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boy, i am bit overwhelmed by the amount of insight and honesty you have with regard to your sexual identity. thanks for sharing that guys.

my sexual identity process has pretty much much unfolded along these lines:

age 0 to ? : frustration
loved and wanted to be close to mom [a lot of competition tho; as the second born of 8 who survived, she carried 12 pregnancies to full term, so needless to say wasn't a lot of one-on-one time with her, if any]

around age 11 : awakening
joined scouts: i was in boy heaven. that's when i knew that there was something different about me in relation to other boys. i just was not interested in what they were doing, but rather was attracted to them, but in a way i did not understand. i wanted more of them than i felt i was 'supposed' to want.
a new family moved into the neighborhood; i was not much into male friends at the time; there were a lot of boys in the neighborhood, but i developed a relationship with two of them: jimmy and joey. i did not feel sexual toward jimmy but i was head over heels for joey, and i didn't start to think about him sexually in a physical sense until after my older brother had started to use me for sex.

12 and on: emerging
in 8th grade [even though in my own mind i had my 'boyfried', joey, it seemed necessary to project an image of liking girls, so out of fear i started to construct this false me as a person who seemed heterosexual. [i was already suppressing my true orientation] when i went to the 8th grade dance, i heard that 'kitty' liked me, and so i asked her to dance. it was an odd moment, but since we danced together that made us boyfriends and girlfriends for the rest of the year. we never kissed or anything like that though.

my brother's abuse started around that time, and it was around 9th grade that i began to fantasize about joey and other boys in our class. our high school was not co-ed, so i spent the whole day with males, except for recess and band.

my world further expanded when i began working at the age of 14, and became exposed to a wider spectrum of male types. i soon worked at the local university in the dining room during my high school years, and so i was now around a lot of late adolescent college types, and older males representing a variety of economic and social strata. they were fascinating to me.

i started to like barbara streisand........... ;-)

one night, when we were sleeping in a tent in the back yard, joey tried to grab my crotch and initiate sex; i was terrified and pulled away. in my own heart and mind i wanted more than sex with him; i wanted something pure, and did not want to destroy the purity of what i felt for him. i did not know that then, but i do now. my brother had already poisoned me to the wonderful sharing of mutual affection that can be shared between two people, since he initiated me in objectification and secrecy and shame.

later on in high school, it became fashionable in the neighborhood to have a girlfriend or boyfriend. joey chose mary lou [who would later become my wife] and i chose bobbie. we spent time kissing and making out in the hammock on the porch and bobbie had voluptuous breasts which were intriguing, and i got to fondle them while we were necking. the sexual heat was pretty intense of a couple of kids our age but still, no tendency to seek out the vagina.

18 and onward:
joined the navy, came out in boot camp where i met no less than 4 flamers!; on liberty we went to the chicago 'y' got drunk and had our dicks sucked by strangers. abuse? i definitely was not thinking about relationship with women, since i was now free from the tethering cultural circle i was locked into while at home with my family.

at age 19 i began to be pretty promiscuous, and by age 20 had been raped several times, and the worst was when i cornered and had a knife held to my throat. that one is hard to relive. but so far, i have not had any type of 'relationship' to speak of. just serial sexual experiences and lots of fantasizing.

i was released from the service in my 20th year, went back home, fully identified as gay and was just waiting for my 21st birthday so i could start drinking at public bars.

age 21
my perp brother died which signaled an era of confusion for me. just weeks before he died he ended the sexual relationship that had intermittently over the last 8 years. the rejection was confusing and devastating.

in response i went 'straight' and started doing what my other brothers were doing: getting married. although their marriages came about because of unexpected pregnacies, i married mary lou; joey had moved to california, and i heard from him never again. what a better way to be close to the memory of him than to marry one of his ex girlfriends? what a tangled web we weave.

age 23
me and mary lou married. she was aware of my sexual abuse history, and i thought that she was 'safe' since she had been entrusted with information that was very personal. well, she had her own issues that had not been dealt with.

it was at that time that i got involved accidentally in church music, and because our emotional lives were so messed up, we used the new society to hide and avoid confronting our joint pain. neither one of our families thought much of psychologists, and her mom already had a secret in her life that caused her on several occasion to be admitted to the psych ward in the local hospital.

