Acts of Disclosure

The Coming-Out Process of Contemporary Gay Men

Marc E. Vargo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317712367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études LGBT

Confronting the psychological, social, sexual, legal, and political issues at stake in the coming-out process, Acts of Disclosure: The Coming-Out Process of Contemporary Gay Men uses research findings and first-hand accounts to help gay adolescents and men accept and embrace their sexual identity as an integral part of their being. Offering helpful advice and specific suggestions that will guide you through the coming-out process, this text also teaches family, friends, and colleagues how they can support and encourage you in this challenge. A roadmap through the confusing process of coming to terms with your sexuality both privately and publicly, Acts of Disclosure walks you step-by-step through the stages of coming out, the emotions involved, the potential pitfalls, and the kinds of receptions you may meet. It points out both healthy and self-destructive coping strategies and teaches you how to take responsibility for your sexuality. You will find its discussions straightforward, honest, and direct, as it broaches the following topics:

• coming out in American schools
• expressing your sexual identity on the job
• the harmful effects of involuntary public exposure
• why some parents adjust better than others to the fact that they have a gay child
• the damaging effects of social myths attached to homosexuality
• the emotional and behavioral reactions wives have after discovering that their husbands are gay
• how to anticipate a possible "outing" against oneself and the advantages of coming out to prevent such an act
• compulsory social programming that may be deeply injurious to gay adolescents
• disclosing your sexual identity after the onset of AIDS Gay males of all ages, parents, friends, children, therapists, psychologists, social workers, and educators who read Acts of Disclosure will realize their error in treating gay sexual identity as undesirable, shameful, or second-rate. As you turn the last page of this comprehensive and enlightening book, you will likely find yourself with an appreciation of gay male sexuality as well as with a better understanding of the complexities of human nature.

Chapter 1

The Coming-Out Process

Coming out was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. When you’re growing up and you’re told all the time about how awful gays are, and then one day it dawns on you that you are one, well, it can be tough. I know I was depressed at first. But you get over it and go on with your life, and then one day you start to feel pretty good about it all. You start to realize it’s okay to be gay.… My only regret is that I didn’t know earlier. I think back to all those years of not knowing or else trying to run away from it. I wish I’d known I was gay when I was a kid, so I could’ve had a head start dealing with it.

The man who spoke these words, a thirty-four-year-old instructor of the humanities, echoes the sentiments of many gay men. And he is right. The coming-out process might be much easier if a person were able to recognize at the beginning of his life that he is homosexual. But a man does not enter the world knowing that he is gay; like other fundamental aspects of his being, his sexuality is something he must discover for himself. And this takes time. Yet the time at which his homosexual orientation itself begins to develop is another matter. For several decades now, psychologists have claimed that a child, as a result of his relationships with his father and mother, forms an affinity for either the same sex or the opposite sex by the time he is five years old, an affinity that eventually crystallizes into an enduring sexual orientation. But today, a growing body of research is finding that a considerable share of a person’s sexual disposition may be present much earlier than the childhood years; indeed, even before one is born.

THE ORIGINS OF HOMOSEXUALITY

In this regard, researchers in the biological sciences have accumulated compelling evidence in recent years suggesting that homosexuality, like heterosexuality, may be a feature that is to some degree inherited. To better understand this assertion, in this section we review the major studies that have explored the biological foundations of the same-sex orientation, with particular attention to the cognitive, neuroanatomical, and DNA research. We begin our discussion, however, by looking at recent sibling studies in this area since inheritance patterns can often be uncovered by examining brothers and sisters reared in the same or different environments.

Sibling Studies

Perhaps the most important investigation to explore sexual orientation in siblings was published in 1993 by Dean Hamer and his associates at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.¹ These researchers found that a man who has a gay brother has a 13 percent chance of being gay himself, whereas a man who does not have a homosexual brother stands only a 2 percent chance—a striking statistical difference. Notable differences were also found in six additional studies, which revealed that a man having a gay identical twin has a 57 percent chance of being homosexual himself compared to a man having a gay fraternal twin, who has only a 24 percent chance.² And this is an important finding, since identical twins occupy the same egg in utero and, for this reason, share a much larger amount of genetic material than do fraternal pairs. It would appear, then, that as twins become more alike in their genetic makeup, so, too, do they become more alike in their sexual orientations. As for the role of the home environment in determining sexual disposition, because brothers, like those in the studies cited here, are reared largely under the same conditions, it is believed that the family milieu, in and of itself, cannot account for such marked statistical differences.

Regarding the source of the genetic material itself, it appears that the mother may be the one who passes it on to her son. The Hamer study found that a homosexual orientation is often associated with the mother’s side of the family, while showing no clear connection to the father’s side.³ In fact, for a given homosexual man, there is an 8 percent chance that he has a gay cousin in his mother’s family and a 7 percent likelihood that he has a gay uncle. Furthermore, if there are two gay brothers in the same family, thus increasing the probability of a genetic basis for their homosexuality, the odds are 13 percent that they have a gay maternal cousin and 10 percent that they have a gay maternal uncle.

