Solving the Sexual Identity Puzzle

One of the weirdest aspects of being human is that since so much of who we are is built into our biology, we aren’t conscious that systems are in place. It’s only when something we took for granted stops working that we become aware of what’s going under the surface.

Some systems are physical, like our kidneys or knee joints. Some systems are metaphysical, like our personality or spirituality. And some systems, like our sexual identity, are so invisibly woven into the fabric of our lives, even when we are conscious of being sexual, we can neither control nor predict our sexual responses.

Our sex life actually begins in our DNA. If you synthesize enough data across enough disciplines it becomes exceedingly evident that people were born with sexual traits, tendencies, orientations, dispositions or whatever else one wishes to name the phenomenon (or, more likely, phenomena) that helps shape the kind of sex, and kind of partner, we will crave when we grow up. It’s exceedingly evident that it happens but we don’t understands why it happens much less how it happens. In order to gain understanding, we will first have to figure out why different brains interpret the same stimuli in completely different sexual ways.

For example, we don’t know how or why it is that when Woman A’s brain sees another woman she feels aroused, while Woman B sees only competition for a male. We don’t know why one woman thinks her husband is the hottest thing on two feet when all her girlfriends think he’s a creepy-looking bastard either. We say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but it’s really in the brain’s neurological processes.

Still, while aspects of sexual identity are the product of DNA, what happens to us in the world dictates the life-choices we make and the people we ultimately grow up to be. Sexual identity keeps evolving and changing throughout our lifetimes. Positive sexual experiences make people feel sexually self-confident and prepare them to make appropriate, self-interested choices. Traumatic or depressing experiences create inhibitions and diminish a person’s belief that things will ever work out okay for them. By the time we are grown ups, our sexual identities are aggregates of all the unseen forces that shaped us, from our innate biological identity to the emotional realities of the lives we have led and the treatment we have received in the world.

I shared my schema for typical BDSM/fetish identity above. It is a highly refined version of my basic seven-stage template of developmental stages of sexuality. I adapt the model to different identities because I’m looking for different things at each stage. But generically, and barring any medical issues that compromise natural development, all human beings go through these seven stages of sexual development.

Seven Stages of Sexual Development

Pre-puberty - before we have consciously sexual thoughts (this typically ends by ages 8 to 11).

Puberty - when we first begin associating sexual behaviors with sexual thoughts (typical range: 8 to 13).

Adolescence - when self-experimentation and first experiences with partners begin (typical range: 13 to 19).

Young adulthood - when we actively pursue partners and have more adult emotions about sex (typical range: 16 to 26).

Mid-life - when we settle into routine patterns of sexual behavior (typical range: 23 to 45).

Maturity -- hormones beginning to ebb but not necessarily the need for sexual bonding and intimacy (typical range: 40 to 70).

Elder sex – the spirit is still willing and the bonding very important, but our flesh is getting tired and our sexual chemistry is no longer vital. (typical range, with decent health status, 68 to end of life).

Note: age range estimates based on current data on sexual maturity rates and life expectancy rates in the US.

You’ll notice that the age ranges I estimate for each category spread out more dramatically with age. This is because while early development can be easily correlated to biological stages, later ones are largely impacted by the life-choices we make and our natural physical health. Thus, I’ve worked with clients who were old – physically and mentally – by age 65 and clients who were still working it and looking good in their late 70s. (For a lot more on the subject, see Volume 1 of The Truth About Sex.)

In a clinical setting, I try to gather as much information as people can provide from each of the stages they have experienced, kind of like a forensic scientist sorting through a crime scene: is there a nugget that will tell me something? A clue my client missed to his own identity?

To a sex therapist trying to dig out the reasons why a man grew up to lead a publicly heterosexual life and a second secret life of dissatisfying and ultimately depressing anonymous gay encounters, I want to know what he learned as a child, how peer pressure affected his self-image in his teens, what kind of sexual experiences he had as a young man and in adulthood. By piecing the stages together, I can get inside his reality and understand all the factors that shaped him.

The variables in his life, from negative messages received at school, home or church, to trauma or rejection, will influence whether his need for social status and perceived respectability is more emotionally important than his innate biological programming. We see it all the time with public figures who are suddenly, scandalously revealed to be gay after years of maintaining a convincing, sometimes even anti-gay, heterosexual front. They want desperately to be straight, for whatever combination of reasons. Honestly I feel sorry for them and furious at the people who pander to their delusion that one can magically wish oneself to be something one is not.

I advise my religious clients to pray away the vanity that anyone can explain why they were made this way, and to accept that this is the hand they were dealt and it’s up to them to play it well.

Although sex researchers commonly estimate that gay people comprise about 10% of the general population, the Kinsey study I cited earlier noted that while less than 10% of their sample identified as lesbian, gay male, or bisexual the number of people who actually have had gay, lesbian or bisexual sex is actually much greater. Put another way, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, we really don’t have a clue how many people are gay or gayish or homoflexible, lesbian or “lesbian until graduation” or bisexual or “bicurious,” bipossible,” biflexible” and any of the other MYRIAD of labels people now apply to help sort out what in the world is going on.

