Support for gay marriage is on the rise. Every new survey shows greater tolerance and greater acceptance of the fact that homosexuality is a personally integral and relational truth that warrants equal rights.
With this support, we also see the rise of greater diversity in gay culture depicted by the media. Certainly the suburban gay parent is a fairly recent standard prototype in the collective consciousness that has gained traction from popular fiction, namely Modern Family and The Kids Are All Right, and from real-life celebrity parents like Rosie O'Donnell and Neil Patrick Harris.
The suburban gay parent does much to humanize the prevailing stereotype that depicts lesbians and gay men solely as promiscuous and unstable, propagated just last month by the conservative, religious website LifeSiteNews in response to Newsweek's recent cover story on sex addiction: "[H]omosexuals are known for having superficial, short-term relationships and hundreds of lifetime sex partners..." (That's perhaps the least offensive quote in their homophobic article.)
I have to wonder about the degree to which any so-called "deviant" lifestyle traits displayed by LGBT people are ultimately an inherent psychological reaction to institutionalized homophobia at every level.
Let's take this trip. First, there's the closet, this toxic idea that it's not OK to be gay, compelling LGBT children to hide their truth. Gay kids live in silence for fear of the repercussions of disclosure, which can include rejection, abandonment, and bullying to the point of suicide. Gay bullying is perpetrated by peers, parents, teachers, community leaders, and world leaders.
While many minorities suffer oppression, from disenfranchisement to outright discrimination to persecution, few minorities additionally experience such extreme degrees of intimidated relational repression during formative years as the LGBT community. What effect does this have on people? As a result of this coerced repression, there exists insufficient co-regulation to explore appropriate relational valuing, which is the process of integrating personal reality with authentic expression that results in healthy, intimate relationships.
Instead, an abyss has to be crossed where a child "comes out." For LGBT people, this is a rite of passage with a wide range of emotions that is experienced mostly in emotional isolation.
The process of coming out results in highly emotive events that border on the traumatic, and these initial experiences have a profound effect on the psyches of LGBT people, especially while brains are still forming in teenage years. Such traumatic, emotionally isolated events can become psychologically idealized, because there is so much personal meaning behind the experience of reaching a positive state of self-acceptance. This ideation is often transposed onto the attending circumstances, which might include conflict, denial, deception, fear, anonymity, and sexual experimentation. This is practically a recipe for an involuntary pattern of sex addiction and/or love addiction to emerge over the long term. To state this clearly: sex and love addiction have little to do with actual pleasure and more to do with unconsciously replaying the emotional features of repressed trauma. The just-released film Shame eloquently underscores this reality.
Coming out is, of course, a long and painful process. In the initial stages, anonymity reflects a crucial and reasonable need for self-preservation for any closeted gay person, whether cruising the Internet or the gay scene. Early casual sex hookups provide not only a sexual release for pent-up stress but also a means of connection with the larger gay community and even sex education through those with shared experiences. As a result, gay sex often becomes synonymous with gay identity.
Most addictions of any nature can be traced back to early childhood trauma. For example, masturbation often becomes a coping mechanism at the onset of puberty, when family power dynamics first start to implode. The release of neurochemicals preceding orgasm numbs painful feelings and creates pleasurable feelings. Seriously, who wouldn't want pleasurable feelings in place of painful feelings? The problem with any addiction is that it does not get rid of painful feelings. They only become dormant and thus prolonged, sometimes reinforced by shame and grief, over time growing more painful until they are finally processed, either through heroic confrontation or utter chaos.
Most sexual acting out is often an attempt at recreating the original emotive trauma as a means to heal it. Usually the effects of years of denial and compartmentalization have gone unprocessed, despite any appearances to the contrary. Lacking new tools, the trauma merely becomes reinforced and can become a pattern. When this pattern becomes unsatisfying and inescapable, this might be considered an addiction.
One of the roots of sex addiction is an inability to cope with trauma and shame, feelings that LGBT people may struggle with as a community more so than their non-LGBT counterparts. However, gay sex addiction is no different from straight sex addiction.
Still, there can be impenetrable denial on the part of the gay sex addict, who often equates promiscuity with personal empowerment, a self-avowed lifestyle choice that expresses hard-won gay rights. Likewise, sex addiction treatment via professionals or 12-step support can appear as a moralistic judgment against LGBT freedoms rather than what it really is: modeled guidance to greater freedom and choice in relational intimacy and the true individual expression of functional and fulfilling lifelong LGBT values.
Follow Alexandra Katehakis, M.F.T. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sexaddexpert
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Are you sure you posted the right link. I didn't see anything in it to justify this characterization. In fact, a text search of the article for the sequence 'homo' resulted in 0 hits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersexual_disorder
Medicine (ASAM) released a new definition of addiction highlighting
that addiction is a chronic brain disorder and not simply a behavioral problem involving too much alcohol, drugs, gambling or sex. This the first time ASAM has taken an official position that addiction is not solely related to problematic substance use."
http://www.asam.org/DefinitionofAddiction-LongVersion.html
Nowadays, yeah, sure, I'd like to have a same-sex partner. But like I said, maybe it's my age. I'm more interested in the day-to-day aspects of living with another guy. Sex --- I figure if it's going to happen, it'll happen. But it's more important to me now to focus on the quality of the relationship, which includes so much more than just sex.
And if anybody has the ability to forward this comment to Mr. Ricky Martin, I'd be ever so grateful ...
Secondly, having said that, I wonder if there is any objective and non-judgmental way to define "sexual compulsion." When I was in training as a social worker/sex therapist, there was a joke about the definition of "promiscuous." The definition was "anybody who's getting more than I am." One of the things I've learned is that there are tremendous differences between individuals regarding sexual desire. Some people are four-times-a-day kind of people, while others are twice-a-month-is-fine-thank-you-very-much kind of people. I've found this diversity to be within normal parameters, especially when evaluating the 4X a day folks - nothing about their normal daily lives was affected: not their jobs, not their relationships, not their health, nor any other thing, but I knew of one therapist who "diagnosed" such people as having "sexual addiction."
Which gets me back to my question: "Is there some objective and non-judgmental way to define sexual compulsivity?"
I think the key to diagnosing a sexual compulsion versus normal sexual behavior would be how that behavior impacts the individual in other areas of his or her life. Even if a person is "promiscuous", if they are happy and content in their lifestyle, able to function successfully in other facets of their life (i.e. sex does not control their lives), then why do they need to be labeled or judged?
Thank you for your smart comments!
I hope that helps.
It would be infinitely helpful if our society and government policies treated addiction as a psychological and medical problem, rather than a religious-moral problem deserving of snide condemnation from the 'righteous' and incarceration in our barbaric prison system.
Notice how many of our politicians get caught is obviously risky sexual misadventures? Their addiction to fame and power is not always recognized for what it is. Again, addictions tend to come in clusters.
I agree and have always thought along these lines. When you actually think about the damage done, prior to coming out, it's no wonder that there are sexual/emotional issues a-plenty. They talk about the rite-of-passage & stress of people moving from teenage years to adult- now add to that you're gay, isolated, have few role models, are told you are not acceptable, threatened (by family & strangers)...it isn't difficult to venture these facts might lead to finding your way via physical contact in order to educate yourself on what you may or may not eventually seek in a partner.
However, I dispute the "hundreds" of sex partners, as well as the phenomenon of being promiscuous as only a "gay thing". There are plenty of str8 Lotharios out there...male & female.