A GAY GUY LOOKING FOR NAKED GUYS IN THE LOCKER ROOM

Hi Project,

I am a normal gay guy 25 years old (recently) but, I say immediately I have never had sexual intercourses with anyone, neither with a girl nor with a guy. Nevertheless I feel a very strong sexual attraction, there are guys to whom I tried to make it clear that I was interested in them, but obviously or they were not gay, or, if they were, they were not interested in me. So I’ve not even had a real emotional relationship with a guy.

All my sex life, since I was 14, is dominated by pornography. When I was very young I spent hours and hours watching porn videos online, sometimes I stayed up all night for this, I had a collection of sites that I visited often, practically every day. Masturbation had become at the same time my only pleasure and my obsession, I masturbated two or three times every day, then I thought I was a pathological case because I did not have a girlfriend and masturbated so much on gay videos.

Time has passed, a lot of psychological complexes don’t even exist anymore, that is, I don’t have problems for my desires, I try to realize them and that’s it. Pornography always dominates the picture but now I use it a lot more selectively, there are some actors that I like a lot and also some content that doesn’t attract me at all, like anal penetration. I have nothing against those who practice it and consider it pleasant, but frankly such things never went through my head, it seems strange to me that I find it everywhere, in practice in all gay videos. Perhaps this is another anomaly of mine.

Six months ago a new adventure began. I, who had never crossed the entrance of a swimming pool or a of gym because I was afraid of getting excited and having to run away literally with my tail between my legs, I began to go to the pool three times a week just to stay in a sporting environment all masculine in which nudity was a common sight.

In fact, when I go to the swimming pool, in the changing rooms and in the showers I always see so many guys completely naked, even if the environment has something erotic just for me. I see clearly that for others the thing is totally indifferent. So many guys stay naked in the locker room for a very long time, they chat with others and even with me completely naked, they come closer, because for them all this doesn’t create any problem. They do not even feel embarrassed for a half erection or an almost complete one. Everything is covered by an atmosphere of male solidarity that for them has nothing erotic.

I don’t know if it makes sense to go to the pool for the reasons why I go there, but I really like to go there, it is in practice the only opportunity to get sexually excited without using pornography, watching real guys, and some are really very nice. I chose the times of my attendance so I can meet the guys I like the most.

But there is a situation that affects me a lot, sometimes I hear the guys talking to each other, they talk about work, study and even about their girls, well, they don’t seem at all conditioned by sex like me, for them their girlfriends are a bit the other half of their lives, not an eminently sexual interest, for them sex is not an obsession, or so it seems. I would very much like to talk to these guys but I never do, because sooner or later they would ask me about my girlfriend and I should answer by telling a lie.

Then there is another half obsession that I carry with me every time a new guy arrives and is to imagine how he has it (you understand what), I try to imagine it and at the same time I try in every way to see that guy naked to verify if I had guessed. I’ll look like a maniac, Project, but the association of a beautiful body with a nice (you understand what) seems to me the best. However, often, beautiful guys, those with a superlative physique, from that particular point of view are not really so beautiful. Obviously all these images and these situations stored in my brain, when I come back home, become material to fantasize about during my endless masturbations.

Project, I want to stress that I’m not bad about all these things, maybe it happened years ago, but today it doesn’t happen anymore, I know that my life is this, maybe there will be sooner or later a guy in my life, I hope so but I’m not sure, but for many years still the pool will certainly be there. I fantasize often about those guys, about what we could do together, even if I know very well that nothing like that will ever happen.

In particular I like one called Alex, or for friends Al, I build on him a lot of mental novels, or rather of novels full of sex. I imagine that we are lovers, that we are accomplices and that he has fallen in love with me, I dream of having him with me in my bedroom, I dream of undressing him off while he wants to get undressed and encourages me, I get excited even now just thinking about it, because he’s beautiful, I dream that we embrace each other naked and touch each other everywhere and each of us holds the (you understand what) of the other in his hand and then you can imagine the rest. It is now three weeks that these scenes accompany all or almost all my masturbations.

If I could have Al I would not look for anyone else. And the crucial point is that I don’t have a generic physical idea of him, I know everything about him, but really everything: I know how he has it (you understand what), but also how he gets a hard on and in what situations, I know where he has a small mole, right in a very intimate place, in short I know everything about how he’s made physically, only he’s not in love with me but with his girlfriend … and for me there are only the fantasies and the beautiful images that I bring with me printed indelibly in my brain.

Once he and another guy made a sexual joke to another guy, one of their friends, they were all naked and the scene was beautiful, they laughed and played just like children, with the utmost naturalness. I guess I’ll never forget that scene!

Is all this normal, Project? Is it normal for a guy 25 y. o. to do what I do? Will I ever meet a guy like Al who can truly fall in love with me? I’m not a beautiful guy, but I’m not bad either, the trouble is that only girls fall in love with me and some of them try to involve me in a very provocative way. Maybe I take refuge in the pool to escape from the siege of the girls, who take for granted that I should fall in love with them.

Now I leave you. If you send me your skype contact, we can talk a bit.

Andrew

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A GAY GUY AND A GAY ELDER ADOPT EACH OTHER

Hi Project,
it was nice to meet you, I discovered an aspect of the gay world that I didn’t even suspect and I liked the non-ideological setting of your Project.

I’m here to tell you about something that is happening to me now and that last year I would have considered absolutely impossible.

I’m an old man and, for better or for worse, I lived my life. For me, the word gay is more a matter of principle related to membership and sharing than anything else. I have so many health problems that the idea of sex doesn’t even touch me, and this has been happening for years now. And here I come to the point.

If sexuality identifies with sexual relations, well, I would say that the time of the end-of-season discounts has already ended, in practice sex in that sense, by now, is a memory and I wouldn’t even regret it. If instead the word sexuality mainly (in practice exclusively) means affectivity, then I can say I’m still gay, because the company of men and guys, or rather I would say of gay men and gay guys, is still a pleasant thing for me, even if sex, in the specific sense of the word, has little or nothing to do with it. What I like is the fact that there is a common ground, that they understand the meaning of my life and my choices because they are basically similar to theirs.

I read your articles on intergenerational relationships, which, I must say, are very interesting, even if I don’t recognize myself in the things you describe because I think I’ve never fallen in love with people much younger than me and frankly I didn’t even believe that a serious emotional relationship could be created without concrete sexual implications.

Then a few months ago I accidentally met a guy of 19, yes, you understood well, 50 less than mine, I also struggle to remember exactly how and when we met, but it happened in ordinary life, because I never attend gay clubs or places like that. With that guy I talked for a quarter of an hour at most, but there was an incredible feeling, before leaving he asked me the number of my cell phone, I was reluctant to give it to him, but then I gave it to him, and frankly I thought that for him it was a matter of pure courtesy, but it was not so.

Since then we have been on the phone every day. He told me so many things about his life and I had no reason to think that they were not true, then he slowly told me that he was gay and that I was the first person to whom he confided such things. Of course I told him clearly that I was gay too. Then he told me that he fell in love with one of his teachers and at this point I was afraid he might fall in love with me, but such a thing didn’t seem absolutely realistic to me. I went to reread your articles on intergenerational relationships and asked myself a thousand questions. But it was obvious that the guy was in love with his teacher, I, for him, represented essentially a chance for relief.

