Open2it Community Blog

I've never written a blog before, but when I found this website I decided to give it a go. First, I just want to say that I love the concept of Open2it, especially that I can express my thoughts to an intellectual community anonymously. I want to discuss some things about human nature that I have a unique (or at least unusual) perspective on. I guess that I'll find out how Open2it y'all really are. Just let me know if my topics get to be too heavy for this community.

So. . ., let me briefly introduce myself.  I was born and raised in Phoenix, AZ, moved to San Francisco for college (and other reasons), and I'm now a museum curatorial assistant.  I started off as a psychology major because I wanted to understand myself, but discovered biology and ended up double majoring.

I'm gay.

Well, that's out of the way. I didn't choose to be, but I am. I'm not a broken-wrist and I don't flaunt my sexual orientation. In fact, most of the people I work with don't know. I've known since I was 11 years old, but I hid it from everyone for 8 years-during which I was too disturbed by my own fantasies to be sexually active (repressed in psychology speak). It was pretty scary to me, these feelings of mine and I knew early on that people didn't approve of them because my mother is vocally traditional.

I didn't come out to my parents until last year. My mother cried for months every time I talked to her on the phone. She still asks me if I'm sure. She's a good mother; I have no complaints, but she was raised on the biblical belief that homosexuals are abominations. You can probably see why I kept my sexual orientation a secret for so long.

My father is a different story. He's pretty passive. Mom is the one who snaps the whip. Dad is more the observant, quiet type. He owns a big car wash with like 10 employees (all Latino). He will never make a fortune, but he's conservative with money and our family is pretty much middle class. When I came out to my parents, my dad told me that he had suspected that I was gay for a long time. He wasn't disappointed, at least not detectably and he has really helped Mom to deal with it.

That's enough introduction. Let me get to something academic. I have wondered for a long time why I turned out gay. I know all the arguments about nature and nurture, but I just can't pin down which one my case supports. As far as I know, there is no one else in my family who is gay so I don't have a plausible genetic excuse, and I never had any environmental reason to "turn" gay.

I actually found this website through a Google search that led me to the videos on this topic and, while they are interesting, I can't clearly attribute my sexual orientation to anything specific in them, like having older brothers (one video cites research that shows that having older male siblings increases the chance of being gay). I am an only child. I was never abused in any way by my father and I never had to fight for his attention. I had a really normal childhood until age 11, after which I felt a lot of guilt. It's like I woke up gay one day and I just had to deal with it.

My mother dragged me to church every Sunday (Dad never went), but there was never any  trauma in my childhood that I can think of, nothing that would change me psychologically or physiologically.

As I mentioned, I embarked on a psychology degree in hopes of understanding myself. After 2 years of soul searching and reading my psychology text books, I was literally no closer to any answers, at least not causative ones. Then I took a biology class required for my major and I really liked the more rigorous answers offered by that area of science. I suppose that I also saw a lot of potential for understanding myself through biology, but the most powerful incentive was my love of and curiosity about animals and evolution.

I stopped believing in a God a long time ago. What sort of all powerful being would put me through the stress of being a gay churchgoer with a mother who unknowingly reminded me on a regular basis that who I was inside was hideous? I can't begin to express how stressful it was believing that I was going to hell because I thought about kissing boys instead of girls, and if anything could cure gayness it would be that sort of stress. 

Anyway, I needed a new way of explaining the world around me, and physical science and evolutionary biology filled that role. My training in psychology would have me believe that homosexuality is a form of deviance, while my biology training taught me that it is actually normal variation. We now know that a lot of animal species practice gay sex, but I'm not sure that they are actually gay in the sense that humans can be. There's some evidence that some animals form long-term homosexual pair bonds (see this video) and those observations are important. Certainly, homosexuality is not considered as aberrant as it once was, at least to progressive biologists, and it might serve important social functions in many species.

Obviously, I'm searching for meaning in my life and I have a lot of issues yet to deal with. For example, I love kids and I dream of having my own kids some day, but I struggle with the idea of raising children as a gay man (I know that it's done, but is it done responsibly?). I think that we can't help what we are, but we can take responsibility for how our lifestyle affects others. A lot of my gay friends disagree with me on this point, but I believe in moral responsibility. Sometimes I think that I can get by on the interactions I have with kids at work (I do a few school group tours of the museum), but then I see a family and I want that too.

I would be interested in opinions about moral issues, but I would also like to explore the whole notion of sexual variation and deviance.  First, though, I'll wait for some feedback on what I've said so far.  I'm trying not to be too provocative, but I know that this topic is disturbing to some people.

As you might imagine, I live a pretty conflicted life and I would appreciate any feedback on how to deal with some of the obvious issues. One persistent problem is how to deal with my mother. She seems to be slowly accepting that I'm gay, but she would come unglued if I told her that I'm an atheist. I moved to San Francisco as much to spare her the agony of my lifestyle as to live it, but I would love to have the relationship with her that I had before I came out. What I wish for is to be myself and have her love and support, but I'm not sure that's possible.