Do You Think Sexual Orientation Actually Changes?

I don't think so but I think its possible to change the self perception.
I think it's really a matter of definitions.
According to kinsey and others few people are 100% 'gay' - and many people who came out later in life were able to have partners of the opposite sex and 'enjoy' it.

But here is the difference I think - I am gay. I have had girlfriends and even had times when I 'enjoyed' sex though in retrospect I also had to often think about a man while having it...
If I only had that 'enjoyment' I would think 'oh sex is ok, and it looks like I am straight because well, I orgasmed with a woman and it felt good.

When I finally allowed myself to accept my gay feelings and accept myself I started to think about sex with a man I was like WOW this is what straight people are getting so excited about! There was no comparison.

I haven't had sex with a man yet since accepting myself but years ago when I was drunk I had a gay hookup - we weren't able to 'finish' because of an interruption and that snapped me out back into a fear mode, but I started to give him a blow job and it just felt so natural and so good, to this day it was my most intense and sensual experience with another person - and I had over 10 girlfriends.


I think once you accept you're gay it's pretty hard to go back to convincing yourself you can enjoy sex with a woman - I occasionally see a woman I think 'oh that would be nice' but it's nothing like my thoughts about men.

Pretty much my interest in women quickly faded.

Now is it possible to 'go back' to that pre-state? Maybe, maybe if you really hit it off with a woman but it would really just be trying to 'forget' about the far more intense gay feelings.

There are 'bi' people I guess and maybe they shift on their own spectrum depending on whether they are around more attractive men or women? I don't know

 

No, I don't believe your sexual orientation changes. What changes is your perception of your sexuality.

 

With some bi people like myself, we can go through fazes where we are way more attracted to Men or to Women and then we go close to neutral but our sexuality does not change.

 

I don’t think your orientation changes however your perception of your sexuality changes. I spent years in heterosexual relationships until one day my true sexuality rose to the surface. Once it did I saw very clearly that I was gay. My attraction to women faded very quickly and my attraction to men far surpassed anything I ever felt for women. Sexual and emotional relations with another man at least for is no comparison. The passion, sensuality, openness, erotic pleasure is just so far superior to being with a woman. I determined I had always been gay but role playing for various reasons for years.

 

I find this so interesting, but have you had moments in your past that was clearly pointing that you were gay and you didnt notice? I find so interesting how a lot of ppl spend a lot of time without knowing they were gay. If you dont want to asnwer thast okay, im just curious.

 

For some people it can change, but not for everone for sure. My orientetion is somewhat fluid, but this argument that it can be forced in some direction is stupid. It can't be.

 

When I look back I see very clear indication that I was gay. Even as a young teen I had a crush on the boy next door. Somehow I managed to bury them again and again for years. I just could not even admit that I found guys sexually attractive all the while secretly wishing I was with a guy. I dated women because society said guys should. That is until the dam broke.

 

Through out my late teens to mid twenties I was hit upon by men or guys. Even while I was with friends or my girlfriend at the time. My friends used to tease me all the time about it.
Even in my thirties and fourties I have been hit on by men. Came out as BI in my mid fifties and now am all out gay.

 

I always considered myself straight heterosexual woman … then I fell for my best female friend and somehow that became physical, even though we had both never considered ourselves anything but straight. .. and Bang my mind blew and it’s still struggling to come to terms with this .. it’s been just over a year and I can’t answer your question .. but for me prior to this I would have said you don’t just change .. but now I’m accepting that My experience was in the fluidity realms . and it has changed, I don’t feel
i’m straight anymore, now that may mean i’m Bisexual, but for now all I known is i’m confused and still in the process of accepting and dissecting my younger years

 

Well, for sure my identity has changed (from straight to bisexual). And my Kinsey scale rating has changed. There is no way I would have been anything but a Kinsey zero or one most of my decades of life. Then about three years ago something happened internally where I now fantasize about guys (those fantasies have crowded out the previous fantasies about women), which would rate me a two on that scale. So I talk about having gone through a shift in later life. I like other scales better than Kinsey, but for this thread it makes sense to focus on just that one.

To your original question: I’m ok speaking as if my orientation has changed as I aged. I’m also ok about using fluid language. I’m not sure society is ready for that, but society still is stuck in its limited vocabulary and either/or mindset (for instance, have you ever asked someone if they are gay? Is the advice on EC to look in the mirror and say “I’m gay!” to see if it fits? Do people around you ask if someone is “gay OR straight”? Why didn’t you or they ask if someone is bi?).

I can also agree with much of what Chip says about people doing a better examination of their life, except for the word “denial”. I’ve been fine with noticing guys since I was a teen (“I like people” is how I answered a friend who asked), I’ve never denied that. I lived in contexts (family, religion, jobs) where that wasn’t going to be a problem for my acceptance or survival. In some ways I assumed everyone could feel the way I did. I think it made me a good LGBTQ ally.

