GAY SEX AS A PLAY

In this post I will try to address a topic that I consider particularly important, namely gay sex as a play.

I start from a clarification. The word “play” takes on the most varied meanings, from the most negative ones, such as in “Minors are not allowed to play”, where  “play” sounds quite similar to “gamble” to those more neutral and related to child’s play. “Playing”, in the sense that I intend to give here to this word, must be something absolutely spontaneous and must have no purpose other than the play itself and the interpersonal contacts it creates or promotes. In other words, playing in order to feel free doesn’t mean getting involved in a sort of comedy that must follow and interpret a script already written, and even lesser playing is a way to compare yourself with others in order to get a prize. The Play is improvisation. In the real play between adults, as in the game between children, everything is improvisation and spontaneity. The play is liberating. The child who stands on the sidelines, and doesn’t feel involved in the play is a child who is afraid, who feels restrained or, worse, he is a depressed child.

Play has a lot in common with true sexuality, that is, with unplanned and non-imitative sexuality. Living sex means first of all feeling absolutely at ease with your partner, because sexuality can only be lived well in a condition of authentic disinhibition, that is, when you are yourself and you see a deep correspondence from your partner.

A guy in a chat told me: “But sex is repetitive, it’s always the same thing!” This statement is the most typical sign of the sexual dissatisfaction. When you live sexuality well, sex is not repetitive at all precisely because it takes over the dimension of play, of laughing, of joking, of not taking yourself too seriously. There is nothing more beautiful in a sexual contact than seeing the spontaneity and involvement of one’s partner and realizing that he feels totally at ease.

Sex is never a duty to be carried out with the utmost commitment or worse an exam to be passed, it has no rules and no script to follow, if it acquires the characteristics of duty or examination, instead of being relaxing, it ends up creating discomfort and promoting performance anxiety. The play consists precisely in moving away from the script and in creating always different situations, the game borders on rice and rice favors disinhibition and allows you to send even very serious messages, without underlining them the too much, and when two partners are really close, messages sent in this soft way don’t fall into thin air at all. Playing, in sexuality, is a very useful means of spreading the message that sex is an ordinary dimension of life and must be lived lightly.

Sex is not transgression but freedom, the two terms manifest two different attitudes: those who live sex as transgression cannot feel truly free and don’t live sex as part of ordinary life but as an exception and a rebellion against an oppressive rule. Freedom doesn’t consist in breaking the rules but in not feeling bound by any rule beyond one’s moral rule. Play is freedom and sex too is freedom, if you lives it freely, it is a manifestation of interest, respect, affection, attention to the other. Playing and living sexuality means sharing and listening. Making love is a way of expressing yourself, of communicating, of not being afraid of being who you are and of showing yourself for what you are.

In sex, body language takes on a special value that sometimes goes far beyond words: a hug, a smile, a gesture of complicity, an exchange of glances, a wink at the right time convey messages of reassuring and encouragement such as: “I’m happy to be with you!” or “Don’t be afraid of me!”

Often playing, in the sexual dimension, takes on a particular aspect, that consists in not doing what the partner expects, in order to confuse him a bit, and to end up dissolving the beginning anxiety with a smile, as if to say: “I’m kidding you! ” Often sexual play takes the form of an unexpected but never inappropriate intimate gesture. The game is always a call to move away from the script and to feel free. If my partner jokes with me while we are in sexual intimacy this means that he really feels comfortable and that he is not afraid of my reactions.

In order to live sexuality in a truly gratifying way, only two conditions are needed: knowing each other thoroughly and maintaining a level of substantial equality between the partners. To live sexuality well you have to overcome the individual dimension to start thinking as a member of a couple, even if it is a couple with very limited time limits. In a couple that works, as in a free play that works, there are no leaders and there are no followers because the relationship must be equal: the choices must be made in two, they must be shared, because only in this way every forcing, that is a manifestation of disaffection, can be avoided.

If sex is the only moment of encounter between the two partners, it ends up to be identified with the true purpose of the relationship, the means (sex) becomes the goal and the person of the partner assumes only an instrumental role: if you prefer to have sex more than love the person, you neglect the deeper meaning of sexuality, that is, its communicative value.

True sexuality can’t be designed, because it is spontaneous, the expectations that lead us to imagine in the partner the perfect crowning of our fantasies are generally the antechamber of disappointments, exactly like, in the play, the expectation that the other has only the role of playing our game, while the other is a person hose dignity is equal to ours. The profound knowledge of the other reduces all expectations to one, that is, to the desire to be able to share one’s sexual intimacy with the partner, in the way in which it will be possible to do so, it being understood that the way must be an expression of couple’s freedom and never the imposition of a single partner, that is, it must be shared.

During sexual contacts complex or problematic aspects of partner sexuality can emerge which we easily notice but we don’t realize equally easily that, in a perfectly symmetrical way, also complex or problematic aspects of our sexuality, of which we often are not conscious, become clear to our partner. The playful dimension of sexuality avoids that taking note of the other’s problems opens the door to a possible refusal of the other, precisely because play dilutes, loosens, distracts from too specific aspects and creates an atmosphere of pleasantness and mutual complicity that defuses the possible conflicts about to burst.

Sex is often loaded with meanings that doesn’t belong to it, and sometimes having sex becomes the sign of an adult and fully realized life, and therefore not having sex becomes the stigma of a loser, this way sex can become a true social status that seems to create a hierarchy between individuals, when this it happens, sex loses the connotation of simplicity and spontaneity that is proper to it and becomes an instrument to achieve different goals.

Just as all individuals are different from each other in genetic characteristics, physical constitution and psychological attitude, so they are different from each other also in the way of conceiving and living sexuality. Two guys, however similar they may be, will have anyway two different ways of conceiving and living sexuality, which means that even within the most close-knit couple there will always be a need for a mediation to find a balance between two sexualities anyway different. This mediation can be achieved through dialogue but can be achieved in a much less formal way with play, which can also take on spontaneously an exploratory value of the possible horizons of couple sexuality. The exploratory play allows you to take a step back when necessary and to communicate your wishes to the partner, avoiding the verbalization that on certain contents sometimes creates embarrassment even in the most close-knit couples.

The playful attitude allows, when necessary, to say no to one’s partner without that assuming the characteristics of a possible refusal of the person. Demands and rejections, if they are real demands and real rejections, are signs of a relationship in crisis.

The playful attitude often allows you to overcome the moments of embarrassment related, for example, to the difficulty of maintaining an erection for a long time or of reaching orgasm, or related to problems of premature ejaculation.

The playful attitude helps to put aside expectations of perfect reciprocity which are sometimes unrealistic and which in themselves should not undermine the basic relationship between two people, although sometimes the expectation of perfect reciprocity seems to produce just this effect. Play helps not to emphasize the problems, which on a sexual level may very well exist but which must not be underlined but accepted in the knowledge that not every day is the same and that loving a guy means loving him and not forcing him to be our photocopy.

Loving a guy means above all loving his freedom. When during the play a child wants to redefine the rules of the game in order to limit the freedom of his partner, the game automatically loses interest for the partner because it is no longer free and creative.

Very often, in consolidated couple relationships, emotional security is sought by imposing rules, but doing so destroys the spontaneity that underlies sexuality. Often one doesn’t have sex out of love, but out of habit, to pass the time or simply because one has nothing better to do, just like when one decides to play cards or chess to deceive boredom. It is obvious that in such situations, relationships wear out and sex becomes institutionalized almost as a contractual performance. When it comes to these levels, recovering the situation is very difficult and sometimes it is even more difficult to resolve the situation by interrupting a well-worn relationship, kept alive only by formal obligations.

When a sexual contact has been truly satisfying, one tends to manifest to his partner the sense of gratification that has been felt and at this point misunderstandings can arise, and in fact arise.

If, addressing your partner after sex, you say: “You were very good!” and the like, you probably think you were very polite because usually such expressions  are seen by those who use them as a compliment but are often assimilated by those who receive that “compliment” to the classic ritual compliment that the client addresses to an escort at the end of his sexual performance. It makes more sense to simply say, “I love you!” which means that I love you as a man, as a person, for your dignity and your way of being not only for your sexual performance.

I would like to warn  those who read me against an attitude, characteristic of sexuality aimed only at performance, that can cause bewilderment and disappointment. Sometimes it happens that at the end of a sexual intercourse, the one of the two partners, who has been at the home of the other, gets dressed and goes out closing the door and saying only. “See you!” There is no need to clarify why such an attitude can be experienced as unpleasant. Similarly unpleasant is the invitation to dinner before a night of sex, which has all the characteristics of an attempt at seduction, much more appropriate and pleasant is to go and have a pizza together after sex, or to have breakfast together the next morning, because this underlines that the purpose is the person and not the evening of sex and frames sex in a dimension of ordinary normality.

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If you want, you can participate in the discussion on this post open on the Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-gay-sex-as-a-play

GAY COUPLES AND SEXUAL FANTASIES

Mau85 – Hi Project, how are you? It’s been a while since we talked

 

Project – Fortunately, everything is pretty good here, and you?

 

Mau85 – Here too, and I could say very well indeed today! Do you remember me?

 

Project – yes, I remember the story with your ex, a story which wasn’t actually over because you and your ex kept hearing from each other

 

Mau85 – Yes, he himself, let’s call him Andrew, and do you remember anything else? I don’t want to test your memory, but I have to understand where to resume the story from

 

Project – I remember that Andrew also had other guys and this fact for you was not at all shocking for you

 

Mau85 – shocking certainly not, in short I would have liked to have him all for myself, but he is like this, he also needs something or better someone else, I think I was afraid that they could take him away from me, that is I was afraid that he would stop loving me because he was in love also with other guys, but I couldn’t ask him to leave those guys because he really loved them

 

Project – yes, I remember these things

 

Mau85 – he, however, felt only half satisfied with these guys, not so much from the emotional point of view because after all they respected and loved him, but precisely from the sexual point of view

 

Project – What do you mean? 

 

Mau85 – In the sense that he tried to involve them in his sexual fantasies, which are not really common, but they didn’t listen to him and in the end, for him, sex was a very mechanical thing, because it was he who had to adapt. Actually I don’t even know what he could have said about himself to those guys but I think he’s been quite explicit, as he had been with me, but I don’t know exactly. He tried a lot of times to involve me too in his fantasies, but it wasn’t so easy to me, in the end I pretended not to understand and tried to do what the other guys used to do, that is, I tried to bring him to my own ground, what in the end really happened every time, even if in the end he was only half satisfied. I have to tell you that seeing that after having sex with me he was not really satisfied put me on a lot of melancholy to the point that I tried to thin our meetings because I expected that he would be disappointed anyway. Project, I saw that you didn’t ask me questions to go more deeper and you did well. I just have to tell you that I love Andrew with all my soul, I respect him as a person, he likes sex, has sex with other guys, but I know some of those guys and they are guys who love him.

 

Project – from what you told me it was clear that your relationship with Andrew was serious. There are people who can see your story in a completely different way, it is obvious, for what it may be worth! The important thing is what you think of Andrew, because you know him very well, the rest doesn’t worth anything at all.

 

Mau85 – well, I’ve known him for years, you can’t make a traditional couple with him, it’s different, but it’s not a less serious thing. He needs other guys, I don’t, but we love each other anyway. But you already know this and that was not what I wanted to talk to you about, I called you to talk about what happened between me and Andrew on February 29, one Saturday, before this virus affair, when it was still possible to circulate. In short, he calls me and without any preamble he tells me that he is under my house and that he wants to go up. In our language it means that he wants to have sex with me. I have often said no to him, but at that moment I was happy that he had come to me, I had missed him a lot in the last few days. He comes up to my home, you know that I live alone, he tells me he doesn’t have condoms, when he comes to me he always has them, I make a puzzled face, as if to say: so what did you come for? He knows very well that for me the idea of having sex with him without a condom is absolutely inconceivable and so he replies: Ok, we don’t even touch each other, we’ll stay at a distance each in his place two meters away from each other, but you have to come in my fantasies, you have to make me do it for once, at least in fantasy, something that is good for me, ok? I look at him and say ok! Then he adds, but let’s get to the end, please, without changing the subject. I tell him it’s okay and we masturbated in front of each other while I tell him an erotic story of the kind he likes. At first all the situation sounded strange to me, but he seemed very involved and I went on with the story which in the end seemed quite engaging to me too. I make it short. We got to the end more or less together, we were both very tired. Well, it was the first time he wasn’t disappointed, and we hadn’t even touched each other. He told me that I was beginning to understand what he needed and that he appreciated very much the fact that I had not tried to escape the matter and do the usual things, then he told me that he hadn’t brought condoms on purpose. In general, after our sex meetings, as soon as it’s done, he leaves. But on February 29 instead we cooked and dined together and he stayed in my house to sleep. We talked a lot, I saw him calm, not at all frustrated, he joked, he said nonsense, in short it was an incredible evening, before going to sleep “in his room” he told me: “I love you!” and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. Then in the following days we had a lot of work to do and stayed apart for a while without staying in touch even by phone, but it’s not a rare thing between us. We had agreed that we would meet again on March 14 (our meetings are almost always on the weekend), but the government decrees intervened and we could not move from home, neither he nor I, but the experience of February 29 was somehow replicated a couple of times via the web, which is not quite the same, but I realized that I no longer had any resistance against his fantasies and that trying to share his fantasies seemed to me much more spontaneous, that is, we were practically on the same wavelength, there was no need of speeches or preambles of any kind. Once we arrived at the end, however, we continued to talk about a thousand other things, even very far from sex, I felt him loose, relaxed, without melancholy notes. He told me about when he was a child, about “lego” constructions, but also about the long afternoons he spent alone, practically abandoned by his parents, about how he had learned to draw (which he still does now and very well) and how he had learned to play the guitar, sometimes when some melancholy thoughts were about to invade him he chased them away by doing exercises with the guitar. We spent two evenings or rather two nights talking and we felt well in a profound sense, he felt accepted, not exploited, He said to me: you are not my type, but with you I’m fine, I feel really well and I want you too to feel well, I am not in love with you but I love you. This sentence may sound strange but I know it is absolutely true. Now I hope that the restrictions on circulation will be removed as soon as possible, clearly because it would mean that the epidemic is waning, but also because I’m looking forward to see Andrew again, because for me only he exists. These are the facts. What do you think about, Project?

