I’m supposed to sit around and love him while he decides what to do with his fucking wife and daughter.
—TIM TURNER, OUT LATE
“Hey, Loren, I wanna show ya somethin’.” My friend greeted me almost immediately after I jumped out of the car at his parents’ farm in Nebraska. I was about ten and he was a couple of years older. We ran off to the barn, where he took off his denim jeans—back then only sissies wore shorts—and in less than a minute, he masturbated to the point of ejaculation, likely not his first time that day. He launched my education in sex as he announced, “I just shot my wad.” Farm boys knew more about sex and at an earlier age than town boys like me, but their knowledge wasn’t much more nuanced than “It takes a bull and a cow to have a calf.” At that time, I still believed that to make a baby, a man must pee on a woman’s crotch.
Discovering ejaculation introduces most boys to sex, and their education builds slowly throughout adolescence and young adulthood. Ejaculation is what men do that women can’t. It is a man’s role in reproduction. For a young boy, ejaculation is the essence of becoming a man; fortunately, it is also immensely pleasurable. But education encompasses both information and disinformation, and education is shaped by cultural attitudes. When a man discovers he is gay, his education must begin all over again.
Discovering our sexuality is much like observing the night sky. One evening, my younger daughter and I were returning from a family reunion in Wyoming. It was August, and at dusk we lay down on the asphalt in a parking lot in the Badlands of South Dakota to watch the stars. The setting sun introduced the earliest and brightest stars. As night unfolded, more and more stars appeared as darkness lay over us like a blanket. The constellations and the Milky Way began to interrupt the darkness that then exploded with so many shooting stars we didn’t have enough wishes for all of them. When a boy first discovers ejaculation, it is like the first visible star in the evening sky, but its appearance is only a tiny hint of a world that will unfold.
Young boys are sexual beings, and erections and erotic dreams begin long before boys know their significance and well before they can ejaculate. During this period of sexual discovery in early adolescence, group sexual play is not uncommon. After dark, on our Boy Scout camping trips, we would strip off our clothes and run around naked. Although often accompanied by erections, being naked created a sense of excitement that was far too amorphous to call it sexual. Sexual exploration with other boys was accepted, up to a point, and if my sexual attraction to other boys surpassed that of my friends, I wasn’t aware of it.
Young boys are sexual beings, and erections and erotic dreams begin long before boys know their significance and well before they can ejaculate.
During my childhood summers, I spent time on my friends’ and cousins’ farms, and we couldn’t wait to get to the hayloft and shed our clothes. No one discussed masturbation, although the Boy Scout manual mentioned something about “unhealthy behavior.” I masturbated a lot, sometimes several times a day, but probably no more than most of my friends. I would promise myself that I would touch myself only briefly and then stop, but I never could. Sometimes I thought, “That was fun. Whatever it is I want to do it again. I think I will do it again now.” Tissues were a luxury, so my mother, without comment or censure, washed a lot of handkerchiefs.
The adults who supervised us never seemed particularly concerned about our nakedness and exploration. Looking back, it seems as if their attitude was that boys will be boys. If there had ever been any concern that these activities might have made homosexuals out of us, the adults certainly would have intervened. As we grew older, I felt a growing sense of disconnection from what other boys might have been experiencing, but no one ever talked about it. It was as if a wall were gradually being built, with me on one side and all of the other boys on the other.
Our brains are hard-wired for several different emotional systems, each with its own anatomical location: fear, attachment, maternal nurturance, anger, anticipation, play, and sex. These primitive structures in the brain remain constant in all humans from one culture to the next. As our brains mature, these centers progressively interconnect in ways that are unique to each individual. Early on, scientists pinpointed the limbic system as the seat of emotions and motivation.
As the secrets of the brain are revealed, neuroscientists have seized upon a portion of the limbic system called the amygdala as the brain’s emotional control center. The amygdala allows us to respond quickly to danger; through the experience of fear, we appraise a situation and choose a protective response. The amygdala assigns emotional significance to events and modifies how experiential memories are recorded in another part of the limbic system called the hippocampus. Although some emotion enhances detail in our memories, when emotions run too high, the amount of detail recorded in the memory of the hippocampus may be reduced. Memories stored in the hippocampus modify our thinking whenever we encounter an emotional situation, and through a series of feedback loops, memories also influence the emotions recorded in the amygdala.