Our daily phone calls lasted for months now, they are very serious, we never talk about sex but almost always about the future, about prospects for study and work. He no longer has his parents, both died several years ago, when he was very young, and he grew up in the family of a brother of his father, who already had his own children.

In short, I think we should add another category to gay relationships, that of “father-son relationships by mutual choice”.

Talking with this guy has given a new meaning to my life, has allowed me not to close myself in my melancholy and to still serve something. I think our relationship is important to him too. He is a very affectionate and also very determined guy. Not having had a family in the classic sense of the term has also made him free from the heavy conditioning that a gay guy interested in mature men can suffer in the years of adolescence and early youth.

The fact that I am gay, for him, is very reassuring. We talk every day about the stories he is experiencing now, stories that seem to me very similar, apart from the age target, to those that I lived many years ago. He asks me about my life and I tell him how things went. He almost remains incredulous to hear about the isolation of gay guys 50 years ago. Sometimes we talk about history and politics and I see that he has that freedom instinct typical of gays. There is only one discourse that absolutely he doesn’t want to hear from me and it is the one about old age (mine) and death. He’s continually looking for affective reassurance. Between us we have created a very nice relationship, which now doesn’t make me problems as in the earliest times, because I realize that my presence is family-like and doesn’t interfere in any way with his sexual life.

The generational gap, understood as communication difficulties, doesn’t even exist between us, except on something that I will talk about later. A true family bond has been created which is very beautiful and almost incredible. Next year he will be at the university! We talked about it a lot, even if my memories of the university date back to the Stone Age. He’s oriented towards scientific studies but is still uncertain among Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics.

There is only one field where I cannot stand him (of course, just to say) and it’s his crazy passion for technology. He continually urges me to get a smartphone leaving aside my 10 year old cellphone and tells me amazing things about applications that I will never know how to download, and even less how to use. Apart from this “technological” side where I feel the generational gap, for the rest there is no problem.

I would say that our relationship has created a real gay family, not in the sense of a gay couple, but a relationship between a gay father and a gay son. I know that no one ever imagines a “gay family” in the sense of “father-son” family and yet it is precisely what happens to us. I know very well that I will never be his boyfriend, but this seems absolutely obvious and natural to me. I don’t feel any sexual attraction towards him and I think that he doesn’t feel at all such feelings for me. We love each other in another way, but I think that somehow we are still a family.

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GAY GUYS SEARCHING FOR TENDERNESS

Hi Project,

we already had the chance to meet in person last summer, you made me have a wonderful tour of the city of Rome with two other guys, and it was a really important experience for me. Today I contact you again to tell you the latest news. It’s amazing how things can change quickly! When you’re 30, you feel like finished, you think no one can ever be interested in you, or at least no one you are interested in, and you think so because you have a particular way of being gay, that you think unique, and then, all of a sudden you are faced with another guy … Let’s start from here.

You had seen my blog, Project, you liked it, but many people considered it stupid, almost childish: a collection of thoughts and even photos of landscapes and animals. You told me that there was nothing explicitly gay and I wanted it to be so, it was neutral at least apparently neutral.

One day, when I come back from work, I open the blog and find a series of “like”, all of the same person, they are many and are not random, at least that’s how it seems. I don’t know who the anonymous commentator is, the nick is neutral, neither male nor female, the comments are short and it’s impossible to understand the gender of the author, I think it could be a girl, because from my blog it’s clear that I am a guy, so I avoid answering, both by email and commenting in turn the comments. I feel a minimum of pride but then I say to myself that it’s always better not to delude oneself.

The following day I find other comments from the same person, also completely neutral. I’m tempted to answer at least one and I do so, even in a very neutral way, but insisting on the idea that the fundamental thing is to love each other and that there are a thousand ways to love. The message was deliberately a little ambiguous.

The day after that person had added another comment, only one, and obviously answered what I had written the day before. The comment this time, however, was about twenty lines long and it was a comment with which I felt very consonant, but there was a feature that I could not explain, speaking of love relationships the author used systematically “he/she”, A very uncommon use, but also this time the message didn’t allow to understand the gender of the author.

In short, it began in this way an exchange of messages on the blog that went on for about twenty days, they were serious messages and all neutral and strictly with that strange “he/she” that I couldn’t understand.

Then we decided to go to exchange emails, first through the blog and then just exchanging addresses directly. Our mails were very prudent and formal: mutual respect, never intervene on the counterattack, always education, but also a progressively less reticent sincerity. I was fascinated by that person who, knowing only that I was a 30-year-old guy (the only information that could be deduced from my blog), continued to build an increasingly important dialogue with me.

After a couple of months of “neutral” mails one day he wrote me these words: “I would like to have a dialogue with you without reservation but I fear that you might not take it well and this holds me back.” I asked him why and he replied: “because maybe you think I’m a girl, but I’m a 26-year-old guy who has found so much tenderness on your blog.” I replied in just a few minutes: “I’m so happy you’re a guy! This exchange of emails is extremely beautiful and important for me!”

The dialogue went on like this for another week, then he wrote to me: “To the point where we are I cannot hide the thing that could be the most embarrassing: I’m gay and I dreamed so much to meet a guy like you. Don’t stay bad, please.”

I replied: “I’m gay too! And I’m so happy to meet you! I think it’s clear enough now that neither you nor I have a boyfriend, it would seem like a fairytale but there is a very huge problem, we don’t know each other personally and many castles in the air could collapse if we meet in person, that’s why we need to be very cautious.”

He replies that he thought a lot about it but that there is also another problem: “we could live perhaps a thousand kilometers from each other, so in the meantime I tell you that I am from the province of Milan.” I tell him that I’m exactly in Milan, and so we combine our first meeting in Piazza Duomo.

On the appointed day I’m there a quarter of an hour before, I put myself on the agreed point, which he knew well, and I wait. At 16.00 o’clock he appears with the agreed recognition signal: a large envelope of a well-known shop of Milan. I recognize him immediately, he smiles and approaches me, he’s really a handsome guy. I smile at him too, the embarrassment is great, after the first pleasantries I ask him: “Are you disappointed?” He replies: “Not at all! And you?” I smile and say: “You’re beautiful!”

He explains that he comes from (omissis) a small town 30 minutes by train from the central station of Milan, and that he lives a few steps from the train station of his town. In practice it is as if he lived in a district of Milan. All this seems extremely positive.

We go around the city, it’s a terrible cold, we enter a department store to warm up. He still studies and studies in Milan at the Polytechnic, so he comes to city center every day. I tell him that I work in the office of an accountant and I hope sooner or later to have one of my own, even if it seems very unlikely.

We study the timetable of our commitments and it turns out that from Monday to Friday we can have dinner together two nights: Tuesday and Thursday, not at my house because the times and schedules of the trains don’t allow it, but in a pizzeria enough easy to reach for both of us. But he can spend the Saturday afternoons at my house (I rented a small apartment of 30 square meters effective). On Sundays we can instead spend all the day together from morning to night. He cannot sleep at my house because he lives with his family and his parents are very suspicious and they fear he has “a girlfriend” in the city.

