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Being queer, I never thought I’d find God; then he found me

I grew up thinking that i wasn't allowed to love or praise god precisely because i am gay. yet, god kept appearing in my life..

Josh Kruger

The author, right, stands with a mentor, Father Gordon Reid, at Easter. (Image courtesy of Josh Kruger)

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Questioning Your Sexuality Is More Than Just a Phase

W e don’t live in a world where sexuality is commonly accepted as something that can change, bend, or even be questioned in private. The cultural presumption, oftentimes, is that people are heterosexual until stated otherwise. And if they are not heterosexual, then they will fit neatly into one of the letters in the LGBTQIA+ acronym for life. It’s an unfortunate bind that can create tension for anyone who doesn’t feel completely aligned with heterosexual or homosexual desires, or who notices that their sexual desires ebb and flow.

Contrary to popular belief, the “Q” in “LGBTQIA+” isn’t just a reference to “queer.” It also calls attention to those of us who are “questioning.” Anyone who isn’t sure how to categorize their sexuality can fall under the umbrella of questioning. In fact, they may struggle with reconciling their desires and attractions with the label under which they primarily identify. This unsureness can stir up anxiety for the person experiencing it as well as potential partners who may want definitive answers before committing to a sexual or romantic relationship with them. Questioning is thought of as a brief stop along the path to “figuring it all out.” It isn’t thought of as “real.”

We don’t know what to do with people who are amid exploring what feels sexually authentic to them. It just feels too messy and confusing. But if we acknowledged the complicated nature of sexuality and how much it varies and changes, we would all have more freedom to explore who our authentic sexual selves are. Questioning is more than just a phase—it’s a practice and identity that is more common than we would like to admit.

There is more to sexual orientation than the binary of being either heterosexual or homosexual . But it wasn’t until the 1948 publishing of Alfred Kinsey’s pivotal work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, that there was an accounting for the area that exists between straight and gay. The Kinsey Scale was the first measure of heterosexuality to homosexuality with many gradients in between. Ranging from 0-6, the idea of a sexual orientation scale, or spectrum, allowed for categorizing people over time. A Kinsey “2” score, for instance, alluded to someone who is predominantly heterosexual, and, as the scale called it, “only incidentally homosexual.” The incidentally homosexual term referred to in practice or in feelings or thoughts. The range from 2-5 on the Kinsey Scale is the space where perhaps the most questioning occurs because that’s where there isn’t a completely solid throughline between one’s attractions and sexual partners.

Despite the existence of this range of sexual orientation, we don’t give space to those who are questioning. For people who have been in only heterosexual relationships and want to explore other desires, for instance, it may feel intrusive or wrong to waltz into LGBTQIA+ spaces. On the other hand, people who have not been 100% heterosexual, especially men, may receive judgements from straight partners who feel they could be hiding or repressing their true desires. But sexuality is more complex than that. Our thoughts and behaviors may not always align. People may be drawn to erotica or porn that depicts sex that varies from their own sexual experiences, or have powerful fantasies that are jarring because of the gender of the people involved. People can identify as straight but have romantic crushes on people of the same sex. We may call it “bromance” or a “friend crush,” but that can also someteims have sexual undertones. Or people may label times when they had partners who didn’t match their sexual orientation as “experimenting.” All of these incredibly common experiences show how we would all do better to recognize questioning as valid and helpful for developing a fuller picture of our sexuality.

Questioning isn’t limited to just sexual orientation. It can also include gender identity and gender expression . Over the course of the lifespan, people may experience incongruence between their biological sex and the way they feel internally or how they would like to be seen by others. It may take time to land on a gender identity that rings true, and this could also change as new insights develop and someone’s sense of self develops. With so many ways to describe gender identity and expression , it makes sense that it could take time to understand what makes the most sense for each person.

Questioning can also occur when people contemplate the ways in which they would like to engage in relationships. People may question monogamy or whether they may be asexual or aromantic. They may need to experience different ways of being in relationships to determine what’s right for them. Identifying as questioning can be helpful when dating and engaging in different types of relationships. It signals to potential partners that you’re exploring and do not have fixed ideals about relationships at the moment. This can take the pressure off of dating as a whole, and helps set realistic expectations for people you date. There are so many people who are questioning, but feel pressured to say they’re looking for a long-term relationship or something casual when they really don’t know what will work for them. It’s way better to say at the outset and minimize confusion or hurt feelings.

Read More: Sex Changes as We Age. Let’s Embrace That

The process of questioning is non-linear and can occur throughout a person’s life. After having worked with many questioning clients, I know how important it is to claim questioning as an identity for people doing the deep work of trying to figure out their attractions and relationship needs. I’ve seen my clients embrace saying “I don’t know” rather than get embarrassed or ashamed when they're asked about what they're looking for. And I’ve seen them connect with other people who are also questioning, and want support and connection while they discover who they are.

