In denial or mental disorder? Need second opinion.

Hello everyone.
I am a 16 year old male struggling with constant questioning of my sexual orientation for at least 3 years now.
The kick-starting event was the fact that as I used to be homophobic due to falling prey to alt-right ideology and later learned that homophobes tend to be closeted homosexuals.
After that I started to question, test and constantly think about the possibility of me being a homosexual.

In the 3 years of this I've read hundreds of various internet resources and posts regarding this. I know this either is a general anxiety syndrome, a manifestation of OCD, or denial.
I've read practically every post and reply on this forum regarding this, and none of the situations matched what happens to me precisely.

The reason why I'm asking about this is the fact that I'm going to visit a therapist soon due to the debilitating effect these thoughts
have on my life, and I'd like a second opinion before the therapist tells me anything from people who understand these issues.

I have no idea whether I'm in denial or have a mental disorder. This is why I'm going to try and provide as much information as possible so you can
pull some sort of conclusion, because I always get stuck at a loop of questioning - reassured - questioning etc.

The main problem I see is the capability of masturbating to homosexual content, even when created as a fantasy. I'd write myself off as gay right now,
if it weren't for the fact that I can orgasm to literally anything, be it porn, text or fantasy. Various kinds of weird fetishes and genres of porn, even when I imagine it in my head.

Now, I don't exactly think I'm a pansexual pedo-necro-zoophile, and my urges reflect it. I've never felt a need to have sex with a child or an animal beyond these
fantasies, and same can be said about men. I've only ever had fantasies about women before I started using porn. I only have sexual urges for women, even now.

There is a probability that it's just a combination of years of porn use coupled with me being easily addicted and lacking restraint.

This kind of conditioning however could apply the same way - it could just be that I'm gay and conditioned towards attraction to women.
There are also stories of gay men being able to have sex and orgasms with women, so this is extremely shaky and I'm still not sure about the
real cause of these attractions and urges.

When it comes to romantic and natural attraction which is often used as a way to find out the real sexual orientation on this forum it's all women,
and always been women. I've only ever had crushes on girls, and only ever got naturally horny around girls. My masturbation before using porn was girls
only, the porn i started to watch was straight porn, and I never watched gay porn on a large scale - only knew I could get off to it. Even now the only
time I use gay porn or masturbate to gay fantasies is to gauge arousal - I don't want you to immediately think OCD, it could just be subconscious denying
me trying to get you to think I have OCD while writing this.

Now this does sound like an anxiety issue on first sight when applied to many of the checklists designed here, but I'm going to talk some more about
what is happening in my anxiety cycles.

Even before I learned about "HOCD" i.e. OCD with a primary focus on sexuality I performed homosexuality checks and browsed forum posts to find "gay symptoms".
I did however have a phase where I basically supressed the anxiety so that it panged only once in a while - this backfired massively when a person started
joking around that I was gay, and everything came back multiple times stronger. I remember staying up late to browse emptyclosets and quora posts to find signs
of denial in me, and even before that I stopped doing a lot of the behavior associated with "gayness" (crossed legs, limp wrists, etc.) due to them being in
said gay checklists.

I do have some form of homophobia still, this is a source of issues since internalised homophobia is a sign of denial. I don't know why, I just tend to
have negative feelings about LGBT people in general sometimes, although I would be lying if I said it isn't mostly gay men and effeminancy (this was on a check list for closeted gay men on this specific forum). I have no idea if it's the internalised homophobia talking or just some kind of intense fear of being like
them. Good thing is that I'm working on this issue and the feelings are diminishing over time.

My main source of anxiety currently is both the period where I supressed the questioning and anxiety (if you're in denial you have no issue with accepting that
you "have HOCD" and this is what happened to me for a few months - I basically used "HOCD" to rationalise the doubt I had [using "HOCD" to defeat the "HOCD"?])
And the fact that the urge to perform checks seems to be going away in the sense that I no longer do physical checks anymore and just mental ones, imagining situations
and testing arousal.

My checks were physical ones in the early stages of this questioning. The latest physical checks I performed were in December when I performed pupil dilation checks.
I got a false positive once (at least consider it a false positive due to more controlled tests yielding no dilation, but it could very well be real).

Basically my main doubt is if I invented this "OCD" to cope with denial, and that I actually don't have it and am in denial all along. This again does sound like
textbook OCD, but keep in mind that I've read up on all the symptoms including this one so it could just be me subconsciously skewing this towards me not being gay.

Since OCD often comes with a history of anxiety or other irrational fears I'll include that for a year or so I had a panical and irrational fear of pedophiles being everywhere, which made me extremely paranoid and stay at home. This however could just be a manifestation of the "sodomy fear" gay men in denial have, and it went away naturally (no idea if the fact I was eventually forced to go outside functioned as a form of ERP of this was just a symptom of homosexual denial all along).

This anxiety has led me to try and kill myself and basically killed my emotions - even previous triggers don't cause as much anxiety as they once did, and a fresh
trigger is the only thing making me feel anxious.

This behavior severely impairs my day-to-day functioning, although this could just again be denial induced depression or repression induced mental issues.

For example, I once realised that straight porn has a penile element which could cause false arousal -> I never watched anything but lesbian since then.
I also found that gay men tend to stare at other men, and from that moment onwards I can't look at men without an intense anxiety spike, but this could just
be me realising my attraction to them and supressing it.

I just hope that I'm not lying to myself.

 

If I could I'd like to ask specifically for Chip's opinion on this, he seems to be the most experienced at diagnosing denial from what I read in the threads.

 

I guess I should elaborate on the attraction issue since it seems like the primary source of my doubt and getting this resolved could mean some form of closure to my problem.

I got to porn at about 11 years old, and did the classic escalation thing - it ended at a point where I watched a really disgusting r*pe japanese cartoon porn and couldn't sleep yet the very next day I masturbated to it with no problem.

I'm currently trying to limit and/or stop my porn use completely, and with how much of it I viewed results are coming extremely slowly.

One notable thing is that masturbating to homosexual fantasies works very poorly, but if I persistently force it I can still get off. This however could just be anxiety blocking arousal subconsciously. I can basically stop physical arousal at a whim for a short amount of time (not the erection, the pleasurable feeling.)

I do have (as said in the first post) a history of masturbating exclusively to girls before I found porn and the first porn I used being straight porn. I also have a tendency to get addicted and very little self restraint or willpower.

When it comes to romantic attraction it's been pretty much exclusive to girls (or at least I believe) - when I'm not feeling so great I watch/read various japanese cartoon material that is basically a cheesy self insert in which you can get with a cute girl.

I do however like yanderes, and I read that gay men in the closet have a tendency to "fall prey" to mentally unstable women. Be it this or just low self esteem, I don't really know.

 

Just to add to this though I haven't felt any sort of disdain or homophobia towards anyone for I think a month now, so I think my efforts have worked on it going away eventually - it's just like my antisemitism, racism and etc. used to go away when I went away from right wing ideology.

 

Also, whenever I manage to get over my doubts for a while with reassurance it immediately starts doubting my mathematical ability (another anxiety of mine, I won't dwell on it since it's unimportant) or it keeps telling me that I'm a social failure and even if I'm straight I will never get a girlfriend (which is true).

 

Do you think that I'm gay/LGBT?