The July issue of Instinct Magazine (on newsstands only, not online) includes a piece titled “Meet The World’s Most Boring Homo,” by Parker Ray. It opens:
For the fourth Friday night in a row, Jack (not his real name) is curled up on his IKEAfied couch, in his apartment in a non-gay part of San Francisco, and just about to watch a New Release from Blockbuster. It’s a movie he’ll probably forget about the next day when he wakes up early — around eight a.m. — to take his dog, Theo, for a walk in the park just a few blocks over.
Jack is 30 and has made several changes over the past year — examining his life, looking beyond his assumptions and stereotypes about being gay, spending time alone, seeing a therapist.
Later in the article, Ray notes:
There were actually quite a few guys we could have included in this piece, most of them over 30, but some who had reached a “gay scene saturation point” by the ripe ol’ age of 27. They have all had some main things in common:
- They’ve bailed on many of their “party” pals, … finding people who would rather start their Saturdays at seven a.m. instead of getting home at that time…
- …[They] spend time with themselves … Jack took up painting … He also got a dog … and he takes a Spanish class … “I want to build a better ‘me,'” he says.
- Finally, this new wave of “boring homos” now have goals that extend beyond what they’ll be doing for the next three-day holiday weekend…
Jack’s story echoes themes from many ex-gay testimonies.
- He had defined much of his life on the basis of his orientation in his twenties, thriving on high-energy partying and competitive style-consciousness.
- He dabbled in relationship-play that proved inconducive to relationship-building.
- Some of his friends have been baffled by his change. “[E]very time I talked with one of my so-called friends about worrying about being by myself, their only suggestion was that I needed to get out more.”
- He’s finding it helpful to make new friends with whom he has common interests.
- He describes the changes in his life as a process, not an instantaneous conversion.
- Self-reflection is bringing his choices more in sync with his values and long-term goals.
In a broader sense, Jack’s story isn’t about his orientation at all. It’s simply about life. All of us are destined to reach points where we examine what is working and what is not. My grandparents did that when they uprooted themselves in the prime of their careers in order to live a more relaxed life. My mother sold her house, quit the teaching job, and went to Europe one summer after most of us kids were out of the nest. She spent that fall starting over, rebuilding the life she wanted in small steps.
Ex-gays often have genuine stories to tell, as well, about awakening to lives that no longer worked for them. It’s great to hear about folks figuring out what fits them better and making peace with themselves.
The challenge arises from those who choose to generalize their experience, proclaiming that their path is the right one for all gays and lesbians.
Conscious choices in the context of well-examined lives are a good thing, period. I respect folks who are willing to do the work of making peace with themselves. The labels — gay, ex-gay, straight, post-gay — may play roles in our individual processes, but they really don’t matter in the end.
As Jack says:
I went to Europe [for my summer vacation] and started to catch up on culture and living that I’d been missing out on. I’m getting to a point where, if I was a guy sizing me up for a relationship, I’d totally date myself.
Sounds like a pretty fine place to be.
Thanks for the food for thought. I’m always maddened by the ex-gay line (or implied assumption) that the more destructive elements of an ex-gay’s former ‘lifestyle’ – e.g. alcoholism, drug use, promiscuity, bolemia, whatever – were the result of being gay. People who read their testimonies buy that uncritically. Your words are a good reminder that putting those things behind – getting healthy and making more mature choices – is a part of growing up, and not necessarily about beoming ‘ex-gay.’
Did any of you see a story in Details months ago about a guy who said that he started having sex with women, and that he wasn’t “ex-gay” or “straight”, or “gay”, he was just giving in to his desires and eschewing labels after years of thinking he could only be gay?
Is that online anywhere?
Details seems to enjoy flirting with homosexuality but also condemning it in a roundabout way (like the infamous Gay or Asian nonsense).
I don’t recall seeing the Details article, but the circumstance you describe — people giving up labels that had worked for them in the past — is very familiar.
The guy I knew at church (now a judge) whose mannerisms and speech synched up with some gay stereotypes, who had anonymous sexual encounters with guys while an active alcoholic, but not since entering recovery. There were no indications that the outwardly vibrant, doting relationship with his wife of 25 years was anything but genuine.
A friend who dated guys exclusively for several years, burned out on dating completely for a couple years, and is now married to a woman who emigrated from the Far East after they met online.
A buddy who met his wife-to-be while she was in a relationship with a woman and, though she’d been married before, never thought she’d be in a relationship with a guy again.