I can tell you, Project, that I didn’t imagine being able to find a guy so similar to me. We spend the whole Sunday in bed together, a narrow bed but enough for us. At first we exchanged only cuddles, even intimate ones, but only pampering, so to speak, nothing dangerous. Then we did the HIV test, even if it was absolutely the first time both for him and for me and now we take some more freedom, but among us there is no craving for sex, when we feel the desire of it, then ok, and it’s really beautiful, but sometimes we stay in bed to cuddle and it’s beautiful all the same. Some Sundays we were together outside Milan to see places that we didn’t know, other times we went to visit museums.

I don’t know whether to say that he is my boyfriend, because in fact he is a bit a lover, a bit a brother and a bit another myself. I try to make him feel good because he is about to finish his studies and they are difficult studies, so he must stay calm as much as possible.

Once I went to wait for him at the exit of the university, I saw him come with his bag full of books, with his padded jacket, the light trousers perfectly ironed and with the gold goggles, he looked more like a wearer than an engineer, some girls have stopped him, maybe to exchange notes of the lessons but maybe not only for that, those girls are enchanted by him because he is charming and has a smile that tears your soul, some of those girls, perhaps, fell in love with him. I stand on the sidelines without showing myself, I wait for him to be alone, then when he’s alone I approach him and take the heavy bag from his hands. I would kiss him there, in front of everyone, but we cannot and then we just exchange a smile.

I’m happy, Project, my world has really changed. Since his first comment on my blog, more than six months have passed and the more time passes, the more my certainty that no one can separate us is reinforced. It’s not a fable, Project, it’s all extraordinarily true!

Paul

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GAY GUYS LOOKING FOR A BOYFRIEND IN CHAT

Hi Project,

I really arrived at the limit. I know that the whole story is at the limit of the incredible and that from the outside it seems a total absurdity, and yet it is a real story. In all it lasted a month, fortunately only a month.

A month or so ago, I enter a chat, where I see the profile of a guy I liked enough, and I contact him. We talk a bit of this and that, then, you know how these things work, we exchanged a bit of photos, but serious photos, no nude or something. He was really a nice guy, let’s say that I had never found one so much complying with my standards (which are not at all easy). We start talking, because I want to understand what he thinks of me, if he thinks it can be done and he tells me that I’m beautiful, which is not really true at all, but he says so all the same and I feel deeply flattered. We talk for hours. He is very attentive to my reactions, he is not the usual rough guy you can find in some chats like that, he treats me well and I also treat him well and above all we don’t talk about sex, and in certain situations it is very rare and a sign of seriousness. When we go to sleep it’s almost dawn and I am very happy to have met him and I begin to dream that at last my loneliness is over. We arranged to meet in chat the next evening. We talk again very pleasantly, he calls me Cucciolo (Puppy), he tells me a lot of nice and tender things and I start doing the same with him. Then I come to the fundamental question: “Where are you from?” And he tells me he’s from Milan, my city! I jump for joy and ask him if we can meet, he replies enthusiastically that he too cannot wait to meet me. We fix the first appointment for the following Saturday night. I begin to fantasize, meanwhile we talk every night by chat and the wait grows day by day. I cannot wait to meet him! Saturday afternoon comes, I take a long shower, then I put on a pair of new underwear … you never know, I shave well, I dress as he said he liked me and I go to the appointment. He was already there, we recognize each other, we embrace. I was radiant like the sun and he was really beautiful in person. His eyes were laughing. We start walking, we decide to go to have a pizza. We go to a pizzeria out of the way, we sit down at a table where we can talk. The speeches are exactly those made in chat, he tells me that I’m beautiful, I tell him that he is just my ideal guy, then we start talking about something else: politics, nutrition, and we get along pretty much about everything, he thinks almost like me. I begin to believe that in the evening we will end up making love somewhere. The hours pass and nothing happens. Eventually I found the courage to ask him if he was disappointed after meeting me in person. He tells me: “Are you kidding? I think I’m in love with you!” I calm down and we say goodbye by giving us an appointment in chat for the next day, to see each other newly the following Saturday. I come home and I get a text message: “Puppy !! You’re the best thing in my life !! “I answer him with an incredible enthusiasm. All my depressions and melancholies had gone away and I felt happy, not only I felt loved, but loved by a guy whom I also loved to madness. Throughout the week, between very tender text messages and chats I melt more and more and I prepare for our second meeting, I think that this second meeting should have ended with something sexual. We arrive on Saturday night. He appears with a small parcel, I look at him with a perplexed face. He tells me: “Open, it’s for you! But only a half … “I don’t know what to think. I open and inside there are two little wedding rings, he puts one on my finger and I put the other on his, then we kiss, but there are people and we have to get back down to earth. We go to the pizzeria. I was literally enthusiastic, I could not wait to get out of the pizzeria and be alone in the car with him, because, given those premises, I expected a little sex, but he tells me that he is too upset and that he don’t feels like it. He accompanies me to my house and we say goodbye. I was a bit puzzled. I ask him when we would meet again, he tells me that he will call me during the week. Well … you understand how it ended, during the week he didn’t call at all, I call him, he is always very sweet with words but he tells me that next Saturday he cannot, but the speech no longer had the enthusiastic tones of the first times in the chat. I insist a lot to see him at least for a coffee during the week. We fix the appointment for Wednesday, I am there but he doesn’t come. I call him. He tells me he’s at work. I call him in the evening but the phone is disconnected. I go to the chat and he’s there … I call him but he doesn’t even answer me, he’s obviously busy. And there I made two plus two four and I said to myself: “He found another guy!” The next day I wait for him at his home, when he goes out to go to work, when he sees me he tries to change course, I block him, I ask him what happened, if there is another guy. He says no and that the fact is that he does not like me physically and that he cannot do anything about it. I ask him if he wants us to remain friends, he tells me it’s better not. I take off my wedding ring and give it back to him, then I turn around and leave. I come home and start looking at myself in the mirror to try and figure out what’s wrong with my appearance. I have a lot of physical defects, I’m not the handsome classic cover guy but I’m not even to throw away. I feel really emptied, I feel like crying, more for angry than for loneliness. I try to call one of my ex to talk a bit, I know that he loves me and he will listen to me, and it happens even this time, but I’m neurotic, impulsive, I treat him badly even if he doesn’t deserve it and I close the call abruptly. Fortunately, there is my job, a very disgusting job, but still a distraction that helps me not to think, but I always remember the scene of the wedding rings, but why that guy made me believe he was in love with me? Or maybe I’m so stupid that I think one can fall in love with me just for a picture and for a week of chat. But he didn’t have the slightest respect. And then … the wedding ring, maybe it could be the same that he had given to his previous boyfriend. I felt disgusted, and I made a decision, I contacted a very serious gay association and I looked for a psychologist, I made an appointment and I went there and I felt good. An old man who has always looked after gays and who knows what it is. I think I did a good thing. Then I called my ex and we talked a little, I felt he was happy to talk to me. Then I said to myself: “I have to take my life back in my hands! Enough with the chats!” And that’s what I’m doing now. Sometimes receiving a blow can do well too!

If you like, publish the email. I am attaching my skype, if you want to talk a bit.