 

What @Chip wrote is the science behind what we know about sexuality. It doesn’t change but our perception does.

I think the word “denial” can be a bit strong for some of us. In my case, I just didn’t “understand” what my sexuality was. I bought into the idea that to be homosexual required me to act “gay”. I just didn’t see myself as the stereotypical gay type especially since I am pretty much in the middle of the spectrum. So, I could be very turned on by a woman and liked the whole heteronormative lifestyle. It just seemed to fit. More recently, though, I allowed myself to understand what my attractions really are. Examining my history, it was there all the time. It’s just that I didn’t understand what it was I was feeling. I was cool with my fantasies about guys...it’s just that I believed it to be a kink rather than a sexuality.

I think as we age we learn more about ourselves and are willing to examine what we never bothered to before. Not just with sexuality but with understandings of other emotional needs and how relate to other people. It makes sense that our sexuality is something we really look at. It can seem like we changed. But, really we just allowed our selves to be more open.

 

I agree with most of what’s been written. For me I think that I didn’t realise I might not be straight because as a young man I had a very strong sex drive and could get excited for just about anything. As I’ve grown older, I have noticed that’s no longer the case and my interests are more defined. Pointedly, I cannot get ‘excited’ for women at all anymore. Whether that’s in real life or online or fantasy or whatever. It has shocked me but that’s where I am.

 

I absolutely think sexual orientation is capable of being fluid. Not for everyone, certainly. I don't think it undermines the validity of people's orientations that are static to suggest that for some, they do move through different experiences of sexuality - human beings are messy and untidy! I don't believe at all that someone's orientation can be changed by an external force, but sometimes people progress through different stages of their own experience and I feel like the difference between "can orientation change" and "can people be constantly discovering different facets of their own experience" is pretty semantic. Is it changing, or is its mutability in fact that person's fixed state? Who knows! People are untidy.

(In my own case, I first came out as bi/pan because I realised I was extremely capable of attraction to genders other than men....then came out as a "lesbian", on account of feeling exclusively attracted to women at that point in my life. Like, exclusively. Now, I'm back to being attracted to people all over the gender spectrum. I don't think I was denying anything during the Girls Only stage, that's just...how I felt, then! I now know that my orientation is, "Attraction to women is my only true constant, the rest is capable of flux". Delightfully untidy.)

 

I cannot disagree with you enough on this point. I don't think it is a semantic difference between these two statements: "can orientation change" and "can people be constantly discovering different facets of their own experience." Those are nowhere near equal. And it's potentially harmful to people desperate for any possible hope that they really aren't gay or bi , if they can only hold out until some magical change occurs.

I do agree with your overall point that for some people their experiences fluctuate and can be rather fluid, but I don't think it's proper to consider that analogous to orientation change.

 

I guess for me I don't really know how to draw a concrete line around these things, nor feel it's possible to quantify it. What I mean is, some people will absolutely feel that their orientation has shifted over time, and I don't think it would be fair to suggest that those people's experiences are misinterpreted or that they've "really" been X or Y orientation the whole time. I would say orientation cannot be changed - it is what it is, and for some people that might mean their orientation is absolutely static, for some that might mean it's capable of significant periods of fluctuation. Is that "change", or is that a fixed point where the fixed state is the changeability? I don't know, and I don't think it's really my place to try and answer that.

It's deeply unfortunate that society creates a situation where people struggle with internalised homophobia and I truly feel for people grappling with that because it's incredibly hard, but that's its own issue. Nobody should have to hope they'll stop feeling the way they feel. But I'm saying, as a person whose orientation genuinely did for a period of several years present as "attracted exclusively to women, I felt strongly about this", and then widened to be solidly bi/pan again, I consider that my orientation having shifted over time.

(Forgive me, my autistic literalism may be in play, so perhaps the question posed in this thread isn't the one I think it is - apologies if so! I just think the human experience so rarely is capable of being boiled down into concrete "No, this never happens," situations. Two people might have the same experience and quantify/describe it differently, is what I mean by the semantics thing.)

 

Philosophical musings are interesting, but this is a help forum for people who are struggling, and many of them are desperate to not be what they already suspect they are. You are free to think how you want, but the suggestion that sexual orientation can change is completely antithetical to our purpose here, and must be called out as false thinking.

Additionally, I would challenge this thinking: "But I'm saying, as a person whose orientation genuinely did for a period of several years present as "attracted exclusively to women, I felt strongly about this", and then widened to be solidly bi/pan again, I consider that my orientation having shifted over time." The fact that for a period of time you felt exclusively attracted to only women does not in any way indicate that your sexual orientation changed, though I understand why it feels that way to you. If you can accept the idea that your fixed state is bi/pan, it didn't change just because your attractions leaned one way more than another for a period of time. That is a very common bi/pan experience. It doesn't indicate actual orientation change.