Looking for the truth, and am wondering if I'm just lying to myself. Advice please!

I am sorry that this is so long. I want to just put this all out there, to give the full picture. If this is incoherent, I apologize. I’ve just had a bottle of wine. I felt I could get closer to the truth with some alcohol. I am normally avoidant and I lock myself up tight sober. When I’m drunk, I feel a ray of clarity.

As a boy, I didn’t like other boys and hung out with girls only. Boys were too disgusting, too brash. They spat particles of food at lunch when they talked with their mouths full. I had a crush on Ellie Sattler of Jurassic Park when I was in 2nd grade. I liked to tie my shirt together with a rubber band so it’d look like hers. I had strange feelings for a boy a grade lower than me when I was in 4th grade. I’d had a very close friend in a girl the previous year (and a different girl the year before that), but she was in a different class, so I wandered around alone during recess. I hated those intervals away from the controlled certainty of the classroom. I had a male friend when I was 10 or 11. I locked us in the guest bedroom, laid down on the floor, and begged him to touch me however he wanted. He, apparently, wanted to get the hell outta there!

I’m a 28 year old male, and the farthest I’ve gone is that I kissed a girl on Halloween of 2004. I’ve had a few girls interested in me, but I never feel a connection to them. I know this is something that holds a certain status, but I’ve never felt a sexual need to have a girlfriend. I started at 11 looking at pictures of women having sex on the early internet days, but quickly discovered gay porn, and ever since, I’ve had this magnetic attraction to it. The first time I saw a woman naked, I thought “oh, ok, so that’s how everything’s laid out.” The first time I saw a naked buff guy on the internet (the first mature male I’d seen at 11 or so) I had this longing. At first I thought I wanted to look like that so I could get girls easier. My dad found the internet cache on his computer (damn you, Windows 95!), and approached me, saying that it was OK that I was gay and that he still loved me. Completely horrified, I backpedaled and made up a lie that I was just looking up that stuff under a dare. This was in junior high school. I’d been looking up images of men having sex for about a month. When questioning me, he said it was OK to explore, and he steered me to some of his favorite straight porn sites. He clicked on a cached picture while talking to me, and thank god it was just a guy’s ass, without anything going into anything else! The next Christmas, he bought me my own computer.

Raised in a conservative (oddly non-religious) family, went to a Christian high school, and every day on the bus over, I’d feel guilty that only 45 minutes ago I’d jerked off to gay porn – I felt like I had to put on a mask. All through high school I had a crush on this one girl that kind of used me as a fall-back boyfriend at school, but we never did anything. I liked her I think but it’s been more than a decade, so I’m not sure. I did have one high school girlfriend. She was attractive, and I hated myself and was confused that I couldn’t act like a boyfriend around her. I didn’t feel any attraction for her, and kind of got off on the fact that I had a status symbol called a girlfriend, but I didn’t like her. She was pretty and an OK person, but I didn’t really want anything to do with her. I thought I just needed to meet the right girl. I felt guilty and awful that I was using her, but I was not yet mature enough to understand the opportunity cost that I was making her spend. There was a very beautiful guy in my PE class in freshman year. I had a breathless guilty feeling whenever he was around. Many times, when viewing TV with friends/family, I feel the need to attack gays. It feels a little like stabbing myself in the gut. When I hear the word "gay" I feel scared and defensive.

All through college, I didn't date although I had a few opportunities. I felt numb towards women. There was one girl I liked, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t get up the courage to ask her out. At the college mixer I was at the same table as this one guy, and he was an Adonis. I felt a really strange feeling, like a guitar string deep in me somewhere was reverberating. At the time, I thought I was jealous of his physique, but all though the mixer I couldn't get him body out of my head. I later saw him on campus, in cowboy boots, and I remember how it felt in my ears to hear the boots hit the ground – a meaty sound belying the mass of his buff body hitting the concrete.There was some sort of need – a mix between physical and emotional, like an itch that needed scratching.
In freshman year of college, with my roommate only a few feet away, I’d be asleep, lightly, and awake with the longing for sex with another male, with me as the bottom. Somehow, I locked this away for years.

I had a dream once that I was in a Japanese house of some sort, with the rice paper walls, and that a door opened and a male walked in, and I drew him close and the dream ended with the last image of me on my knees with my mouth open, approaching his crotch. I’ve never had a sex dream about the opposite sex.

While earning my Master’s degree in engineering, I finally let myself settle into the possibility that I was bisexual. I would watch some straight porn, but women seem somehow simpler, more basic and boring – a make-up laden face with some breasts and an empty spot where a penis is supposed to be. I would try to masturbate to them. Many times, I would watch gay porn, and as I came, I would force myself to think about cumming into a vagina. If I was spent, but wanted to get off one more time, I’d watch a gay video – it always worked. No matter how exhausted I was, no matter how many times I’d came, it would work to get me to that last orgasm of the night.
Sometimes I would get boozed up – like I am now – and would spend a few hours watching gay porn. I would finish with this feeling of relaxed euphoria. I’ve never felt this way with straight porn.