Multiple emotional centers of the brain function through a series of integrated networks, and the networks change dramatically through our learning. Between the ages of nine and seventeen, our brains undergo enormous changes that refine our physical and emotional functions. As young children, not all our neural connections are yet formed. The labile emotions we associate with adolescence are a consequence of incompletely formed neural connections. As a result of our continuing neural development, during adolescence we gradually shift from characteristically childlike emotional reactions to greater self-regulation, social awareness, and emotional control. The onset of hormone production in remote parts of the body during adolescence complicates all of this, as anyone who has been around a teenager knows. As we reach adulthood, the amygdala relinquishes control over our emotions to the prefrontal cortex of the brain.1
Multiple emotional centers of the brain function through a series of integrated networks, and the networks change dramatically through our learning.
Although our brains are all similarly hard-wired for several emotions, the way the networks interconnect the parts of our brains where emotions are centered varies considerably from person to person. Our different life experiences create unique, fine structural areas in our brains. These connections evolve and expand throughout our lifetimes as new learning adds complexity. In the novel Blue Boy, Rakesh Satyal writes, “Only now am I able to fully understand what being called gay means. . . . It means that you are wired for a different life entirely. It means that your body, your feelings, your responses toward all other people are different. You do not look at men the same, you do not make love to them the same way.”2
My first real awareness of being in the presence of something that might have been homosexuality—although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time—came when I was about nine years old during a rare family vacation to Chicago. As we visited the shore of Lake Michigan, just east of downtown, I darted barefoot across the hot sand to change into my swimsuit in the men’s bathroom. In a concrete-block building that was open to the sky, naked old men crowded driftwood-colored wooden benches lining the perimeter of the changing area. The men were more distressed by the presence of their young, unwelcome guest than by their nakedness.
When I walked into the room, all activity—if there was any—froze. Perhaps my discomfort came just from being in the presence of naked men. With no men in our household, it was the first time I had ever been in the presence of a totally naked man. And here was a room full of them. No one looked at me in a sinister way, no one talked to me, and no one touched me. I didn’t see anything overtly sexual (although until I was nearly forty, everything relating to homosexuality went unnoticed). In fact, I have absolutely no evidence that anything sexual was happening. But when I remember the incident, the emotional memory it creates is similar to the feelings I’ve had as an adult when I’ve been in a highly sexually charged environment. The circuitry of my brain wasn’t wired enough to assess the situation and plan an appropriate response. I changed quickly and ran back to the beach and the security of my mother.
The first girl in our class to have her period was the first person to help me connect some of the centers in my brain. She happily shared the details she remembered from the movie shown to the girls in the fifth grade. We boys never saw it. A new scheme preoccupied me: if I could just have sex with a girl, I would finally feel like a man. In the seventh grade, I pinched a girl’s breasts while we were roller skating to see if she might want to have sex with me, but she angrily skated off. I was disappointed—not because she rejected my primitive attempt at seduction but because I felt nothing when I did it.
Emotions change how we think, and thinking alters our behavior. In the 1960s, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer developed the two-factor theory. The theory proposed that emotion has two parts: physiological arousal and cognition. Emotion-provoking events induce physiological changes such as an accelerated heart rate and shallower breathing; those sensations make us aware of an emotion. This sends a message to the prefrontal brain, which plans and executes the appropriate response.3 The two-factor theory suggests that people label their emotions according to their physiological clues and their environment.
In the mid-1980s, while still exploring my own sexuality, I discovered a park near Des Moines where gay men were said to meet for sex. It was an uncommonly beautiful August day, sunny and mild with very little humidity. A little while after I parked my jeep, a pickup pulled in behind me.
My heart began to pound and my breathing became shallow as a young man walked up to the Jeep and said, “How’re ya doin’?”
“Fine.”
He went on, “I’m from Oklahoma, here for the state fair. Came out here to see if I could meet someone.” We spoke in meaningless conversation for a while, and then he said, “I’d really like to suck your dick.” His directness shocked me. Not all sexual negotiations between gay men are nonverbal. I told him I wasn’t interested.
He walked away, but I knew he hadn’t given up.
He returned to my Jeep and said, “I really want to suck your dick.” I said no again, but with slightly less resistance.
I continued to refuse, and he walked away again. A short while later, I got out of the Jeep and walked deep into the woods. He followed me into the woods, as I was sure he would. I sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. He walked up to me, and with his two large hands pulled down my shorts, exposing me. This was more than not-quite-sex. I had not anticipated that having sex in a tree would ever be a part of my gay sexual development.