 

Project – You have been happy and he too, this is the better proof that you and  Andrew love each other! There is a reciprocal trust, a very uncommon way to accept one another’s rules and then he didn’t feel rejected in his most intimate fantasies, you made him understand that you didn’t feel conditioned, in short, you have put him at ease. It would be very nice if it was like that even in all the monogamous couples both gay and hetero, if there was this level of sexual availability! But believe me it is very rare. Very often in sex there are real attempts to prevaricate, attempts to impose models without ever adapting to the other

 

Mau85 – But I felt happy and I said to myself that I was a fool when I tried to avoid to consider his need for what it really was without giving him the opportunity to express himself as he wished, when instead I did it I saw him happy, because he didn’t feel rejected. I think that when you make your partner understand what you need and he pretends not to understand and wants to bring you on his way the feeling of frustration must be tremendous, because you bitterly feel that between you and your partner there isn’t any real feeling, that you are considered no more than a body available to the fantasies of others. In short, Project, I’m slowly learning to understand the meaning of many things that a few years ago I would have refused and would have seemed completely absurd to me. I liked without any real reason the classic couple model and I thought that I would never adapt to anything different and instead when Andrew told me that he had fallen in love with another guy but he loved me anyway I accepted this thing and I have never regretted my choice and now I learn that in order to live sexuality well, one must try to leave room for the other, respecting and accepting him. I saw him smile and it was a beautiful thing. If I love him I don’t have to say no to him for more or less stupid reasons. And then the evenings spent talking together were wonderful. I feel that he really loves me.

 

Project – You have come to these conclusions but the vast majority of couples would never get there, simply because there is no real affection, or perhaps there is, but putting first the self-realization, first the selfish note. The things you say would scandalize many people, but anyway they are very true. I remember you saying that Andrew had never deceived you, well, saying this about a guy means rewarding him with the most beautiful compliment one can do. I’m not surprised that you fell in love with Andrew and even less that you never felt the need to find another guy because there is a relationship with Andrew and it is of deep ones, those which are not lost with the years.

 

Mau85 – I knew you would understand. I told a small summary of this story on another gay site and they asked me if I was out of my mind, in the end they left me alone because they thought I was making fun of them! I’m glad to talk to you, I feel encouraged. However, if you want to publish this chat, publish it, maybe it puts someone in crisis! Thank you, Project, Gay Project has given me so much!

Good night.

 

Project – Thanks to you! And a hug to you and Andrew!

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If you want, you can participate in the discussion on this post open on the Gay Project Forum: http://gayprojectforum.altervista.org/T-gay-couples-and-sexual-fantasies

GAY GUYS AND REJECTION OF SESUALITY

Hi Project,

I took a quick look at the book Being Gay, it is truly monumental, from small tastings it seems interesting to me and it is extraordinary that it can be downloaded at no cost. You have done a useful job, I don’t add other adjectives.

I am a 25-year-old guy, I live in Northern Italy, so in an environment that should be gay friendly. Here there are gay associations but, if I refer to that mythical 8% of gays, I have to conclude that those who attend associations are a small minority and I don’t tell you the comments I hear about them by a lot of people.

Where are all the other gays? I don’t see them anywhere, so even here gays are scared, and I think they do well to be afraid because the social climate is not good at all, and actually it’s even worse than it was a few years ago.

At school I didn’t know a single gay guy, no one declared himself, and exposing himself too much was dangerous. The dating sites and the App, which everyone talks about, are not for me, they seem to me a squalid thing. My gay life, let’s call it so, started at university.

I attended and I’m finishing up attending a faculty with few students, not even forty the first year and then around 30 or even less until the end, they are almost all guys, girls are quite rare, in my course I think they are only five, well, a few weeks after the start of the lessons of my first year I realized that, let’s say, I was not alone, and that the compulsory attendance was not only useful for the exams but also to build relationships with the other guys.

In practice, the university works on two levels, one formal, official, in which there are relationships with teachers, objectively very technical and very limited, even if we are very few, because the courses are short and are very dense with content, and the other underground, but not too much, in which the very fact of being together from morning to night creates in us, young people, a climate of collaboration that favors the birth of friendships, and, in some cases, even something more.

In the morning we start the lessons at 8.00 and then, with various intervals we finish around 17.00. We eat at the canteen, perhaps at different times, depending on the lessons, but it is a very small service, only for our faculty and we study practically all together, even if divided into groups. Even those who live close to the university don’t come home, because together we feel good. I do not speak of large groups but groups of three or four guys, we have two study rooms for each year of the course and these rooms are also well equipped. Groups should be formed on the basis of uniform interests, and that is what has happened, but in general it is not a matter of study interests.

I don’t even know how it happened, but it happened, I found myself with two other colleagues, we chose each other instinctively, we were fine together, at the beginning we didn’t know at all that we were three gays, for me, it was a completely new world to be discovered, I felt that with those guys the relationship was different from what I had with others, there was no competition, there was only a great desire to be together, to work together and even more.

The two guys of my small group of study, Louis and Antony, were very different, Louis was a nice guy, but he was not my type, he was pleasant, reassuring, but physically attracted me little, while Antony was very insecure, always hesitant, he was tall, blond and with blue eyes, with hair a little longish, he was a bit neurotic and complexed by the fear of being out of place, to annoy, he apologized for everything, even for very trivial things, with him I too felt a little anxious because I didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable.

I knew almost immediately that Louis was gay, because it was he who told me it: “to avoid misunderstandings”, he added. I avoided to tell him that I too was gay. Louis was fine with me and with Antony, but from what I understood he had a boyfriend and so he had his life, we were his study friends and maybe we would have also become friends of confidences, but his basic interests were elsewhere.

With Antony things were very different, when we were alone together we felt a certain embarrassment, we often talked about Louis or other guys. At one point Antony told me: “Do you know that Louis is gay? He told me it this morning …” I replied that I knew, I saw a moment of perplexity on the face of Antony, I think he wondered why I hadn’t told him, but he didn’t comment and I think he appreciated my discretion. I was hoping that the dialogue on the subject would widen but it didn’t happen and it ended there.

We felt very well when we were there, the three of us, but when I was alone with Antony I didn’t know what to say or what to do, he had an embarrassed and embarrassing behavior, he never spoke of girls and even less of guys but it seemed to me that a good relationship had been created between us.

When we had to separate, in the evening, none of us took the initiative, and a quarter of an hour after a quarter of an hour we came home very late almost every night, but we didn’t talk too much, we spent almost all the time in silence. Among other things, when I was alone with him I was also embarrassed because I was almost always in erection and I was afraid that he would notice. From what I saw, he didn’t even give a minimum sign of erection and I didn’t like this thing at all.

The hypothesis that he was gay didn’t seem too realistic to me despite the fact that he tended to stay always with me. I feared that our relationship could turn into a relationship of dependency but in a sense I felt very attracted to Antony. I came to think that I should tell him that I was gay, because if he had found out it by himself or if he knew it from others he might feel uncomfortable.

One of the long nights spent walking back and forth around the city, I took courage and told him it, he answered me: “Don’t worry, I had understood it for some time” I asked him how he had understood it and he told me: “When you stay with me you’re hard all the time …” I asked him: “Does this embarrass you?” He replied: “If I felt embarrassed I would not be here …” Then he continued: “You want to know if I’m gay too? “I nodded and he said:” Yes, I feel gay, or at least I don’t feel straight but sex is a bit of an obsession and a bit of a frustration for me … ” And then we finally entered the topic.

This was more or less the speech:

“I’ve never fallen in love with a girl, while when I’m close to you I feel at ease, and I feel at ease even if you are in erection and perhaps especially for that. You will tell me that I am stupid, but I am really complexed by these things, I think I am very feminine, I don’t feel like a woman, but I think I have female physical movements and attitudes.”
“Who? You? No! Not at all!”
“You also saw Louis, he too is gay, but he is very masculine, no one would take him for gay …”
“No! Antony, no! Take these things off your head! You’re a beautiful guy, and you’re very masculine, you’re not rough, you’re not massive but thin, but rest assured that you’re 100% masculine … ”
“Well … maybe … ”
“But why do you feel conditioned in sex?”
“For me, sex has never been a simple thing, I’ve never been with anyone … ”
“Not even me if this is the problem … ”
“Yes, but you go into erection when I’m there, I on the contrary feel only embarrassed, I’m completely stuck, I think I would feel totally uncomfortable being with a guy … ”
“I think these are just fears, when it happens you will realize that it’s a very simple thing … ”
“I don’t think it will ever happen … ”
“But at least when you do it by yourself … there are no fears … ”
“When I do it by myself, as you say, and it’s a very rare thing, afterwards, I feel sick … ”
“But why? There’s nothing wrong … ”
“I’ll tell you something that nobody knows … I as a child, not even as a child, as a boy, because the first time it happened I was 14, I was raped by an uncle, and the story went on for a month, I was really afraid of him, at the end I couldn’t stand him anymore, I threatened him that if he came back I would have told my father and he disappeared. He was 44 years old and I have been really raped from behind … I don’t tell you how I felt when I experienced my first gay feelings, something disgusting, I don’t want to be gay, being gay sucks me … now maybe you can understand … ”
“Oh my God I would never have imagined, if you want I take you home, I don’t want to create difficulties of any kind … ”
“Please shut up! … Let me go on with what I’m saying, I am a victim of homosexuality and I don’t want to be gay, I don’t even know if you can understand such a thing, but even if the memory of those things really disgusts me, I ended up becoming gay just for that reason … ”
“No, Antony, now it’s you the one who has to shut up … but which “to become”? And then you say that your uncle was was gay but I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m gay, I have the pleasure of being near you, even sexual pleasure, it’s like that and I’m not ashamed at all of this, but I never imagined penetrating a guy from behind, really never.”
“That’s because you were been given an education.”
“No! This is because I’m gay!”
“I didn’t understand … what does it mean?”

And there, dear Project, I took my smartphone and I had him read a piece of your book where you talk about these things. He was initially perplexed, then he went on to read, after a few minutes he looked at me and asked me: “So then my uncle could even be straight? … ” I told him that he probably was, because what he did was not a gay behavior. He was perplexed, confused, he insisted on asking me if I had ever had fantasies of that kind and I told him that it really had never happened.

The speech didn’t seem to him according to what he had seen in some videos in which anal penetration was always present in practice. I told him to read all your article and also the part of the book about the hetero-curious and I drove him home. He was puzzled, very meditative, but occasionally he made some gesture of satisfaction and even a few sketchy smiles.

The day after everything went on easily at university as if nothing had happened; immediately after 5.00 pm he asked me to take him home, but we went around in the car until late at night. He had read the book and seemed to have discovered a world, he told me: “Reading the book I got the very clear impression that my uncle was not gay at all and I realized that instead my fantasies are really gay. My uncle paid no attention to my penis, just zero, he never masturbated me and I was over 14 years old and I would have reacted but he never did, but he wanted me to have oral sex to him, but never did it to me, and above all there had to be the anal penetration and there was also something that I didn’t understand at all, that is the attention to my nipples, a really anomalous thing, to the nipples yes and to the penis no! Actually the overall picture was very different form that of real gay fantasies, isn’t it? Even I have never had fantasies of anal penetration but I thought it was something only mine, a refusal due to the abuse, but it seems that it is a very common thing among gays”

Since Antony was talking to me so freely I too felt obliged to do so and he was very intrigued by that speech that he didn’t expect at all. It was now night and there was little light, he asked me if I was hard, I said yes, he asked if he could touch it from outside, I said yes, he touched it for about ten seconds, then he looked at me and said: thank you! He apologized for the fact that he could not reciprocate, because he wasn’t in erection, then he thought just a second and told me: “Come on, check it, it’s right that we’re on par!”

In the following days we talked a lot less because the exams were coming and we only studied, in three at the university and then in two at my house, a single-room apartment where I lived alone because I was away from home. He came to stay at my house, because it is within a stone’s throw from the faculty. We studied a lot, we slept together in the same bed, but between us there has never been sex, not even at the minimum level. After 15 days of overwork we passed the three exams we had planned. I expected him to move back to his house but he asked me to stay, I obviously said yes.