23-31 [the miserable years]
tried to make the marriage work, but the demons of guilt and shame won! thankfully though, i felt worse about having my kids brought up in the context of a relationship that modeled dysfunction. i wanted them to have better than i did. so me and the mom, after a bout with therapy, split.

31 and beyond [the recovery years]
recovery from every addiction imaginable. yes even recovery from recovery.
tho in the early stages, about 7 years into it, i began to wonder if my sexual identity had been confused as a result of having been molested, and allowed myself to get involved in a relationship with marie. there was really no emotional involvement, and sexually, there was no interest, but looking back i can see it was just out of boredom and fear of having no other option that i entertained the possiblity----i figured i should give it one more shot! luckily, it ended 2 years after it started, after i realized that she was merely looking for someone to punish for what her ex-husband had done to hurt her.

that was back in 94, and i have not backsliden since then. :-)
actually i was in two 5 year relationship [that's really a stretch to call them that ] with a couple of guys, but there again, i was looking for love in all the wrong places. sexually i felt obliged to accommodate their desires and that drove a wedge between us. what i have learned about myself, is that i can't abide the shortcut method to automatic trust in a relationship. trust happens and gets built into the supergenes of a relationship over a thousand exchanges.

today i accept my sexuality as being what it is, however, i find myself less attracted initially to people in general, and was surprised recently to feel a mini crush on one of the guys who goes to the church i work for.

i have a hard time determining in a given situation if it is my sexual energy being broadcast, or if what i am feeling is a transmission from another person.

at any rate, i still like males a lot, and find them so fascinating and interesting, and often times get the urge to unwrap them.

funny thing sexual energy. i try not to let it go to my big head these days.

well, guys, you really didn't expect a short answer from me now, did you?

Damn, that's quite a story there. Good on you for managing to stay sane, I don't think I know many people who could have gone through all of that.


Steve, what I like about that definition of sexuality is that in my own head if I say "Yeah, I'm DEFINITELY straight" then my brain automatically goes "well then prove it" and I have go through these entire processes of having to examine my sexuality, which take a lot of time out of me living my life. But if I say I'm mostly straight but that I may have some bisexual tendencies my brain doesn't usually spend any time thinking about it.

Personally though I was always really unsure of what I was until I was probably 20, then I started to see that for most of my life even though I had some homosexual thoughts and tendencies I was more consistently heterosexual in just about all of my behavior. Then I started looking for answers as to why, even though I had always like girls when I was a really little kid, I had had fantasies or thoughts about doing these things with make friends of mine and in one night it all just fell in my lap.


I was stoned out of my mind, the highest I had ever been, on pot from a New York delivery service that I had smoked out of a friends vaporizer, and it brought back everything that I knew was there but had never thought about. I had vivid hallucinations when I closed my eyes that I was being violently raped, and the perp was saying "Yeah, you love that, I know you do you effing homo" and I was like "no, I'm not gay" in my head but after a while I just gave up trying to fight with that hallucination. As a result, I had a panic attack that lasted for three days where I felt disembodied like I was literally floating outside my body. Then I realized it was the years of abuse, not my true orientation. I guess the place I'm at now is one where I'm trying to let my heterosexual identity be there without fighting it and coming to terms with my past abuse and integrating it with my present self. It's a bitch though, especially since I'm dealing with a porn addiction and a general fear of being social when girls are around. I sit there and think how beautiful they are, but then I cut my thoughts off there and I'm too afraid to approach em. I'm working like a fiend to get over it though.


Anyways, I think this just goes to show how complex sexuality can really be. Kudos to the OP for making this.

First off, I'm sorry if I sounded like a whiner in my first post on this thread; my story is hardly a tough-lucky story compared to some I have heard. Though I suppose it is true that "for each of us, it was the worst thing that could have happened" (or something like that I read here once).

I like the idea of not needing to prove ones sexuality. If I look at my past, some of my behaviors both sexually and otherwise were probably driven by that need. I don't need to do that, and it doesn't jive with the person I want to be. I'll do what I need to do to maintain boundaries, but I want to be able to just let myself be me otherwise.