I credit the Internet and new media for making it possible for us to speak freely about the sex we actually enjoy, as opposed to the sex psychiatrists once insisted we must have to be diagnosed sane. People of previous generations were taught that homosexuality was a mental illness. Being gay or lesbian in the 1950s automatically put you at risk for arrest as a sex criminal and for involuntary commitment to a psychiatric institution. Indeed, this fear continued to hover over the heads of lesbians and gay men well into the 1980s, when then President Reagan signed legislation to outlaw involuntary commitment for the mentally ill. It took nearly 20 more years for the psychiatric community to agree that being gay isn’t a mental illness and, even as I type, the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding on whether or not gay people are entitled to equal rights.

If we’d been able to speak freely about sexual variations decades ago, by now everyone would know, for example, that more people are clinically bisexual than straight or gay. I am using a RIGID definition of bisexuality to include any and all erotic experiences involving a same-gender partner. This includes (and is definitely not limited to) the orgies of your misguided youth, drunk frat parties you can’t remember, what you did that time in Vegas, threesomes, making out with friends, plus common youthful experiences like circle-jerks at summer camp or comparing genital or breast size with your best friend. Bisexuality takes innumerable forms and does not imply a complete sexual encounter. It simply means that the person is likely to be sexually adaptable, and able to perform with either sex depending on circumstances.

Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s long-established model of sexual orientation has become the preferred scale used to classify adult sexual behaviors. On the Kinsey Scale, the gayer your are, the higher your number. “Exclusively heterosexual” is at the top (as 0) and “exclusively homosexual” is at the bottom (ranked as a 6). In between the two, he lists gradations of gay, such as “Predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual” (2) and “Predominantly homosexual, but more than incidentally heterosexual” (4). For years, psychiatrists and psychologists have been using this as a template for diagnosing sexual identity.

To me, the Kinsey guide is a curiosity piece, outdated and based on bad assumptions. For one, it doesn’t account for the natural fluidity and changes that occur throughout our lives. People may live as a 1 or a 2 (or a 3 or a 4, etc.) at different times in their lives. Sometimes homosexuality is a product of circumstance, as we know from studies of prison populations where people become gay or lesbian during their incarceration even though they live as heterosexuals on the outside. Sometimes heterosexuality is a product of pressure from family or society to fit in, as we know from the vast numbers of gay men and lesbians who’ve told their stories of coming out.

Nor does the Kinsey scale make room for transgenderists, who may be gay in one gender but straight in another, or whose sexual preferences may shift after transition. Similarly, folding lesbianism under homosexuality is an insult to lesbians. Lesbian sexuality isn’t the same as gay male sexuality, because, you see, lesbians are women and gay men are men.

But my biggest problem with the Kinsey Scale is that, well, it’s ridiculous in light of 21^st century research. For one, there is no intrinsic importance to being more or less “incidental.” How does one even decide whether their gay encounters were more or less incidental? Looking at human sexuality as a scale where straightness and gayness are at polar extremes is a 19^th century conceit. Its underlying assumptions are that male sexuality is more important than female sexuality and that homosexuals are the “opposite” of straight men.

Ironically, the emphasis on gay v. non-gay obscures what the Kinsey Scale itself suggests: bisexuality occupies a central, possibly even majority, role in human sexuality. Yet Kinsey does not acknowledge bisexuality as its own sexual identity, but rather as subdivisions of homosexuality and heterosexuality.

What if Kinsey’s premise is backwards: what if homosexuality and heterosexuality are subdivisions of bisexuality? Contemporary research and studies are leaning that way.

Basic Schema of Sexual Identities

Note: All my definitions are works-in-progress, based on my own research and understandings of sexuality. All my identity models, therefore, are fluid and in flux, and sensitive to the chance that as new data emerges, things will need refining and reworking.

I don’t believe in fixed matrices for sexual identity. It is the rare person (and one I have never personally met) whose sexual identity does not evolve, mature, and alter throughout each stage of life, from youth to middle age to old age.

I know it is possible for people to live out one sexual identity and then, years later, to live out a different one. Sometimes, people who wanted a lot of sex at one stage in their lives don’t want sex at all in other stages and vice versa. Sometimes people go through phases in their lives where, because of circumstance, their peer group, or curiosity, they experiment with new sex acts. Some new sex acts become part of people’s permanent sexual repertoire while others just live on in memory as once-in-a-lifetime experiences. And sometimes, as is fairly common among intersexed and transsexed individuals, people mask their sexual or gender identity until they feel old enough and secure enough to act on it.

Still, I feel we need to stop relying on outdated models and take a fresh look at sexual identities. So for the purposes of this book, I am going to distill my basic take on the categories of sexual identity into a visual aid and provide a chart for you to ponder.

