Repression and first knowing

I'm still in the middle of the process, so I don't know how much I can say….but I do know that it's confusing and uncertain right now. I grew up thinking I was straight—even having some pretty intense crushes on guys in my youth group—but whenever I dated, I found that the attraction didn't survive the first kiss. Only recently have I realized that I had some even stronger crushes on girls I knew; the first I remember was on my best friend when I was 12 or so.

I'm still wondering what, exactly, my orientation is. It's hard, not knowing, not being able to share that with a potential partner. And at the same time, it's like my parents are whispering in my ear, "This is just a phase and you know it. You're just doing it for the attention. And, oh yeah, you're sinning, too." I mean, I know that voice is wrong….but knowing doesn't make it go away.

 

I wonder, too how much I was repressing. I know a lot for me was boxing up and shoving aside feelings. I knew they were there, and I shared them with those close to me, but I also tried to force feelings with men and claim I was bi. Pretty sure I did that because living a hetero life would be easier. But I was never happy. And I never allowed myself to feel. And things never felt right.

It wasn't until my best friend asked me "if you're bi, why don't you date women?" That I stated to ask myself the same. I'd tell her about crushes on women, or should I thought was beautiful, but I never considered dating them. I don't know why. Something there was probably repressed. But when I did, wow! There was instantly no question. I truly attract to women and only women. So much quickly explained. Never any true questioning other than why don't I when I know I like them.

 

It took me a long time to figure out what was 'wrong' with me. I knew I was different by the time I was 12, but I grew up in a small town in the 80s and LGBT awareness was basically zilch. There was one openly gay man in my town and everyone treated him like a leper. My own parents told me to stay away from him because being gay obviously meant that he was a predator.

The whole subject of sex was taboo in my household; my mother would change the channel when people kissed because she didn't want us watching 'that kind of thing'. Anything having to do with sex was therefore not open to discussion. As far as I can recall, homosexuality wasn't even discussed in health class in school, so I really didn't know what to make of gay people. I, like everyone else I knew, thought that trans people were 'perverts', in the same class as child molesters, and I would have died before telling anyone the kinds of thoughts, feelings, and desires I had.

It was incredibly confusing and distressing for me. I couldn't understand why, when I thought of myself, I thought of myself as a girl, or why I hated being a boy. My role models were Wonder Woman, Princess Leia, and Ripley from Alien. I never identified with male role models, though I sometimes liked them and found them interesting. I never wanted to look like one. My own thoughts and feelings made no sense to me, and as I was already being badly bullied by the time I reached high school for being a 'f--' (even though I was 'straight and cis', I was deathly afraid of telling anyone about what I was going through.

Mental illness also runs in my family, so I naturally assumed that what I was experiencing was a product of schizophrenia, like my older brother. I thought the thoughts and feelings I had were 'crazy'. So I tried very hard to repress all my spontaneous thoughts and desires to 'fix' myself because I didn't want to become 'ill'. I thought if I could stay in absolute control over every thought and feeling I had, and push away all the 'girl' feelings, and then I would be okay and no one would find out that I was insane and they wouldn't lock me away in a mental hospital. My brother had been hospitalized, and I didn't want to end up there as well.

I got so good at repressing everything, and was so certain I was just mentally ill, that even after high school I ignored LGBT issues entirely. I never connected the dots. I had no idea that I was trans. I knew that I liked to write from a female perspective, that I like to play games with female avatars, that I wished I'd been born a woman, and that dressing up in a leather miniskirt and heels on Halloween had been the best night of my life, I even wished every night I'd wake up the next day in a female body, but it never occurred to me that there was a name for what I was going through. It never occurred to me that I was the same sort of person as the 'trannies' I'd reviled in my youth. I saw no connection: they were sexual deviants, who chose to do weird, inappropriate things, and I was mentally ill and just confused about myself. They were two completely different phenomena in my mind. It took me a really long time to realize that there was no actual difference, even though I'd been consciously aware of my own thoughts, fantasies, and feelings my entire adult life. So I didn't even admit to myself that I might be trans until about 10 years ago. And at that point I just doubled my efforts to fix myself, because the thought of being openly trans terrifies me.

I am just now, at the age of 44, starting to come out. I regret not doing it sooner. I wish the awareness had been there when I was a teenager. I wish I hadn't been so brainwashed into hating myself and people like me. I'm grateful I never followed through on any of my suicide attempts. But over 30 years of hating and fearing yourself, of being convinced that everyone you know and love will reject you if they only knew 'the truth' is too high a price for anyone to pay. I only hope I have enough time to salvage something from this wasted life.

 

Recently, I've come to believe that my mind automatically repressed my gay feelings as soon as I hit puberty. I was never consciously aware of them. I didn't know what "gay" was, so I had no way to understand what was happening. My mind simply took the disturbing, confusing feelings and split them off. When they forced their way back into my awareness at age 18, it was overwhelming and terrifying.

I realize that much of my so-called personality is a product of this repression.

For example, I now recognize that my long pursuit of women was desperate and compulsive. I needed sexual/romantic validation from women to assure myself that I was indeed a man. At the same time, I had trouble forming intimate relationships with male friends because there was something unnerving about getting close with a man.

This kind of deep, early repression is the mind's attempt to protect itself. Undoing it is like trying to rip out the foundation of a building: the whole thing is going to come down. And that is scary as hell.

I've spent the last 20 years trying to force my gay feelings either back into my unconscious or fully out into the world, without resolving why I repressed them in the first place.

The fact is, I still have not made peace with the idea of being gay. I've always believed that being gay is a consolation prize: a psychosexual compromise for males who never grew into men.