When the young man walked up to my Jeep, I experienced the physiologic response of shallow breathing and a racing heart. At that point I could not be sure whether he intended to assault me or have sex with me. Although I was in an environment known as a gay cruising area, it was only after our interaction began that I was certain of his intent. The hesitancy in my response was an opportunity for messages to be sent to my prefrontal cortex, where I could process the information and then make a cognitive decision to walk deep into the woods or to speed away in my Jeep.
Although the basic elements of all our brains are similar, the intricate networks connecting these elements do not all develop in the same way for everyone. Children have been characterized as either inhibited or uninhibited. Inhibited children hover near their mothers, are quiet, and avoid strangers. Most children fall on a continuum between the two. As adults, some who were more inhibited continue to have difficulty separating from their families and connecting with others in intimate ways. Throughout their lives their primary emotional commitments are to their families of origin. Coming out for them can be especially difficult. The death of their parents represents a huge loss. Although they may long for a meaningful relationship, they continue to isolate themselves, preferring no attachments. Their relationships are more instrumental than emotional. Uninhibited children spend less time with their mothers and embrace new activities. Because they are less sensitive to the judgments of others, coming out for them may be less difficult.
A thirty-seven-year-old gay man from Canada who contacted me online was trapped in a life from which he saw no escape. He was a school administrator in a small town where living as an openly gay man would have been extremely difficult. Being an experienced teacher with a master’s degree, he had reached the highest level of the salary scale, reducing the possibility of professional mobility. As an only child he felt a responsibility to care for his parents. His father had developed Alzheimer’s disease and required full-time care, and his family had few resources to pay for it. It became financially expedient for his mother to live with him, destroying his last boundary for privacy.
Although faced with these difficult realities, he also seemed to be toward the inhibited end of the spectrum. His only escape was watching gay pornography or chatting in sexually explicit chat rooms, but he could not masturbate without fearing that his mother would discover him. Consequently, he began to stay awake far into the night, compromising his performance in school the next day. He was losing hope that he could ever have someone to share his life with, and he had no one with whom to discuss his frustration and disappointments. Although loneliness was imposed upon him by his role as a caregiver, he was more fearful that the loneliness would become worse once his role as a caregiver to his parents had ended.
Meeting someone involves taking risks, and one of the biggest risks is facing rejection. After speaking to a group of gay men, one man I met said, “Gay partners don’t just fall into your lap.” Many men are shy about meeting others and waste evenings wanting to talk with someone but being unable to do so. Knowing what to say is only half the battle; knowing how to listen and ask questions is equally important. Urban areas are often home to a variety of gay men’s groups that center on hobbies, books, politics, sports activities, potluck suppers, and coming out groups. These can serve as vehicles for developing a network of friendships. Putting a notice on Craigslist about a fathers’ support group could be a good method for finding other men who have families. Gay bars, arts events, fundraisers, and LGBTQ resource centers can also expand networks of friends as well as people to date.
We seek intimacy, pleasure, affirmation, and approval from our partners and peers. The brain is the most complex organ, and we want to understand it because we care about how we behave. Our DNA determines how the emotional centers of the brain are established, but each of us builds an intricate and evolving structure in our brains as we interact with our own changing environment. Life cannot be defined by a genetic code. We do not connect with humanity purely on a biological level. Developmental and cultural differences exist, and these experiences make us unique.
If discussing sexuality places a target on your back, a discussion of pedophilia, pederasty, and age of consent is like picking up a hand grenade without a pin. Ignoring the topic does nothing to defuse its explosive potential. Gay men wrongly and frequently have been accused of molesting children and recruiting children to “the homosexual lifestyle.” So much distorted information has been produced by those who condemn homosexuality that the topic begs for comment. First of all, let me make it clear that I am not advocating for pedophilia, lowering the age of consent, or sex with animals.
After I read an essay online in the Roman Catholic press in 2010 alleging that homosexuals are responsible for the sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic clergy, I posted this response: “I am a sixty-seven-year-old gay psychiatrist, and almost nothing you have written fits with my own personal experience or with the experience of any gay men that I know.”
In response to my post I received an e-mail from a well-educated young man who began, “Homosexuality is just wrong.” He went on to say that gay rights leaders have acknowledged that “pederasty is at the core of the gay rights movement.” I was more than a little shocked, so I wrote back and said that because I had never heard anyone in my psychiatric training or in my personal life use the word pederasty, I had to look it up. I wrote him that if pederasty was supposed to be at the core of the movement I’d joined, I ought to find out something about it.
