He had high blood pressure, migraines, chronic heartburn, eczema, was subject to panic attacks and some days he had twitches and tics too. His doctors told him to take more vacations. I told him that if we could get him to stop torturing himself, it would be better than a vacation.
After several failed marriages to women, Jerry was trying to deal with the possibility that he was gay. He wanted so much to be a good husband, but the same pattern repeated itself every time: he loved women, but after a while, they bored him in bed. He didn’t mind a vagina, he said, but he was not that fond of them either. They were okay. He preferred for his woman to perform oral, while he masturbated her with vibrators and toys. When it came to intercourse, he wasn’t always able to maintain an erection so he avoided it whenever possible. This had made some of his wives very angry.
Every marriage had ended with him fading out of the sex life, and then fading out of the relationship, generally blaming his ex’s bad temper or demanding nature, and finding someone new to rekindle his passions, at least for the first year or two. It was the fifth wife who finally figured him out: she told him he was gay, and that she wanted a divorce.
It wasn’t as if Jerry didn’t know. He just hadn’t wanted to accept that because he had gay fantasies in his mind that it meant he had to have gay sex in reality. He had chosen to lead a Christian life, he said. Then he told me a story about his youth.
At the Baptist church in which he was raised as a boy, Pastor Kirk was a hero to the kids, especially Jerry, whose own father was distant and cold. The pastor, though, always had time for a smile or an encouraging word, and possessed a natural gift for ministering to his flock, especially the children, who were regularly invited to the pastor’s home to play with his own progeny. Handsome, caring, learned, and extremely charismatic, the pastor became Jerry’s role model of masculine perfection. He wanted to be just like him when he grew up.
When Jerry was thirteen, his parents abruptly announced that they were quitting the church. Pastor Kirk was a bad man. No one was allowed to speak to him ever again. No one was allowed even to speak his name aloud at home. The law was laid down strictly and when Jerry started to cry and question, his father sent him to his room.
At school the next day, Jerry heard an incredible rumor. All the kids were calling Pastor Kirk a fag, and claiming he left his wife for a man. Jerry didn’t believe it. The pastor had been passionately vituperative on subjects like infidelity and homosexuality. When he spat out the word “sodomites” from the pulpit, the whole church felt his revulsion. How was it possible that Pastor Kirk had left his wife to live in sin as a homosexual?
Jerry was shattered. On some level, he was awed by the pastor’s audacity – as Jerry saw it, the pastor had risked it all for love. It seemed so romantic. Jerry was so conflicted he could barely eat for three days. He was finally able to break the spell of misery when he prayed to God and promised that he would never disappoint his family, his church, and God the way the pastor did. Secretly, Jerry was a little jealous of the mystery man who had captivated the pastor. He began obsessing over what kind of a sex life two gay men might have together, trying to imagine how Pastor Kirk looked without clothes. By his mid-teens, he was regularly jerking off to fantasies about Pastor Kirk and hating himself every time.
He convinced himself that jerking off to gay fantasies didn’t make him gay. As long as he lived as a straight man, he could be one. And so he resolved to marry a woman and to be faithful to her too. He felt in his heart that he could do it through sheer will-power. That’s what his faith told him. But now, sitting in my office, Jerry was finally realizing that despite the promise he made to God at age thirteen, despite all his striving to be someone he was not and to cover up his authentic sexual identity, he was a gay man who had lived a life of self-hatred.
The timing of this traumatic event could not have come at a worse period in Jerry’s biological life. Male puberty is a very vulnerable phase for most boys. Boys don’t produce testosterone until they hit puberty (usually 10 to 13). But once testosterone production begins, it can soar to the high end of adult normal. Suddenly, you have a little kid whose bloodstream is flooded with androgens at levels that rival or exceed his own dad’s levels of testosterone. Still, while their underlying biology is pumping adult-level hormones, the boys themselves are still children. They think, feel and act like children. They struggle to handle the underlying hormonal load – and so do their parents! In those years, boys must feel as psychosexually stressed as a woman during bad PMS. So if they are traumatized during that period, it can wound their sexual identity in ways we have yet even to comprehend.
There was only one positive option for Jerry now, and that was to find a way to make peace with himself. He couldn’t go back and change his life; he could not undo the damage of failed relationships; and he couldn’t make up for all the decades lost to having sad sex with women instead of the potentially joyful sex he might have had with men. I encouraged him to date men but he was afraid of it – even if they did develop feelings for one another, he could never live as a gay man. He didn’t know what to do with his gayness but he had a long list of all the things he would not do, and that included giving himself permission to love himself as he was. I was so sad for him. While I am, by nature, an optimist who thinks it’s never too late to find sexual happiness, Jerry was so broken and traumatized, he was just too frightened to change.
Sex and Self-Esteem
If you think it’s mainly sexually unconventional or differently wired people – gays, lesbians, queers, kinksters – who naturally will be the most ashamed of their sexual desires, you’re wrong.
How we feel, personally, about sex acts is certainly impacted by the religious and social norms, of course. We can see the brutal evidence of that in the high rates of suicide among gay and transgendered youth, for example, who feel emotionally overwhelmed by the negative social messages they get about their identities. The pain people experience by feeling socially outcast, rejected or mocked by peers, treated as sinners or mentally ill people, and denied their human rights on the basis of their sexual identity, is enough to destroy anyone’s self-esteem.
But, interestingly, it’s equally, if not more strongly, influenced by how we feel about ourselves. People with fundamentally positive views of themselves tend to be self-accepting, no matter how quirky, edgy, or sexually radical they are. They tend not only to ask for what they want, but they expect to get it and on the whole get more of what they want out of sex than other people. They don’t believe their sexual interests make them a flawed person or less than others; indeed, it may make them feel more creative and adventurous than others. In other words, people with good self-esteem feel entitled to sexual pleasure in bed and seek it out on their own terms.
People with a negative sexual self image tend to feel anxious and inadequate. They find it hard to articulate what they want, and harder to ask for satisfaction. They may be their own worst enemies – censoring their fantasies, sublimating all their urges, and sacrificing their needs to please their partners or their parents. They may struggle with shame for wanting what they want, or wish they were more like other people, who they imagine are having better sex lives. In the end, they never get as much sex, or the kind of sex, they need to feel complete.
Resolving sex issues in relationships isn’t as hard as people believe it to be. I think people are scared that sex will turn out to be too embarrassing or mysterious for them to handle. They’re afraid that opening up about their sexual needs and fantasies to their partners will hurt their relationship. My clinical experience has been the opposite: secrets destroy otherwise supportive, respectful, loving relationships.
BARBARA was a bio-engineer in her late 40s and