We had long evenings to spend together and we talked a lot in a totally free way, we talked about our families, our desires and obviously also about sex. I could understand that the memory of the violence troubled him deeply and even if he too began to accept the idea that his uncle was not gay at all, still he still had many doubts about it, he asked me to talk to him about my sexual fantasies and I did, he listened to me with the utmost attention, told me that the penis seemed to him an undesirable thing, associated only to violence and this fact tore him because he also experienced homosexual fantasies but mixed with feelings of rejection. I asked him if he had felt feelings of repulsion when I had made him touch it from above my trousers and he simply replied: no!

He told me he was happy to be with me, even because I had never pressed him for any reason and that I was a positive image of gays, and finally he added: “if you are gay, I too can be so”. I liked this sentence very much and I told him enthusiastically but he replied that anyway it wouldn’t have been easy for him, that he needed time and that I had to be patient, even if we slept in the same bed.

One day, after a day of intense study we went to sleep. We turned off the light but I felt that he had not turned the other way as he always did but had remained turned towards me. At a certain moment he asks me: “Are you hard now?” I say yes and he asks me if he can touch it, I say yes and he touches it very gently, after a while he says to me: “Touch mine!” And I feel that he is hard too. He tells me that it’s the first time that this happens to him spontaneously and that he doesn’t feel rejection neither touching me nor being touched, then he adds that he doesn’t want to go any further and we stop touching but we keep talking, he tells me he’s happy but that he doesn’t want to delude himself too much and above all he doesn’t want to delude me.

We get up, get dressed, I put myself on the sofa and he lies there, resting his head on my legs. He asks me: “Do you mind?” I only answer him with a smile and he says: “I have to get used to the physical contact … I have never done such a thing.” It is very late and falls asleep on my knees, I don’t move him. When it starts to dawn I take him in my arms and bring him back to bed. He’s really a nice guy, or rather, it looks beautiful to me. I lie in bed next to him and I fall asleep too.

In the following days he seems to have completely forgotten about what had happened between us, I don’t say anything but when I sit on the couch to see the TV he almost always comes to lie down on my legs and I feel his warmth. One evening, before going to sleep, he asks me to show me naked because it has never happened before, I smile and I completely undress in front of him and I start to get a hard-on, he tells me I’m beautiful, then he undresses and he too is in erection, he comes close and hugs me tight, but very tight, almost hurting me, then asks me if we can sleep naked, of course I say yes, I put only one more cover on the bed because it’s a bit cold. We hug tightly in bed and we stay like this for very long minutes.

The next day it was as if nothing had happened between us, not in the sense that there was disinterest, but as if what had happened was absolutely normal. There was certainly more physical contact between us, there were more hugs, we stroked our hands, we leaned against each other when we were sitting on the couch, but there were no sexual contacts, nevertheless, despite this I felt happy, I saw him smile, play, make jokes, it was a beautiful thing.

One evening I see him very discouraged, he keeps me at a distance, I try to understand why and he tells me that he tried to masturbate thinking of me but that the thing didn’t arrive to its obvious end because he felt a terrible sense of rejection, something very strong, not for me but for the idea of sex in itself, it seemed to him like a dirty thing almost a way to do violence against me, to play with my image, something like a lack of respect. In short, he was really uncomfortable and I had the distinct feeling that there was very little to do and that he would never have abandoned the obsessive memory of violence. I hugged him, but he was totally passive, then I said to him: “I love you, Antony!” He replied: “I’ll never have sex with you …” I told him: “I’m just worried about losing you and this would be devastating for me … ” He told me: “I cannot do anything, I tried, but I cannot … ” I didn’t know what to say, maybe a few days before it seemed all too easy, but slowly I was beginning to doubt that with Antony I could create a story, let’s say so, a normal story, that is even with a bit of sex, I don’t say much, but at least a little to convince me that he loved me and didn’t consider me only in relation to the memory of violence. I was beginning to understand that the problem was more serious than I had imagined.

We continued to live together but we removed any behavior that could have even a vague sexual implication, we continued to sleep in the same bed but always wearing pajamas, even during the summer, and he stopped lieing on my legs when we see the TV. We are good friends, yes, true friends, friends who talk about everything with the utmost sincerity, I love him deeply but slowly I lost the confidence that Antony can become my boyfriend. It’s been years, almost four years now, Antony and I still live together, sometimes there was even a minimal attempt to sexual approach between us, that has brought more frustration and disappointment than anything else. I think Antony has in fact put aside the idea, I don’t know if we will ever come to share sex, I have many doubts about it, but I know that without Antony I would feel lost.

I never imagined that I could live my life like this, and yet I feel that this is my life, I always hope that things can change, but the first rule, for me, must be the absolute respect for Antony and his problems. For me it is not a renunciation, I have made my choice and I don’t think I would be able to live a different life.

Antony and I really love each other and we are still young and something could always change, but our love will not fail under any circumstances.

I embrace you, Project, or I hope your work will be useful for Antony as it was useful for me.
Charles
_________

In conclusion, I must state that the e-mail above is reported in the forum with the consent of both protagonists of the story. The text is in the form of an email but has been agreed so as to avoid any risk for privacy and to be as clear as possible. In particular, the references to the faculty have been significantly modified for reasons of privacy. I must emphasize that, if it is true that this story deals with the consequences of violence and sexual abuse, the situation described is certainly not the worst, because violence and sexual abuse can really have tragic consequences. The two guys mentioned in the story you read, have built a very strong emotional relationship in which sexuality, even if limited and denied is somehow strongly present. I have to underline that I happened several times to talk with guys who had suffered violence or abuse and I could see how much these episodes have weighed on their sexuality and their emotional life.
Project

____________

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

GAY FANTASIES OF A MARRIED MAN

Hello Project, only in this days I have met your beautiful and very useful site and I have found several answers to my “troubles” and I must say that at least in part and thanks to you I feel a little less agitated. I am writing to you, however, because I think that my experience may also be useful to others (so I authorize you to post this email, if you think it appropriate), and above all because I would like to have advice on how to behave or better, on what is your best way to deal with my situation with less anxiety. And then I’m just fine to talk about it, because I’ve never talked to anyone and then I’ve been carrying this weight for 30 years now. So I would like it to be clear what a great step I’m going to make.

I am 44 years old (and also because of this I have written because I read that you like to increase the number of “no longer boys”, as you call them, who bring their experiences.

I am happily married to a wonderful woman and I have two beautiful kids. I want to underline it because I love my wife to madness and she loves me even more, if possible, and with her there is also a good sexual harmony: I find myself satisfied on that side, also because, without exaggerating, we occasionally experience something new. The only flaw is that over the years (12 of marriage) the frequency of the sexual intercourses has diminished. She too seems to me to be satisfied, but she would like to have a greater frequency in the intercourses.

But let’s get to the point. Ever since I started masturbating, that is, at 11, if I remember well, my sexual fantasies have always turned, at 95%, to homosexual contents. In most cases, depending on the time, the fantasies have seen me and see me even now in the passive role and in fact, from the beginning I had and still have a great pleasure in anal self-stimulation. I have never had any kind of sexual intercourse until the age of 28 and this does not seem normal to me. My sexuality was then expressed through masturbation. In truth, my discovery of attraction to the guys has never led me to any particular sense of guilt or to attempts of repression: I accepted it immediately, but at the same time I realized that it would not be easy to live my sexuality freely.

Girls for the truth I have always liked them, and even today if I see beautiful women, sexual thoughts come to my mind. Conversely, as many do, if you exclude the adolescent phase, I feel that I cannot find any affective interest in a man/boy: at best I could fall “sexually” in love with someone of them. As far as I’m concerned, honestly, I do not believe in love between two men; the true love I could have found, and really found presently is only with women, which I consider to be superior to men in this respect (I know you will not agree but that’s not the point).

Given the above, in adolescence, I was having trouble communicating with girls, both because of shyness and because I was conditioned by the social environment (at that time I lived in a small town) and by my mother in the sense that I did not want to be seen around with not nice girls because my mother always told me I was a good guy (that’s true) and that cute girls had to line up for me (obviously it’s not true, because I’m not particularly attractive). Perhaps I missed a strong push to have heterosexual intercourses because I probably liked more those gay. Surely I always liked better the male body. I also have always been involved in the studies and probably at that time masturbation was enough to calm my sexual appetites.

As far as the possibility of gay intercourses is concerned, even though, as has already been said, there was no problem neither moral nor of personal acceptance, living in a small town, even though there was no internet, there was anyway, of course, a strong social conditioning. etc. etc. I have never had real opportunities, nor have I really been looking for such opportunities (except for some timid approaches which have not led to anything). However, I lived quite serenely (blessed masturbation!) And by the truth I said to myself that the sexual intercourse between men was superior to that hetero because it gives the opportunity to enjoy with all parts of the body. Probably if I had more opportunities and more explicit, had there been internet with its beautiful sites (like this) that would help me overcome my shyness and, why not, less beautiful sites (porn movies) that would still make me understand many things about the gay world, I would have had my homosexual, traumatic or beautiful but still right experiences, because that was the age to make those experiences!

At that time, however, I could also have fallen in love with guys, what really happened with some comrades (without any possibility). When I left my little town to go to college in a big city, you could suppose that, freeing me from the conditioning of my old town and of my family, I could have experienced my first gay relationships but no! Again in this case, I was overwhelmed by other types of conditioning: first of all, and maybe it was also right, the commitment to the study, since I felt obliged to my parents who spent a lot of money to keep me in college, but also the fact that I was living in an apartment with one of my high school friends (and that’s where the little town comes back to me) plus two absolutely hetero guys totally locked up at any dialog. So I didn’t even have time to look for boys and girls and didn’t even have such a big desire.

I kept masturbating thinking of homo intercourses (during this time both active and passive, I imagine because, without having any experience, any way of feeling pleasure attracted me) and I was there “drooling” when I was seeing guys around or on television. When I finished my studies and started working, always in the big city, I went to live alone. At that point I said, “Finally I can arrange my life as I want, I can decide whether to have gay relationships or not, or go looking for girls!” But it was not that easy: I didn’t have a computer neither I was really interested in buying a computer, and at that time social networks and chats were still in the early days, during the university years I had been isolated from the social context and I almost had to fit into the social environment of the city, I did not know how to meet people, women or men, and those were even the first few months of the new job with all this entails, and I did not have the luck to have some bisexual colleague with whom to try something! I really was not so bad physically: not much beautiful in the face but with a muscular body, tall, wide shoulders, only with a slightly prominent belly but with a nice seat. I had started a first approach to gay pornography (magazines), but nothing more.

When at last (at the age of 28!) maybe because I felt alone, I decided that it was time to have sex (hetero or even gay), I first went with a female prostitute and lost my virginity. I must say that it was not traumatic, but I did not feel a particular pleasure. Then I started thinking that I could not go on like that and that I had to experience gay intercourses.

At that point, however, and I don’t know why (what do you think about, Project?) I felt also a strong need for paternity and “normality”: I absolutely wanted to have a family with a woman who loved me and that I could love, and also have children. I really wanted such things and not just to suppress my gay sexuality! So I thought that it was absolutely crucial to make a choice, a choice that really influenced all my life and that’s why I’m now writing to you: had I to follow the “sexual” part of me and then give vent my desire to have fun with guys every time I wanted it, but with the prospect, on the other hand, of living a life not easy (it is useless to turn around) as a bisexual single because I never wanted to “live” with a male? This would have forced me to remain basically alone, whether I chose to remain hidden or to expose my nature, causing great pain to my family. Or had I to give up a part, even important, of my sexuality, continuing to take refuge in masturbation, but having for the rest a serene life, (what then actually happened)?

I decided that sex wasn’t certainly the most important part of life and that in the end you cannot have everything and therefore I made my choice. Today I don’t regret it and this choice for the truth is very similar to that of a heterosexual man who marries and decides to be faithful, to renounce having sex with other women. Nevertheless I regret, that I didn’t have gay relationships in adolescence and youth. I wish I could say today: “I still like guys, but I’ve already done what I wanted to do, I have had my many relationships, and have experienced what was to be experienced and then I made the right choice.”

Unfortunately, things are not so and after so many years, now I feel a little in crisis because it seems to me that masturbation is not enough anymore, nor it’s enough to feel very excited when on public transport I see good guys; I would like to feel a male’s body with all my senses, let a gay penetrate me, and also enjoy him. But in my situation it’s not easy. I would not have moral inhibitions to go with male escorts, but in addition to the obvious fear of illness, however overwhelming, I would not have had time or opportunity to stay at the computer choosing this or that one because I obviously have a family and from whew I’m working I cannot go to these sites.

I could put an ad and then just wait, but in this case too, the thing should be handled by the home computer and I would have difficulties for the above reasons. And then, it’s really worth? Ah, had I too had the luck of several people who write to you, who can, by “normal” ways, get in touch with gay or bisexual people! I could make contacts with men who are in my own situation and only experience sex stories, but my wife probably would not forgive me and I do not know if I would do it. And for the truth I do not know how much I can enjoy having sex with men of my age: I still like teenagers but at my age it’s ridiculous to think that you can find someone willing to have sex with one of over 40, moreover passive, if not for money. Besides, I’m no longer as handsome as when I was young because with growing age I got a little belly. Of course, a thirty-year-old man would theoretically have more experience and know how to make me enjoy.

