misguided, since it would be highly likely to traumatize him, to hurt him in a way that he might never be able to forget or forgive.

  “I haven’t spoken with my parents in ten years,” Evan told me despondently, “because when I told them I was gay, they kicked me out of the house. I was only fifteen years old and had nowhere to go. I ended up staying with friends of mine who understood what I was going through. When my parents let me move back home a few months later, things were never the same. My father never talked to me and my mother told me over and over again that in her mind I was just a ‘boarder,’ that I was no longer her son. I never got over this and felt bad about myself for years. The only way I could cope was to stop seeing my parents at all.”

  “My parents are old now,” Evan explained, “and sometimes they leave a message on my answering machine begging for me to come home to see them. But as much as they want to see me now, I just can’t get myself to do it. Whenever the holidays come around, it hurts a lot.”

  While it might be easy to think of Evan’s parents as having been thoughtless or uncaring, the reality is that they probably believed that if they withheld their love and affection from their son, somehow he would “decide” he was no longer homosexual. But sexual orientation is constitutional—an essential part of who each of us is—and is not a “decision” that we can control or that can be changed by or for our parents. Especially because a boy may be in an extremely tenuous emotional state by the time he finds the courage to discuss his sexuality, I believe it is critically important to convey to him, as soon as he shares his feelings, that he is still loved through and through, that his sexual orientation will not in any way diminish how much he is admired and respected. These are the things a boy needs most to hear.

  To refrain from saying them is to risk placing a boy in serious emotional—even physical—jeopardy. And to risk losing him, in one way or another. But if instead a boy is given the love and support he so desperately needs at this crucial time, if he is assured that his sexual orientation will never change the way he is thought of or how much he is cared about, we are then doing the best thing we can do to restore his sense of self-worth, preserve his faith that we can be trusted with even his most challenging feelings and struggles, and ensure that his adult romantic relationships—whether he ends up being either gay or straight—will be as happy, healthy, and fulfilling as possible.

  Only then will he be clear that being a “real boy” or becoming a healthy masculine adult—contrary to the myth of boyhood culture—has no relationship whatsoever to whether one is gay or straight.

  SOME THOUGHTS ON BOYS AND AIDS

  When we broach issues of sex and sexuality with our sons, we cannot help being also concerned about AIDS.

  As distressing as it is for us to face it, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, is an extremely serious health crisis affecting millions of young people around the globe. I firmly believe that as reluctant as some parents and some schools may once have been to teach children about sex and sexuality, especially about homosexuality, the reality of AIDS, the reality that it complicates, unravels, and even ends human life, makes teaching our kids about these issues absolutely critical. We must speak to them, and speak to them frankly.

  The worldwide impact of AIDS has been absolutely devastating. As of December 1997, an estimated 30.6 million people worldwide—29.5 million adults and 1.1 million children younger than fifteen years—were living with the HIV virus or with full-blown AIDS. Through 1997, cumulative HIV/AIDS-associated deaths worldwide amounted to approximately 11.7 million—9 million adults and 2.7 million children. And since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, approximately 8.2 million children younger than fifteen years have been orphaned worldwide because of the premature deaths of HIV-infected parents.

  Statistics relating specifically to the United States are also staggering. As of June 1997, in the United States, 612,078 cases of full-blown AIDS had been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of these, 511,934 (84 percent) were males aged thirteen or older, 92,242 (15 percent) were females aged thirteen or older, and 7,902 (1 percent) were children under age thirteen.

  While by now we all know that the HIV virus is blind to sexual orientation—it infects gay people and straight people alike—in the United States the largest number of men with AIDS contracted it through homosexual sex. According to a 1996 study of men in the United States diagnosed with AIDS, male-to-male sexual contact ac
counted for the largest proportion of cases (50 percent), followed by injection drug use (23 percent).

  But lest any of us conclude that AIDS in the United States is essentially a “gay disease,” I should emphasize that the transmission of HIV by heterosexuals now accounts for an increasing proportion of AIDS cases in the United States. From 1988 to 1995 the proportion of U.S. AIDS cases attributed to heterosexual contact each year grew from 4.8 percent to 17.7 percent. And AIDS is now the second leading cause of death in the United States among people aged twenty-five to forty-four.

  All of these statistics point to an unassailable fact—we do need to be worried about our children and what they learn about AIDS. Addressing the reality that many adults still hesitate to talk to their children about sexuality and AIDS, Surgeon General Antonia Coello Novello wrote in the 1993 Surgeon General’s Report on AIDS and HIV: “Yes, it is painful to think about the temptations and the dangers they face every day. But sex and drugs are facts of life; we can no longer ignore them than we can death itself. We must prepare our children to face the reality of AIDS in their lives.”