We began a friendly and thoughtful correspondence. We were eager to learn from each other. He loved the Roman Catholic church, was a lay leader in the church, and worried about how the Church had come under attack over a series of scandals exposing widespread abuse of children, many of which dated back several decades. He expressed that as a father he had concerns about protecting his children. I wrote that I knew that some young people felt victimized by men and women who abuse the power of their positions, but I felt like he was conflating pedophilia, pederasty, and homosexuality, which are entirely different.
I told him that I knew some gay men who as teenagers had had sex with an adult and didn’t feel forced into it or traumatized by it; some admitted to initiating it. None considered pederasty central to their thoughts about being gay or a part of the gay rights movement. We continued our correspondence in discussions about maturity, age of consent, and abuse of power. He said that he wanted very much to understand, and his curiosity seemed intellectually honest. I corresponded with him because I believe that prejudice is only shattered when our antagonists have a personal relationship with someone who is gay.
In another response to my comment on the essay, I had a much less satisfying exchange with another man whom I will call George.
George: [You do] not think that homosexuality is wrong. Homosexuals fit the description of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the man above other men. He stands above other men because he does not submit to a moral law that he did not himself devise. That is to say, his behavior is not restrained by any law. Pederasty, homosexuality, the corruption of the clergy, the devolution of society into paganism, it all hangs together.
Loren: You don’t know me.
George: Oh, but I do know you! You have identified yourself as a homosexual, an immoralist. If a person can define for himself that homosexuality is perfectly good, nothing stands in the way of defining pederasty as perfectly good. Nothing binds his conscience. Morality is a matter of taste. Homosexual-, fornication-, and abortion-embracing churches are literally dying before our eyes.
Loren: You are as unable to see the evil in yourself as you are to see the good in me. You have attributed to me stereotypical characteristics of being gay with no attempt to know me as a Christian or a human being. You don’t know me.
Shortly after the essay appeared, CNN World reported on the outrage displayed by gay rights groups over comments made by Tarcisio Bertone, a senior cardinal and the Vatican’s secretary of state, linking homosexuality to pedophilia: “Many psychologists, many psychiatrists, have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia, but many others have demonstrated, I was told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia.”4 This CNN report went on to state, “A Vatican spokesman said Wednesday that just 10 percent of the abuse cases against priests that were reviewed by the Vatican constituted ‘pedophilia in the strict sense,’” because 60 percent of those incidents were between priests and teenage boys. James Cantor, editor-in-chief of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, rejected suggestions of a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. “Although there have been claims that child molestation is a result of homosexuality (or of celibacy), there is absolutely no basis in science for either conclusion. The scientific evidence instead suggests that pedophilia and hebephilia are caused by atypical brain development occurring near or before birth.”5
According to the American Psychiatric Association’s The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, pedophilic disorder is characterized by the “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” Pedophilic attraction is sexual attraction in which it is obligatory that the partner is a prepubescent child, usually thirteen years of age or younger with the perpetrator being age sixteen or over and at least five years older than the child. The DSM-5, the newest revision of the diagnostic manual, also attempts to distinguish between atypical sexual interests and sexual disorders. Atypical sexual interests—also known as paraphilias—include things like fetishes, S and M, or cross-dressing. This subtle but crucial difference makes it possible for someone to engage in consensual but atypical sexual behavior without being labeled with a mental disorder. Most people with atypical sexual interests do not have a mental disorder.
Having an atypical sexual interest by itself is not enough to consider it a mental disorder. To be considered a mental disorder it must do one of two things: either create personal distress, or cause emotional or physical harm to another or involve someone who cannot or will not give consent. Because a child has not yet developed enough social awareness and emotional control to be able to understand the meaning of consent, pedophilia is by these criteria a mental disorder.6
Almost everyone agrees that it is wrong to have a sexual relationship with a preadolescent or when coercion is present. Parents and governments have an obligation to protect vulnerable children from adults who disregard their interests and easily manipulate them. People who oppose homosexuality frequently quote a few seriously flawed studies that suggest that pedophilia exists more commonly in homosexuals.7 I am a gay man, but I am also a father and a grandfather. How could anyone believe that any gay person, but particularly gay fathers, would accede to a gay rights movement that would sacrifice the sexual innocence of their children or grandchildren?