These folks don’t hang their identity or their orientation on a single word. There just isn’t a need or a benefit to doing that. They are content with what is.
The common thread I see in all of this, including the story told about Jack in Instinct and by many ex-gays, is the same one for folks who first identify as gay or lesbian in middle age or later: Life is seldom a perfect straight-line path. For a while it seemed like mine would be just that — a gradual progression from adolescence to old age, steadily accumulating experience, career accomplishments, financial security, family, and personal satisfaction.
The truth, though, is a lot of us end up doing life by trial and error, discovering some things work well for us for a while but not forever.
Bose, I have to admit that some of the examples you gave don’t exactly prove much to me about flexible sexuality (especially the man who suddenly up and married some woman from the Far East — that sounds like something on a MTV show). I think that sexuality is fluid, but more often than not, the truly wild swings are based on psychological upheaval and the person marries or dates what is not expected because he thinks that a superficial change, such as trading a man for a woman, will improve or at least alter all the problems in his life. Usually that doesn’t happen, and the man either has to dump this woman and go back to his old life, or stay with her in a friendship marriage or a very suffocating marriage where no one is happy.
I think with women it’s much more likely to be able to fall in love with both genders.
Yeah, I don’t expect to prove much in a sentence or two describing decades of other folks’ lives. I just know that after spending ordinary, relaxed time with them that the contentment I seen in them seems genuine.
Well you can feel contentment with someone without feeling physical lust, or romantic love. I think with many straight/gay marriages, it’s about feeling peaceful living with someone and not having to worry about anything developing.
I don’t understand why it is so impossible to think that there might be people out there who have experienced a shift in orientation? I don’t think it’s very many people, and I don’t think because it happened to them that it means everyone else should or can experience the same thing.
For every 1 person who has experienced a shift in orientation, it seems like there are at least 100 or more who haven’t, no matter how many years or what they tried. And it should be OK to be the 1 person who experienced a shift, as well as the 100 who did not.
I know it’s hard because most (or at least a good many) of them (ex-gays) have an “it happened to me, and you can/should experience/want/strive for it it too” attitude, but we can’t let that stand in the way of acknowledging that it may be possible that some people out in the world experience a shift in their orientation.
It doesn’t make the experience of ex-ex-gays who have tried and tried but haven’t changed any less valid. Even if the ex-gays think so, it doesn’t.
I myself knew someone personally in the gay community who still identifies as a lesbian but found herself attracted to (and eventually married to) a man. Why? Who knows. She didn’t either and said that if people were lined up on the street she’d be attracted to the women 99% of the time. However, she fell in love with a guy and they were married. It happens. I also personally know someone who has experienced a shift in orientation after many (15+) years in reparative therapy. I’m convinced after all this time it’s genuine. It happens. Rarely, I think, but it does. So what?
I just feel like if I try to pick apart every ex-gay’s story and find the loopholes or the reasons or try to make it out as if they are pretending all the time, then I need to live with them trying to pick apart my life and figure out “why” I’m gay and what I can “do” to change. And I’m not going to allow that. We’re all different. What works for someone else doesn’t work for me, and I’m OK with that.
/rant
Annika, in your ranting you apparently neglected to mention that I *did* point out that women have a higher rate of going back and forth between the genders. But I haven’t seen this among men, and I think it’s far less likely for a gay man to be able to suddenly wake up one day and want to have sex with a woman, or for a straight man to wake up one day and want to be able to have sex with a man.
I don’t believe in labels but I also don’t believe that anyone can simply turn gay or turn straight. That type of thinking is what makes so many straight people hate and fear us anyway. Because they think we will wave a magic wand and make them homosexual.
I’ve periodically seen a few men naturally drift, in one direction or the other, when their biology, psychology, or romantic inclinations are flexible enough to either not fit a label — or when they are wise enough not to force-fit themselves into a political or religious stereotype.
Some people are, quite simply, attracted more to another person than to a particular body type.
Actually, James, my comment (ranting) wasn’t so much directed to any one person or any one comment, to tell you the truth, I guess. It just happened to get touched off by your response to Bose.
And honestly, my made-up figures should have been something like…this may happen to 1 person and to 1000 others it doesn’t. It’s probably somewhere more in there. Unfortunately, we’ll really never know (at least not in the near future), I don’t think, because the research being done doesn’t seem to be done scientifically and without bias.
