I have to be “thoughtful” in how I answer this question because even though it’s been years, and further more, over the course of years, of teaching workshops, I try to preserve the sanctity of confidentiality in what men have revealed. That being said I was running a workshop with about 50 men—-normally I would produce a monthly pamphlet with weekly topics and an email blast that would go out to about a thousand or more. This week’s meeting was about LGBTSGL relationships and intimacy. The funding for about 50% of the workshops I’ve done of the past two decades has come from the CDC so their encouragement is that we always try and include HIV/safe sex information or strategies.
Teaching a workshop about intimacy is always an attempt to get men who have sex with men to expand and explore their engagements with other men, whether in the short term or the potential long term relationships. I generally help/teach/encourage them to discuss fears, money, goals, desires, with a partner.
One young man, let’s call him Patrick for anonymity’s sake, had been regularly coming to this Thursday night group (it generally ran from 6pm to 9pm, with a light meal afterwards), I also ran a youth meeting for those under 27 all day Fridays and Saturdays with similar workshops structured for their age and needs. Patrick knew several of the men at the meeting, as most do, circulating throughout the same night clubs, bars, etc. so it wasn’t unusual that he had several coworkers and a supervisor there with him, who were also men, and had sex with men, identifying as they would. They all worked for a non-profit focused on sexuality in a peripheral way and as I said before, the CDC provides billions in funding across the country for sanctioned agencies/workshops that incorporate health trainings. This meant it wasn’t unusual for groups from other agencies to circulate through my men’s meeting on Thursdays—-as I and others would through their personally appropriate meetings to help bolster attendance numbers and draw in others.
I’m always trying to mix it up in workshops—-handouts, pamphlets, book chapters, books, show a video so that I can both control passages of time if it takes a while for the conversation to stir up or as guideposts to structure a workshop to a logic point and end.
I’m going on about intimacy and how we learn some things from our parents but due to having perhaps a sexuality which isn’t exclusive to heterosexuality, we have to learn same sex intimacy skills and have consideration for the fact that another man is at the same new learning curve, when Patrick raises his hand. He stands up, completely unnecessarily, and I notice that he’s had a drink or two…or four. Along the way to the agency office, he and his coworkers had stopped at Lenox Lounge, a popular, mixed sexuality spot in Harlem. Ok. They’re adults and no one’s messy intoxicated, so I noticed but didn’t care. I did note however that every time Patrick has been to my workshops in the past six months, he has rarely been sober. (You’d be surprised all the mental notes teachers make about you over time.)
Patrick starts talking about his father as being non-affectionate. Ok, the norm pretty much for this group of men (though the standing, to command attention is sort of grandiose…) Then he talks about how he’s been in therapy for the past two years. (I silently applaud this.) Patrick then goes into detail about how, he has a well paying job, he has recently broken up with a partner because he would go on drug and alcohol binges every week, rent hotel rooms and hire male escorts to come over to do drugs and do him. He talks about how this was his way of eschewing intimacy with his partner.
Now I’m kind of happy now—-not at his circumstances/actions—-but at his honesty because it’s individual honesty that usually elicits group honesty. He’s also presenting a great personal example of how he had the trophy of LGBTSGL world (a committed, loving partner) but due to malformed intimacy strategies and actions, trashed it. As a bonus point, he’s also normalizing having voluntarily gone into therapy with a prominent therapist around sexuality issues, further making my workshop check off good clinical/service bells.
Then Patrick, his work supervisor sitting next to him, drops the bombshell that due to his therapy work, he finally told his father that it was time for them to stop their sexual relationship that has been going on for 15+ years, since he hit puberty. Going into detail he explains, that he and his father were splitting the hotel and escort costs—-it has always been a drug/sex/incestuous three-way with his biological father.
Now there are times in workshops, even with my clinical, teacherly, mature “face” on, tilting my head in the way Counselor Troi showed me from Star Trek, focused non-judgment as I got from Guinan, that I’m like: “And now we have officially jumped the shark! How the natural fuck am I going to clean up this mental nuclear bomb that so and so has just detonated in the room?”
Proudly, having spent himself—-psychically across the room (yeah, make the narcissitic imagery, several men would do this over the years on purpose.) he sits down. Of course the room is in dumbfounded silence and of course I have to move us along, process what he’s just revealed. Polite Guinan smiley-face.