My correspondence with the young man, which began with his claim that “homosexuality is just wrong” screeched to a halt when on May 5, 2010, the Miami New Times broke a story along with photographs about George Rekers, one of the leaders of the Christian conservatives, as he returned from Europe accompanied by a twenty-year-old male prostitute he had hired on a website called Rentboy.com. Rekers claimed that he hired the young man from this gay, male escort site to help him carry his baggage.8 Rekers, a clinical psychologist and a Baptist minister, began his lucrative career by writing a book advising parents on how to raise children so they would not turn out gay. He promised that homosexuality could be cured, and he had been responsible for some of the most vicious assaults on homosexuality. Rekers has since divorced the antigay organizations he helped found, the Family Research Council (FRC) and NARTH, both of which believe homosexuality can and should be cured. In leaving he wrote, “I’m not gay and never have been.”9 His damaging writings and public appearances tell us more about his fractured psyche than they do about homosexuality. Rekers’s exposure had been profoundly disappointing to my correspondent.
I want to avoid sweeping generalizations about those who oppose homosexuality; however, history has repeatedly shown that conflict about same-sex attraction often besieges the men who are caught up in rigid ideological judgments against being gay. Occasionally, their passion breaks free and they find release in clandestine man-on-man sex.
Prior to having received the initial correspondence from that young educated man, I had never before read anything that suggested that pederasty “forms the core of the gay rights movement.” In fact, the word pederasty rarely crosses the lips of anyone other than those who condemn homosexuality. In that context, pederasty is frequently and incorrectly interchanged with the word pedophilia.
Several definitions exist for pederasty. The different uses of the word are important. The definition that provides the least reproach to homosexuality describes pederasty as a nonspecific sexual activity where one of the two participants is a minor—that is, between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. A more restrictive definition states that pederasty means anal intercourse between two men where the receptive partner is a minor, a definition that implies coercion. In contemporary American society, depending upon the jurisdiction that defines age of consent, an adult who has engaged in pederasty could be charged with felony sexual assault.
One of the gay leaders whom conservatives connect with pederasty is Harry Hay, who died in 2002 at age ninety. Stuart Timmons chronicled Hay’s life in a book, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Rights Movement. Hay had once been a member of the American Communist Party, and he had a brief marriage to conceal his being gay from the party. Prior to his death, Hay was considered an elder statesman of the gay rights movement. He was one of the founders of the Mattachine Society in the early 1950s. Hay reported that his first same-sex encounter occurred at age nine. At age fourteen, he discovered same-sex lovemaking with a twenty-five-year-old sailor. He described it as “the most beautiful gift that a fourteen-year-old ever got from his first love!” Hay’s defense of his experience with the sailor disturbs many, and confounds our contemporary notions of adolescent sexual maturity.10
Different cultures celebrate the transition from childhood to adulthood with various traditions. Quinceañera is a traditional Latin American celebration for girls when they turn age fifteen. Historically it signified the young girl’s eligibility for marriage. During the ceremony, adults present the honored teen with a pair of high heels as a sign of her ascent into womanhood. She, in turn, gives her younger sister a doll as a symbol of relinquishing childish interests. Bar mitzvah—bat mitzvah for girls—is a solemn ceremony held at age thirteen to admit a Jewish boy or girl into adult membership in the Jewish faith. This ritual communicates that a young Jewish person is entirely responsible for adhering to Jewish law.
But the brain does not mature on one celebratory day and maturity varies from individual to individual, across cultures. Some adolescents are capable of thoughts and actions with unusually high levels of maturity, and some come from societies that demand it. I once had as a patient a twenty-five-year-old African man who was studying in the United States. I hospitalized him for his first episode of acute mania. He sent for his African wife, who was but fifteen years old and had infant twins. I told him I doubted her ability to travel thirty-six hours with two infants and without being able to speak English. He said, “Dr. Olson, you don’t understand our culture,” and I didn’t. It was an important lesson for me to learn: understand people in the context of their lives. My patient’s culture demanded of his wife a high degree of emotional maturity, whether or not I believed she was capable of it.