Andy, your story about being stoned and having some recollections and the related panic attack ring true to how I opened up to my memories. It was the last day of my freshman year in college (spring 1991). I had just taken my last final exam, an intro to astronomy class. I got through it quick and knew I had aced it. I went back to my dorm room and dropped a hit of acid. I thought it was going to be this beautiful spring day and I would have a blast. All of a sudden I started asking myself too many questions: why does the pepsi can "melt" like that? what are those colors in the ceiling tiles all about? Then things went downhill from there. I was losing control and I realized I hadn't packed up to leave for home that next morning (we had to load a trailer). Also, that sunny day turned into a torrential downpour. I was freaking out. And then I was overwhelmed by this thought: I feel gay. No rational reason for it, it just was. I started seeing everything as phallic symbols (yes, I took the perquisite intro to psychology class that year). People were commenting that I looked scared but I could not share; I was holding on for dear life, surrounded by people who were laughing and conversing - but I sense something wrong in it all, and there was some veil of personality I was noticing in everything.

Anyway, it threw me off for days and anytime I got high after that I was put back into that panic place. What happened is, that afternoon and night on acid I opened a floodgate. But it took through that summer to remember I had those homosexual experiences with a peer that included most of what you think in regards to sex acts. I remembered other problematic memories as well. All this slowly ate away at me, and I kept getting high because I thought it was my identity but it always put me in a place of terror mentally and my mind spun out of control. Things got worse from there I suppose.

Eric

At this present time in my life I could be concidered asexual. I have no attraction or interest in sex. Thus causing my wife great distress. I do not feel that I was always this way and with the therapy and recovery for csa I believe that a healthy attitude toward sexual intimacy and intercourse will be rediscovered.

Throughout my teens I was for the most part really confused about my sexuality. I looked at both sexes and found them attractive in the sense of the physical beauty of the human form and in a desire for sexual experience. I allowed myself to conform to the hetro designate that our community displayed due to ignorance or openmindedness to anything else. I was secretly a bisexual I think. In order to hide my confusion and fear of ridicule from family and friends I forced myself to side with the hetro. It wasn't until later in my early 20's that I had a homosexual experience that was of my own choice. This did not fulfil me as I thought it would and I returned to looking for the hetrosexual lifestyle.

I was questioned by my T on this subject quite throughly before I read my story to my wife. You see, I was terribly afraid of what her reaction would be to the events of my early 20's. After that lenghthy discussion with the T I have come to the conclusion that I do indeed feel the desire to be with a woman and not a man.

However I still suffer the effects of csa and have such a inferiority complex of myself and my ability to 'really please' a woman in a sexual way and of opening up my heart to letting anyone in emotionally that my libido is shamefully absent from my life.

This may not sound like a very happy situation to be in to anyone that is reading this post. Please don't take it to be more than what it really is. It is a recongition of where I am at this time in my life. I fully believe that my libido will increase as my recovery and selfesteem, awareness, and mental health increases. I have had some discussions with my wife, Yes I am even opening up to her, around this very important issue in our marriage and she is prepared to help me to rediscover my desire for sex as I progress.. It is kinda like starting all over really. This time I won't have to be stinking drunk to quell the fears and anxieties that I have always had regarding myself, my body and how to express my desire for sexual activity.

The story of recovery is always churning out new and life giving awarenesses with every step.

Blessing to all and thank you for your unjudgemental kindness and support.

Steve

I too am straight for my sexual attraction is toward females. But there has been I few times when I have with really good male friends that I have felt some physical attraction towards them. But never initate anything because of the taboo of being gay that I was brought up with.
In my family my parents never showed any type of affection and I had no clue that there was even such a thing as sex. All I knew is that every couple of years there would be another brother.
In all the time I lived with my parents I never saw or heard them having sex.

My initation into sex was with my fifth grade teacher Mr Candell. It felt good and repulsive at the same time. I don't know how but I knew what he was doing was wrong but I didn't have anyone I felt enought to tell what was happening. So I l;earn that sex was a repulsive and dirty secret to be kept to myself. The last time I was abused by him he forced me to stand in the bathroom and watch hiw masturbate into the tiolet. It was the most repulsive,fasnating and arousing thing that I ever happen to me to thay point in my life. And it really affected my view on sex. Not to long after I was abused I was at my school playing and I found a picture of a naked woman lying on her back with her legs wide open holding her vargina wide open. I felt those feeling of being replused,fasnated and aroused again. it was liked that image had been seared into my mind just like the last time with Mr.Candell.

