Used to feel like I was pretending I wasn't gay, now feel like I'm pretending I am

Hi everyone, this is my first post here.

I'm 30, and for most of my life have considered myself to be either asexual, or borderline asexual. As a result, I have managed to reach this age without ever sleeping with anybody. To add to that, I have only kissed three girls (no boys), when I was at the ages of 21, 22 and 29 respectively.

Increasingly over the past couple of years I have come to accept both that I have sexual feelings, and also that I have a fair amount of sexual confusion. For a long time I was in denial even on the first point. The reason being that I had always been pretty sure that I was not the least attractive man in the world, and I have normal, outgoing social skills, so I excused myself for the facts of the previous paragraph by the fact that I hadn't made much effort to change them. Indeed, at uni I literally wanted to ask people how you knew you were attracted to someone (I never did, because I knew the question was ridiculous) That defence would collapse if I were actually trying to have sexual relations.

On the sexual confusion issue, my situation is this. I notice men on the street, I find them comfortable to look at. I have difficulty even forming opinions on whether or not most women are attractive. To the extent that I can, it feels like I'm using a different part of my brain, trying to deduce the answer, and if someone else (especially a man) gave a different view, I would generally defer to them. I wouldn't think like that if someone had a different opinion on a man's attractiveness.

But for all of that, I haven't been able (with the possible exception of very recently) to persuade myself that I wanted to have sex with men. Whereas I have actively wanted to have sex with women. It's just that that desire was sort of in the abstract, rather than tied to particular women. It was as if there was a disconnect in my brain. I wouldn't see a girl and say to myself "I want to have sex with her" and then start trying to bring that about. One possible example of this disconnect is that when watching (straight) porn, I would only ever see myself in the role of the male actor, but it was still more important to me that it was the man that was good-looking.

It didn't help that I would have gayer and straighter weeks and months, in which my thoughts would incline more one way and then another way.

Two months ago I admitted most of the above to my best friend. I honestly couldn't have imagined it going as well as it did. He was infinitely understanding and supportive. I didn't quite cover the fact that my feelings for him might be a bit deeper than his for me, but that's for another post. In our conversations since then, it has been basically assumed that I am gay.

Since then, I feel like I have come on a long way. I did feel very weirded and grossed out by the thought of myself taking part in gay sex, and I think that I have mostly overcome that now. I am more comfortable in thinking of myself as being gay than I was.

But this is my problem (sorry if it's taken a while to get here). A few weeks ago I went to a gay club on my own, and basically didn't feel especially comfortable. I'm not completely sure I had ever even seen guys kissing before. I just feel that there is a lot of mental de-weirding that still needs to take place before I can get involved. It probably doesn't help that I had a pretty homophobic school environment, where it was fairly well drilled into you that you didn't want to be gay. In the end I just spent the evening leaning against a wall, drinking and watching. It occured to me that I felt that I had gone from feeling that I was pretending I wasn't gay, to feeling like I was pretending that I was.

There are a couple of other things as well. I would be jealous of a man who had had a lot of sexual success with women. I honestly don't think I would care if I knew a man who had had a lot of sexual success with men. Maybe that's just the way that society views things, and I've internalised them, but that is at least how I feel at the moment. I think that if I were offered the chance of sex with an attractive man or an attractive woman, and they were each (in the parlance of the John Cusack film) a sure thing, I would probably stare at the man, and then attempt to head off with the woman, even though I suspect I would probably have an easier time getting aroused with a man.

So there it is. Currently I'm assuming that I'm gay, and that this is just a phase that people go through, on the grounds that I don't think that many people walk this far down this path and then conclude that they're straight, but I also worry that I'm trying to answer a question that doesn't necessarily have an answer. I have at least once in the part few weeks panicked and thought "Hang on, I don't want to do this, people don't need to talk themselves into wanting sex with people that they're sexually attracted to". That passed, and I no longer worry that I am essentially trying to cure myself of heterosexuality, but the general feeling is still there.

I'm just anoyed that I almost couldn't live in a time or place where people had more freedom to love whoever they wanted, but I just feel thwarted by my own brain chemistry. And on that note I feel I would be being remiss if I didn't describe myself as bi-furious.

Thanks for reading (those that made it this far). Any reassurance that this is just a thing that some people pass through would be welcome.

 

Re: Used to feel like I was pretending I wasn't gay, now feel like I'm pretending I a

Thanks.

I would just like to add that I hate the fact that the above post makes it sound like I'm objectifying everyone. I'm honestly not, but I think that carrying out thought experiments on this subject matter sort of forces me to sound like that's what I'm doing.

