When Raymond was coming of age it was commonly thought that homosexuals were bad people and deviant. They were considered the worst possible people, just as they still are in some ultra-conservative circles.
So when he began to realize that he was sexually attracted to other guys at about 14 or 15 years old, Raymond was not able to make the logical connection that he was gay because he knew he wasn’t a bad person.
There was also a popular idea that if a young man had same sex urges, they could go away by having sex with females, as if to suggest that they really wanted females in some way.
As Raymond reached adulthood, he was still unable to resolve the dichotomy between self image and the social construct of a gay man. “I certainly knew I was attracted to guys, but I could not translate that information into a homosexual self image because of the false information stuck in my head about gay people,” he shared with me during our first coaching session.
Eventually all of his siblings and friends were getting married, and Raymond felt it was expected of him, too. He met a young lady, who he found attractive, got engaged, married and then had 3 children. But Raymond never stopped being sexually attracted to men. It did not decrease at all, in fact the more he tried to fight it the more intense the same-sex attractions became.
Eventually the marriage failed. He stayed in the local area to be available as a father to his children and during that time Raymond finally came to terms with his sexuality. “I was about 43 when I finally came out to my family and was scared of how my children would react. I think for gay men born a long time ago, we often did not understand ourselves because we had no cultural references and the science of human sexuality had not penetrated into our culture. I’m sure to a large extent my difficulty was made worse by having attended 12 years of Catholic school. That experience cured me of atheism, but I think my Catholic guilt was very deeply entrenched.”