There was a very attractive girl in the latter years of college who used me for my class notes. I was in the top 10% of the class, and the day before the final, she came to my condo, and we talked for hours before I gave her my notes. She returned them later, with her boyfriend in tow, saying they couldn't stay since they had dinner reservations. After that final the next day, she said “it's been fun” as she walked out of the room past me. I hated her and imagined some horrible monster eating her alive for the next few months. Her boyfriend was gorgeous – how could I compete with THAT?!
I roomed with a girl the last year of college, and I felt jealous when her boyfriend visited. I think I wanted her for myself, but – mindfuck! – I didn’t want to have sex with her. I just didn’t want him anywhere near her, and I wanted him out of my apartment.
I’ve been reading up on homosexuality, and found that I meet many of the genetic markers. For example, I’m left-handed with an abnormal hair whirl direction and that weird finger length matchup.

I’m repelled by many gay guys I see on tv – they seem feminine, overly-dramatic, and not at all male.

A few years later, after taking time out to heal from a medical situation, I’m looking around, a 28 year old virgin, seeing people around me marrying, and I feel lost, like I’m using the wrong codec to watch the movie of life. I saw I girl walking in a crosswalk with her boyfriend, and I was intensely jealous of him – why can’t I be close to a girl like her! – and was in a foul mood for the rest of the night. When watching TV, I note that a woman is attractive, or is a “good female specimen”, but often one of the guys on the TV will shoot an electric thrill down my spine. In normal, everyday experiences, just walking around town, I’m not attracted to anyone , male or female.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME, AND WHY AM I SO CONFUSED? AM I GAY? IS THERE JUST SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME? WHY CAN’T I JUST BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE?

This post is an absolute monster, and I hope I don’t come off as demanding your attention for such a long question/situation report, but somehow the OCD part of me feels like blabbing out the entire story is the only way to get an accurate assessment. Posts of this length should be illegal.

 

Re: Looking for the truth, and am wondering if I'm just lying to myself. Advice pleas

Thank you for your support and replies! I’m not entirely sure I’m through with denial yet – there’s hope and uncertainty and wiggle-room there, and it’s a comfortable place. I’ve a bit drunk again; just enough so that I can think. It’s like peeling back a layer of dead skin – temporarily sloughing off some of the numbness that’s rather nice sober. Oddly, I type better as well.

Admitting to myself that I’m gay feels a bit like suicide, honestly. I feel like I’m plunging a knife into my stomach, pulling it up. What if I just have something against women? Maybe there are men out there so attractive that even straight men are attracted to them? I’m sure there are plenty of straight men out there who weren’t friends with other boys as children. I had a few heavily-parentally-moderated male friends, where my mom would set play dates. Either way (straight or gay), I feel like somehow I’m lying to myself – that I don’t really mean what I say, that somehow I’m just avoidant and will wiggle into any form I can to avoid discomfort in socializing with people I’m attracted to. If I’m gay, then my parents will think I’m just neurotic, that I’m just making drama? Even thought my dad said he would support me if I was gay, more than a decade ago, there was somehow a rift in our relationship after that; he felt distant, I felt somehow rejected, broken. This is all ancient history. Can gay porn turn me on so much just because straight porn is so boring? The men in gay porn seem so connected somehow, and straight porn seems almost clinical in comparison. Isn’t there some chance that I was just messed up from seeing gay porn at such an early age? Then again, I almost entirely ditched straight porn after that. I watched the season premiere of glee the other day, and I still feel breathless over that new guy at NYADA. I want to work my lips down his lips to his throat to his chest. I feel like I could spend a warm California afternoon with my head on his chest.

My parents have a sort of cold war compromise of a marriage – if either leaves the other, it will be mutually assured destruction. Why am I even worried about that? Shouldn’t I have gone through this in high school? Why am I 28 and having to think about this? Maybe I’m straight but just am scarred from being scared of women in the past? Maybe I secretly am misogynistic? Sometimes, when I watch straight porn, I say to myself “ok, that gay porn is nice, but let’s get back on topic with women”, and I’ll spend lots of time carefully scanning films for very attractive women paired with men who pluck that deep basso string down there in the depths somewhere. When I see an attractive naked man and woman in a photo, I desperately (a muted, hidden desperate) want to rejoice over her shape, her breasts, her skin, but all I can think about is that part of the man where his clavicle joins his neck, and his Adonis line and what lies below.

When I’m drunk this feels like it falls out of me like the intestines of some gutted animal. I change when I’m sober – I’m better at rationalizing, doubting myself. I’m halfway through a bottle of cheap triple sec. But, if I wasn’t gay, then why would that word, uttered, make me tense, guilty, afraid? Maybe I just have Homosexual OCD? I wasn’t ever picked on as a kid, never called “gay”, was always silently on the sidelines. I feel straight, only I’m not attracted to women, but an attractive guy will somehow lodge himself in my head. I can masturbate to a half-naked guy without problem, but a shirtless woman is like crossing a desert , exhausted, looking for some sort of miracle well of straight lust.