Lucio (even if it is not my true name, everyone calls me so)

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GAYS AND DAMAGES OF PEDOPHILIA

It happened to me many times over the past 10 years to write about the sexual abuse of minors and about the consequences that these abuses entail in the lives of the victims. I would like to dedicate this post to clarifying some fundamental points. I will start from the concept of abuse to illustrate the most typical situations in which the abuse takes shape. I will then stop on the effects of the abuse on the victim’s sexuality in childhood, adolescence and later in adulthood. I will focus in particular on the concrete risk that those who have suffered sexual abuse may in turn perpetrate child abuse and on sexual addiction as a result of the suffered abuse.

A premise is a must, my speech is based on the experience gained in Gay Project and, of course, only deals with situations where guys have come to speak explicitly of the suffered abuses. Basically these guys have already a rational awareness of what they have suffered and, at least in a relative way, they are able to objectify it, so they are guys who have already followed an important individual path and have overcome many of the conditioning induced by abuse.

Let’s start with the concept of abuse. Sexual abuse is distinguished from sexual violence because, unlike this, it almost never presents itself with violent or intimidating methods and, very often, at the beginning, in the future abuser there is not even a clear desire to make an abuse.

The collective imagery depicts the abuser as a perverse-minded maniac who, after having spotted casually the child, consciously conceives a project of abuse and stubbornly completes it, but things are objectively very different.

The abuser, in the vast majority of cases, is not a stranger but a close relative of the child or a family friend who habitually frequents him and who has considerable familiarity with the child.

It should be emphasized that a child generally doesn’t have inhibitory brakes and his childhood play has an immediate physicality that is difficult to understand for an adult. The beginning of the path, often long and non-linear, which leads to abuse, lies precisely in the familiarity between the adult and the child. This familiarity also means at least relative freedom of language, freedom of play and often physical contact.

Since statistics make us aware that a high proportion of abusers are adults who in turn have been abused, it is easy to understand that if an adult who was abused when he was a child is in situations similar to those in which he has suffered abuse, he can, more or less consciously, remain conditioned. The temptation to play the role of the abuser can become very strong and the ability to resist this temptation can reach the breaking point.

Generally when the abuser is an adult who has been abused in childhood, the initiative of the new abuse is really of the adult, even if the path towards the abuse is very gradual and goes through stages of advancement and regression. On the other hand, if we consider an adult who has never been abused, things often develop with much less awareness, without a predetermined scheme and almost spontaneously.

The adult grants the child too much freedom without understanding in advance the risks that this behavior may entail. The adult underestimates, or better, is led to underestimate the seriousness of the abuse, and commits some typical errors of evaluation induced, or rather self-induced by a need of justification. He believes that since the boy is very young, he will take the thing as a game, he will not understand the sexual implications and above all he will forget very easily that experience, but evidently these three hypotheses are totally unfounded, and are destined only to fuel the irresponsibility of the adult. The adult who ends up accepting a risqué sexual game with a child pretends to find a justification in sentences such as: “the child was consenting” or even: “I did nothing but play his game”. It is evident that these two formulas, which may make sense to legitimize free sexual behavior with an adult, cannot absolutely apply to a child, because the child is objectively unable to understand the long-term consequences of what he may have also sought.

It is evident that sex education should aim, among other things, also and in particular, to make adults aware of the severity of the consequences of pedophilia, also making it clear that in many cases people slip towards pedophilia very gradually, and often have no awareness of it, and when the awareness arrives, the damage is now irreparable.

It should be noted that one of the fundamental parameters for quantifying the harm produced by sexual abuse on a minor is the duration of the abuse. When the abuse occurs in a single episode, it certainly leaves much less traces, especially if the abuser is not a family member, but if the abuse is repeated and becomes routine and is accompanied by threats such as: “Don’t tell no one, if not, you don’t know what will happen!” creates a state of subjection and real compulsion, that is, becomes a true form of violence.

Anyone who has committed a single abuse of a child would do well, if he has a minimum of conscience, to go and live in another city to avoid that his presence can help to consolidate the memory of the abuse. The behavior of the adult who starting from the assumption that “since now the damage is done”, thinks it is worth to make the abuse become a habit, confuses two totally different plans, that of the abuser and that of the abused. In legal terms after the first abuse one is guilty of a serious crime, technically of a delict, and there is the risk of being denounced and prosecuted, even if the continuation of criminal conduct over time aggravates the crime, the termination of those conducts does not cancel the crime anyway, and the adult who transforms the abuse into a habitual fact starts just from this reasoning; but from the point of view of the child, the repetition of the abuse can really create years after very dangerous situations, as forms of self-blame, interruption of dialogue with parents resulting in a progressive isolation of the guy, and above all can represent for the guy a sexual imprinting able to affect his whole life, creating addictions and heavily interfering in the formation of sexual archetypes and therefore in his sexual orientation and related preferences.

If the abuse is not violent the victim may not immediately notice the danger, but after years, when the level of awareness will be adequate, the memory of the abuse will work in the depths of the guy’s conscience. Most of the damage resulting from non-violent abuse occurs within adolescence. When the boy’s deep and innate sexuality awakens; if it is a straight sexuality, the boy, although deeply suffering for the memory of what happened, in going to (hetero) adult sexuality will also feel a sense of release from the memory of the abuse suffered, in essence the memory of the abuse will be completely separate from adult sexuality.

On the other hand, if adult sexuality were to manifest itself as gay, things would become complicated because gay feelings would be strongly conditioned by the memory of the abuse to such an extent that the guy would think he is gay only as a consequence of the abuse and this would mean that an atmosphere of negativity linked to abuse would be automatically extended to the nascent gay feelings. What I have just written is not a theoretical discourse but it is what I have seen practically in gay guys who have suffered abuse. But there’s even more: the negative light cast on the nascent gay dimension due to the contamination with the memory of the abuse often provokes attempts to escape towards heterosexuality (the so-called escape-heterosexuality) destined to end up miserably and sometimes in long times, leaving behind feelings of frustration and depressive thinking.

It should be immediately clear that the negative effects of the abuse are practically always extended to adulthood. The memory of the facts, especially if they were systematically repeated for long periods, becomes obsessive, the guy, now grown up, often reviews the scene of the abuse that becomes the core of an obsessive-compulsive disorder and as such, despite being substantially an intrusive and disturbing thought, ends up taking on more and more attractive characters. The guy tries to recreate in his current life situations similar to those of the abuse, in some cases creates more or less unconsciously intergenerational relationships in which however the genuine sexuality is very intimately mixed with the obsessive thought of the abuse, and slowly, the abused guy, becoming an adult, begins to wonder how he would behave if he were on the side of the abuser, and here often moments of deep crisis come, because a grownup man realizes that the abuse has not only conditioned his sexuality but may have transformed him in a potential pedophile, that is, in turn, in an objectively dangerous person.

In their sexual life, adults who were abused when they were children tend very often to reproduce sexual behaviors and practices corresponding to those that were the object of the abuse. The compulsion to repeat those behaviors can be close to addiction. In essence, an adult comes to the awareness that the abuse has literally ruined his life and has marked his sexuality in a very negative way so much so that he becomes a potential pedophile through obsessive fantasies of that type.

