Growing Up Gay
When I think back of my early childhood, I can remember moving with my parents and little sister to a city in southern Sweden called Tranås. I started in a new school, and I was fascinated, in a rather special way, by a particular boy in my class. While my thoughts at that time were not particularly sexual (I was nine at the time), I often thought about whether or not I thought this boy beautiful. I had problems settling the issue in my mind, but nevertheless, I looked at him ever so often, and I felt pleasure while doing so.
As time went on, as I entered puberty, I began to take a more active, albeit still very discrete, interest in other boys. While in the locker room after physical education, I detected that I was sexually attracted to several of the other boys, and I also saw many boys walking around the school corridors who caught my attention. Sometimes I looked them up in the school's photo catalog to see what their names were, and in my free time, I often dreamt about being physically close to them.
But during this period of adolescence, I never really thought about what I was. All the things that took place in the emotional-sexual realm were, admittedly, real and concrete to me: I experienced real feelings for other boys (love, infatuation, sexual attraction). But at the same time, on an "intellectual" level, I never confronted these feelings, and so I continued having them without worrying about them or trying to transform them in any way. They just were, and that was fine with me. While some opponents of homosexuality often claim that it is "unnatural" (a claim which is thoroughly refuted in the essay "Homosexuality and the 'Unnaturalness Argument'"), for me, my homosexual feelings were very natural indeed.
When I was 16, I became a Christian, which complicated matters quite a bit. After a conversion in the summer of 1984, during which I confessed Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, I joined the Pentecostal Church by being baptized on December 9. While I felt great satisfaction about being a part of the Christian church, I gradually encountered attitudes among fellow Christians and in the Bible which were rather hostile towards homosexuality in any form. I adopted that negative attitude, and I became quite a vocal homophobe.
I grew up in a church much like most children in Louisiana. As I became older I began to worry. The church taught that homosexuality is an abomination, and that I would burn in hell forever. Well, I panicked, such as any child who questions their sexuality would. Being the
During the late 1800s and 1900s in various societies, imperialism played a major role. Imperialism consists of a country's domination of an economic and cultural life in another country. Within the 1800s and 1900s, Europe became a large-scale global leader. Europeans set up colonies all over the world, specifically Africa, India, China, and Japan. Imperialism is viewed through two different major points such as the imperialist and colonialist.
Society has grown to accept and be more opened to a variety of new or previously shunned cultural repulsions. Lesbians, transgenders, and gays for example were recognized as shameful mistakes in society. In the story Giovanni 's Room, the author James Baldwin explores the hardships of gays in the 1960. The book provides reasons why it is difficult for men to identify themselves as homosexuals. This is shown through the internalized voice of authority, the lack of assigned roles for homosexuals in society and the consequences entailed for the opposite gender.
Andrew Sullivan, author of, What is a Homosexual, portrays his experience growing up; trapped in his own identity. He paints a detailed portrait of the hardships caused by being homosexual. He explains the struggle of self-concealment, and how doing so is vital for social acceptation. The ability to hide one’s true feelings make it easier to be “invisible” as Sullivan puts it. “The experience of growing up profoundly different in emotional and psychological makeup inevitably alters a person’s self-perception.”(Sullivan)This statement marks one of the many reasons for this concealment. The main idea of this passage is to reflect on those hardships, and too understand true self-conscious difference. Being different can cause identity problems, especially in adolescents.
For years homosexuality in the United States of America has been looked down upon by citizens, religions, and even politicians. The homosexual culture, or the LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender), has been demoralized and stuck out and lashed against by the Heterosexual community time and time again. To better understand the LGBT community we must first grasp the concept of Sexual Orientation.
Different anthropologists such as Nowak and Laird (2010), and Butler (2006), recommended that these residents of jungles contain an exclusive background; position, morals and everyday life is entirely through big adjustment. It can be said that the Mbuti people live in their own world. This paper will discuss the kinship system and the social organization of the culture as far as how they practice equal sharing of food after engaging in hunting and gathering. This paper will also discuss how the Mbuti culture uses gender relation to determine their hunting ages.