I didn’t said anything yet to my wife, I don’t feel like it yet, I don’t know if she would understand. maybe in the coming months I will do it, perhaps just to get rid of such a weight and maybe this could make our relationship even better, because she would understand that I am honest. Lately, I’ve given her some signal, because during sexual intercourses I asked her to penetrate me with phallic objects. At first she hesitated, but then she said to me, “Because I love you, if you like it, I’ll do” and then she asked me if I like males but I did not have the courage to say it and indeed I told her that if a man wants to feel pleasure in that way it’s not an index of homosexuality. She told me something I was happy about, that is if I had sex (and I suppose, sporadically) with a male, it would be less harming than if I had sex with a woman for the simple reason that I would go looking for a kind of pleasure that she could not give me. But soon after that she started crying and I felt my heart wounded!

Project, what do you suggest to face my situation more serenely? I would like to have your reply. Lastly, I would like to send positive messages. I hope my experience will be useful to the young guys who are now living the same things I have experienced, I hope they reflect before acting to avoid my own mistakes, putting away any hesitation in experiencing gay relationships if they feel they want to do it, and putting also away every external conditionings (which, contrary to what people think, still today are common among the guys, although in very different manners according to the context). Even today, even for those who live in the little towns, thanks to the internet there are more ways to get to know each other and compare their anxieties. And then I also think of my children, both boys: I think that what I’ve been and still I’m through is not useless because, when the time will be right, I will be able to educate them correctly about affectivity and sexuality. For charity, I will not encourage them to be gay, rather I will explain to them that gay life is tough, but I will tell them that their dad has no problem if they want to experience gay, sexual or sentimental relationships. And then they will decide what is best for them.

I wish you all the best.

P.S .: I cannot use chats and the like, I’m ignorant of the matter and on the other hand in my situation I would not even have the chance; so please give me an e-mail reply; if you think it appropriate, you can also post this mail and your answer.

What follows is my answer.

Hi, I go straight to the point. What you write does not have much of gay, rather it is a mentality far removed from that of most gays, I can tell you better, for you it is important to experience a kind of sexuality, not to build a love story with a guy. For you there is only one of the two components of homosexuality, that is, the typically sexual one, and it lacks the affective one and you tend to read gay sexuality as a set of sexual practices that are not even the majoritarian in the gay world (penetration) and are a vague transposition in a homosexual key of a typically heterosexual sexuality.

Experimentation of sexuality has nothing to do with sexuality, it is an experiment not an act of love and on the other hand you say and underline in any way that you do not believe in love stories between two men, which for a gay guy is absolutely essential. A married man gratified by heterosexuality, having a relationship with a guy or wanting to have a relationship with a guy is not a gay but a heterosexual who goes or wants to go with the guys but will in all likelihood transpose into a homosexual relationship things that with the gay world have little to do. In the heterosexual dimension, sexuality is inevitably with fixed roles, in the homosexual dimension the existence of roles doesn’t even make sense, despite what people believe, there is a principle of substantial equality, it is the sexuality of similarity and not of complementarity.

A gay guy falls in love with another guy (even heterosexual) and doesn’t fall in love because he wants to experience some sexual practice with him, but because for that guy he feels love and tenderness. I would like to clarify one thing, according to the common language a man is homosexual if and only if he has sexual intercourses with another man but this does not make sense, on the contrary it happens often that guys not yet openly gay fall in love with guys with whom they could never have sexual intercourses. A gay guy may regret a love story ended badly but not the lost opportunity of having sex with a guy.

A gay falls in love with a guy and then sees him sexually, masturbates thinking about that guy, wants him but wants him as a person, because it must be just that boy and not another one, he does not want him because he’s a guy but because he is just that guy. A gay would not think of going to search for an escort to try a sexual contact or put ads for sexual purposes, could even put ads but dreaming of doing almost miraculously in certain environments the encounter he had dreamed of all his life, that is to find there the guy who really loves him and that will be his boyfriend steadily.

A gay guy does not dream of gay sexual intercourses but of a love story with a guy and when he is in love is brought to do anything for his boyfriend. I have seen authentically heroic gestures, incredible courage and abnegation manifestations of gay guys in love for the good of the guy they love. A gay guy in love, for the guy he loves, is capable of giving up everything because he realizes that the relationship he has created, if real, is able to change his life 100%. But you tell me, in any case I still feel the strong impetus to try a gay sexuality. Given that you cannot build any serious affective affair with a gay guy, you will find only guys or men who, like you, just want to try or continue to experience sexual intercourses, if you allow me, this is the anteroom of a deep frustration. I don’t say it for moralism but because I have seen these things a lot of times.

A forty-year-old guy seriously looking for an affective relationship with a man can also find answers worthy of being taken into consideration. But when I saw married men go looking for “just” homosexual experiences to say that they experienced it as wall, inevitably, a few months later, I saw the consequences in terms of frustration and sometimes of sexual dependence. I add another thing that seems to me to be absolutely fundamental, and it is the relationship of a married man with his wife, especially in families with children. If I try to think about how a woman can feel when she understands to have a husband looking for sex out of the house and with a man, I get shivered. You are destroying your wife’s life in this way, and moreover when she made her choice she was not aware of what really you had in mind. Let’s not talk about the kids. I have seen great children who have accepted that the father was gay and that he lived with another man but in a relationship that nevertheless appeared in the eyes of the children (because it really was) a true love affair, but of course those children would not accept that the father wanted try to prove gay sexuality.

When you married you didn’t speak clearly to your wife, until now even if you didn’t really allow her to understand who you are, however, you have considered that your relationship should not be crushed by different sex fantasies (hetero or gay) but if you’re looking for sex from a man, your wife would feel betrayed and no less than if you were looking for sex from a woman. I would strongly disagree with your invitation to the guys to “experience gay intercourses.” It is good not to be “afraid of external conditioning” if it is to build true gay love stories but to push people to experience gay sexuality without an affective basis means just not having the pale idea of what gay life really is. I apologize for my perhaps too much determined way to deal with the problem, but I have to clarify and point out that what you consider gay are the typical gay fantasies of a heterosexual man, that of gay only have the appearance.

I add here below the answer to my email.

Thank you so much for the wonderful answer, it has been very helpful, you are really a nice person. The perception of me as bisexual or gay or otherwise attracted to males stemmed from the fact that my free sexuality (masturbation) has always been addressed to guys and still excites me to see beautiful males. If things are different then ok. In the meantime (and I hope I did well) I took courage and I told my wife everything! In confirmation of what you say, she felt betrayed because I did not tell her everything before marrying and maybe she would have accepted me the same but in a conscious way: she said practically the same thing you said to confirm that she is definitely a person better than me. But better late than never and also now I know, above all thanks to you, that I must not betray her for any reason in the world because I love her immensely and now more than ever I need her love and she needs mine.

I hope my wife will be able to metabolize the suffering that I created her, she who simply dreams of a normal life with a normal man, thanks to the fact that she knows that now I would never betray her and that I need her. Paradoxically, however, I feel better, because I have freed myself of a burden that I have worn for too many years and because now I know I can masturbate without hiding from her who is willing, out of love, to participate in these fantasies of mine and also accepted more serenely to practice anal penetration for me. Yesterday, after I told her, every time I approached her there was an erection and it seems to me that couple sexuality can gain, I feel even more satisfied: always a compromise solution but less hypocritical and freer.

Excuse me if I said that guys have to experience gay relationships, I was wrong to write and in fact if you read the part dedicated to my children, I spoke, more correctly, to experience gay relationships both sexually and sentimentally, if they feel they want to do such things. I just wanted to say, in fact, that if a guy in adolescence feels he wants to have a gay relationship in his sexual and sentimental fullness, he can do it without hesitation, so as not to find himself living in regret, like me.

Feel free to publish this e-mail, if you think it appropriate, I’d like to read your opinion and also those of the guys of the forum, even with reference to developments with my wife. You’re a big, Bye.

Here below my answer.

Your mail makes me immensely pleased, because you did what had to be done, that is, you spoke clearly with your wife. Sure she felt betrayed for not having known everything before, but at least now she can have the certainty of having an authentic relationship with her husband, in which there are not things that are not said. Of course you feel better! You did what you had to do. See, the relationship with your wife, just from what you write, has all the characteristics of a true emotional relationship, in which there is sex, of course, but there is also a community of life and a cooperation to build something together. Being accepted by his own wife even after such an admission is a sign that the relationship is very strong.

You can also have your fantasies about guys but loving a person is a different thing. To love means to live together, to build together, to have a common world, in two, to be a couple and no longer to two individuals.
A hug! And good luck!
Project

I report below the answer I received.

Dear Project, I’m always “the man married who experiences gay fantasies”. Excuse me if I write to you again, I’m far from taking advantage of your immense availability. But I read the discussion that followed on my case with great interest. I would have liked to register on the forum and answer the numerous comments, but my wife wouldn’t have approved.

I was pleased about the interest, but things have been said about the relationship of love with my wife that I didn’t like too much: I’m good to be considered a repressed gay or a schizophrenic bisexual (yes, I always knew that my behavior is not 100% normal and in my life I never felt heterosexual, I felt gay at times, before getting to know my wife, bisexual almost always), but it hurts me when one calls into question my deep love (both feeling and sex) for my wife. You can understand that for me it would be terrifying: it means that for all these years of marriage with my wife I only pretended to love her first of all if front of myself and unknowingly, even though I am deeply convinced of loving her in the highest sense of the term and above all of feeling sexual fulfillment: if I think about it, I feel like crying!
But I wanted to tell you that you’re really great and do you know why? I went to read a post of March 31, 2010 entitled “Gay Sexuality and Transgression”. I quote here two passages:

” It sometimes happens that some guys who have a typically heterosexual and fully satisfying emotional and sexual couple life don’t ever masturbate thinking of a girl but they do it thinking exclusively of guys with whom they don’t feel emotionally involved, but their sexual fantasies are concentrated only on a particular sexual behavior, considered very transgressive. In such situations, the classic principle of free sexuality, according to which sexual orientation emerges through the masturbation (free sexuality) and not through the couple sexuality, cannot be applied precisely because in these situations masturbation is not really free and the fact of masturbating with transgressive gay fantasies (or considered such) indicates that masturbation is experienced not as sexuality but as an act of rebellion against taboos. The more transgressive the fantasies that accompany masturbation are the greater is the gratification that is obtained by overcoming the taboo. I mean that for these guys masturbation is not really a sexual experience but an act of self-assertion as a person who got rid of taboos. This mechanism of overcoming taboos through transgressive masturbation can in some cases evolve into forms of transgressive couple sexuality.”

“It is evident that in this case masturbation is not at all a form of free sexuality and, I would say, it is not even a form of true sexuality. It often happens that the “transgressive” masturbation of a guy who is really a heterosexual accompanies the temptation to put into practice masturbation fantasies. It should be noted that in these cases the affective dimension is totally lacking and the problem is reduced to bringing the overcoming of taboos from the masturbatory dimension, that appears reductive, to a far more “transgressive” dimension of couple sexuality. I emphasize that the guys who have a “transgressive” gay masturbation generally have a rather distorted view of gay sexuality that for them, even if they say otherwise, is basically something anomalous that becomes interesting precisely because “transgressive”, the idea of gay sexuality and affectivity as normal for these guys is difficult to accept, in a sense, if they considered gay sexuality normal, it would lose all attraction for them. It must be said that these guys in the vast majority have never fallen in love with a guy and consider at least unnatural that two guys can live a deep and mutual love. All this with being gay has clearly nothing to do.”

In the aforementioned post you describe exactly how my situation is after I met my wife, except, in my opinion, that I’m not exactly hetero. You wrote this thing 3 months before I told you my experience! So to insist on the theory that is the free sexuality, without other specifications, that determines the true sexual orientation seems to me too simplifying in my case. I would like to say that, without having read the post above (I swear it, before anyone doubts it) after my coming out with my wife, as I said, we are having sex more “transgressively” (I admit, in this period I cannot help but be penetrated by her almost every night, I’m sexually happy, also because pleasure comes to me not only from the act itself, but also from the fact that it is exactly my wife who makes it to me and such a thought makes me feel like in the early days of marriage). Not only this, but the things I learned from your site have made me better understand the gay reality as something less transgressive and coincidentally, at least for the moment, I don’t masturbate with certain fantasies!

I realize that claiming to describe my sexual and affective life in 3 pages was a mistake, because I cannot make people understand all the nuances, but I couldn’t bore you by focusing on the details. After all, my goal was not to know what I’m (I am a person very self-interested: I’ve been forming a precise idea of myself for a few years now), but to have an advice on the best way to live my situation and you gave me that advice very well, Project: you made me understand that looking for occasional intercourse even on payment would be detrimental, first of all for me, even before than for my family. Of course, before knowing my wife I thought almost exclusively of guys in masturbation but it was almost always anaffective masturbation: even when I was thinking about specific guys (for example high school or college mates) I always thought of them as sexual objects. I almost never felt in love with guys, while in happened with girls (with a lot of sexual desires that anyway only for very short periods accompanied my masturbation fantasies: Jek is right, I’m not normal).