Although we may not be surprised to learn that men and women in undeveloped countries reach maturity at younger ages, the same thing happens in urban environments even in the United States as a man from Baltimore described to me on my blog, MagneticFire. He said that urban children grow hyperaware of their environments in order to deal with whatever comes up. He went on to say that most who live outside of the inner city cannot imagine what this experience is like. He grew up in a city with pervasive drug problems where sexual activity and other dangerous situations were commonplace. He wrote that surviving in such an environment demands a high level of maturity at a very young age. In his case, by the age of eleven, he was physically mature and sexually active.
This young man’s experience in the Baltimore ghetto and the world of my patient’s African wife are vastly different from the world of my youth. Although my life’s circumstances dictated a high level of emotional maturity, I maintained a high degree of sexual innocence, perhaps even longer than I should have. Adolescents may reach physical and sexual maturity long before they reach emotional maturity, but emotional maturity may also precede the loss of sexual innocence. These difficult transitions will be experienced differently by a child who is “inhibited” than by one who is uninhibited—whether in the Baltimore ghetto or in rural Nebraska. Some adolescents can function with higher levels of emotional and physical maturity than others. No universal age stands at which an adolescent becomes capable of giving consent for sexual activity, and those who cannot protect themselves must be protected from those who would exploit their innocence.
Strong emotions change how we think. Discussions of the age of consent enrage some people beyond the point at which any sensible discourse can occur. People disagree passionately and vehemently over the age at which a boy has the emotional maturity to give consent for sexual activity, but particularly if that sex is with another boy. Although I felt very sexual as an adolescent, the drive I experienced seemed to be diverted from its logical target. With a growing awareness that my friends were becoming more sexually active, I began to feel more and more disconnected from them, but I didn’t know why.
No universal age stands at which an adolescent becomes capable of giving consent for sexual activity, and those who cannot protect themselves must be protected from those who would exploit their innocence.
Sexual maturity is a very complex issue from a genetic, cultural, and neurological standpoint. Both heterosexual and gay adolescents usually do not have the capacity for the commitment and permanence of adult relationships. The brains of adolescents have not developed sufficiently to be able to understand all the consequences of their behavior. Today, even in our more liberal society, if two adolescent boys were engaged in sexual activity, the older one would be called a sexual predator, even if the younger adolescent initiated the activity. Other than the sex of the partner, these relationships are no different than comparable heterosexual ones, but because the participants are gay, they come under far harsher scrutiny. Let me say once more that I am not endorsing pedophilia, pederasty, or changes in our social definitions of age of consent. Our society has a responsibility to protect the safety of children and adolescents and to assure that sexual behaviors are not the result of coercion and manipulation. What I am suggesting is that our society is blatantly hypocritical in the way it approaches gay adolescent sexual behavior compared to the way it deals with the sexuality of heterosexual adolescents.
Is it not unjust for the age of consent to be different for homosexuals than the age of consent is for heterosexuals? In 2000, the Sexual Offenses Bill became law in the United Kingdom, equalizing the age of consent of all heterosexual and homosexual acts to age sixteen. Prior to the reign of Queen Victoria, gay sex was punishable by death. In 1967 being gay was legalized for those of twenty-one years of age. It was not until 1996 that it was suggested that the different ages of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals breached human rights. Any change in the law was opposed by the House of Lords under the pretense of protecting children and preventing sixteen-year-old boys from falling prey to older men.11
When do the emotional networks in the brain become mature enough for sexual expression? Variations in development mean that the age of consent cannot be defined simply by a number representing age. Developing gay sexuality must be considered in the context of all adolescent sexuality. By the age of fifteen, 18 percent of all boys have had sexual intercourse at least once. By the time adolescents reach the age of nineteen, 69 percent have had sexual intercourse.12 Gay or straight, sexuality emerges between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Most adolescents, however, receive little advice on how to understand and explore their developing sexuality, making them more vulnerable to those who would exploit them.
Those with strong feelings against homosexuality would certainly disapprove of an ongoing sexual relationship like the one I had at the age of twelve with Randy, a male friend who was a couple of years older. It would be scrutinized more harshly and considered to be far outside the realm of normal adolescent heterosexual experimentation. When it comes to adolescent same-sex experimentation, many fear the awakening of a sleeping giant, as if all adolescent same-sex activity is transformational. That issue is further complicated when age of consent comes into play—because Randy was older than I, a relationship like ours is by default construed as predatory, even though I was always the initiator.