Maybe I just like drama, being different, having a secret? I think this is my biggest betrayer – I can bullshit here and there, but as far as lust is concerned, there are a few women I look at and say “wow” to myself, but somehow I feel like I then fabricate a deeper, sexual attraction I have to build the scaffold, order the masonry, carefully arrange the mortar. I guide myself through imagining her as my girlfriend, but somehow she’s never naked. When I see an attractive male, I instantly want to kiss him on that special spot on his neck, and work down through his chest. I want to be awash with his tides, his maleness. I want to drown in him.

I’m an atheist, and one of my favorite pictures is the Hubble deep field – the universe is a blindingly enormous place, there is the physical reality, with the subjective social-spiritual relativity lovingly draped over it, glued in place like a moist cloth. Why would it be so hard for me to figure this out? I’m open minded, damn it. I believe that sexual preference lies in genetics, in discrete mechanical interactions in the body. I read stories where gay men say that they “just knew” from an early age. I feel a deep, panicky need to normalize myself – I’ve never felt normal, though I’ve been at times in the cool cliques. In high school, when a female friend asked me which girls I liked, I couldn’t come up with any, so I grasped around blindly inside myself, and remembered that one of the girls in my physiology class was quantifiably attractive. She became my assigned girlfriend somehow through matchmaking for a few years. Am I supposed to feel lust over women? I’m rambling now. I guess, since I’m a virgin is there any chance that maybe I’m just straight but without experience? I feel like I’m always inventing attractions to women, and I feel relieved when I can manage to feel attracted to a girl – it’s like climbing a mountain, I exert energy being attracted. I feel normal when I summit. With men, when I see an attractive guy that I’m into, it instead feels like I’m falling into some valley – I relax, float down into that far-down crevasse, and feel the attraction, effortlessly.

I guess what I’m wondering is if I’m just fabricating this male attraction? Could I be straight but just avoidant towards women? I’m putting everything I can into this post. I feel like I’m taking some sort of awful, sharp and scraping instrument to my emotions, trying to cleave away a good sample – a solid specimen to put under the microscope. Is it possible that I’ve somehow generated some sort of an avoidant construct, where I like guys just because I’m afraid of women? I feel like a stud when I’m flirting with women, making them laugh, but I think they’re more attractive clothed. I feel good flirting with girls, but I don’t ever fantasize about them naked.

This is the last time I’ll post such a long post, I’m sorry. This is my best defense, a kind of leaden sledge hammer to hide behind. I don’t want to be gay; I want to think that there’ s something wrong with that me that I can fix, just hand me a monkey wrench, please, and I’ll torque my settings back to normal. If I really am gay, I will accept myself, but I doubt myself so much – I wonder how much I lie to myself. I feel like I pack myself carefully –neatly- into a small box with a transparent lid for others and myself to look through, but with a pearl lining, and I can’t help but to stare into those pearly depths and wonder, fear.

 

Re: Looking for the truth, and am wondering if I'm just lying to myself. Advice pleas

Hi scanner007,
Thanks for sharing your experiences – it helps to know I’m not the only one out there that’s been in the labyrinth of mirrors! I am sorry that you had to go through similar doubts. Whatever the case, it's vital to be able to accept yourself! I do need to get started with relationships, you’re definitely right there – I never really bothered to go out and look for women because it seemed like more trouble than it was worth. As far as losing my virginity was concerned, girls don't seem adverse to me, and I just assumed that eventually I'd meet a woman that I wanted to play with... it just never happened. I thought that because I’m a bit of a social phobiac, that I wasn’t turned on by women because they made me nervous… but when I’d flirt with girls and really be on my game, I’d feel good because I was able to make them laugh. It was more like me doing a standup routine at a comedy club and enjoying the applause instead of getting to know the women. Coincidently, some of my close female friends asked around to see if I was gay, and this was a while ago, so maybe it's obvious to everyone but me. I think the big thing is that I FEEL STRAIGHT. I just want to date and have sex with men. Hmmm, seems like I have some bargaining going on. Either that, or I have a very poor understanding of the application of logic!

I think I’ll take some time off, and let myself process over this. Rereading my (epic drunk) posts, it does seem really obvious, I just can’t help but question if I’m just screwing with myself. I did the google image search thing, comparing men with women, and I thought there was something there for a second while looking at Scarlett Johansson, but then I realized I just really liked the symmetry in her face – she’s nearly perfect. Maybe I’ll give porn a rest for a few weeks and get out and see what works for me in the real world. But then again, there's a lot of straight porn that's identical to gay porn, just with a woman, and I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about that one crucial substitution. When I see a girl giving a blowjob, I want to be right down there with her.

The best bet might be finding a gay friendly therapist, see if somehow I'm just making all of this up. It seems pretty obvious to me that I'm in denial, but... still.

Thanks to everyone who replied! I’m going to think things over for a while.