At 40, I find I might not be gay.. but it's complicated..

I've been out of the closet as gay since I was 17.

I was raised very religious, but homosexuality was never a subject that came up during my upbringing, nor in church, nor in Sunday school. I was raised by my henpecked mother and my abusive grandmother. My father died when I was 4 of a brain tumor.

My brother, who is 5 years older than me, was rebellious from an early age, and he "played" with girls many time by the time he was finished with elementary school. When my father was still alive, he would beat my brother with a belt when it was found out that my brother had "played around". I was not allowed to use my brother as a role model because he was supposedly such "a bad person".

I was Mr. Goody Two Shoes.

My mother and grandmother had always taken the attitude that men looking at women in a sexual way is degrading, that it's this horrible and taboo thing known as objectification and it's just the worst thing.

Then when I was in Sunday school, a couple times they would separate the boys from the girls and teach the boys that the desire to look at naked women is a sin, and they even tested us on it later on.

If you want an idea of how disconnected I was from other people, in elementary school during P.E. they once had a contest to see who could climb the rope all the way to the top of the high ceiling. I was able to do it, but by the time I got to the top, a "good feeling" happened, and I wanted to recreate that. So from then on, most of the time during recess, I would "pretend" to climb the pole until I got that same feeling. I had no idea what sex was, I had no idea what attractions were, I was just clueless.

In middle school I was attracted to the idea of being stuck in mud. Getting stuck in mud would give me an erection. I still didn't know about sex, I learned bits about that during my freshman year of high school--and by that time, I had already been programmed. I wasn't until my sophomore year that I even knew that women had "more than one hole".

Needless to say, by the time high school rolled around, I was scared of looking at women. I thought it was a bad thing to do, so I blocked it out of my mind and I created a scenario where I have FEAR whenever I see a picture of a naked women. (And I still have some of that reaction today--it's more fear than any sort of repulsion.)

I've never had the desire to screw someone in the butt, I HAVE enjoyed getting dominated by someone, and I enjoy the grungy elements of a guy, but I've never actually been the top or actually screwed anyone in my life. As far as actual ME f***ing, I'm honestly still a virgin.

My attractions to guys have been mostly admiration, a wish to be more like that person. I've wanted a father figure of sorts. I wanted to be around people that I could learn about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate for being a guy.

I would regularly hang out at biker bars, trucker hangouts, places with aggressive masculine men, trying to learn and absorb that sort of thing, since it was completely denied to me as a kid.

Anyway, I've never fully been able to enjoy sex with guys. It has just never felt comfortable or natural to me. I enjoy servicing a guy because I enjoy pleasing someone I admire. I can get off at pictures of guys I admire, but I've never really gotten off at seeing someone else getting off, it's all about admiring someone's physique (and I like big burly fat bearded biker types) and their manliness, and I enjoy being dominated by that kind of thing as well, but it's not something I actually get off on, I just can't really cum with another guy very easily--at 40 years old, I've cum with guys a total of 5 times. And I've really tried.

And then there's the fact that the support groups I was around when I came out of the closet were mostly guys who would say "Eeew icky! Fish!" and similar comments when someone would talk about women's bodies.

And then there's feminism.... it's in media everywhere, it's taught in schools (or at least, it was when I was in school), it's changed James Bond movies from a sexual fantasy to a politically correct action movie, it teaches that to whistle at a woman isn't a compliment, it's a threat of rape, it teaches that being proud of liking women and knowing how to get women excited is the most piggish neandrethalish degrading thing possible. Learning how far that stretched is something I've come to realize over the past few months, and learning how much I had been conditioned when I was growing up is something I've realized in that same time.

Anyway--I don't know what to do. Trying to look at pictures of women still gives me this strange fear reaction, yet I'm strangely SLIGHTLY aroused by the idea of actually f***ing someone, aroused by the idea of actually using my equipment that isn't small, and I've just never been able to picture that with a guy's ass.

I'll always have this kind of attraction to guys, but I'm just scared. What would it mean in my head if I DO like women in more of a "I want to be WITH this person" vs a "I want to be LIKE this person"? It just scares me. It would mean that my whole life has been a lie.

I just don't know what to do. I don't know of any resources for this type of thing other than anti-gay Christian "gay reforming" type of horrible places, and I'm sure not going that route. So here I am.

---------- Post added 15th Jun 2013 at 01:50 PM ----------

Well, it's too late to edit the message--but the phrase "and I enjoy being dominated by that kind of thing as well, but it's not something I actually get off on" should NOT have had a comma.

 

The fear is that I'd like it, and between my upbringing and the fact that I've identified as gay for the entirety of my adult life, that's not something I'm supposed to like.

The BIGGEST problem is that I still seem to associate pleasuring myself in general with something bad--so I've always had to think about other things (generally thinking about the form of someone's body or someone wearing a particular kind of outfit in public, never about sex itself, not even allowing myself to enjoy watching an ejaculation)--but I'm at that point now where that band-aid isn't working so well anymore and I need to attack the root instead of trying to work around it.

If I can attack the real issue, I don't think it will matter whether I'm gay, bi, or... straight... no I don't think I'll ever be straight...

 

Well, earlier today I watched a particular video clip that was randomly thrown at me on Facebook, one of those clips that gets deleted really quick because, well, it's porn, and this one was straight, and for the first time ever (I don't know whether it's because it caught me off guard or what), I was able to jack off to something and THINK about the fact that I'm jacking of to something and not have this strange overwhelming guilt about it.