We will now try to understand how an adult who has been abused in childhood tends to build an emotional and sexual life. Obviously, here the speech will be restricted only to situations concerning adult men abused in childhood by men. When I say adults, I intend to refer to people aged at least twenty. It should never be forgotten that those who come into contact with these adults don’t know their story because even in the context of an important emotional relationship, the adult who has been abused in childhood, if he arrives to talk about these things with his partner, what is not to be taken for granted, will do it only after a long time, when the affective relationship will be well established and it will be reasonably foreseeable that a clear discourse will not undermine the relationship itself. The fear of not being accepted that seen from the outside seems to be connected right away to the abuse, actually hides a much deeper and more consistent fear linked to the fact that adults abused in childhood can have and in fact often have sexual fantasies concerning minors, and at this point the partner may feel deeply uncomfortable.

It should be added that often, when not exclusively, the adult who has been abused as a child tends to create intergenerational relationships, and in these relationships the oldest partner is afraid of being accused of something, in some way, akin to pedophilia. In these cases the older partner tends easily to marginalize the younger because this one is a carrier of more or less sporadic fantasies about minors, and because he realizes that the intergenerational relationship tends to be a repetition of the abuse scene. It is obvious that the adult who has been the victim of abuse, let’s call him an adult A, tends to keep the subject for himself, but in doing so he realizes that the relationship is deeply conditioned by unspoken things that are still very important. It sometimes happens that the adult A tries in a more or less transversal way to share with his partner fantasies about minors, which for him are sometimes true obsessive thoughts; this serves to probe the ground without arriving at explicit discourses.

When the explicit speech arrives, the partner’s reaction is fundamental. Every rejection reaction is particularly traumatic for the adult A, because it attributes to him a fault that he does not have, turning in fact him into a potential criminal, who is in reality only a victim. At the statistical level it is practically impossible for the partner to share the fantasies of the adult A about children, also urged and solicited by adult A, the partner should not respond by complacency stating to share those fantasies, at least partially, but must tell the truth in the clearest way, remembering that adult A is not asking him for a sharing of fantasies that he himself would not want, but in reality he is asking him if the more or less obsessive presence of those fantasies can be able to undermine at the base the relationship itself and he is also asking (if it is an intergenerational relationship) if the fact that the relationship is “also” a way of reliving the moments of abuse can destroy its actual affective interpersonal meaning.

If the partner who does not share the fantasies of the adult A about minors is really interested in maintaining a strong emotional relationship, he must make it explicitly understood. The most irresponsible behavior of the partner is to pretend not to have understood or worse in minimizing, because to speak clearly on these issues, for the adult A is at the same time very difficult and fundamental. The most reassuring speech on the part of the partner is to make clear some elements: 1) Having fantasies about minors and putting them into practice are two very different things. 2) The fantasies, especially the obsessive ones, are not easy to be controlled, but if an adult A has a sense of responsibility, those fantasies remain only fantasies and never turn into acts harmful to others. 3) If an intergenerational relationship may have been established “even” to reproduce a situation similar to that of the abuse, it is still a totally different thing precisely because in that relationship it is possible to talk about the abuse, because now the sexuality has a profound emotional value.

An adult A needs above all emotional stability, to be able to trust and to be himself with his partner, without hiding his neuroses, his obsessions and his most intimate thoughts. An adult A should not be accepted only as an adult but specifically as an adult A. The partner must be fully aware that the memory of the abuse will always be present at the bottom of the personality of the adult A, and that being able to talk about it is liberating. Often, unfortunately, attempts to create serious affective relationships by the adult A, clash with moralistic resistance and prejudices that lead to blame the adult A and to his marginalization. It would always be useful for two ex-partners, once the relationship is over, to maintain a friendship, bearing witness to the fact that the relationship of mutual esteem has not failed, this is all the more useful and necessary in the context of couples with an adult A.

For the adult A there are also other consequences of the abuse, consequences of a more general type, such as the decline in average levels of self-esteem, the easy tendency to discouragement and the lowering of resilience when one becomes a victim of the aggressiveness of others. From the outside it could be mistakenly assumed that the abuse leaves no room for recovery but it is not so. Generally adults A show a peculiar characteristic: they don’t abandon relationships with people, they demonstrate a very strong emotional fidelity, even if not always accompanied by a corresponding sexual fidelity within the couple, and above all they try, when possible, to keep the dialogue absolutely authentic and truthful, far from social rituals or habits.

Relationships with an adult A, when born from mutual acceptance, even partial, but authentic on both sides, have an emotional solidity that leads them to resist over time without losing intensity. Obviously adults A can have highly diversified individual personalities, beyond the experience of abuse, but it should never be forgotten that that experience remains a heavy conditioning that must be understood and accepted for what it is, any mental reserve on what the experience of abuse can cause, even after many years, is a very heavy mortgage on any kind of relationship involving an adult A.

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If you like, you can join the discussion on this post on Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-gays-and-damages-of-pedophilia

ONLINE THE FIRST PROTOTYPE OF THE NEW GAY PROJECT TEST

After the release of the new version (17) of EasyPHP “compatible with Windows 10” I managed to resume work on the new test of sexual orientation of Gay Project. Today I put the prototype online:

http://gayproject.altervista.org/prova4

I specific and I emphasize that the test uses cookies (like, in practice many sites) but they are completely harmless cookies and there are no tricks of any kind, they only are useful to pass intermediate results from one section to another of the program.

This new test is all based on images, technically it already works like that, but I have to add another type of question preceded by a written text. 

Compared to the previous test there are some news:

1) There is the male and female version, there is the Italian and the English version.

2) The test is flexible, in the sense that the following questions are chosen based on the previous answers and therefore two tests carried out by different people follow different question paths.

3) Response times are measured and evaluated.

Of course it is all to be perfected but the basic tools are there and then, at the moment, the test is not connected to a DB, but the result vector can be recorded every time a test comes to an end.

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For comments and suggestions: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-online-the-first-prototype-of-the-new-gay-project-test

GAY GUYS FACING STRESS AND DEPRESSION

Hi Project,

I decided to write to you because in the last two years and in the last one in particular I think I have entered a kind of vicious circle from which I cannot really get out. I don’t even know if being gay is among the causes of this malaise, and if so, how much it can weigh in the overall budget, but my self-esteem is really very low.

I am almost 30 years old, I don’t work, or rather I have done only occasional jobs to have some pocket money. I just graduated with excellent results, which I would not have expected, albeit with a lot of delay. My dream would have been the world of scientific research, which still fascinates me, but when I try to get to the bottom of certain scientific issues, I realize that I lack the basic tools, maybe I expect too much from myself, but there are guys even younger than me that possess those instruments, at least so it seems, and therefore I don’t see myself really suited to that world, even if my professors tend to push me in that direction.

In reality I have a weak will: I start something and then I leave it in half, my friends, the very few I have, or rather the very few who can stand me, say very positive things about me but I am convinced that they do it to pull me out of depression, which I think conditions me very deeply even in emotional life. I have never been able to keep a guy for more than a few months, sooner or later we get to the critical moment and they all leave with more or less credible excuses, someone stays but defiles a lot and prefers to keep a relationship not very engaging. What they really think of me they don’t even tell me but I can deduce it from their behavior.