 

Re: Used to feel like I was pretending I wasn't gay, now feel like I'm pretending I a

Thanks everyone for your responses, including to those I haven't particularly responded to below. I had thought for a while that posting here was sort of the next thing I wanted to do. I don't really know any out gay people. I know a couple of people that I haven't seen in years, and will try and give them a call, but it's going to seem a bit out of the blue until I say why I'm calling. I wanted to come here first.

Credit where it's due - I borrowed that word from the UK sitcom Fresh Meat, where in one episode (S2E1) one character gets a bit angry and confused about whether he might be gay. But it is a useful word. It's not an episode that's especially enlightening to people in that position, but that's where I got the word.

Yup, that all seems pretty familiar. Although I am sort of seeing the sexual confusion from the other side now. A few weeks ago I would have been really pleased with myself if I had noticed that a woman had legs (as if that deserved some sort of medal...), now I just get a bit annoyed with myself when I do recognise a woman as attractive. It opens up questions about the difficulty telling between the thoughts "I want that" and "I want to want that". Maybe it's only possible to worry about that question when the truth is that I want to want that. I've sort of had enough of this now and just want an answer so I can move on with my life.

I spent a long time telling myself that I would rather be gay than in the weird, basically asexual place I found myself. I told myself that to prove that I couldn't be gay, because I would have chosen being gay over my then conception of myself. But really I think I privately knew that what I wanted was to say that I had looked at myself freely and frankly and concluded that I was straight.

There's probably a lot there that's right. I do still think of the gay people I have known as "other" people. I recognise almost none of the clichés about gay people as really pertaining to me, except for a complete disinterest in football, which is hardly statistically significant. I know that that doesn't mean anything in terms of what my sexuality is, but it possibly makes it a bit harder to say "these are my people". I feel that to call myself gay feels a bit like I'm claiming credit for a struggle against oppression that has been more or less entirely fought in my absence.

Yeah, I know it's okay to be attracted to men and women. But I definitely think that my feelings toward men and women are, at the least, qualitatively different. I also sort of suspect that, like how you can only get your eyes lasered after your prescription hasn't changed for a few years, you can possibly only call yourself bisexual once you've been pretty stable in that position for a while.

 

Re: Used to feel like I was pretending I wasn't gay, now feel like I'm pretending I a

Thanks! Sorry I didn't spot that you had posted here sooner.

It does make it a bit difficult. On your thread we mentioned how we're each a bit concerned that some day we might conclude that we weren't gay. I think there is a fear that I will come out to people, and then only really figure out whether I'm gay or not by kissing/sleeping with men. If I got to that stage and realised I wasn't gay, it would be embarrassing, but at least I would have learned something. The big worry is that I wouldn't want to tell my mother about this if there was any chance I might be wrong. I know that telling her that I was gay would hurt her, and I'm not looking forward to that conversation.

I actually went to a gay club for the second time a few weeks ago. I had a much better time, danced, and was generally comfortable with the environment. Nothing happened, but I think that I would have been comfortable if it had. The downside was that while I was there I happened to bump into a girl I work with. Luckily, she didn't seem to draw any conclusions from the fact that I was there. I pretended I was there with others, and said it was the first time I'd been. She said she goes there all the time. This is annoying, as I'm now can't easily return.

One other thing. Being pedantic, questioning your gender identity would (as I understand it) mean trying to figure out if we were men or trans women. That doesn't apply to me, and from your posts I don't think it applies to you. Sexual identity, yes.

I guess so. In that I was more comfortable when I returned. A lot of it comes down to time to accept things, and get used to it. At about the time I started this thread, my level of stress was high enough that I developed a twitch in my left eye which lasted for three weeks.

It's largely the same point as in your thread when I said that I felt like I was lying when I tell people that I'm gay. There's still a feeling that gay people are "other" people, but I am attracted to men. Talking to people definitely helps. Even if you're in a conservative country, hopefully you can use the news to bring up conversations about gay rights, which should give you an idea as to how sympathetic they will be. I've been lucky in that none of the people I've told seem to have treated me any differently as a result.

I also recommend that when you feel a certain way about something, it's worth trying to take that view apart and work out why you feel that way. One reason I had for not wanting to be gay was from a general feeling that heterosexual relationships are always depicted as more wholesome than homosexual ones. I think that largely comes from an assumption in the media that heterosexual relationships are about love, but homosexual (especially male-male) relationships are about sex. There was a story recently about a school not letting children do a project on gay rights, thinking it unsuitable for children. I don't think that comes from the assumption that gay rights are about sex rather than love.

One last thing, the following article (which I may have posted elsewhere as well) is one that seemed very familiar to me, and hopefully it will be useful in helping you feel like it's not too unusual to figure things out at about this age.

Ian Thorpe and the truth monster