No matter how carefully I have written this part of the chapter—and I have rewritten it many times—I am aware that some will misinterpret my words to mean that I am advocating for man-boy sex. Some people are so horrified by this thought that their emotions will interfere with understanding. Let me be explicit: Sexual encounters that result from the use of coercive power of one over another are wrong. Period. But they are wrong for all ages and for all sexual orientations. They are not more wrong or less wrong when the two are of the same sex.
One of the tasks of adolescence is to learn how to be a sexual person—a task that is no different for heterosexuals than for gay people. I have never spoken with a gay man who felt that he would have been heterosexual but for some adolescent same-sex exploration. Some men remember their adolescent sexual experiences with older males differently—as neither reciprocal nor voluntary but rather based on an imbalance of power. An adolescent who wishes to refuse an adult’s advances may be too intimidated by the power of authority to say no to a priest, a coach, a youth leader, or even worse, a parent. A child’s inability to say no must never be taken as consent.
Although I have no regrets or guilt about my same-sex experiences in early adolescence, sometimes I become anxious when I remember how I was unable to resist my attraction to Randy. I remember that relationship with Randy as being reciprocal, and I do not feel I was victimized or abused. We were both adolescents, incapable of understanding sexuality from a more mature perspective. Many of the men I interviewed for this book described very similar experiences. Even though I pursued Randy, today he might have been considered a sexual predator, put on a registry for sex offenders, and given a legacy that would have followed him the rest of his life. The sexual activity that I had with Randy did not convert me to being gay. As I look back on that experience, I see it as an unfolding of my sexual orientation that began long before and continued long after my involvement with Randy.
Many boys, both gay and straight, relate a history of sexual activity much like what I had with Randy. If both are young, it may be ignored as boys being boys. But what of adolescent boys—and there are many—who like Hay had a relationship with an adult male? Apparently already aware of his being gay, Hay made it clear he had no intent to say no to the sailor. One of my gay friends has a gay son who late in adolescence had an ongoing sexual relationship with an adult man. My friend insists that the relationship was abusive, but his son, who is now an adult, continues to defend it as being reciprocal. Although some adolescents may be harmed by these relationships with adult men, none are converted into becoming gay through these relationships. More than a few men have told me that as adolescents, they pursued an older man. Because of the differences in age, and presumably power, these are complicated issues. But they should be no more complex for homosexual relationships than for heterosexual ones.
Kristijan is a mid-forties gay American man of Croatian decent whom I interviewed. Although he is now inactive in the church, he was raised as a Roman Catholic, attended Catholic schools, and served as an altar boy. When he was thirteen, on a Friday night after an eighth-grade dance at his parochial junior high school, he waited for his brother under the lights on the front patio of the school. Although it was late, he was typically the last to be picked up and wasn’t too concerned. As he stood there, someone started a car at the adjacent nuns’ convent. The car slowly circled Kristijan and stopped near where he stood. The dome light came on and revealed the driver as the bishop.
The bishop waved Kristijan over to the car. Kristijan walked to the passenger side as the bishop lowered the window. He greeted the bishop, who asked why he was alone. Kristijan explained he was waiting for his brother. The bishop, a very handsome, midfifties man with striking blue eyes, said, “I don’t want you waiting alone.” Kristijan responded that even though it was late, his ride was coming. Kristijan was aware that the bishop intended something more than keeping him safe, but the bishop was so insistent that Kristijan got into the car with him.
The bishop told Kristijan, “Don’t worry about your ride. I will take care of you.” As he reassured him, he reached over, put his hand on the inside of Kristijan’s upper thigh, and snuggled his hand against Kristijan’s crotch. Then the bishop said, “It’s okay, you’re with me now.” Kristijan said his body was flooded by feelings of fear mixed with sexual desire and excitement. He looked down at the bishop’s hand and then into his face, which he described as warm and kind. The bishop nudged his hand into Kristijan’s crotch again as he said, “It’s okay. You can come with me.” Although he very much wanted to go with the bishop, he thanked him and got out of the car. The bishop then said, “I’m sorry to see you go.” Kristijan told me that he has no question that had they driven off together they would have gone to the bishop’s house and had sex. Kristijan accepts that pedophilia is wrong, but he does not consider the bishop a pedophile or himself a victim. To this day, Kristijan regrets not leaving with the “incredibly sexy” bishop. His story indicates how complicated these issues are.