I’m not the classic handsome cover boy, I’m not at all, in fact, some of my ex boyfriends listed me things that don’t go well in me on a physical level, I don’t hide that this fact has influenced me and pushed me for example to do some training at the gym, or to be careful about the diet and other similar things, but then all these things were useless, because I think that my ex have gone away mostly because I tend to depression. Sometimes I thought that something in me doesn’t go well at psychiatric level, this idea scares me a bit, but it has been with me for some time.

I cannot say I’m totally alone, I still have some friends, but I should say that more than friends they are guys who fell in love with me, even though I didn’t fall in love with them, and they tolerate me for this, they comfort me, they listen to me but I always have the doubt that they do it even, if not above all, to act like the good Samaritan, that is in practice because they are sorry for me. Frustration is a daily exercise for me.

With my parents the relationships are only formal, after all they are good people who made many mistakes, mostly out of ignorance, with them I could never talk about myself, they are convinced that I am strange, but now they accept me so and they don’t even try to have a minimum of dialogue with me and basically they have never tried it. It worries me that I have no dreams for my future, that is, there is nothing that I really want.

Sometimes I think the reason for all this state of things is the absence of a job, which, if there were, would take me to a very different atmosphere and I think more positive, but for now I don’t see serious job prospects before three or four years and frankly I regret having to depend on my parents until almost 35, but I think there are no alternatives. The lack of work, however, is only the fuse that has detonated the bomb of frustrations accumulated over the years, I would say since I was a child, gay, of course, but not only, gay with some interest for mature men and then even more conditioned and marginalized for this, even by other gay boys.

My interest in mature men is not exclusive, I am also interested in some of my peers but, what is worse, I am never satisfied by anyone, there is no one who ever seemed to me my ideal companion, and then I tried to keep multiple open relationships at the same time and you can imagine with what results. Some of my ex, in the end accepted it, because obviously they love me despite everything, the contacts with them have not been lost, but have become weaker, because even if they don’t say it, it is clear that they would seek an exclusive relationship with me that they will never find.

Years ago I was very fragile emotionally, much more than today, and the first failed romance put me in terrible situations, today I began not to give too much weight to these things but, of course, this is possible only living the relationships much more superficially. I am surprised by some of my ex who have not disappeared and still love me even if they have a life now very far from mine, sometimes I don’t know whether to believe in their declarations of affection and I think that such declarations can be devices to regain me, even if all this probably makes no sense.

Sometimes I feel resentment against the world, feelings of frustration, of absolute uselessness, honestly, perhaps today less than a few years ago. I lost some time at university because I was overwhelmed by my emotional problems and the sense of defeat and disengagement got the better of me. I often wonder what future I will have and there I see the deep darkness, the confusion is total.

It has often happened to me in the last years of university to go for exams in full awareness of having understood little or nothing at all of the subject I had studied and still obtaining excellent results, completely unexpected. Some professors made me compliment on a personal level, even though I clearly said that there were many things that were not at all clear to me. I really don’t know what their compliments could refer to, because for me the study is yet another and perhaps the most important source of frustration.

Sometimes I clash with certain books, which I would gladly cut to pieces, because I feel that there are things that at most I can guess but that are not at all clear in the strict sense of the term and there the frustration is really heavy, I fill in whole notebooks with calculations, I do computer simulations but sometimes I still cannot have clear ideas. With these premises should I enter the scientific research world? I don’t know what to think.

Project, every now and then I read your sites, which are interesting but also discouraging, it is true that you don’t have to tell fantastic stories and you have to present things as they really are, but many stories of those that I read on Gay Project don’t encourage at all, though honestly, reading, I realized that maybe I’m not the only loser in the world.

I stole too much time, I leave you my cell phone and my mail, if you like, we could get in touch by chat.

Massimo
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Hi Massimo,

yesterday I had the pleasure of talking a lot with you and many things have clarified, but let’s go step by step. I state that I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist nor anything like that but only a person who has been in charge of gays for several years and for many hours every day, but I happened several times to come into contact with people who also had serious psychiatric problems, because this is part of the lives of both straight and gay people. In these contacts I have been able to see closely what it means to be depressed with a depression diagnosed by a psychiatrist and to understand how much depression can weigh heavily on the quality of individual life. I have also seen people with forms of reactive depressive neurosis, which in conditions of strong and prolonged stress may show something that can sometimes be confused with manifestations of major depression, but in these cases I have also noticed that the elimination of the stress condition caused a progressive elimination of the reactive depression.

I talked a lot with you (several hours) and we didn’t talk about depression if non at the beginning, but then the conversation followed other paths. I noticed that at the beginning you left me a lot of space and I talked freely, then, gradually, you began to enter the discussion, clarifying and pointing out many things. When we broke up, the climate was absolutely relaxed, even optimistic, about professional prospects and many other things. All these things make me think (I repeat, I’m not a psychiatrist) that what you call depression is in essence a form of reactive anxious neurosis, probably long-standing, but frankly the word depression seems to me more an exaggeration than anything else.

And there are several reasons that lead me to think so. Let’s start from the first, that is, relationships with friends. In your first e-mail you described your friendships or as attempts to not get lost by guys who fell in love with you while you didn’t fall in love with them, or as a way, by your friends, to get in the role of the good Samaritan towards a weak friend. From what you said to me, however, the situation is very different, because, as you have explicitly admitted, your friends love you and despite your behavior, sometimes neurotic, consider you a person of considerable value, not as a scholar but just as a man, firstly because you don’t let friendships fall, call your friends on the phone, if you have not heard them for a few days and talk to them with the utmost sincerity. All this shows considerable attention to others as well as to yourself.

And even the relationships with your ex boyfriends, except for very rare exceptions, are of affection and respect. That is, the substance of the relational structures of your personality is very solid, I would say much more solid than that of many people who believe they have many friends while they don’t even have a single true friend. And, I stress it, to create friendships like those you mentioned to me, whether or not they are with ex-boyfriends, it takes a truly remarkable ability to perceive and follow one’s own and others’ emotional needs.

Now I come to some weak points: I notice that even if your ex boyfriends tend to maintain good friendships with you, you say you never found the one who could be the ideal guy for you, so it’s likely that your dissatisfaction comes from a sexual contact that is not really involving, you try to change partners but then tend to keep the old relationships and in the end it has always been this way. You say that your partners are looking for the exclusivity of the relationship but with you they will never be able to find it, which means that it is the monogamy itself that seems to you unsuitable for you.

I add another thing, in the mail you talked about attraction to men older than you of several years, but in your personal history you have never experienced intergenerational relationships, indeed you have carefully avoided them, it is not unlikely that your avoiding this particular form of sexuality is at the base of a not indifferent stress. You yourself have experienced the intolerance that many gays have towards people who live intergenerational relationships.

It is no coincidence that with your ex boyfriends you have talked about everything, but not of this particular aspect of your homosexuality. With them you say you have removed it out of necessity but this made difficult for you the relationships with those guys, just because they were not 100% clear and there was still something unsaid. This fact was probably the root of a sense of guilt that you never got rid of. I don’t know if your exs would have reacted well, some maybe not, but you didn’t verify and you took for granted a rejection reaction.