Puberty is a difficult time for any child, but for transgender teens, it can be the difference between becoming who they want to be or remaining in the wrong body. In June of this year, PBS Frontline released a documentary, entitled Growing Up Trans, which chronicled the lives of eight transgender and nonbinary children, from the ages of 9 to 19, as they navigated through the process of transitioning to their prefered genders. Some of the kids took hormone blockers to slow down their puberty, others were going through puberty at the time and wanted to transition before it was complete, and one had already gone through puberty and was still taking hormones to transition. The controversy revolving around the documentary focused on whether or
It is first beneficial to know the definition of piracy. Piracy has been characterized multiple ways from multiple disciplines. For the purpose of this paper, I will apply the definition of piracy from the 1982 United ...
The act of "coming out" is a complex political tool. Its use is open to ambiguous possibilities, ranging from subverting social order to reinforcing those power structures. Of course, it is undoubtedly an empowering act for many non-heterosexual persons to identify themselves as such. Even if the categories of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" are entirely socially constructed (as Michel Foucault argues), that does not mean that they are not real categories of thought that shape the way we live our lives. Indeed, my computer is entirely constructed, but is still undeniably real. Since many non-heterosexual people do live their lives identifying differently from heterosexual people, they may find "homosexual" (or a similar label) an accurate description of their identities and daily lives, however socially contingent that description is. That said, I do not wish to make a judgement call on whether or not someone should or should not come out. Rather, I wish to examine the complicated space represented by "the closet" and the multifarious effects that "coming out" has on the larger social structure.
The debate over homosexuality as nature or nurture dominates most topics about homosexuality. People often confuse the nature/nurture issue with the development of gay identity. In fact, the nature/nurture argument plays a small, insignificant role concerning gay youths (Walling 11). Homosexual identity is the view of the self as homosexual in association with romantic and sexual situations (Troiden 46) Many researchers have either discussed or created several models or theories concerning the development of homosexual identity. However, the most prominent is Troiden’s sociological four-stage model of homosexual identity formation. Dr. Richard R. Troiden desc...
Osmundson, Joseph. "'I Was Born This Way': Is Sexuality Innate, and Should It Matter?" Harvard Kennedy School. N.p., 2011. Web. 11 Feb. 2014. .
In the rural, Catholic village that I grew up in, there were a total of 3-5 gay people ranging in age from teenagers to adults. When we would go out of town and see a presumed member of the LGBT community, I often heard homophobic comments. Most of the residents in my hometown were born and raised there, for at least two generations. Be it that homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness or the fact that everyone is Catholic, the community was moderately homophobic. This played a large role in the formation of my identity over the next several
Sexual attraction is an everyday part of life that has different effects on each person. In the following paper I am going to discuss the different types of sexual attraction for adolescences ages 12-20, early adulthood ages 20-30, mature adulthood 30-65, and older adults age 65 and older. Sexual attraction: which sex are you attracted to, or are you attracted to both men and women? Then we have sexual behavior: what sex are your partners? And finally, we have sexual identity: how do you think of yourself are you gay, straight, or bisexual? Some of us develop feelings of attraction to a one type of sex before we self-label
The sexual orientation of a person has been a critical debate over the past several centuries. For several...
Just like Alfred Kinsey said “The world is not divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.” The world is divided into people that want many different things in life, everyone has a different opinion and mind set on what they want. Some people have other beliefs and values than other people, so we cannot judge them for being themselves. I believe that sexuality is the way that you express yourself through sex, or sexual actions. There are many factors that go into sexuality. I mainly learned about how sex worked through my health and child development classes. There were other things that contributed to my knowledge on sex, those were media, talking with friends or people at school, and my family values. How I think about sex is greatly impacted by these factors, some factors impacted me more than others but all of them still have an impact on my beliefs today.