But then Moses, we’ll call him Moses, because he was a spry 70 years old—-bright eyed, bushytailed man who’d spent decades in the military travelling the globe and having sexual adventures that he would share readily, at the step of a foot—-raises his hand.
(“Aw, fuck…” I think because we’re now going to truly get the bowels of sexual Hell unleashed.)
Moses shares that he was born in some long since destroyed ghetto so his parents used to send him to the only sanctuary in the neighborhood, the Catholic Church. He was about 6. And it was there that the multiple “fathers” for years would take every possible form of sexual advantage of him that one could think of. And he loved it; he relished his time there. So much so that he then took his newfound skills home and often massaged his biological father—-his back, his feet, in the tub, to sexual release.
“Thank you, Moses.”
Yet another hand goes up and yet another man mentions sex with his stepfather and then another years of sex with brothers and then another raped often by his father. The rest of the tales aren’t gleefully told as Patrick and Moses did theirs, others reporting pain, humiliation, shame, as sexual abuse can induce—-Patrick and Moses staunchly defending their experiences as pleasurable and educational.
Now I’m in damage control mode because there are the ones sharing and potentially the ones not sharing and I can’t have them leave the workshops with little timebombs going off in their heads if they’ve had such experiences. You can see that I really know what “triggering” folk looks like—-not some internet bullshit that someone claims they read and sent them into a mental spiral. No, real ass triggering.
I sew up the psychic gashes as best as possible for the next hour and we break for the meal. Patrick’s supervisor explains how Patrick—-having divulged a textbook’s worth of dysfunction—-will be in charge of a whole division of their agency. I’m officially gobsmacked. And you think there are certain words that you’ve never experienced and then someone shares this loaf of Wonder Bread and you realize—-”Ohmigod, I’m gobsmacked!”
Wait for it…..
Patrick then proposes that I come work for him, he’d be my direct supervisor.
I demure.
I demurred so hard I think I broke a toe.
What can I clinically tell you about this and what have I done, taught, written about this?
I will offer that, and I’ve done some workshops on it, LGBTSGL males don't have clear definitions of sex and sexuality. I’ve written and talked about incessantly for years how often I have to do my This is Your Body breakdown with a diagram handout in 75% of all of my workshops with men.
What is also a point of concern is that there are clear demarcations of sexuality for opposite sex actions. Such as when one loses one’s virginity and what is legal and illegal based upon the age of the participants; what is morally right by Western standards of sexuality mores.
But LGBTSGL world is kind of like another planet…and you’re on the Enterprise and you visit this new planet. And their rules are so different that you’re amazed they can do the same things with their humanoid bodies.
By that example, I mean that the question of when and how do boys lose their virginity with other males if they are same sex inclined? When is it legal, right, appropriate, moral?
See the problem is that if we continue to push same sex ideation as wrong then it’s not adults who are traumatized greatly, it’s children and teenagers—-because they have no guidelines. Or better yet boundaries, they have no boundaries for what is appropriate sexual conduct and not..
What is often in place instead, which is why I was so often teaching variations on intimacy recognition and skill building, is a form of gross or maladaptive or direct pleasure seeking, sexuality.
I will tell you personally, aside from my work, what often turns me off the most, probably because of the influence of having boundaries and personal measurement standards, is how grossly blunt or graphic gay men are towards me. They genuinely want to get to know me as a person—-by asking my penis length.
But I understand this behavior because so many men grew up hiding/veiling or continuing to do so around their sexuality. So when they get a Yellow, not even a Green light, they speed through the intersection of propriety and manners. Now ratchet this gusto back to being a youth, under eighteen or even younger, and not having any money, power, limited Voice, very few tools of personal Agency and no boundaries around your sexuality. Males on this spectrum are then literally fodder for older males with more experience or simply sexual interests/desires. The majority of these males fall into the adult range or are older by several years, which makes them the more mature of the two—-they know the “rules” or what boundaries are and are essentially using the young male for sexual gratification, power, fulfillment of issues.
Notice no one ever talks about being the perpetrator with gusto—-we have a culture where the victims are only 50% of the voice of what was happening—-that veil of invisibility or lack of responsibility from the other person being what causes humiliation, shame, insecurity, etc..