Questioning doesn’t have to be stressful or anxiety-inducing. We naturally question what and who we like, how we want to be treated and what kinds of partnerships and communities we want to build. People who are exploring their sexuality deserve the space to do so, no matter how long it takes or what the outcome is. Because sexuality can change and surprise so many of us, it’s important to recognize questioning as an authentic experience—for others and for ourselves.

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Sexual Orientation

What does it mean to be a gay man, coming out means valuing your "difference" more than others' approval..

Posted March 1, 2018

Understanding Sexual Orientation
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So many gay men grow up believing there is something “wrong” with us because we are different from other supposedly “normal” males. We expend considerable energy hiding our genuine selves from everyone around us—including those who care about us and, too often and most insidiously, from ourselves.

We project an image we believe will let us fit in with those whose approval we seek. It’s not surprising that a term like “straight-acting” shows up so often in gay men’s online personal ads. It presumably means the advertiser considers himself a “real” man—real, that is, according to a standard of masculinity he doesn’t attribute to other gay men.

American males of all sexual orientations are raised in a culture that insists the only way to be a man is to be “manly,” which typically requires denying our fear , loneliness , tenderness, and need for love, and projecting an attitude of invincibility. Harvard psychologist William Pollack calls it the “Boy Code,” the messages instilled in a million ways from our youngest age telling us that “real” boys must keep a stiff upper lip, not show their feelings, act tough, and be cool.

Pollack writes in his book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood , that “perhaps the most traumatizing and dangerous injunction thrust on boys and men is the literal gender straitjacket that prohibits boys from expressing feelings or urges seen (mistakenly) as ‘feminine’—dependence, warmth, empathy.”

So many gay men learn we are different from other boys by having the fact pointed out and ridiculed by bullies during our young, most impressionable, years. Our young peers become pint-size enforcers of the Boy Code—using shame and even violence to enforce conformity to the absurd notion that every male is heterosexual and expresses his maleness only within a limited, permitted range of emotions and behaviors.

As every gay man knows who has been insulted or assaulted for his actual or perceived sexual orientation , there are steep penalties for violating the Boy Code as there are for anyone who is “different” from the presumed (typically white, heterosexual, middle-class) standard.

How does a gay kid survive the trauma he suffers for being different in a culture that still condemns his difference as something bad or “less-than” and wants to mold him into the same shape it tries to mold every boy?

Robert Pollack says the most important thing a family can do to support their gay son is to keep loving him, “to convey to him, as soon as he shares his feelings, that he is still loved through and through, that his sexual orientation will not in any way diminish how much he is admired and respected. These are the things a boy needs most to hear.”

What a man most needs to hear—from others, but most importantly from himself, in his own mind—is that he is okay just as he is. He needs to know that it’s okay not only to be gay if that's what he is, but to be a man who chooses what being a man means for himself .

Fortunately there is a long history of gay men who bucked the accepted definitions of masculinity and created lives that expressed their understanding of themselves and how they choose to express their identity as men who don’t necessarily fit traditional molds.

The late Harry Hay often called "the father of the modern gay movement," founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in the fall of 1950 for gay men to gather and ponder the questions Hay had long been asking: Who are gay people? Where do gay people come from? Where have gays been throughout history?

Hay didn’t intend the Mattachines to be a political organization per se, but a group that would come together to enhance their self-understanding and explore the contributions gay people had made to the human race through the ages. The group was named after the secret male societies in France that in the Middle Ages dressed as jesters and used dance and comedy—a kind of camp humor —to mock the king and ridicule society’s false pretenses.

In a 1987 essay titled “A Separate People Whose Time Has Come,” Hay described homosexuals as “spirit people,” who, throughout the ages, had served society in their roles as “messengers and interceders, shamans of both genders, priestesses and priests, imagemakers and prophets, mimes and rhapsodes, poets and playwrights, healers and nurturers, teachers and preachers, tinkers and tinkerers, searchers and researchers.”

Hay believed that gay people had something special to teach nongay people about human life, and for that reason should be nurtured, rather than reviled, by society. He postulated that “gay people represent a genetic mutation of consciousness whose active fostering is now required for human survival.”

Hay believed that gay men are different from heterosexuals and that those differences go much deeper than mere sexual attraction to other men. He said gay men look at the world differently, are uniquely nonaggressive, noncompetitive, oriented toward sharing and inclined to develop what Hay called “subject-subject” love relationships of equals.

In a 1990 interview for the Washington Blade , Harry Hay told me our calling as gay men “is not only to accept our uniqueness, but to affirm it, make it joyous.”

For gay men, learning to accept our “different” sexual orientation as a positive aspect of ourselves is only part of our “coming out.” For all men, regardless of sexual orientation, the bigger challenge is to embrace the things about ourselves that make us unique—even when they don’t comport with the prevailing notions of what it means to be a man.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), the American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, poet, champion of individualism and opponent of conformity, put it so well, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

John-Manuel Andriote is an award-winning author, journalist, speaker, and communication consultant.

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When we fall prey to perfectionism, we think we’re honorably aspiring to be our very best, but often we’re really just setting ourselves up for failure, as perfection is impossible and its pursuit inevitably backfires.