When I assess sexual identity with a client, I evaluate three factors:

1. Are they monogamists or polyamorists?

2. What sexual behaviors are the most arousing for them?

3. What is the sexual nature of their partnership(s)?

Visually, it looks like this:

I depart from traditional research by starting with what I consider to be a fundamental question when trying to determine how to integrate your sexual identity with your life choices: do you want one partner or many partners? It is universally assumed that everyone is looking for ‘their special someone” and, actually, most adults are – but sexual exclusivity may not necessarily go along with “love and commitment.” While people can’t always live their dreams, I want to know the dream so I can help them achieve acceptable compromises.

Next comes sex: not the sex you necessarily are having right now, but the sex you wish you were having or try to have as often as possible because it’s what turns you on the most. If you fantasize about “doing it” you’d fall into the MOVA/MOA category; if you need to get into a furry suit or wipe down the bondage chair first, let’s face it, you’re kinky.

The third key component in an ideal sex life, of course, is your partner.

For the sake of explaining it in a sex primer, I’ve boiled human sexuality down into six strictly defined categories. Please don’t contact me to tell me the definitions are narrow: I know! It’s deliberate, as I’ll explain at the end. Here are my working definitions for each of the categories listed on my chart.

Bisexual: People who are sexually attracted both to men and women, though seldom to equal degrees. Some bisexuals are only content when both sides of their desires are satisfied; most bisexuals are contented to settle into monogamy, particularly if they are family-oriented. Some bisexuals lead a gay or lesbian lifestyle; most bisexuals lead a heterosexual one.

In common parlance, “bipossible” means people who have the potential to be bisexual, “bicurious” are people who are inexperienced but interested in exploring, and “biflexible” are those who enjoy bisexuality more as a spice than an entrée.

Heterosexual: People who only sexually desire opposite-gender partners. No exceptions.

Gay Male: Men who only sexually desire same-gender partners. No exceptions.

Lesbian: Women who only sexually desire same-gender partners. No exceptions.

Transgender: I’m not brave enough to define it. We have barely scratched the surface of what gender fluidity and gender identity really mean. I strongly believe it should be acknowledged as a separate sexual identity. Newer, better and more objective research has demonstrated that gender variances are common. We also now know that there are many more gender fluid people in existence than ever acknowledged. All my work leads me to see gender fluidity and transgender identity as another normal expression of human sexual diversity.

What we call transgenderism is expressed and lived in so many different ways, no one has even catalogued it all (if such an enterprise is even achievable). But one thing is certain: people with gender variations think, feel, and act on sexual impulses differently from their biological peers. Thus their choices in partners may be fluid or transitional (hooking up with partners according to their own stage of gender development rather than the partner’s secondary characteristics, for example); their own sexual identity may shift throughout life or may be as static as a conventional heterosexual’s; or they may go through periods or stages of asexuality, heterosexuality, lesbianism or gayness.

To further emphasize the diversity and range of transgenderist identity, my short of list of people in this category include people who identify as intersexed, transsexual, transvestite, transwomen, transmen, drag queens, drag kings, gender queer, third gender, and bi-gender. I also include people who are primarily attracted to transgendered people. Many people have traditionally dismissed fans and fetishists who lust after differently-gendered people. I don’t. I see them as people who may have a hard-wired fascination for gender fluidity, even if they themselves are comfortable with their own gender.

Asexual: I include asexuality as an isolated sexual identity in this schema. The science is still new but I’ve heard from enough self-identified asexuals to believe that they deserve recognition as a kind of stand-alone phenomenon in the world of sex. Asexuals do not experience desire, arousal and passion the way others do. Many of them forego sex altogether (including masturbation), some periodically indulge for the sake of emotional closeness with a partner.

I’ll finish up by backtracking to my reasons for offering up such narrow, definitions and why I grant no exceptions for, say, the heterosexual woman who only goes down on other women when her Master orders her to, the straight guy joining a gang bang, or the gay guy who dates post-op transwomen. Yes I know they identify as straight and gay, respectively, and may live that way most of the time. I respect their self-identification.

That said, sex studies repeatedly suggest that the boundaries between straight, bi, gay and lesbian are plastic and easily permeated by outside forces.

In the real world, individual sexual identities overlap categories. In the real world, tons of gay and lesbian people have had sex with opposite-sex partners. In the real world, tons of heterosexuals have had homoerotic and lesbian experiences. In the real world, bisexuals aren’t people who can’t choose between two orientations either. Seen from a statistical vantage, in the real world, most of us actually are bisexuals. What motivates us to form permanent relationships is such a complex and individualized brew of emotions, perceptions and triggers that the relationships we form may not even reflect our intrinsic erotic personality.

The secret to sexual happiness is the same as it is for personal happiness: be true to yourself. That means accepting your authentic sexuality and working with what you’ve got to tap your maximum potential for pleasure and intimacy.