To be sure, findings like these lend credence to the notion of a biological foundation for sexual orientation. Based on such figures, one researcher has estimated that up to 70 percent of a person’s same-sex nature may be inherited.⁴

Cognitive Research

Other investigators have explored the workings of the brain itself to determine if measurable differences exist between gay and straight men. Cheryl McCormick and her colleagues, for instance, looked at hand preference and discovered that, compared to straight men, gay men are more likely to be left-handed or to use their right hands for some tasks and their left hands for others,⁵ a difference between the two orientations that is almost certainly due to neurological factors.

Other studies have found that gay and straight men differ in their abilities on certain types of mental tasks. “On the average, gay men are worse at spatial tasks and better at verbal tasks than straight men,” explains one investigator.⁶ Indeed, on tests of natural spatial ability, such as a mental rotation task that requires a person to visualize an object revolving in space, homosexual men score lower than heterosexual ones⁷—a difference, like handedness, that is almost certainly the result of dissimilarities in the way in which these men’s brains are constructed.

Neuroanatomical Research

Still other researchers, rather than speculating that the brains of these men may be structured differently, have sought to explore the matter in a much more definitive fashion; namely, by performing post mortem exams on the brains of gay and straight men.

The first study of this type came from Europe in 1990, where Dick Swaab of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research reported that, while examining the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men, he discovered significant differences in the size of a structure—the suprachiasmatic nucleus—that governs body rhythms.⁸ As could be expected, this was a stunning revelation since no physical differences had ever before been detected.

The following year, researcher Simon LeVay at the Salk Institute made a similar announcement. Examining the brains of forty-one gay and straight men, he found that a part of the hypothalamus, a structure involved in sexual functioning, was two to three times larger in straight men than in gay men; this discovery, according to LeVay, suggests that “gay and straight men may differ in the central neuronal mechanisms that regulate sexual behavior.”⁹ Statistically, the odds of such size discrepancies being due to chance are one in one thousand.¹⁰

Also in 1991, a University of California at Los Angeles research team led by Laura Allen and Roger Gorski discovered that a bundle of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is, on the average, 34 percent larger in gay men than in straight men.¹¹ Thus, like the results of the other neuroanatomical studies, these findings imply that the neurological makeup of homosexual and heterosexual men is different, presumably in such a way as to contribute to remarkably disparate affectional and sexual interests in adult life.

DNA Research

Most of the studies mentioned above were based on the notion that a gay man is programmed biologically to become gay. The sibling studies point toward this possibility, while much of the research on cognitive and neuroanatomical differences stems from the assumption that it is genetic factors that account for the dissimilar development of these men’s brains. It should come as no surprise, then, that in laboratories around the world there is currently a race to find the “gay gene,” the single piece of evidence that would prove beyond doubt that, at the starting point of the gay man’s existence, he is placed on the path toward homosexuality.

At this time, of course, we have not located such a gene. If and when we do, however, it is unlikely that its existence will, in and of itself, account for homosexuality in all cases. Human sexual functioning may be far too complex to be caused by a single agent. In fact, most researchers believe that other factors may well be necessary to bring one’s homosexual orientation to full bloom, factors that may include specific conditions or events in the childhood years or possibly later in life. Some even argue that certain men may become gay for nonbiological reasons.

Nevertheless, the search for the gay gene continues to be a crucial avenue of inquiry, since its discovery would mean that at least a portion of the same-sex disposition is almost certainly predetermined. It would also help account for many, if not all, of the neurological differences between gay and straight men found in the studies that we have just discussed.

As for the current state of our search for this entity, an investigation by Dr. Hamer and his colleagues has provided a solid starting point. In 1993, this team examined DNA in sets of gay brothers and straight brothers to determine if differences could be detected in their chromosomal makeup. And, indeed, they uncovered a remarkable difference: the homosexual brothers shared a particular chromosomal pattern 82 percent of the time, the odds of which are less than one in two hundred, while the heterosexual brothers displayed this pattern no more than would be expected by chance.¹² These results, then, strongly suggest that important chromosomal differences do exist between the two sexual dispositions.