With my wife I was engaged 3 years and they were beautiful years like the first years after marriage, when we were sexually very active and not only because upstream there was a deep love relationship. In those 3 years I should have realized if something was wrong and I should have given everything up, instead everything was fine: the other night I remembered with my wife that it was enough for me to hear her voice on the phone to get an erection! Not that I stopped masturbating thinking about homosexual relationships, but my sexual fantasies oriented themselves exclusively to imaginary transgressive relationships, no longer thinking about specific guys. After all, the emotional part of love for my wife has never failed: she is the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in life and I want to scream at all! The sexual interest has waned, starting from the birth of the first child, but it is a normal thing in couples (isn’t it true, Barbara?). I would not charge it to my being bisexual or if you prefer repressed gay, if anything it’s the other way around. Those who know the life of a couple know that at a certain point it is no longer enough to see the partner naked to get excited, also because the body is not as beautiful as it once was, but it is necessary to know how to touch, how to caress, etc. in a crescendo of new sexual stimuli that for those who have a very high libido like me can mean experiencing “more” transgressive “games”. This needs time, dedication and with two children, the work, the house, I assure you that it is not easy. That’s why masturbation for me is not the only form of sexuality due to the fact that I don’t like that expressed with my wife, but the valve to vent my own instincts in a simple way, without too much effort and intellectual or sentimental involvement. What I wanted to say then is that for years I have convinced myself that I was bisexual and I believe that the discussion on the forum does nothing but confirm it, but I don’t place too much emphasis on the dissociation between heterosexual affectivity and gay sexuality, because also from a sexual point of view the hetero side is satisfying for me and it is so much more because at the base there is a deep emotional bond! (and, Project, you took it immediately).

I would not then unleash your ethical reactions (don’t be too bad with me), but I would say that I have always been happy to be bisexual: it is nice to be able to love one’s own female partner and feel sexually satisfied with her and at the same time feel excited to see beautiful guys on the street and then if I can share this excitement with the woman of my life it is even more beautiful! It is obvious that a bisexual who places the “traditional” family at the top of the scale of his values should at some point make a choice: hence my regret for not having fully lived the homo part when I could. I thank you all, no one excluded and I would really like to embrace you not only virtually, even that “bad guy” of Publisher, whose analyzes have been very useful to understand me even better. A special thanks, as well as to Project, also to Barbara, who was able to express in a sublime way my mood and of which I share every single word. Congratulations to Telemaco for his sensitivity: it is a quality that is always a pleasure to find in guys his age and I wish him to find the person who can make him happy because he deserves it. Congratulations also to Aster, who from his blog appears to be a sweet boy, cultured and also cute: in my next masturbation fantasies I’ll get excited thinking of him who says “ugly typical repressed fennel!”. Joking aside, he is a smart guy and not just for the coming out story (as a parent I hope things with his father are settled: for a father to feel close to his son who “cheated” him has not price). Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, these coming out stories have a bit fed up even for controversies. Rather, Aster, let us dream and tell us your love story with your boyfriend (sentimentally eh, I better specify it before you start to think that I’m a pervert). I regret not being able to participate actively in the forum, but maybe I will follow you and who knows, in a few years, when my eldest will be in age, I hope you can enjoy reading what I have to say about education on sexual and sentimental orientation. I hope I will be a good father, and this thanks to my “experience” and thanks to you. Best wishes.

Peter

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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-fantasies-of-a-married-man

HOMOSEXUALIY ANXIETY AND SEXUAL EXPERIMENTS

With the author’s permission, I publish below a rather interesting email in which it is very clear what “sexual experiments” are and how they have only the appearance of sexuality and are instead expression of a more or less clear compulsiveness resulting from anxiety states.

Dear Project, allow me to use the word dear as I’m a loyal user of the site and the various articles published. This is not the first email that I send you, we already had some long talk, about a year ago, just this period. This said, I try to summarize again my experience in the shortest but still satisfactory way so that you can have a clear idea of my story.

I’m a guy 21 and a half year old, [-omissis-]. I have always been very shy and reserved, but at the same time also sociable. I started to masturbate very early, at about 8 to 9 years, always thinking about girls, I remember, digging in my memory, that at that time I tried to masturbate thinking about a friend of mine, but it happened just once, an isolated case that I have never repeated. Very often we masturbated in groups, two or even three of us, in front of a porn, but always each on their own, and touching each their own genitals. I distinctly remember that in that age I was not caught by any kind of curiosity and / or desire to touch or do things to my friends, but the only curiosity that pushed me was the fact that my classmates had an already quite developed apparatus, with hairs, and even with larger sizes than mine, and I envied them a bit and wanted to be like them. So up to 16 years and a half, about 17 years, everything went smoothly for me, with fantasies related exclusively to the other sex, desire exclusively to the other sex and so on.

However, despite my strong desire for women, at that age I still had not managed to have a girlfriend nor to give even the first kiss, and it weighed me a lot, also because all my courtship always failed, all inexorably, I was very fat, insecure, introverted, my best friends had already had sexual experiences, while I was practically at zero and it weighed me. It was at a time when this thing began to weigh heavily on me that I began to think “I’m probably gay”, “I’m gay, if I’m not good with girls, then I’m gay”. From this point on my mind has always been monopolized by this thought, I began to test myself by looking at other men, trying to masturbate thinking about the guys, in parallel I continued satisfactorily my masturbatory activity exclusively dedicated to girls, and at the same time I began to lose weight, to become pleasant, to have the first girls, the first kisses, the first sexual activities (not exactly sex, but petting, foreplay, in short, everything that goes from the kiss to the non-penetration of the vagina).

Meanwhile there were long periods, even 5 or 6 months, in which I could put aside my anxieties and my fixations about the possibility of being gay, and with this also all the forms of test I had devised etc. … The situation changed last summer, period when I began to contact you, because my experiments, performed during another fixation period, began to give positive result, i.e. I began to reach orgasm even trying to masturbate thinking of guys, perhaps the satisfaction was not the best, but I reached orgasm.

Nonetheless, even during this period my attentions, both emotional and visual, remained linked to the girls, their appearance, their behavior towards me, etc., in short, I never went looking for guys and when I met some guys I didn’t experience any excitement or erection, however, if I tried, I could reach the orgasm by masturbating thinking of any guy.

To this I have to add a dream, made one night, in which I dreamed of kissing a man and I had an erection. This convinced me of my homosexual orientation, however I continued to masturbate on girls, without absolutely being able to do without, I would say, days later I also made the same dream about a girl, and when in October I started again to attend university and started again to work, my fixation set completely aside, and mine heterosexuality was until May / June complete and satisfactory, in January and February I also had a very beautiful girl, with which unfortunately I went not beyond petting.

However, in this summer period these doubts, these fixations have resumed and I have resumed my experiments, up to masturbate completely (not exclusively) on guys, with relative satisfaction, sometimes yes, sometimes completely no, sometimes partial, during these masturbations my erection is not complete, but it’s partial, but the feeling of pleasure is there anyway.

At the same time I continue to enjoy a masturbation linked to the girls, which anyway, at least for the moment, gives me greater satisfaction. At present, however, when walking around the street, etc., I don’t find guys who attract me or who spontaneously cause me fantasies about them, or cause me erections, and at present I don’t have any spontaneous fantasies about guys, my masturbation about guys is currently just something I do to see if that side of me is there, or is not there, I do not know, I cannot explain it, but I don’t know, I have the feeling that I could do without it, if I had not this fixation about discovering that I’m gay.

On all this, the awareness of a lot of things, I gained lately, has a strong influence, such as for example the fact of not getting along very well with my father (although I love him anyway), or the fact that he is not really my model as a masculine figure, and that in my life I feel more inspired by my mother than by my father. I believe that anyway the male figure of reference of my life was my maternal grandfather, that I lost when I was still a child, I have some good example of my father to keep in front of me, but my relationship with my mother is much stronger, and this leads me to think that I may be gay, because my model is still a woman, and with my father I don’t get along so well. In some things I see myself in my mother and this thing makes me think that I’m gay.

Well I think I told you everything possible, although I was not very synthetic at the end, I hope you remembered me, since we got in contact last year, however, I keep a good memory of you and your availability. I would like you to answer me as soon as possible, as I am leaving in a few days, and I would like to leave with a slightly clearer mind, I would like to get your answers, and being able to have a nice chat with you on messenger. What I seek is clarity in order to understand myself, thanks for the attention you’ll reserve to me, I am infinitely grateful.

F.D.

The following is my answer.

Hello, I will try to answer you as directly as possible. From what you say it is quite clear that you have very little to do with homosexuality, I would be led to say that in practice there is nothing that makes me think you are homosexual.

Let’s start with a fundamental concept: masturbation is a sexual act in the true sense of the term, not when it ends up to ejaculation but when it is experienced in a sexually involving way, that is when it causes pleasure and when it is accompanied by projective sexual fantasies that anticipate situations that are strongly desired or recalls to memory situations actually lived and authentically rewarding.

I specify one thing: sexuality does not have as its object “men” or “women” as such but only a few, very few women and / or some very few men. In other words, every sexual activity is essentially dedicated to a single person or at most to a very small number of people. The guys who masturbate do it having in their mind the image, in general, of a single real person who arouses a concrete sexual interest. You say: “I didn’t look at the guys, nor seeing them provoked desire and / or erections, however I could, if I tried, reach the orgasm by masturbating on any guy.” Such masturbation “on any guy” and without a true previous sexual involvement, is not in fact a sexual act but has all the characteristics of a sexual experiment, typical of neuroses of anxious origin. If you have a straight sexuality, that from what you write seems absolutely dominant and I would say exclusive in spontaneous terms, there is no reason why you have to test yourself to the point of masturbating without a real sexual desire but only to test your hypothetical homosexual reactivity.

Behind these behaviors an anxiety disorder can be hidden. The fact that gay sex experiments are not always present but are limited to some periods would suggests that they may be motivated by tensions in heterosexual sexuality, as if you were trying to find another way a way of escape, but it is clear that you are not gay. It makes sense to say that these things are the result of an anxious disorder if and only your challenge with yourself about gay masturbation is for you a source of anguish, despair, unpleasant feelings, all things that don’t seem really happen in your case. Gay masturbation as a test certainly has a compulsive component but it seems a rather weak compulsion that doesn’t undermine the dominant heterosexual sexuality.

I don’t even think you are bisexual, but if there was a real gay component more or less weak, however, it would not be objectively a real problem and a little common sense would be enough to go on well anyway.

It does not seem to me that objectively this so-called compulsive disorder that leads you to test your sexuality through gay masturbation is really disturbing. I add that in you the emotional dimension of homosexuality is completely missing and the physical dimension of masturbation doesn’t really have anything sexual, not only, you have a very theoretical and stereotypical vision of homosexuality and tend to read your relationships with your parents as a proof of your hypothetical homosexuality, but this reasoning doesn’t make sense from any point of view. Summing up, what’s really gay about you? Basically nothing!

The compulsions that lead you to gay masturbation as a test actually you don’t even live them as real compulsions, you’re used to living with them, and are things that don’t make you objectively feel bad. Could you do without gay masturbation? Frankly, I think so and this in fact also empties the concept of compulsiveness. Compulsion means feeling forced to do something, but if you can safely do without it, compulsiveness does not even exist. Frankly, I think this attempt to explore gay sexuality is an attempt to escape from a straight sexuality that sometimes must not have been fully satisfactory. As for the possibility of talking through msn, I think you already have my contact. You can call me whenever you want, even if you don’t see me online.

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-homosexualiy-anxiety-and-sexual-experiments

GAY SEXUAL BEHAVIORS

I apologize to Daniel who has probably felt neglect, what is absolutely far from my intentions.

Hello Daniel, because of the breakup of my computer (and the fact that I don’t open too much frequently my email account on the msn site), I read only today your message of April 7th. I sent you an email to apologize. I published below your email with the whole post you sent to me so kindly. I thank you very much for your trust.
____

Hello Project, finally I decided! After thinking about a lot I was leaving everything go for the umpteenth time but instead I’m here and now I’ll try to write even if it makes a very strange impression to me, if nothing else because I don’t know you in person even if things you are doing seem to me serious, and I would also say very serious. That’s why I’m writing to you. I didn’t write a post for you to post in the forum or on your gay sites, I send you a few pages of my diary instead. I have always wondered if there are other guys who have lived the same experiences I have lived, it is obvious that they are there, but I wonder if they reacted the same way I have reacted. Maybe I’m not able to give things the right value. I would pray you to publish these pages (if they don’t seem a bit ‘too rough) on the site msn, even on others and on the forum if you like, but on the site msn I would particularly like. I greet you and hug you! Daniel (my contact is: [omissis])

DIARY

Wednesday

A nightmare day! They sent me around the city all day: do this, do that! Go up, go down! In short, I am the servant of all. I’m a worthless guy, all right, but a bit of education is needed in any case, but why have you to clean your feet on me? It’s people that just sucks, I have to keep good relationships with them because if not, where do I go? The boss shows at least a bit of respect, but the others are really squalid people.
This morning a strange thing happened at the post office, they changed the employee of the packages and put there a young guy, he looked like a kid and today he has been very kind with me. Anyway it’s a little consolation on a shitty day.

Thursday

I worked little today. I’m tired of doing anything. There is a new guy who works with me, but he is not even passable, he would not be ugly but is clumsy, you tell him one thing and he understands another, sometimes I cannot even understand exactly what he says, he talks strange, I don’t know, anyway he wouldn’t be really bad, but he doesn’t really attract me, let’s say he’s not unpleasant, he tries to talk with me but he wears something similar to a wedding ring, so I think he has a girl.