I don't know how to honestly do a complete 180 in my attitude towards being gay. How do I explain it to myself? "Hey, being gay is actually great, you just internalized the idea that it's bad from our intolerant society!" I don't really believe that. I've always mistrusted media and religion, questioned everything, and done my own research.

But maybe I was biased from the start. I felt that being gay was bad, and sought to understand why I felt that way. Maybe my so-called research was just a way to justify my self-loathing.

Writing this post has actually given me a lot to think about. I guess the immediate takeaway is that repression runs deep — really, really deep.

 

I know I repressed a lot of feelings for a long time. For me, I don't want to kiss men or have a real emotional connection, I just want to be dominated by a large penis. I don't ogle or think about men sexually in public and I'm not attracted to 99% of them ever. Maybe I'm just picky but I recall having a friend at 13, he was a year younger, and being in awe of his penis, though it was not larger than mine, I knew at that point. I like big ones, some of the time. Big effing deal. I repressed and fought those feelings for 20+ years and it ate me up inside. No, no more, no thanks. It's ok and I'm pretty sure most "straight" guys feel that way too. I don't care what people think.

I've had to take meds for the anixety and depression it caused me. I'll be starting real therapy soon but I'm, for now, doing my own therapy. I'm, while looking at the mirror, saying to myself 10 times per day, I like large penises, it does not make me a bad person, sissy etc. I think it's helping.

 

Hell

Subsequent to hell I journal and PM (private message) with other ECs members.

 

I also remember becoming angry whenever homosexuality was mentioned in a positive light, and comforted when my parents would make rude comments in response (for instance, if we were watching a TV show where an out lesbian was presented favorably, my parents would roll their eyes and say something to the effect of "Do we really need that on a cooking show?" I'm ashamed of that now, but I also know that it was a result of my needing to convince myself I was straight, so I could fit into my parents' narrow brand of Christianity. In their denomination, there was no room for LGBT+ people, unless they'd "repented of that lifestyle" and "gone straight."

….my childhood just gets more and more messed up the more I reflect on it….

 

This has been a big problem that I haven't been able to resolve. I'm angry that no one explained basic human sexuality so I could see that I was gay. Somehow I have to get over that. "Gay" meant sissy, wimp, flamboyant, girly, but never simply a guy who is attracted to other guys. Based on the wrong definition I now can see that I tried to not be "gay" and that was not good for me, but not knowing the real definition caused even more harm. I don't know when I finally figured out what gay meant, but I was about 23 when it hit me that I was gay. I feel stupid it took so long. All the guys that caught my eyes in classes, at work, at bars, etc was because I was gay. I wanted to be more than friends with them, but didn't know that was possible. I remember being jealous of a few friends when they spent time with their girlfriends or paid attention to women but I didn't know the truth of why at the time. How is it that others here and all over have just met other gay people and found romantic connections even when they weren't out and in times much less accepting than today? It boggles my mind how apparently blind and unlucky I was/am.

 

wow. Swap the genders in your text and this is 100% me, and I hadn't even realised it until I read what you wrote.

I have had massive depression and anxiety issues all my life which are only just recently being correctly treated and medicated. I think the clarity of thought I have now compared to in the past has helped me realise how much I was deluding myself. Having supportive and wonderful friends in my life is another relatively new thing and definitely helped me see that things I had taken for granted (being lonely, feeling worthless, feeling inadequate, feeling incapable of fitting in, etc) aren't necessarily true.

I feel like now I can look myself in the eye in the mirror, knowing that I like women, and actually even like myself. Before this I would see in my reflection only awkwardness and shame to be me.

 

I was isolated and sexually repressed thanks to parents who were conservative Christian (Southern Baptist) and because I was home schooled in a rural corner of the rusty buckle of the Bible Belt. When I went through puberty and started being attracted to anyone, I've always been attracted exclusively to men. I somehow managed to disconnect that thought from anything sexual - even though men clearly turned me on - by redirecting it into the narrative that I "envied" other men who were more attractive than I was, because body image issues, or something. The most curious part of that part of the story is that I kept my ignorance even once I spent four years at a public university, even spending part of my time in the theatre department (need I say more?).

What ultimately pulled back the veil of my repression and ignorance of my own feelings was at least in part that I was reading about LGBT people and Christianity in a book[1] that I had heard about on a progressive Christian blog and decided to order for some reason that I couldn't consciously explain at the time. It was while I was reading the author's story about when he first came face to face with the fact that he was attracted to guys that I put things together and realized that - I will attempt to roughly quote the author from memory - "there was a word for people like me, and that word was 'gay'."

[1] Torn by Justin Lee

 

For me, it wasn't so much as repression but unawareness and never making a (mental) connection regarding my sexuality.

A large part of my life has always been focused on career and finding my life purpose. I did not have gay friends growing up. Homosexuality was not talked about openly in my social environment. Although I dated guys, I had some intense crushes on girls. I thought that was a phase and never connected that to my sexuality.

Some years ago, I was in career transition and had some quiet time to myself. I wasn't living in a cave but I had more solitude time than in my whole life till that point. I wrote in journals. Watched videos, listened to interviews online. One day, I chanced upon a lesbian movie and a switch was turned on. "Am I gay?!"

What followed was panic and then feeling self conscious. I could be in public and looking at a woman, and think, "Do they know I am gay?" "Does my looking at them/her give me away as gay?"

When I look back at my past, I probably should have picked up the signals myself. I have a feeling some people suspect I am gay before I figured it out myself. After acknowledging my sexuality, I don't experience strong repression, though I have some homophobia which I am working on.