Manhood, Sexuality, Identity Confusion
The confusion comes from the fact that like every other young person, whether in puberty, pre or older, we have crushes and desires—-that generally align with one or two sexualities—-one “louder” than the other, and it is experimentation/exploration that solidifies “preference”.
What an abuser is taking advantage of is that space of no boundaries, no power and confusion. A huge element of the confusion that abusers use to justify abuse its that the victim/sexual recipient can be sexually interested, erect, willing though there is a clear age/maturity difference.
Our bodies, and therefore our sexualities, are often activated by hormones long before we reach brain-emotional maturity.
There was a man in one of my workshops, Chad, we’ll call him, who regularly talked about having frottage and oral sex with his uncle. The only thing that stopped them from penetrative sex was that they were both tops. Chad was in his late teens and had a enough sexual awareness not to want to be penetrated but he was still making out, sexual with his uncle, 20+ years his senior.
Another element of the emotionally immature victim is that heterosexuality gets days, months, years of reaffirmation about one’s desires/sexual interests that same sex attracted folk don’t. So by the time an abuser spots or tries something, the victim has been pretending to be heterosexual, has been acting potentially asexual, has been desirous and is finally getting sexual attention. A boundary would be and include discernment about family relationship and propriety.
And the abuser has purposefully chosen someone who cannot or does not understand how to make such discernments. Make no mistake Patrick’s father chose him because he sensed, eye spied an availability; the fathers in the Church chose Moses because he was abandoned and unattended in many ways by poverty and then his biological father, for his own reasons, allowed a child to give him pleasure for his gratification, not Moses’.
Which is some of what I’ve confronted Patrick and Moses and several other “gleeful” victims in workshops—-Did you date? Did he take you places? did he show you off with pride?
No.
You were not a romantic/loved partner. You were an object in human form for sexual gratification. Because you weren’t special to him in the way you may perceive. And I generally hurl the mental wrench at them (for opening this can of sexuality dysfunction in my workshops) you are never the first. Ever. Nor were you the last. You were whatever you were/are because of availability not from some sort of cosmic alignment and uniqueness about you. You were available and used without discrimination or recrimination.
One gets to the other side of victimhood, because no one is supposed to stay a victim, when one recognizes or learns—-”Oh, I was a person of opportunity for this person’s issues/desires. It was deeply personal for me, but it was in no way personal to them.
To the point of male to male sexuality and man to boy love—-the point is that we grow, age, mature for a reason. Sexual maturity is different than the ages of physical capability. What this bs ideological posit forgets to account for, is from the perspective of what it means to be a responsible adult, a responsible man. Manhood is, throughout most sane cultures, responsibility, accountability and integrity.
I often challenge this way of thinking with if you’re invested in this as part of your sexuality then you should be part of the lobby for equal rights and protections as other sexualities are. Or what about the responsibility to someone of lesser maturity-mentality? Just because a child or teen thinks they want something doesn't mean they have the capacity to understand the consequences. Which of course would logically bring us to the juvenile criminal justice system distinctive from adult, because of that very lack of maturity and foresight. It’s also why we don't’ give children guns or automobiles or elect them to public office—-we understand that age and maturity are done in often non-congruent stages.
However if you are an already marginalized sexuality, like anything non-heterosexual, then there’s “wiggle” room, pointedly to boys and perhaps carnal initiations from father figures. Notice none of these older men are regularly seduced, coerced and held down by younger adult men? If their sexuality is so desirable then logically they should be irresistible to the men…and yet they're not. There’s a reason why men, father’s or not, have to aim at literally lower hanging fruit.
But I digress.
I was eternally glad that Patrick was seeing a super duper professional because healing for him would involve detangling the fact that his obvious bad boundaries, drug and alcohol abuse, public narcissism and warped professionalism, needed help. (It also spoke volumes to me about his supervisor. Often covert abusers align to controlling victims with similar but non-sexual (physical) behaviors though emotional behaviors and stratagems that involve the same manipulation and control for their means. Patrick was an excellent employee because his insane divulgences made him uber-dependent upon his supervisor’s esteem and job.)
Yes, I refused the job offers several more times because bluntly, non-profits don't’ pay enough for that kind of cray-cray. I’d rather be a personal assistant to you know, a Kardashian or a Real Housewife.