I observe, incidentally, that you have never even mentioned this or that sexual practice, and this also leads me to think that your discomfort, which has led you to a certain polygamy, does not concern what you do in couple life but with whom you are in couple. I would add that the reduction of family relationships to pure formality, which may also be a common occurrence for gay guys who grew up in substantially homophobic contexts, is a particularly accentuated feature for guys who experience sexual interest in adult men, because in these cases homophobia of the family would present itself in an extreme form, only the presence in the family of another homosexual person, even of a homosexual woman, can allow to relieve the pressure on the gay boy interested in mature men. In a situation like yours, your attitudes are defensive reactions that are more than understandable. In practice you have never had the opportunity to build something that was actually satisfactory for you and this only accumulates stress.

I would like to add an observation. The humanistic type of study generally is not very stressful, on the contrary the “very serious” scientific type of study can really lead to moments of crisis. I’m not talking about the study of the average student, but about the study of the scholar, the scientist who wants to understand going all the way. Here frustrations can be very deep and are often underestimated. It is evident that you tend to consider yourself inadequate and to demand from yourself levels of understanding that are far beyond common standards. If your teachers push you to scientific research, it is clear that they see significant potential in you and also your expressing doubts and your always believing inadequate are just the sign of your predisposition to research. Doubt is the true soul of research and leads to an increasingly aware knowledge.

In a nutshell, I think you are a truly remarkable person at all levels, who must only gain more self-confidence. Try to achieve what you really want, both professionally and in emotional life, with no prejudicial preclusions of any kind, and try to talk with your ex boyfriends about what you really are, because I think they would not marginalize you at all and dialogue with them could become even deeper.

A big hug.

Project

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If you like, you can join the discussion on this post on Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-gay-guys-facing-stress-and-depression

THE MEANING OF A GAY FRIENDSHIP

Hi Project,

at the beginning of 2017 I thought: new year old life, not only in the sense that nothing would have changed, but in the sense of a life old man style. Things have changed a bit today. Last night we exchanged a few words in chat. I’m a little younger than you, but the way is that. I have long since stopped looking for a partner. In the course of my life I’ve had only one, he was a good man, we were already over 50 and we got together, I don’t even know why, with the usual illusion that putting together two desperations, something good can come out. 

For a while it worked, then he started to feel bad, but not on a psychological level, he had big health problems, it was an ordeal from one hospital to another and after six months of genuine anguish he was gone, he left at age 54. After that story, I said: that’s enough. I never wanted to live situations like that again, because they are really destructive: you see that the person you love is going from bad to worse day after day and you only hope that everything ends soon, because you know very well that there aren’t other possibilities. 

Then, after it happened, a tremendous period of emptiness came to me. Fortunately I worked and I could not let myself go to the melancholy. But when I came home I felt damned alone and discouraged. I no longer have relationships with my family of origin, my parents are dead, my brother lives abroad and we no longer call each other neither for Christmas. In short, I felt desperately alone, and then I was already old and the idea of starting over again I did not have it anymore. I had no objects of my partner. He didn’t write anything, we did not exchange gifts or something, we just lived together. After it happened I gave away his things, everything, basically clothes, he had no valuables of any kind and he used an old mobile phone that he never wanted to change. 

My house is now perfect: everything is almost maniacally standardized. I made an archive with all the papers that can be useful, from those of the condominium to the medical ones. I do everything to myself: wash, iron, clean the house, which is very easy, because I use paper dishes and at most I have to wash two small pots a day. In short, the house is all well arranged but it is empty, just me, indeed it would be better to say that I live there “alone”. Every now and then I read something gay, your forum but also others, and I am shocked by certain stories of the elderly man acting like young guys, that is, old people who have not yet understood that for them the ride of carousel, as Tiziano Terzani said, is almost finished. 

I don’t know what will remain of me. My partner is gone, so no one will have real memories of a bit of life really lived with me … and I have not done anything meaningful that is worth remembering, you could say “an unimportant gay”, and I feel just like that, let’s say it’s my stable tone of mood for years now. But, as I told you at the beginning, lately something has changed, I met, for work reasons, a thirty year old gay guy and we became friends, I underline it, only friends. We see each other very rarely, but it often happens that we talk by phone or on Skype. 

It is not a love story, he is a nice guy but I am very far from the idea of any strong involvement and he (this is really evident) has his own affective and sexual life that involves him in good or bad in a profound way. For him I’m just a friend, an older friend but just a friend. In a year, he came to my house no more than four or five times, and he always stayed shortly. He had lunch with me only once. It would all seem very trivial, but it is not at all. Now, through him, I am discovering so many things that I never imagined. 

According to my classic logic, at 60 you are depressed, but at 30 you jump of joy, this is what I thought, then I realized that being 30 years old is much more beautiful at 60 than at 30, and that guy, I will call him Lucas, has a thousand problems, some are just his own, are problems of character that it’s difficult to overcome, but many others derive from misunderstandings, and psychological games of various people he meets. 

I’m beginning to understand what the true life of a thirty year old gay guy is, which is certainly abysmally different from mine, because he still wants to fight and still believes in love, while I gave up for some time and threw in the towel without regrets. In our phone calls he talks to me about his troubles. He has the work that a little distracts him, because he works at an excellent level in the world of scientific research, but when, in the evening, he comes home he feels alone, and then he calls me and we chat a lot. 

I wondered why he decided to take me seriously, because he really takes me seriously, then maybe he does the opposite of what I would have done. He has no real gay friends, just acquaintances he hardly ever meets, with me, on the other hand, the evening phone call is now something recurrent, every day if he feels particularly bad, or every two or three days. He feels rejected by the guys who really interest him and is affected by a thousand complexes, blaming himself for everything. 

Between us there is not a real familiarity, when I speak with him I always fear to cross the limit, to use words or even affectionate tones that seem out of place. I never invite him to come to my house and I assume now that it cannot be otherwise. Our real bond is the telephone, about an hour in the evening, almost every evening. What can this guy bring in himself? He tells me that he doesn’t feel conditioned by me because he feels that I am not afraid of him, but after all it is not so true, because with him I don’t feel so free and I measure words. 

I know that unfortunately I cannot do anything useful for him, I listen, I never change the subject, I leave to him as much space as possible. It’s a strange friendship, I don’t understand exactly what sense it can have but I think there’s a sense that otherwise it would not go ahead. I am perfectly aware that a friendship of this kind will last until Lucas doesn’t have a boyfriend and frankly I hope that he will soon be able to find one as he wishes. When Lucas will be fine, I will feel alone once more, the ephemeral consistency of this relationship cannot empty it of its meaning. 

Not receiving Lucas phone calls would mean that he was able to rebuild his emotional world. He is not very confident that it can really happen, he has built slowly, by virtue of more or less disappointing experiences, a cuirass made of cynicism and he says that his cynicism has melted only a couple of times, when he has really believed to fall in love. Lucas is not an easy person, he is tormented inside, he is very insecure even if he is a scientist, he tends to give up immediately, to throw himself away, not to believe in himself, I think he has stopped dreaming for years, admitted and not granted that he has ever dreamed, probably, in spirit, he’s older than me. 

This is my life now. At least I feel useful to someone and it’s not a little thing. Do you have any suggestions, Project? Of course you can post the email where you want, because there are no sensitive elements. Thank you for the Project, which is a really useful thing even at my age.

