Defining Oneself
Submitted by GCFboi on January 03 2001 23:29:43
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Hello again everybody! Happy new year, and I hope you all had a good Christmas. I enjoyed reading the posts from the last couple of weeks. You know, suddenly, for the first time, I feel like this board is the only place in the whole world where I can truly be honest about everything I feel. That makes me both happy and sad. I am very happy to have people to talk to, who I know will not judge or hate me. I am sad that there are so few people in real life who are like that. Although I have a couple of friends in real life who are BLers, both of those men have moved away in the last couple of years to other cities, and now I only can talk to them long-distance. And they are both very busy professionals, so it is hard even to find the time to talk. So I am a bit more lonely now than I used to be. Of course, I am lucky to have anyone to talk to at all, but still there is something nice about having someone present in flesh and blood. I guess I didn't realize how fortunate I was at the time. I kind of took those friendships for granted. As I have said before, it is only within the last three years that I have really started to think critically about my sexual orientation. I've known that I was gay since I was about 11 or 12 years old, but at first I just repressed it and prayed to become heterosexual, and then after I came out in my late teens, I took the unfortunate route of "have sex first, ask questions later". There was a regrettable period of time during which I was really just into sex and pornography, and was not interested in actually getting to know myself or being healthy. That was how I got myself into the situations where I was sexually abused. I was not thinking about the consequences of my actions. (It must also be said, that there were exactly TWO healthy relationships for me during that phase. Somehow, in the midst of all my problems, I mananged to have a couple of boyfriends who I actually got to know and love as people before having sex with them. In retrospect, I don't know why I felt the need for all the other, shallow relationships, when apparently I WAS capable of having loving relationships all along--I guess it had something to do with low self-esteem and a feeling of emptiness that I was trying to fill). But it was only after I made the decision get into therapy and recovery for my sex addiction that I really began to ask a lot of questions about myself. Now I am at the point where I feel I am facing a new question, that I never really thought about until I started exploring boylove on the internet: What really is the difference between being a gay man, and a teenboylover? It is clear to me that I am not like all of the other boylovers in the world, because I am not sexually attracted to prepubescent boys. (I do LIKE younger boys; they are very cute and adorable, but I don't have sexual feelings for them like I do for teens). For the first ten years that I knew I was attracted to other males (that is, until I was 21), I assumed that all gay men were interested in teen boys like I was. It was not until some older gay men started to make fun of me for talking about my feelings for teenage boys, that I realized that this was not the case. Now I am wondering, what percentage of gay men are teenboylovers? How much of a minority within a minority am I? Do I have two separate sexual orientations, or one continuous one? It seems to me that the situation of a relationship where one person is in their late teens (16-19), and the other is in their early to mid-twenties, is a fairly common one. This seems to fall within the category of what is considered "gay" by most people. But what about the situation where the younger person is 12-15? Or where the older person is above 25? Can that be called "gay", or is that better described as "boylove". This seems to be a gray area to me, and I don't know quite how to define it. It is clear to me that no matter how old I get, my feelings are probably not going to change. I will always be attracted to men, so I will always be gay, but I will also always be attracted to teen boys, including younger teens, and I don't know, as I get older, whether I will belong in the gay community for feeling this way. I don't know if anyone can answer these questions for me, but somehow I feel like I am caught in the middle between the gay community and the boylove community. I don't know quite which one I fit into better. (And why the hell is "fitting in" important to me anyway?? I wish I knew. I guess I just feel lonely sometimes.) The thing that makes me sad, though, is that there seems to be a lot of anti-BL prejudice among many gay people (even moreso than straights sometimes). All the people who have ever called me "pedophile" have been other gay men, not straight people. That hurts me, and it makes me wonder. Boylovers seem to be more understanding and less judgmental overall. Lately I have found myself feeling more at home visiting boylove sites on the net, than gay sites. Somehow I feel like I am hated by many of my own peers in the gay community, because "normal" gay men are not supposed to like teenage boys. I guess my problem is that I like both older men and teen boys, and I don't want to have to deny either part of my sexuality. I can't imagine my life being whole without my older friends, or my younger friends. And I don't understand why the question of my sexual indentity bothers me so much, when I try to tell myself that I don't even care about labels. I guess somehow I am worried that I will not be accepted in the gay community, though, if I try to be honest there about the feelings that I have. Boylove seems to be even more taboo sometimes among gays than among straights. Maybe I just need more time to think and ask questions. Since the days when people first started making fun of me for my feelings, I've never taken the first step to come out as a teenboylover to anyone in real life; all the people who have come out to me, have done so on their own initiative. I don't know what any of my other friends would think of me if I told them. I honestly don't know whether the majority of my gay friends are like me, or not. I'm afraid to ask them. Well, thanks for listening. I suppose there are no easy answers. I just wish people weren't so obsessed with labels, and with defining what is "normal" for one group or another. I wish I could just be myself without having to try to live up to what society wants "normal" gay men to be like. |
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