Being used sexually by older boys and men when he was in care wouldn’t make him gay -it would, however, make him distrust himself and his motives for relating and feeling sexual, which is a very different thing. His poignant yearning for his absent father, and consequent idealisation of him, means that every man he has a relationship with has the impossible task of being a daddy replacement – which may explain his bitter disappointment in relationships. He also had an absent mother – but that doesn’t fit in with the notion that homosexuality in men is “caused” by dominant mothers. Could it be that he yearned for father figures more than mother figures in later life because he is gay, not the other way around?
On the other hand, his hatred of the gay scene I do understand, especially the cruel-cool London gay “community”. He’s been single for years? Yup, know that one. But he’s looking for the gay scene to “enhance his life”? Oh dear. There are many things wrong with the (gay) world, but the only way it can be changed is if people get off their backsides and do something about it.
But the reason he stays around the gay scene is that it supplies him with lots and lots of sex – but he devalues it, is quite contemptuous of it in fact. He says he’s not into “one-night-stands” so I imagine the sort of sex he has is extra-mural, cruising or cottaging, as he says he has a lot of it. Why isn’t this mentioned? Sadly, he says that he couldn’t have a relationship with God because of what he’s been doing sexually – the spirit/flesh polarity in Christianity. But does he end up having sex with men on the first night, and then lamenting that they don’t stay around? Hm. I do know that one, too.
Hearing about his harrowing childhood, it seems that it was tailor-made to leave him doubting himself, hating himself, no matter what he turned out to be. There is a myth that single people, especially sexually active single men, are “destined to a life being unsatisfied”. That’s life – it is, in the main, unsatisfying, for a hell of a lot of us. Gay men don’t have the monopoly on disappointment.
I thought he was brave to leave the group – “I’m hurting too much and I don’t think you’re going to be able to solve my problem”, he tells them, and I’m afraid that’s true. But it was impressive to watch him turn his back on the bible-bashers, and hear his criticisms of them, for they are, after all, very sophisticated in the dark arts of shame-based manipulation.
I imagine the purging of his painful feelings from childhood has released him from some of the more compulsive traits of his sexuality, freed him up to choose a bit more – but he could have got that from a non-religious therapy group, that catharsis and consequent calm. On the radio on Tuesday he spoke of being bisexual, which wasn’t mentioned in the TV programme – so that’s a bit confusing. He has always had choices. The trick is to become conscious of how we are blind to them.
Oh I don’t know. I have some of the same questions that he has, but I’ve come up with different answers. So it was good to see one man being so honest about his depression and his struggles with it, and to hear trenchant criticism of the hedonism of the gay scene. But I think he’s in trouble if he looks for the solution to his pain outside, in the gay “community” or in a counsellor or in a group – it has to come from inside him. And as he was sailing down the canal at the end with his godson talking about feeling calmer inside, more at peace, I was happy for him.