Barto

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If you like, you can join the discussion on this post on Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-the-meaning-of-a-gay-friendship

TRUE GAY LOVE AND EX BOYFRIENDS

Hi Project,

yesterday night you had a really huge patience. We talked until late at night, it was almost three o’clock. You know that my fixed subject is my ex. I had called you to let off steam for a while because I had not heard from him for several days. Even though he is no longer my boyfriend, we kept on staying in touch all the same. No sex, only talking, but I experienced very partially the trauma of detachment just because we continued to stay in touch. 

In short, yes, I considered a bit like a betrayal the fact that he didn’t call me for 15 days, as if it were a way to tell me or make me understand that I’m worth nothing for him, and I was beginning to process all the thing in the classical terms of betrayal: he has sex with another guy and he doesn’t care about me, so he just made fun of me, etc. etc., so I am the victim and I must hate him, but I don’t hate him at all, I just cannot. It is true that he has sex with another guy, but at least up to 15 days ago he remembered me and took me seriously. 

The thing that struck me most when I showed you all my beautiful claiming speech expecting you to console me and allow me to be a victim, was your way of reacting. You asked me if I really loved him and I told you yes, then you asked me if it’s him who calls me or I’m the one who calls him and I told you he always calls him. You replied that “true love is another thing”. I stayed bad for it, I felt offended, clubbed instead of understood and I could not give it an explanation. 

You asked me if I had ever worried about how he really was and I didn’t know what to answer. You also told me that in your opinion he cares about me and not a little, maybe even more than I care about him, I was very puzzled and I began to ask myself a lot of questions. I slept very little at night and I continually thought about my ex. In fact when we say that we fell in love with a guy we say it in view of our happiness, if we want to call it so, not in view of his happiness, and instead we should worry first of all about his happiness. I felt like a perfect fool who thinks he understood everything about love and instead he didn’t understand anything, one that confuses love and possession. 

This morning I did something I never did, in theory for fear of annoying, but actually to keep me at a safe distance from him. I picked up the phone and called him. It was clear that he was happy to hear me, I asked him why he had not called me again and he told me that he was afraid of bothering me and that was probably the case. We were about to lose contact just because we thought we understood each other’s reactions while we didn’t understand anything at all, neither he nor I! 

We talked for more than an hour in a very serious and affectionate way, not with mawkishness as engaged couples who exchange pampering but with a true affection, that doesn’t faint for any reason. In fact we broke up, it’s true, but we continued to love each other. I felt him in crisis with his boyfriend, he really fell in love but the other guy is not in love with him in the same way, my ex sees him elusive, sometimes looking for excuses not to meet him and he thinks his boyfriend is probably getting busy to find a guy with whom to feel better than he is with him. Now, my ex would not be upset if his current boyfriend was looking for another guy, in fact it is what he did with me, what he cannot stand is doing things secretly, not to speak clearly, answering in an evasive way. 

He was used to the utmost clarity when we were together, we used to say everything even in a brutal way, if it came spontaneously. After all, we decided together even the fact of separating, even if it seems paradoxical, and it has not been destructive for either of us. Now he feels degraded, little considered, he feels more like an object than like a person, he has the impression that he is only a marginal figure for his current boyfriend. I too sometimes told him no, maybe because I was tired for work, but I never kept him at a distance. 

I continue to think of him very often, he says that of our relationship he especially valued sex, but I think the key thing was just love each other, it was also for this that sex had a strong sense, because sex is not something technical. With the new guy there is a lack of warmth, they are always chatting on the phone as two sweethearts, with a lot of smilies and ILY, but in the end, that other guy doesn’t try to spend as much time as he can with my ex, and told him that he is a bit neurotic and that he “should try to improve” his character and this has put him in crisis because my ex is easily in crisis for these things and feels himself guilty of everything. 

I don’t know if their relationship will end, it can happen but not necessarily, at least for a while, because apparently things are going on, but I wonder: how is it possible that that guy doesn’t even notice that my ex does not feel at ease? How is it possible that he doesn’t notice it? Or maybe he doesn’t really care, but then why chatting and little hearts? He’s not a kid, he’s a grown man and he should understand that you cannot play with other guys. But I see my ex less prostrate than he was in similar situations before we got together. What I’m afraid of is that he can go a bit in depression, because when he was with that guy at the beginning and things were fine, I saw him truly serene, I would say sometimes just as happy as I had not seen him for years.

One thing I understood, Project: to love a guy, there is no need to go to bed with him, and even if you go to bed with a guy, that guy, in essence, may not really matter anything, as you say : “Love is another thing!”

If you want, post this email on the forum, because It could be useful for someone.

Still many good wishes for a Happy New Year!

Manuel

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THE TRUE END OF A GAY RELATIONSHIP

Dear Project,

today is a strange day, I spoke again with my ex after 15 days, it’s the first time I feel the clear feeling that everything is over between us. We have been together for years with ups and downs, then he found another guy, something that I expected and that didn’t upset me, because between us had remained a very important friendship, we were still often in touch and just for this I didn’t feel the weight of the gap, I would say that we went on like that for about six years, he with his new guy, with all the events of the relationship in progress, I always alone, but there was something important between us. 

This morning he calls me … well, the feeling of embarrassment was very strong, at the end we said goodbye quickly, as if he were in a hurry to close. We talked only about obvious things, while at other times we were talking a lot and at the end there remained the feeling that there really was mutual trust. Today I can say that our relationship came at the end of the line. End of the journey. 

The journey does not end when he finds another guy but when I don’t mean anything for him. At the beginning it seems that that moment will never come, but then inexorably arrives and then you ask yourself what all our history was about, which was not at all a trivial thing and lasted for so many years. By now our history belongs to the past, that is, it no longer exists. What’s left for me? I don’t know, I’m removing even the memory. 

Perhaps I still have the idea that loneliness is the only stable reality of life and that loves and friendships are only particular ways of not really understanding each other, or maybe many years ago we were different, but then time passes and sweeps away even memories that seemed more sacred. Tomorrow is another day. At other times I was exalted by my love story, because it was a love story, or at least it seemed such. Who knows what love is? Then, the sexual component was lost and I told myself that there was still the essential thing, that is to love one another, but slowly that was lost too, and now it remains only an increasingly faded memory of another self that has lived another life in another era, but it is as if I read a book, all this does not belong to me anymore, it will no longer belong to me and slowly the memory itself will vanish. 

After him, I didn’t have any other stories involving sex, and even from the point of loving each other, it was never the same thing. With him I was convinced, at least at the beginning, to have found the ideal companion and for a while it was so, I felt I was important, then a very slow downs began. There have never been crises between us, only a slow losing, almost imperceptible, day after day. Today I’m not upset, I almost became aware of the inevitability of all this mechanism and I feel protected, I could say vaccinated, for the future: no more love stories. 

I’m not old even though I turned 40, so much people believe that at 40 life is all to be lived but a guy like me cannot manage to delude himself twice. I had a few chances, but my brain immediately went in search of critical points, weaknesses, I identified the things I did not like about my potential partner. A phrase out of place, a claim too much could were enough to warn me. I said to myself, “What are you doing? Are you fooling yourself again?” And it was enough to stop flying and to try to hold me tight to the ground. 

In front of me I have the void, the prospect of a life without strong affections, the alternative would be deluding myself, but even that is not a good prospect, there remains the third way, that is the less important and more disengaged relationships. My program is only one: put apart programs.

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