What I mean by that and I’ve written about this before, and the above isolates it—-is I found myself at that agency and several others, focused on LGBTSGL folk, were run by people who were overt or covert abusers. They are places ripe for pinpointing victims, those who have been previously victimized and being the sole support system for those ostracized from their families (boundaries/maturity). That agency eventually went under from ego and corruption.
I would also cast out as another idea/thought that some of the reasons why, besides the sexual, that young non-heterosexuals males allow father/older male sexual engagement is due to older male abandonment. They don’t learn appropriate boundaries, relationships, acceptance and love. I often mention in classes clarifying between my biological father and stepfathers (several) my mother making several attempts to create stable marriages/relationships. But even in there being multiple men (who yes, had their dysfunctions) all tried in various ways to fulfill, fill or be fathers to me, show me manhood, healthy relationships. And in the areas they failed, I was able to discern success from failure.
I offer that because sometimes standing in my workshops, certainly a decade a ago, I questioned why I was the facilitator, why I was by many comparative points similar and yet healthier, happier, joyful, inside. The alchemy of having fathers through at least 75% of my pre-21 years old (when I left for college) time significantly helped me construct a healthy garden to further grow the seeds and saplings of manhood in. I think about that a lot, would even look at gay male friends and hear the chorus of their yearning, need, dysfunction and abandonment and watch it play out in insane promiscuity, self-destruction, depression, addiction, suicidal ideation, sexuality shame and confusion. The various political, social, religious organizations that espouse the faults of marginalized people—-whether by ethnicity, poverty or sexuality—-are right—-having responsible adults as parental figures disrupts dysfunction. I spent a lot of time counseling men, teens, tweens, etc. acting as a strong paternalistic figure. For at least half it was a bit too late, they’d already imbibed the Kool Aid of their own dysfunction and insanity.
I decided to write this because I know the question is provocative and a couple of folk want to play get off games on such things, mainly gay men, because of maladaptive sexual maturity. Patrick and Moses and others, were all hurting, in pain, destroying themselves. Eventually Patrick lost his job, cycling in and out of addiction for years. Moses eventually died, kept at arms length by dozens of men who could’ve been good friends or even potential lovers because his sexual attentions—-just in casual chit chat—-were so gross, boundary-less, slovenly that he had become a victimizer.
The psychological thinking/theory/proof is that the abused have the potentiality to become abusers if there isn’t several forms of intervention, change, re-learning. I can tell you from my own sexual abuse past that at 13, a young friend came onto me with promises that he had done the same with his brothers/cousins. Revolted, I threw him out of a window. Don't’ be upset, we lived on the first floor and regularly climbed in and out of my bedroom window. But I summarily rejected him.
My Doing My Own Healing Work
Later, I would do two years of an Incest Anonymous group then a group around sexual abuse for 2 more years in college and over the course of 2 years of private therapy (I believe one should have counseling a year every decade of one’s adult life) I discussed and worked through my sexual abuse issues. It helped tremendously facilitating workshops and teaching classes, listening to men and women for twenty years.
We’re not even going to list the books and videos I have about all facets of the subject and all permutations of victims, victimhood and victimizers. Which is pone of the reasons why I was an LGBTSGL Youth Coordinator.
No, my abusers, two, were cousins, not my father or stepfathers.
Fathers and Sons
So yes, specifically it happens between males, the abuser being fathers because they too have some sort of historical sexual dysfunction or boundary crossing by other adults so they don't do what we all “learn” to do—-have a thought, see an image, and disagree with it, not simply due to social programming, but to what abusers don’t do—-think about, before they act on it, dispel it—-abusers think it and start the seduction process—-never empathetically consider what this will do to their victim for the rest of their lives.
Never forget that the perpetrator wasn't trying to create a public, consensual mutually gratifying romantic/sexual experience for BOTH involved. The victim is simply a living object for gratification of the perpetrator’s ego and nether regions.
Yes, some like Patrick and Chad and Moses will wax on about the delight in the sexual attention but they’re like fruit pies showing the golden crust, uncut into slice of their minds/selves not understanding that some of us can see the other side of the pie—-smashed, damaged, unable to form healthy relationships, narcissitic, perhaps even having graduated to perpetrators themselves.
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