DNA, of course, is the blueprint of what we are to become. Unlike our physical bodies, which change over the course of time—our bones soften, our brains deteriorate—DNA, by and large, does not change; at most, it may show subtle effects of aging. Consequently, by studying it at any point in an individual’s lifetime, even after his death, we are able to find what existed before he was formed; that is, the code that determined, in part, who he was to become. In the case of sexual orientation, dissimilarities between the DNA of gay and straight men may mean that in certain respects these gentlemen were designed to be different at conception. Accordingly, Dr. Hamer concludes that, within this one genetic area, we can account for a significant degree of an individual’s sexual disposition.¹³ Indeed, both Drs. LeVay and Hamer concur that recent genetic research “provides the strongest evidence to date that human sexuality is influenced by heredity because it directly examines the genetic information, the DNA.”¹⁴

Thus, the preponderance of biological research—sibling studies, cognitive research, neuroanatomical investigations, DNA analyses—suggests that a gay man’s sexual orientation, like that of his straight counterpart, may be established to some degree before he is born. It implies, too, that sexual orientation is a permanent condition. Like eye color or height, it is largely a given, such that any attempt to radically alter it may violate the individual’s wholeness and integrity as an organism.

Play Research

In terms of the gay child’s development after birth, studies indicate that it may follow a fairly typical pattern, with the homosexual child displaying noticeable differences from the straight child sometimes as early as the first year of life, according to UCLA researcher Richard Green.¹⁵ In a longitudinal study, Dr. Green tracked forty-four boys displaying conventionally feminine interests—the so-called “sissy-boy” syndrome—from childhood through adulthood, and discovered that two-thirds of these children became homosexual or bisexual as adults. These findings support what earlier studies have implied, namely that boys who are most apt to be homosexual as adults usually dislike rough, competitive sports, preferring instead more tranquil activities, such as reading; also, that they are inclined to play with girls, not boys,¹⁶ dress in girls’ clothing for fun, play with dolls instead of trucks, and assume the role of mother, not father, when playing house.¹⁷ This should not be taken to mean, however, that the pursuit of feminine interests causes a male child to become gay; rather, it is presumably his homosexual orientation, which is already in place, that causes him to have such interests in the first place. Nor do the findings mean that effeminate boys invariably become gay men—25 percent of them do not—rather that marked differences in patterns of childhood interests distinguish a great many gay children from straight ones. And this insight is intriguing, given that a considerable amount of play, in most species, is biologically driven.

In this regard, LeVay, among others, has proposed that “sex-typical” play is under hormonal influence; moreover, that gay men, regardless of their degree of masculinity as adults, report having engaged in a certain amount of childhood play that was characteristic of the opposite sex.¹⁸

In all, then, this research into play patterns bolsters the notion that certain aspects of homosexuality may be biologically determined; that the course of the gay child’s development may be designed, in part, to prepare him for a same-sex adulthood. Yet this does not mean that the boy who is destined to be homosexual knows that this is the case. The fact is, he usually does not know, partly because he is typically raised in a heterosexual household by parents who treat him as if he were straight, the result being that he initially thinks of himself in conventional, nongay terms. In spite of this early lack of self-awareness, however, the boy may still be drawn to other males during his early years, not realizing that he is remarkable in this respect—that compared to other boys, he is much more attuned to his own gender.

“I can remember being attracted to men as far back as age seven or eight,” recalls Greg Louganis, four-time Olympic gold-medalist in his autobiography, Breaking the Surface.¹⁹ “I didn’t understand what it meant, but I knew what my feelings were. At that age, I just assumed that’s how everyone felt.”

Another youth recalled the following:

As far back as I can remember, I always had feelings of love for other boys and men in my life. … It wasn’t until I was nineteen years old and away at college that I first realized all the other men in the world didn’t feel the same way I did.²⁰

And yet, while a gay youth may feel that he is like everyone else when it comes to sexual matters, he may feel different in other, nonsexual ways. And this brings us to the first stage of the coming-out process, the stage in which the youth who is unaware that he is gay finds himself feeling unlike other boys in important respects.

STAGE 1: THE PRE-COMING-OUT YEARS

Researcher Richard Troiden of Miami University interviewed 150 gay men in New York and Minnesota about their childhoods and found that, before they reached their teens, 72 percent of them had experienced a “sense of apartness” from other people.²¹ “I never felt as if I fit in,” said one of the men. “I don’t know why for sure. I felt different. I thought it was because I was more sensitive.”²² Yet most of the men in the study did not attribute such feelings of isolation to sexual factors. In fact, nearly all of them said that they were largely unaware of their sexual orientations during this early period in their lives.

Of course, it is possible that this sense of being different is simply a natural aspect of human development and, as such, is not necessarily limited to gay youth. As researcher Troiden points out, it may be that straight men, were they to be asked, would recall that they, too, felt alienated during their adolescent years. Surely most heterosexual youths feel awkward, atypical, and alone at times, although perhaps not as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Coming-Out Process
• Chapter 2. The Family Sphere: Gay Sons, Husbands, and Fathers
• Chapter 3. The Professional Sphere: Coming Out in the Workplace
• Chapter 4. The Public Sphere: Managing Widespread Exposure
• Appendix. Coming-Out Resources
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index