Friday

What a stress! Today the boss came, or better the owner, but I have not even seen him. The manager was in total agitation, he’s probably more than 40 years old but behaves like a kid with the owner, from what I saw, if the boss asked him to go to bed with him, he would say: “ok, boss!”
Then I saw for a moment the guy at the post office counter, who’s really a nice guy, not anything exceptional but very nice, he perhaps attracts me at least a little bit, but we have only exchanged a smile.
At home I quarreled badly with mum, she’s too much interested in my business and I cannot stand it! My father doesn’t do such things, it would not pass by his head, but she is nosy and then what is she looking for? And it makes me angry when she says it’s not true. I put things in a certain order and I always find them in another way.
Anyway for her part any rummaging is useless, my important things are all in the computer under passwords and there nobody can spy, nobody! Today I had to go and get a pizza with Laurence and Luke, but obviously they didn’t remember it, because they have other things to do, they can’t give up the girl to be with me! All right, they say we’re friends! But friends of what?

Saturday

What a horror Saturday and Sunday. I can only wait for Monday. Friends have a lot of things to do, I don’t! I’m here at home, and what am I doing? Luckily there is internet, but internet is also boring at the end, yes, at least a bit of sex, but it’s all false, I don’t say that it disgusts me, indeed! But at the end beyond a good wank you don’t go anyway, at least as I see it, because I don’t want to be involved in problems of any kind, not even on a psychological level, I hate all that chitchatting, I think, because I don’t know how does it work. A beautiful site is [omissis] indeed it is really nice, but even this website I don’t say that it’s boring, a little I look at it (and more than a bit) but in the end what do I need when I go there? I download a little bit, yes, just on a physiological level, damn but it’s not enough for me, it’s not enough for me anymore! I want a real guy, I want to devote myself to him with all my strength, I can really make a guy happy, but I don’t have a real guy!

Sunday

Lunch at my uncle’s home. At least I ate well. My uncle, in my opinion, thinks that I can get together with Martina [his daughter]. But I think that such a thing didn’t even cross Martina’s head! Luckily! Otherwise I would have to keep at distance! I had been proposed to enroll in a gym, you know how many beautiful guys to see! But I will never go there! Tomorrow I have to go to work. Ugh! I’m very tired of my job! Now I’m going a bit on the usual site, so my eyes can enjoy.

Monday

Today a very strange thing happened, that is not so strange, but is something that came to my mind and doesn’t go away, the guy from the post office smiled at me in a way that could only have a particular meaning. Now I know his name: “Mauro M.” because it’s written on the identification tag he wears around his neck. He started looking for a package sent from my company that was lost and it took more than half an hour to find it but at the end he managed to find it, I followed the whole operation and I was able to observe him closely. It’s really cute, not beautiful but sweet, in short, I would not have gone away anymore. When he found what happened to the package he looked at me straight in the eyes and smiled at me, as if to say: I did it for you! I’ve been thinking about it all day, I guess I’m falling in love.

Tuesday

I told Mauro for a few minutes, he gave me the cell phone number and I gave him mine, we’re going to get a pizza tonight. Who knows what can come out of it? I have to take a nice shower and I have to shave well. Nothing will happen, I know, but if it happens I want to be prepared. He’s gay!!! How beautiful! How beautiful! How beautiful! What a beautiful evening, how sweet, how much I would cuddle him, damn I would have eaten him with kisses and then I really like him because he has not the fixed idea of sex, we were talking in the car, just talking, two gays in the car who keep just talking, it means that he is not one of the usual ones, he has caressed my hand and I was about to die looking at him in the eyes. I felt charged to the nth degree, I thought he would take a step further but it didn’t happen. He told me that he only had had two boys but they both got rid of him because in sex they wanted to do just what they wanted and he felt instrumentalized and tried to make them understand it but they didn’t want to know. But I say: you find a guy like Mauro, but how do you get stuck on things of sex? If you love each other at the end a balance can be found. Poor fellow! I think he felt really bad. With me nothing like that would have happened, I told him so, and he just smiled and kissed me, but slightly. Mauro! How can I not jump on you?

– omissis –

The following week.

Tuesday

With Mauro we have made so much progress, now we kiss just as it should be done, in short, an involving thing on a sexual level, but he also made me a speech a bit strange. He told me what he would like to do with me. Up until a certain point I found myself in his words, but then he asked me if I would have accepted to be passive and said that “that is a great test of love”. This thing gave me a bit annoyance. I told him that I never had had such fantasies and he told me that he felt completely active, then he downplayed and tried to change the subject.
Okay that he can also have different fantasies from mine, but now he puts me in crisis, I don’t want to lose him, but I don’t even want to do things that I don’t like. And then I don’t understand one thing: Marcello, who was gay at the highest level, didn’t have these fantasies, that didn’t even pass through the antechamber of his brain. He had his particularities on many other things, but in things of sex I found myself quite well with him. Mah! This creates problems for me. But why should I do things that I don’t like in order to make Mauro happy? And then there is also the problem of the risk, because in those things there is a risk of AIDS, all right, with condoms it is much less, but it is not even that, mah! But maybe he said so just to say and perhaps he will not even insist, because in fact it could all be fake problems and maybe for him it’s not even an important thing, but from what he said it didn’t seem so.

Wednesday

Damn, tonight he was so cuddly, sweet, but also a bit too insistent. One thing leaves me a bit perplexed: we just kiss, I tried to go further but he stopped me and told me that with me he wants a “complete” thing, i.e. in practice he wants to penetrate me, otherwise nothing! In a sense, for a while, it seemed to me like an emotional blackmail, as if to say to me: either do as I say or you go away. In the end he ripped off me a half-positive reply. Saturday night we go to his house by the sea. I wonder if I’m doing well. It is true that he calls me ten times a day and tells me very tender things, he tells me that he only thinks of me from morning to night and that he masturbates thinking of me but he has not asked me if I do the same. But he insists too much on that other thing. Mah ! And then what can I do? I cannot talk with anyone about anything like this.

Sunday morning

Today I didn’t like Mauro too much. When I made love with Marcello, it was all in par, there were no roles of any kind, with Mauro (who is also a nice guy and naked is much better than dressed) I feel like if between us there was nothing really shared. He thinks only of his wishes and I have just to undergo his wishes. I endured everything, but the idea that having sex that way was really disgusting for me, didn’t even touch him, he didn’t understand, or maybe he did not give a damn to it.
I suffered everything and I thought that, after, perhaps we would have exchanged the roles because the thing for me was completely unnatural and repellent, or that there would have had some sex like the one I had with Marcello, that was true sex really shared and lived in two, at par, a thing in which you think about how to make him feel good and don’t even think about yourself, and instead nothing, when he ended doing what he wanted, he didn’t really think about it.
I say, I’m there too! But how can you not notice it? He used me; that I’m a guy like him, he didn’t even notice it, I was just his inflatable doll. Mah! Thinking about these things I also have scruples because maybe from his point of view everything is different and I’m doing the problem too big for things that in the end are not even a tragedy in the sense that one, at the limit … but then why? I don’t know what to think. Tomorrow I will try to talk to him.
I send him a text message a bit affectionate, but yes, like those he always sends me. He doesn’t answer, I send him three text messages and he doesn’t answer me, he never did that, I don’t know what to think. Mauro calls me and tells me that I treated him badly, that I don’t love him because I tried in every way to make him uncomfortable for the fact that he had asked me to be passive and I ended up consoling him and telling him that I love him madly. Not to madness, but that I love him it’s true.

After a week.

Monday

He definitely dumped me. We ended up in bed five times in six days, I ended up doing what he wanted, but he also wanted me to pretend to have fun, no! This seemed too much to me and I tried to talk seriously with him about it. I told him that at least I would have wanted a little attention on his part because after all I’m a guy too, he told me that he doesn’t act as a passive because he doesn’t like it, I told him that I was not referring to such things, he replied that if I wanted to be masturbated I could do it alone, he got angry and started to raise his voice, then he calmed down and apologized but I left. Now, somehow, I’m missing him but I finally feel free again. Anyway I miss him very much.

Tuesday

Yesterday I saw Marcello and told him the story. He knows Mauro. Mauro also tried with him with the same technique, but he sent him to hell. Great Marcello! (But why am I always the most stupid of the situation?) He told me that Mauro always does this and that he has already done it with a lot of guys. At least now I have clear ideas. But how did I listen to such a fellow? And now whom do I think of when I masturbate? Well, there is always internet, luckily at least in front of the screen I can be myself!

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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-sexual-behaviors

GAY THEMED OCD AND NAKEDNESS AT THE GYM

The following email is a particularly important document, it is not about a gay guy, but about a straight guy with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) characterized by the obsessive fear of being gay. Guys with gay-themed OCD submit compulsively to tests of erection in environments or situations of gay interest, and/or to tests of masturbation with gay fantasies, in order to determine their sexual orientation. Obviously for these guys the climate of the locker room of a gym is generally strongly anxiety-inducing. The hetero guy who wrote the email, very well followed at a psychological level and now about to exit OCD, has begun to attend the gym and the relative locker room and has managed to have, even in that environment, an excellent control of anxiety.

“Hello everyone! I have not written for some time, lately I’m quite absent from the forum, even if I’m in chat almost every night. Many times, in recent years, I happened to feel bad and I came to the forum to open a topic and ask for help and some advice on how to get out of the black moments. This time, however, the situation is opposite, I’m writing to you because I’m finally beginning to understand and accept myself for what I’m, a straight guy, without asking myself too many questions, without making too many problems. My self-esteem has greatly increased, both thanks to psychotherapy, where I put into practice with all my will the therapeutic strategies of my psychologist (I must thank him too, because without him I would never understood the mechanisms and automatisms of thought that had almost taken control of my mind, settling themselves within me), and thanks to my openness to experiences, where I also made many mistakes, but I learned from them.

Unfortunately, today I still suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I don’t deny that when I’m anxious, negative thoughts start to burst and this sometimes makes me very nervous. But the positive thing is that I finally recognized this automatism, and when the thoughts arrive I try to accept them for what they are, that is “thoughts”, as the word just says, which are images, words that are not real in that moment. The fact is that the thoughts provoke emotions, positive, if the thought concerns a beautiful thing and obviously, they cause negative emotions if the thought is negative. I now try to tolerate them, because I’m aware that a thought is a just a thought, and cannot represent reality. I take my life as it comes, with the positive and negative sides, and I try not to make a drama if someone tells me something rude. The negative thoughts are for me (but I think for everyone) a wake-up call, for example if I’m doing something and I start to fell anxious and I negative thoughts appear it means that I don’t really want to do it. I must thank these thoughts, I must thank the anxiety, which on one hand made me suffer like a dog, but on the other made me understand that the life I did until a few months ago, didn’t belong to me, I acted a character that I was not, and I did things I didn’t really want to do.

My life is changing, and positively, of course I have my black moments (like everyone) but I’m beginning to manage them effectively, and above all I try not to emphasize certain situations, which in reality are nonsense. I‘m becoming more elastic mentally, I accept my parents for what they are, I don’t judge them, even if they have judged me in the past, but in my heart I have forgiven them.

I am beginning to listen to myself, my real needs, my body, my sexual drives, I accept all this as normal things. When I’m among the people, I feel like them, neither superior nor inferior. In the past I tended to feel inferior, I judged myself as an incapable, a clumsy. Today when I talk to a person I look at that person straight in the eyes, sure of myself, I pronounce the words well when I speak, I feel at the same level. I don’t judge myself negatively if I don’t have any real friend yet, with whom I could go out on Saturday night.

I always say to myself that everything has its own time and that I must not be in a hurry. Already the fact that I can interact with people and especially with my peers (before I was afraid of my peers), is a big step forward for me and I’m happy for it. I’m sure that if I keep going on this way, showing myself for what I am (and I’m not just talking about my sexual orientation, but I mean everything), I’ll finally be able to find people who have the same sensitivity and with whom I can share good moments. I can finally see the positive aspects of life and I dwell on them, and when I can overcome my fears, I congratulate myself.

A month ago I joined the gym to improve my body and my mood. When I’m there I feel at home, it’s a beautiful environment, there are many quiet guys (and also very nice!) And sometimes I exchange a few words with them. The first few times, I didn’t want to take a shower there, I preferred to do it at home, because I was afraid of having an erection watching other naked guys, then a few weeks ago I decided to overcome this other fear of mine. This morning after the training I took a shower there, before entering the locker room I had a little anxiety, then I took courage and I entered. I started to undress, I took the bathrobe and the bubble bath and went in the shower. After the shower I went to put the underwear clean, to dress, dry my hair etc. etc., in short, all things that normally people do after physical exercises. But all this (apart from the initial anxiety) was accompanied by a sense of absolute freedom, I saw other naked guys and I felt a bit of sexual excitement, but only psychological, in the sense that physically I didn’t have erections.