As an aside, it’s just frustrating when people from both camps throw out imaginary figures or absolutes (“tens of thousands of ex-gays” or “no one ever changes – they were really never gay”). I get frustrated after a while – just in the “not knowing” – and the knowledge that even if someone came up with a scientific way of ascertaining *why* someone is gay, and if they were “100%” gay from a young age, and if they “really and truly” changed, even if someone could prove that, there would still be those who didn’t believe it, or didn’t want to believe it – simply because the hurt from the ex-gay camp and the christian camps is so great… (end of aside)
At any rate, I do actually agree with you James, in much of what you say – from what I’ve read in other responses you’ve had. I just got exasperated that if Bose says that he knows people who have had experiences that don’t fit into the norm, I think we shouldn’t assume that those people aren’t experiencing romantic love or feeling physical lust. I think that might have been what made me go on my rant, now that I reflect on it.
I suppose I get tired when ex-ex-gays or gays stoop to the same level as the ex-gays when wanting people to fit into our ideas of what sexuality is or isn’t over the course of a lifetime. While it may be true that some ex-gays were more bisexual perhaps to start with, or some may have been dealing with sexual addiction, but not necessarily orientation issues in the first place – that doesn’t mean that I can ever know that for a fact about any of these people. Just as they can’t know for a fact what factors (if any) other than biological ones have caused me to be gay.
Nowhere have I said – and I’ll never say – that someone can “turn” suddenly straight or gay (and heaven forbid – I would never say it could be “simply”). The two examples I gave were – 1, a woman who still identifies as a lesbian and is primarily attracted to women but finds herself in love with a man (I don’t think anyone would say that counts as “turning straight” suddenly); and 2, a person who has experienced some shift in attraction after *many* years of persuing that.
Neither of those examples is a quick change to another orientation, by any stretch of the imagination. And, I should note, these are only 2 examples out of many people I’ve met over the years in both the gay community and the ex-gay community. And they were the only 2 that readily came to mind to support the idea that people can experience orientation shift. I could give many more examples (many, many more) of people who have tried and tried to pursue change and have not had any change in sexual orientation (myself included). And for the record, I’ve gone through the typical ex-gay ministry (Exodus) stuff, Living Waters (Andy Comiskey’s ministry), Cleansing Stream (not specifically designed for ex-gay stuff, but received lots of prayer for it while going through this program), many hours of “Deliverance”-type ministry, and Theophostics, in addition to almost 15 years of private therapy with both Christian and nonChristian counselors. It’s not as though I prayed once, nothing happened, and I said – well, I tried it – it’s not for me. All this to say that I am speaking from some bit of experience in being in a lot of these circles over the years.
And I do agree that women’s sexuality (not every women’s sexuality – but women’s sexuality taken as a whole across the experience of all women) is perhaps more fluid then men’s – based on anecdotal evidence there seems to be some truth in that.
I guess the bottom line for me is that there are days that I feel that perhaps constantly trying to convince people that Alan Chambers (or John Paulk, or Stephen Bennett, or….[insert name here]) either was never gay, or was always gay and is still now gay and just “pretending” with his wife – I just don’t know that it’s productive, in the end. Don’t get me wrong – I understand that the reason it’s so easy to want to go there is because when someone is trying to take away your rights and interfere with your family and with your life and turn otherwise loving people against you (yeah, I’m stating this strongly, but I do feel that’s what Alan Chambers and the like does when you get right down to it). I do get that. And trust me, I looked at the recent (poster-sized) picture of Alan Chambers that was posted somewhere here in the last month and had quite the amusing dialogue going on in my own head. I guess in the end, it just doesn’t feel like it ultimately gets us anywhere. If I don’t want to be put in a little box, I don’t feel like I should do that to others either – even if I do completely disagree with them about sexuality and whether it can change “if you just try hard enough.”
Annika, you’re right that sexuality isn’t something that remains static, yet it’s more likely that the majority these sucessful shifts are of people who are bisexual in nature, yet are psychologically inclined to a same-sex orienation. With those variables taken into account, human sexuality becomes even more obscure to our understanding.
Yet you’re right that these shifts, wherter they are common or very rare, are immaterial. I sometimes feel that the quest of completely proving the the immutability factor of sexual orienation leads us to that “it can’t be cured” mentality, that we consider it as a mental illness that must be changed if possible, which I don’t consider positive for our well beings.
Got to this web page while looking for an ex-gay who could share his experience with me telling me if gay desire within a heterosexual relation would fade away with time or I’ll have to fight against it forever.I’m 25 and have a successful heterosexual relation but also homosexual desire that i’m repressing.