A 2003 survey of the number of sexual abuse complaints against Roman Catholic priests and deacons found that over 10,000 people had lodged complaints in every diocese in the United States against nearly 4,400 priests. David G. Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said, “It’s at least plausible that as many or more nonordained people are abusers as there are priest abusers.”13 Comments made by Pope Francis during his 2015 visit to the United States disappointed some abuse survivors. He said, “I deeply regret that some bishops failed in their responsibility to protect children. It is very disturbing to know that in some cases bishops even were abusers. I pledge to you that we will follow the path of truth wherever it may lead.”14 But for many victims, Francis’s comments were not enough to overcome their sense of disappointment. Upon his trip back to Rome from Armenia in 2016, Pope Francis said that the Roman Catholic church should apologize for the way the Church has treated gay men and women.15
How can we explain the disparate experiences of adolescents? Why are some crippled by their experiences while others transcend them? The interpretation of these experiences does not rest on the act of sex alone. Recalling the two-factor theory of Schachter and Singer, the interpretation comes from the physiological response, the context of the experience, and the way our cortex processes the experience.16 Changes in the brain, physical changes of the body, and psychological maturity all come together in puberty, and the rate of change varies considerably from one teenager to the next. The effects of premature sexual activity are greater for children from chaotic and abusive families that offer little support than for children in less dysfunctional families. Sexual abuse by a family member carries the greatest consequences. These consequences are also greater if the abusive activity was frequent and invasive and occurred early in adolescence.
Thinking holds power over emotion. Some of my experiences have taken on a new interpretation since I accepted being gay; my brain was rewired to incorporate this new knowledge. Perhaps the difference between those of us with negative experience and those of us with more positive experiences is related to the way we have reconstructed the narratives around these experiences.
Children must be protected from sexual practices where there is an imbalance of power; sexual exploration and sexual exploitation are not the same thing. While sexual abuse is more common than once thought, in the l980s the legitimate concern about abuse rapidly developed into mass hysteria. All memories are but reconstructions and are factually inaccurate, but these concerns about sexual abuse produced an epidemic of false, recovered memories. In Prescriptions for the Mind: A Critical View of Contemporary Psychiatry, psychiatrist Joel Paris, wrote, “Therapists, beginning with Freud, believed that everything that happens in one’s life is recorded in the brain. . . . But that is not true. We do not remember most of what happens to us, and what we do remember is more a narrative than a recording.”17 In society’s attempts to deal with its collective guilt for ignoring sexual abuse of children for so long, in some cases we have created overly harsh penalties for sex between a young boy and an older one. For example, some very young adolescents have been labeled sexual perpetrators and incarcerated in sexual abuse treatment programs, yet limited evidence exists for the effectiveness of these programs. Protecting our children is vital, but doing so in an informed way is critical. And our children must also be protected against overly harsh, ineffective, and in some cases, inappropriate treatments.
The emotions of trust and fear recur frequently in stories like Kristijan’s. When the Roman Catholic Church ordained pedophile priests, it gave them the mantel of trusted men of God. The Church offered sanctuary to troubled children who may not have been able to trust their families. When trust is destroyed by severe or repeated abuse, fear ignites the amygdala, incinerating the capacity to trust even when no danger is present. Children must be protected from sexual practices that involve an imbalance of power and an abuse of trust. What could induce greater fear than a breach in trust by those who proclaim to be our protectors?
Children must be protected from sexual practices where there is an imbalance of power; sexual exploration and sexual exploitation are not the same thing.
Although same-sex sexual exploration is often disregarded as “boys will be boys,” sexual education that would better equip a young boy to deal with his expanding sexuality encounters tremendous resistance, as if the innocence of boyhood would be unleashed, resulting in out of control, sexually driven automatons. In the 1950s, girls were shown a movie about menstruation, but boys got nothing. In Nebraska, farm boys learned about sex in the context of breeding farm animals, and city boys learned about sex from farm boys. Many of those who oppose sex education feel the need to protect the innocence of their children. Opponents believe that sex education undermines the values taught by parents and see sex education as a subversive attempt to remove parental authority. But ignorance and preaching abstinence is no protection of innocence.
Sex education should be so much more than a ten-minute discussion of good touch and bad touch, ideas that are to be shed magically like wedding clothes upon entering the honeymoon bed. Sex education could teach young boys that they have a choice, and that a failure to express their choice is not the same as giving consent. It could teach them about how to deal with an imbalance of power with someone in a position of authority. It could teach them about safe sex. Whenever children do not receive a healthy education about sex, they will seek to educate themselves. That sleeping giant is going to wake up.