But if I had had an erection, of course, I would have felt embarrassed, but just because I’m accepting sexuality for what it is, I would not have made many problems. While I was taking a shower and soaping my body and hair, I felt free from all fear, I felt the warm water on my body sliding slowly, the perfume of the bubble bath, the steam that surrounded me. I really relaxed and felt so natural, I was naked along with other naked guys, doing normal things, free from any negative thinking and from any worries. I was so at ease that I was a lot of time in the locker room, I did everything calmly, because there were a few guys, sometimes with the corner of the eye I looked at some penises but I’m very prudent and no one noticed it!

Then, when I was almost completely dressed, a gentleman of about 40 (maybe even less) entered, a sculpted and attractive physique. Even before, when I was doing the exercises in the gym, he had glanced at me and I had returned the glance, then in the locker room he started chatting: “and even today we trained…” and so we talked for a couple of minutes. Then, I finished dressing, I put the jacket on, we said goodbye and went away. When I got into the car, before starting the engine, I said to myself “very good, it went very well!!” and I came back home happy! Often, many of our fears are completely unfounded. The human mind is often a double-edged sword because (as said before) we listen to our thoughts and the famous “anxiety” arrives.

For example, this morning I was very worried about the shower in the gym, I even imagined scenes in which I had an erection in the locker room and someone made fun of me. Instead I experienced the exact opposite, but then again, an erection could happen in the future, but I will not make a problem because it is not. Living well with oneself and with one’s own sexuality is a wonderful thing, feeling one’s own instincts and having one’s own erotic imagery as a sort of private garden where we can only access ourselves with our imagination (this applies to everyone, gay or not) means to know yourself and feel good about yourself. I conclude with two thoughts that I wrote these days in moments of serenity:

1) “I feel good, but not because I’m all right, but because I accept the things that don’t go well without making a drama.”

2) “The charm of life is characterized by the mystery and uncertainty of every day, which are scary to each of us, but at the same time make life more beautiful and intriguing. I am convinced that if each of us knew his own future at the start, he would not even taste every little moment of life. Doubt and uncertainty are and MUST ABSOLUTELY BE PART of life, without them we couldn’t open ourselves to experiences and we couldn’t afford to make mistakes. In my opinion, a man who is not wrong, or doesn’t admit to having made a mistake at least once in his life, cannot be called a man.”

I wish all of you a good evening and happy Christmas holidays! A hug!”

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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-themed-ocd-and-nakedness-at-the-gym

SEXUAL DISCOMFORT AND TRANSGRESSIVE SEXUALITY

Let’s now develop some reflections on sexual discomfort and in particular on the relationship between discomfort and transgressive sexuality. From the experience of Gay Project we can deduce two very useful synthesis observations in the interpretation of the discomfort connected to sexuality.

 

1) The split between sexual orientation of married life (both in terms of affectivity and physical sexuality) and the orientation of masturbation is an indication of discomfort. A straight guy who lives his sexuality without any discomfort connected to sexual orientation is a guy who falls in love only with girls who has a sexual activity as a couple partner only with girls, who has sexual fantasies only on girls and masturbates just thinking of girls. The speech for a gay boy is exactly specular. It should be emphasized that bisexual guys can fall in love with both boys and girls, which is not an indication of discomfort if a falling in love, directed both to boys and girls, both emotionally and sexually, also corresponds to masturbation with fantasies both on guys and girls. Basically the balancing of sexuality is realized when the same orientation presents itself in all the manifestations of sexuality, from affective ones to sexual ones as a couple partner and to masturbation. When among these elements (falling in love, couple sexuality, sexual fantasies and orientation of masturbation) there is no congruence, a guy experiences a situation of unease.

 

2) The fact that masturbation fantasies don’t focus on the guy with whom one is in love, that masturbation is not emotional, but systematically and exclusively focuses on a particular sexual practice to which is attributed a strongly transgressive connotation are all an indication of discomfort. It sometimes happens that some guys who have a typically heterosexual and fully satisfying emotional and sexual couple life don’t ever masturbate thinking of a girl but they do it thinking exclusively of guys from whom they don’t feel emotionally involved, but their sexual fantasies are concentrated only on a particular sexual behavior, considered very transgressive. In such situations, the classic principle of free sexuality, according to which sexual orientation emerges in masturbation (free sexuality) and not in couple sexuality, cannot be applied precisely because in these situations masturbation is not really free and the fact of masturbating with transgressive gay fantasies (or considered such) indicates that masturbation is experienced not as sexuality but as an act of rebellion against taboos. The more transgressive the fantasies that accompany masturbation are the greater is the gratification that is obtained by overcoming the taboo. I mean that for these guys masturbation is not really a sexual experience but an act of self-assertion as a person released from taboos. This mechanism of overcoming taboos through transgressive masturbation can in some cases evolve into forms of transgressive couple sexuality. I had occasion to present the case of a very young guy who lived a gay sexuality not only subjectively transgressive but objectively at risk, with men much older than him. This guy, who not only considered himself 100% gay but the most transgressive of gays for what he was doing, ended up years later to give up completely the idea of being gay because in a very gradual way he fell in love, at the beginning only unconsciously, of a girl who really loved him and led him to understand his true sexual orientation.

 

That guy, in fact, had ended up making a life that he considered transgressive as an act of rebellion against his father who tried to control and repress him. His gay sexuality, or rather his gay sexual activity, gratified him not because it was the completion of an emotional relationship with another guy but because it was an act of transgression, that is, an affirmation of his will against that of his father. If such mechanisms are indeed rare in couple sexuality, they are much less rare in masturbation that may actually be not a sexual experience but only an unconscious act of rebellion. It is evident that in this case masturbation is not at all a form of free sexuality and, I would say, it is not even a form of true sexuality. It often happens that the transgressional masturbation in a gay key of a boy who is really straight is accompanied by the temptation to put into practice the masturbation fantasies. It should be noted that in these cases the affective dimension is totally lacking and the problem is reduced to bringing the overcoming of taboos from the masturbatory dimension that appears reductive to a far more transgressive couple sex. I emphasize that the guys who have a transgressive gay masturbation generally have a rather distorted view of gay sexuality that for them, even if they say the opposite, is basically something anomalous that becomes interesting precisely because it is transgressive, the idea of sexuality and of gay affectivity as normal for these guys is difficult to accept, in a sense, if they considered gay sexuality normal they would end up no longer interested in it. It must be said that these guys in the vast majority have never fallen in love with a guy and consider at least unnatural that two guys can live a deep and mutual love. All this with being gay has clearly nothing to do.

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NON-POSSESSIVE GAY LOVE

We come now to the non-possessive love. Also in this case I will resort to a literary quotation and precisely to ”Another country” by James Baldwin, one of the most beautiful gay-themed books I have ever read. It is a masterpiece of American literature, but it is the gay side of the book that has always enchanted me. For Baldwin, homosexuality is a high value, it is a form of love with a capital A. The book has tragic implications in the initial part, which seems to follow a rather common direction in the previous gay literature: homosexuality as a tragedy. But the second part, which is the preponderant one, completely overturns things and homosexual love ends up imposing itself as a value capable of giving meaning to a life. 

The characters are many but the story that makes up the central part of the book is a wonderful gay love story born by chance between Eric, a young American writer, and Yves, a French boy younger than him. Their story is not a tragedy, it is not a story of loneliness, no! It’s a true love story and it’s a love story that ends well. Eric meets Yves shortly after the war, they both know very well that their life will no longer be the same as before. The atmosphere is of tenderness, of mutual respect, of profound love. Eric returns to America and Yves sends him a sweet letter and after a while follows him to the United States. Yves arrives at the Los Angeles airport and Eric waits for him. When the boy crosses the gates with the agitation in his heart, he knows that he has arrived in the city (Los Angeles) in which the inhabitants of paradise (the Angels) had set their home! And with this metaphor the book ends. But this love story is not a fairy tale, Yves loves Eric but knows that sooner or later he will need to feel free even by Eric, to be himself; also Eric is aware of all this, he knows that sooner or later, in a more or less distant future, Yves will leave, he will have to leave to follow his path, but this fact will not lead Eric to abandon Yves to his destiny to look for a another boy, Eric will love him in a total way even knowing that at some point he will lose it, because, as Baldwin says, in love there is nothing to decide but everything to accept. This consideration has always seemed sublime to me.

In practice, the relationship between Eric and Yves is an example of true non-possessive gay love. I would like to point out that very often gays have in mind a gay couple model derived from heterosexual marriage. In the case of the gay couple, since the law in Italy doesn’t contemplate gay unions, there are no strong legal guarantees of the stability, at least formal, of the relationship, but the double assumption remains that the couple must be destined to last forever and it must necessarily be exclusive, that is, in essence, it must stand on a real pact between two guys who are bound by mutual fidelity and the indissolubility of the relationship, this at least seems a priori to be the most desirable condition.

The story told by Baldwin is, instead, an example of a spontaneous relationship of love on the basis of which no explicit or tacit agreements of any kind are taken for granted, in essence of a true non-possessive love, without any external constraint. Demanding a guarantee of fidelity and duration means not realizing that at the base of every relationship of love there are feelings and feelings are not coercible or binding in any way.

Let us ask ourselves now what are the most typical manifestations of sexuality, which are based on a true affective dimension. Here the problem becomes complex and we come to the conclusion that in reality an affective dimension, however tenuous, always exists at the base of sexuality. It can be an absolutely equal and uncompromising love like that of Maurice and Scudder and even without any prerequisite of durability or exclusivity like that of Eric and Yves, but at the basically even the half-love of Clive for Maurice was born in a spontaneous way and implied, at least at the beginning, a real emotional involvement of Clive towards Maurice. Love, in itself, when it is born, is born with an enormous emotional potential, but sometimes on this basis, the reasoning, which is no longer emotional transport, takes over and so the logic of giving and having, the convenience, the balance of risks and benefits start to become the substitute for love and the emotional dimension goes into the background or ends up being completely canceled.

Gay love absolutely equal and unconditional exists in the novels, as an archetype, as an inspiring principle, but when you compare yourself with reality you understand that nobody is perfectly Maurice or perfectly Eric and that in all of us, in various ways and degrees, we hide a bit of Clive, and that true feelings always coexist, at various levels, with other motivations.

I would like to immediately say that the other motivations are not necessarily utilitarian and opportunistic as those of Clive and are often spontaneous and totally unconscious. Speaking with the guys, sometimes I hear expressions like ”I want to try to stay with a guy”, this expression is a sign of emotional immaturity, that is, of not being ready to understand the meaning of couple life. The speech needs to be deepened. A guy’s sexuality develops and structures itself through individual masturbation well before a couple’s relationship is reached. Masturbation, through the fantasies that accompany it, allows a guy to prefigure the future couple sexuality, but masturbation has the intrinsic limit of being a substantially individual activity even if projective, in which a guy confronts himself only with his imagination, it is precisely for this reason that masturbation is generally very gratifying, because one must compare with himself only.

A boy who arrives at the first experiences of falling in love can easily find himself in traumatic situations in which his sexual fantasy has to deal with the reality of confrontation with the other. The experience of falling in love is in itself completely different from that of masturbation, contains inherent the risk of a real emotional contact with another guy, which involves a whole series of problems that in masturbation are solved at the level of fantastic projections; whereas when the guy falls in love these problems must be dealt with on a real level. It is about declaring or not declaring one’s feelings, about uncertainty on the other guy’s sexual orientation, about the type of relationship that can be created, about the way to proceed, about the times and the limits of the relationship.

However, one thing remains clear, when one falls in love with another, the relationship is essential beyond any a priori conception of a couple life. Falling in love has a deep emotional dimension and, for a young boy, it has a fundamental formative value, it is an emotional involvement that touches all aspects of personality and brings a boy into a truly new dimension. For some elements, such as having an erection when you are close to the guy you love or simply when you think of him or masturbating thinking about that guy, falling in love develops in continuity with the feelings previously experienced in masturbation, and the masturbation itself is now used by the guy in love mostly to relive experiences and to project in his mind images all focused on the figure of the beloved guy, but falling in love also has an absolutely new and determining dimension non-strictly sexual: the presence of the beloved one is strongly felt and a strongly altruistic affective component begins to manifest, which is the essential component of falling in love.

You realize that you love another guy, that you want his good, that a single smile can be precious and that ultimately the affective interest is addressed to the person of the other as a whole. This type of experience greatly favors the maturation of a guy and makes him try, beyond the strict sexuality, what love is and indeed makes him see sexuality not as an end but as a means for the realization of the good of the other, respecting the times and the real needs of the other.

What does it mean to fall in love? Falling in love means finding in another guy some true deep consonances, not always and not only in the sense of finding similar interests or analogous ways of thinking but often, even if unconsciously, in finding analogous ways of suffering, analogous reasons of unease, similar attempts to escape difficulties, I would say analogous forms of despair when that level is reached. At the base of love there is essentially the sharing of discomfort and the possibility of finding a dialogue, even non-verbal, precisely on discomfort. If this dialogue is honest and we realize that it is equally important for the other, the prejudices fall and we question our ways of being, we are willing to change ideas, to follow the other on his way, to recognize the superficiality of our way of seeing things.

The speeches of principle, the assumptions taken for granted, the presuppositions that seemed obvious to us, leave the field to the idea of making the other feel good, beyond any condition and any assumption, we realize that the other has a his intimate coherence, that his reasons have a meaning that goes beyond our assumptions and even beyond our assumptions of principle, that his weaknesses are very similar to ours and that a serious comparison between people who love each other is not a comparison between ideologies or between abstract positions, it is not a comparison of presuppositions but a trying to understand the reasons of the other by accepting to put aside one’s own or those that are believed to be their one’s own.