When I got to the age where sex and women began to interest me. Some how I found some porn and I was off to the races. Most of my adult life porn has been my sexual outlet because I felt safer just beating off to porn. It was just me and the porn and I felt nobody was getting hurt.Besides I had no social skills or trust in other people and I only interacted with other to do those things that I had to do. Mostly to obtain drugs or work.

In jr. High there was a girl who liked me and try pursuing me but her attention scared the hell out of me and I rejected her advances. She was hurt and tried to start a fight with me and for awhile I did my best to just avoid her. She thought that was something wrong with me. She didn't know how right she was.
In high school I never dated the fear was just to great to risk allowing anyone close to me. Plus I could satified myself with porn. And my only sexual experiences were with girls when I was drunk and high. Just heavy petting and never intercourse.
During this time a set of pattern of living that went on till I was twenty nine- drugs,alcohol and porn.
I joined the Marine Corps when I turned 18 and was sent to Okinawa for a year and I contiue my relationship with these three things. My friends and I would go out to the town on payday to drink in the bars and they would hit the whore houses. The whole year I was there I only went into the whore house twice. and I found the experience to totally repulsive. She was a middle aged women,older then my mother. I could not climax and so I just gave up. The second time was at a place near Kanteena airforce base on a side street called whisper alley. You would walk down this narrow street and a woman would open a small window and whisper to you to see if you were interested in some business.
If you did she would open a door so you could come into a bedroom and would do to you what you requested. I got a blowjob and for the first time in my life a women made me climax. But during and afterwards I felt those old feelings of replusion and arousal.
In january of 1981 I was transfered to Camp Pentleton Ca. Where I carried on the pattern of behaior that I had always lived.
One night my buddies and I were down on the beach in Oceanside Ca and we were drinking Jack Daniels and So.Comfort and we met these two girls who partied with us. After awhile one of the girls let me know that she was interested in being alone with me. So we took off in her car and parked and started to make out she wanted me to have intercoarse with her but I was too drunk to get an erection and I felt too much anxiety. So she gave me her phone # and told me to call her. But I never did because I felt humiliated because I could not be a real man. So I retreated back into my old safe pattern of behavior.
This pattern with women happen a few more times.
Then I met my first wife in a bar on the top floor of the Holiday Inn in Long Beach Ca. I was there with a friend we had drinking and I asked her to dance we. We had a few more drinks and we went to her house and had sex. I was unable to climax again but it seem no big deal to her so we fell asleep.
We start seeing each other and I was able to overcome my anxiety and we had a very satisfing sex life. Things were good for the first few years until we started having problems and fighting. Her anger scared me and I withdrew into myself. I started living that pattern of solitary life that had learned so earily in my life. As I stay withdrawn from her she got more and more angry and I retread more and more until it was too late to save the marriage.
Even in my present marriage I am back into that cycle of anger and withdrawnal again. In the last year we have had very little personal interaction and less sex.

I AM BACK TO JUST BEING PRESENT PHYSICALLY.
Time to address and change an old pattern.

Guys sorry I strayed off the topic.

Ron, thanks for the thread and the wake up call.

Mike

Alright, so I don't know what to do about this. I really don't enjoy looking at gay porn on the internet, but everytime I look at it I feel really really anxious, like afraid anxious, and then even if I don't want to I get an erection, even though I know I'm not attracted to any of whats going on. But then I force myself to get off to it, and once I do it's like theres this voice or part of my personality thats telling me to get MORE into it when I know after all this time it's not what I'm into, it's like I can't just leave it alone and walk away from it, because my head gets this impulse where it's like "you HAVE to look or you're just going to keep feeling more and more agitated and unsure". And then of course I'm a trainwreck afterwards because all the work I'm doing in therapy is going down the shitter every time this happens. Really if it weren't for that one issue that I seem to have trapped myself into repeating, I wouldn't even be questioning my orientation. This is driving me nuts. Does anybody else have this problem or know what I'm talking about?

Andy,

:-)


What if you thought of it, considered the possibility that it is not who you are but, rather...what was done to you?

My experiences are such that, if I keep coming back to something over and over, well, it must be important.

And, I don't know that all the work you are doing is going down the shitter each time it happens...do you think?

I used to do that, too...have a bad day and negate all the hard work I had allready invested.

What if...you thought of it as, you are getting closer to what you need?


:-)


Dave

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