Falling in love means understanding the reasons of the other, that is, going out of our own strictly individual dimension. Falling in love one must recognize the profound dignity of the other behind his behavior, that is he must understand the dignity and meaning of those behaviors beyond appearances. Understanding the other is not a question of intelligence but a question of love, because love leads to recognize the profound consonance between two people, which often manifests itself in their common way of suffering. If there is something in the other that you do not understand, it means that you are not in love with him.

When you fall in love, the other person’s way of being is transparent before your eyes so that you can understand its deep motivations and share them, you also feel them as they were yours and don’t judge them anymore. What does sex have to do with all this? Sex, by itself, can express a deep love, when even sex becomes a profound way of communicating. A hug communicates more than a thousand words. But sex is a form of love when it is really lived together, in conditions of perfect equality, I insist on this idea, I mean that the presence of attitudes of closure, of misunderstanding of the reasons and moods of the other, the attitudes of instrumentalization of the other, at any level, prevent one from experiencing a sexuality that is truly a form of love.

Having other reasons, besides those that are recognized in the other, means having prejudices, mental reservations, means setting conditions for an interpersonal exchange that should be without conditions. The basic presupposition of every form of love is the recognition of the authentic human dimension and at the same time of the ”fragility” that characterizes the loved one, because only in the context of this authentic human dimension and at the same time ”fragile” the apparent inconsistencies in the behavior of the other find a meaning and a positive value beyond any assumption and any theoretical model.

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A GAY GUY SAVED FROM REPARATIVE THERAPIES

I‘m 31 years old and, after a long struggle with myself, I started to live again, I have been destroying myself for several years and I think I have found happiness just a couple of years ago. I often hear people exalting family as if it were a beautiful thing, that is, as if it were the ideal place for a boy to grow up serenely but for me, and I’m only realizing it now, the family has been a terrible place. From outside my family seems a family like many others, a father who has a good job (very good), a mother who worked but then left the job after my birth to devote herself completely to me (unfortunately she did!). Both my parents are of a good cultural level. 

 

I have no memories of any of my grandparents, but I think that my grandparents have been the ruin of my parents, just as my parents have been my ruin and maybe even worse. Both my father and my mother are only children exactly like me. I have never once seen my father and mother exchange a gesture of tenderness so as I have never seen my father tired or unkempt or my mother not perfectly settled. My mother has always been a freak of order, cleanliness, etc. etc. … The fundamental value that has always dominated my family is social prestige. My parents are wealthy, we can say it, but they are not rich in the true sense of the word, certainly, for them, not feeling up to their world would be a great suffering. I grew up being alone or with people much older than me.

 

The school was an obsession for me since elementary school, I couldn’t be the second in my class, I had to be the first one and this cost me a lot. My mother sometimes asked me questions, questions like those the teacher asks at school, just to see if I was able to answer. My parents were very attached to the church, today I think it was more for reasons of opportunity and politics than for religion itself. In particular since I was seven or eight years old I often saw a priest in my house who could have been about forty years old, I will call him Don Luigi here. Today I say a “prete”, but then I said “sacerdote” [the two words mean “priest” but while “prete” in a common word, “sacerdote” is the official word, used by the Church itself ], because my mother was convinced that, under the word priest, said by me, there could be something quite derogatory. He was an important priest, very respected and then he struck me because he was a bit my father’s ecclesiastical version: short hair like Germans, perfect clergyman, always perfectly ironed, shiny shoes, etc. …

 

I understood only many years later how much this priest has influenced my life since I was very young. It was Don Luigi who, in practice, decided that I had to attend elementary school in an institute of nuns, but I don’t have a bad memory of the school or of the nuns, except for the fact that the environment was almost military and the study was really a torment for me. But that school had two big flaws that I didn’t see at the time, in the first place it was totally out of the world, that is it was all muffled, muted, the children grew up and didn’t realize they lived in a world completely separate from reality and then there was the fact that the children were addressed to religion beginning from 6-7 years old with a substantial brainwashing of which they could not absolutely realize the consequences because they lacked any possibility of comparison with the lives of other boys.

 

At seven years old the sisters prepared us for the first confession, but a seven-year-old boy has very little to confess, so I assimilated all external attitudes; clasped hands, kneeling, reciting penance, etc. etc., What the priest told me in confession at that age was always that I had to obey my father and my mother like I had to obey Jesus, who loves us if we do what he commands us.

 

Toward the end of the fifth grade I made my first communion, but I still didn’t understand anything about what I was doing. The sisters taught us catechism and I studied it like any school subject and I was also proud to know why God had created the world, etc. etc. … The choice of middle school, even this in a religious institution, was warmly sponsored by Don Luigi who said that for me a “serious school” was needed, serious for him was the same as religious, that would prepare me well for what life would have presented to me, implying that the public school was a very bad environment in which I could only have ruined myself. In the seventh and eighth grade the environment was quite similar to that of the nuns, even though there were no nuns but priests. The school sometimes, I would say quite frequently, organized a camping or a stay in the country for three days and I liked it a lot. They called them “retreats” and were used to prepare for the confirmation I received at age 12.

 

My life was completely quiet, confession and communion every Sunday, which for me was a obvious but also very mechanical thing, for the rest I had to study and to try to be the first in the class, at home I had to obey dad and mom, that was all.

 

Then, suddenly, at the beginning of the eighth grade, my world of child safety goes into crisis. One night, for the first time I have a wet dream and I remember perfectly that I had dreamed that I was spying on one of my classmates in the shower, or rather, before he undressed to get a shower, when I imagined that his underwear was down I had my first orgasm. The dream, I still remember, was really exciting and the physical sensation of my first orgasm was very intense and even the impression, vaguely embarrassing, that I felt later, feeling all wet and sticky, was very strong. I didn’t know what had happened because I knew why God had created the world but didn’t know that sexuality existed, or at least I couldn’t connect what had happened to me with that minimum of concepts about sex that I had been able to steal from the external world, in practice only from TV because the internet in my house had never existed except as a working tool for dad.

 

In short, it was the first time I felt embarrassed for sexuality. I didn’t know what to do: talk with dad or with mom? And then tell them everything? Even that I dreamed of spying on a friend of mine and of seeing him naked? Or would I have to go immediately to confess because dreaming of such a thing is surely not a good thing? And then what was all that sticky substance that I had found on myself. I decided to avoid my mother, because I thought she would not understand, I went to talk to my father who immediately understood what had happened, but I didn’t tell him that I had dreamed of seeing a naked boy. He told me that now I was growing up and that what had happened was the awakening of my sexuality and that it was not a dangerous thing but in order to have a serious advice on how I would have to deal with these things I had to talk to the priest.

 

I understood only many years after the absurdity of a similar speech, at that time the answer seemed to me clear and comprehensive. I went to confession in the afternoon with a priest I didn’t know because I was very ashamed, I found an old man who told me that those things are useful when you get married and have children and that until then you have to maintain purity, that is you have to preserve absolutely a gift so great that can make you a collaborator of God in spreading the gift of life. Then I told him, almost as if it were a banality, what I had dreamed of and he stopped and told me: “This is a serious sin because men are made for women and women for men”, and added that I had to pray much for Jesus to make me return to the right path, etc. etc., then he gave me the absolution. For me it was a tremendous shock. What had I done wrong? I really could not understand it.

 

However, I decided not to say anything to my father about what had happened in confession and to commit myself to the maximum so as not to think any more about those things that I had been said were a serious sin. Since then, maybe I was still 12 years old or I had just turned 13, my life became a continuous struggle against myself. I discovered masturbation after a few days, but with serious feelings of guilt and with even greater guilt feelings, I continued in my gay sexual fantasies. I went to confession every Sunday with a different priest telling him just that I had masturbated because for me the sin was that. From the priests I heard things of all the colors, always on the negative, clearly, but with many different degrees of negativity.

 

After the intermediate school, my fate was marked, and for the intervention of Don Luigi I ended up for the third time in a religious school, always of priests, like the middle school, even if of another order, there is no need to say that I was sent to the classic high school, the thing was obvious a priori. A mixed class with a predominance of girls, however, the guys were a dozen, not very few. Of course I had attended also elementary and intermediate school in mixed classes of boys and girls together, at the time such a thing seemed quite secondary to me, but entering the ninth grade I saw things in another way, that is I had begun to look at the boys, clearly with the maximum circumspection and with a thousand scruples of conscience, but I had begun to look at them. I knew I should not have looked at them but I couldn’t not help looking at them.

 

At school there was very little to do, surveillance was very strict and at most you could have seen smiles between a boy and a girl and also this with a lot of sense of limit. In practice, I experienced anguish all the years of gymnasium-Lyceum, not for school, where I was definitely not the first, with great disappointment of my mother, but for sex. Attempts to repress me have been really absurd because when I entered the Gymnasium I received as a gift my first computer and my first internet access with the warning on the part of my parents that “this must be switched on only for school and when we are at home”. But as the facts didn’t follow the words, I almost immediately started to go on the internet to look for gay photos and videos (which at that time were still few and very short). With internet the frequency of masturbation has increased exponentially, once a day and even more.

 

To this my very private sexual life corresponded the confessions in which I had begun to tell the priest that I had gay fantasies and in confession I was told by the priest and starting from the first time that in order to definitively solve this problem and to have a normal life one could resort to a psychologist, because there are very good psychologists who can help the boys to “get back on track”, I was then 16 years. That’s how I made the most absurd decision of my life, as if it were a heroic choice of which I had to feel proud: I would have gone to a psychologist to get out of this story of masturbation and homosexuality, but how? My parents should have known it. I thought to tell my parents that I didn’t sleep at night, that I felt very agitated and that I wanted to talk to a psychologist, in response I was told that Don Luigi was precisely a psychologist and that I could talk with him. Against such a proposal my refusal has been categorical. My mother tried to insist, I ended up convinced not to talk to Don Luigi but to contact a “serious psychologist” indicated by him. I knew that there was professional secrecy and I tended to trust.

 

After a few days I went to the first appointment with the psychologist, he must have been between 35 and 40 years, everything was very ritual, bed, notebook, low light, etc. etc., I was a little frightened, I told him of my problem: “compulsive masturbation and homosexuality, etc. etc.”. He tells me that a lot can be done but that my commitment must be total.

 

After the first sessions he makes me compile some tests and gives me a book to read about reparative therapies where there are terrible stories of homosexuals finished badly, I bring the book home and hide it because I don’t want my parents to find it, I read the book but it makes me sick, the psychologist tells me that my doctor should prescribe me anxiolytics but I don’t want to take medicines, then he sends me to a religious group that deals with these things and tells me that “operating on two fronts” things are much easier.

 

The group met in the evening, going there for me was an experience of a terrible self-inflicted violence. I resisted only the first two meetings, then I told the psychologist that I couldn’t take it anymore, he tries to insist on getting me back to the religious group saying it’s for my own good. But I had no intention of going back there, so he proposed a more gradual way …

 

In the meantime, I had practically stopped studying for school and I found myself with a debt in Greek that made my mother go on a rampage. I turn seventeen and I feel truly destroyed, a nothingness destined for failure. I spend a whole night crying, I cannot do it any more, I’m tired even of my live, I’m truly at the limit.

 

Talking to a classmate of mine, I come to know that she goes to a psychologist and that she is well with him. I tell my mother that I want to change the psychologist, she sees me right on the edge and does not object. I wait for the day of the first date.

 

The environment is Spartan, just reduced to the minimum, the psychologist is old, about sixty, white hair, sweater. We shake hands and he tells me to sit down in an armchair, he sits in a chair in front of me, I tell him my problem: “compulsive masturbation and homosexuality”, he asks me: “masturbation how often?” I tell him “Even once a day” that seemed to me very much, he smiles, opens his arms and says, “And with this? This is the norm!” I insist: “But with homosexual fantasies …” And he answers me:” So what? If one is gay it’s obvious that he thinks about guys and not about girls, these are normal things!” I told him: “I do not know what to do anymore, I can’t  go on, I’m just at the limit … “. Then he let me tell a little about my life and he told me: “We must simplify things, you don’t have to do the things that others tell you but what you want, you don’t have to live badly, because otherwise later you’ll have a thousand regrets, you’re a very young boy, a gay boy, so what? What’s the problem? The absurdity, for a gay guy, is to force himself to desire to be no longer gay or worse to commit to not being gay anymore! You must begin to become autonomous, to do what you think is right, the problem lies in the fact that you are worried for things that don’t concern you, for things that others want from you, but you must do only what you want. You will have problems because your family will not easily accept your freedom of doing what you want, but your autonomy you have to earn it day after day.”

 

When I got home I felt free, the feeling was very strange but I knew that the things that this psychologist had told me were basically those I didn’t have the courage to say to myself. It was not easy to build a real autonomy because actually my parents did everything to put me in trouble, and here the psychologist was really useful. Now I have a boyfriend for two years and I love him deeply, he also helped me a lot, he had an enormous patience with me. Now we live together! One day we were walking on the road and I told him: “Take me by the hand!” He looked at me questioningly as asking why, and I added: “There is Don Luigi!” And then he hugged me and kissed me in the street, that’s why I love him!

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