Part Three - Recovery

So now clean and sober, attending 12 step meetings, he began to have to face these demons or angels or whatever metaphor we want to use to describe the forces that shape us.
He had one short lived relationship in the early months of his recovery from addiction but he had acted just as dysfunctional here as he had in earlier partnerships and the woman was troubled too. It ended and he sought relationships with many more women who either rejected him or only slept with him once. He burned with shame whenever he remembered the homosexual things he had done, but other times was highly aroused by the notion of exploring that side of him again and he began to notice that the more ashamed he felt about the deeds, and the more inadequate he felt concerning being able to keep a woman in his life, the more the thoughts of homosexual acts came. Pornography also fueled it and he noticed the porn with men and women was the only kind that did so. Men with men porn just seemed odd, not gross, but weird, but the same body parts seen in acts with women became highly attractive to him. He resisted his fantasies because they would have involved prostitution or sex with strangers and those activities too closely resembled the addictive world he had just escaped from, but he also began, for the sake of argument so to speak, to imagine what it would be like to have a healthy experience with a man. He had been asked by his gay friend years earlier if he desired to kiss a man. When my friend said no his gay friend said "well you aren't gay."
This same gay friend, however, later said my friend was simply closeted and hadn't been able to come out enough yet to see it. My friend's sponsor, on the other hand, after several months of getting to know him and hearing his struggles with sexuality suggested he might need therapy to resolve the causation of these issues. What complicated things for my friend was that his sponsor was becoming a devout Christian, and though he never pushed this on my friend, there was a subtle implication in his suggestions that homosexuality was pathological.
My friend still wanted women, he knew that. He didn't have trouble performing with them, as he had heard truly gay men who try to live a straight life do and he couldn't see himself in a long term relationship with a man - the idea didn't horrify him it just seemed silly because he wanted to love and touch and share a life with a woman with her hair and soft skin and tough body that could endure childbirth (and tough spirit that was the metaphorical earth of our species it's fertile firmament giving life and often denying it's implantation however fickly or wisely depending).
He began to tell others about his trouble. He had told old friends right before he began recovery and they hadn't rejected him, though some privately were "weirded" out he heard from third parties. He shared at his meetings about it, but didn't give details. He had heard that many other recovering addicts had engaged in same sex relations but that they often did it for money to support intense heroin or crack habits. He hadn't done it for money. He also hadn't just did it because of drugs - it hadn't been just a wild orgy at a party he barely remembered because the urges remained after months of being substance free. So he still felt ashamed. Thoughts of suicide sporadically came. He felt like a fraud whenever he acted in a way that seemed to him as masculine, he felt like people were whispering about him behind his back. It didn't help that years before three out of the four long term girlfriends he had had all called him a "faggot" during fights.
He conflated his sexual struggles with his life struggles. He was working at a job well below his caliber that though it paid enough wasn't what he had gone into debt to go to college for and he still couldn't seem to find the discipline or inspiration to do his art.
He wasn't sure if he was a closeted gay or heterosexual survivor of abuse. He definitely felt he had a choice though, he felt he could embrace being a heterosexual though, but then suddenly would recall how many gays had tried to have their orientation "fixed" mostly by Conservative Christians or by a society that only 30 years earlier was still labeling homosexuality a psychological disorder. Yet his thoughts were part of a disorder. What had come first though? Was he gay but had piled layers of self hate upon that and more layers of drugs and allowed peers and society to pile on the mess further with their messaging?
The idea that therapy would help seemed appealing, but the more he wanted the thoughts and urges gone, the stronger they seemed to become. The Shame was a sexual accelerant. He wondered how even pursuing therapy would work because wouldn't the desire to seek it for this reason be part of a desire to eliminate these urges? And hadn't a desire to eliminate them made them stronger?
Over time he found here his answer.
He had to love that part of him. He had to accept that he was able to be attracted to men as well as women despite that desire perhaps being formed from abuse, despite it “not having been meant to be". He had to reject the self hate that accompanied a desire to rid himself of the urges. He would never assume all or even many homosexuals had their orientations formed out of negative experiences. He suspected from people he knew and stories he heard that this might be the case but whether something was created out of the bad doesn't mean it can't become of the good. In other words, just because some homosexuality might could have been avoided if the person hadn't been victimized (and this is likely only a small percentage of cases as most it seems highly likely is something someone is born with) that doesn't mean that the person's homosexuality was thus always destined to be an acting out of an abusive script to use therapeutic jargon. My friend came to believe that he likely was always inclined to be more open towards every role he might play in life. This was an openness nurtured by his choices and value systems that were all about exploring and discovering truth and knowledge about life and the world. But a series of collisions between his developing and unarmored self over time had him create a sexual side to himself that became highly negative and self hating. He discovered that as he developed better relationships with his self, his peers and women his urges to use homosexual fantasy as a way of hurting himself diminished. He began to be a healthy "man" a hard worker, a leader, a survivor and a helper. This all repaired his idea of masculinity in himself and in general and the tormenting kind of sexual desires waned. He still would have fantasies here and there, have a private sexual life, but he no longer hated himself for it and in fact thought it was just something natural about him that sometimes still alarmed him when it emerged but something that overall was harmless and even endearing as it was part of him.
My friend says he needs to thank all those who helped him, looking back over what I wrote, realizing that in an already pretty long piece he didn't have time to mention all the people on his path, past and present, who helped him come to his current place of peace about his sexuality. He definitely didn't do it all himself he wants to emphasize as he reads what we just wrote, a lot of the action occurred internally but a giant world of souls surrounded and informed it all.
A couple days later my friend approached me again. I had told him I would be editing this piece as I could and so he knew he could still add or alter it. We met up and I took out my notebook.
He told me he wasn't sure he wanted this published anymore. He had had nights of fitful sleep, he had gotten easily angered and wanted to fight people who were rude to him at work - which was one way his shame about both being bisexual and having been physically abused seemed to manifest in his life pretty regularly though less frequently as he got better over time - he had had a fantasy sexual episode and when it was over he felt disgusted with himself again.
I asked him if perhaps what we had written hadn't done enough justice to the struggle this was for him, that we tried to package it too neatly too happily as may be an implicit tendency of art, we are restrained by form, by an attempt to make our picture of reality prettier and more symmetrical and the same tendency may even extend to our other attempts to describe reality, when we talk about self, about sexual categories, about anything of significance that we must label using language or logic or categories.
He said yes. He paused for a long while. "You know this isn't fun. If I could go back and not have been molested, not been in so many fights, had different, healthier messages about what being a man is all about, even if I couldn't go that far back if I could have just not fooled around with my one gay friend those few times I did and not had sex with that prostitute I would. Does that mean I hate gayness? That I think it's wrong? No. But it would just be Easier for me in my life now and I have that right to choose going forward I have a right to refuse to ever do bisexual things with another human even if I will forever be bisexual and may forever have fantasies that are . I can't and won't hate that part of me but I can prefer other things. I can work on not hating that part of me while still work on focusing my sexual energy toward my future wife. I feel trapped between two extremes of views here. I feel like the Christians I know would suggest naively that God can just remove these desires and that continuing to have a private fantasy life I am not working on focusing my energy toward sexual union with my future wife that I am sinning. On the other hand I feel the gay people I know will say I am denying who I am by attempting to never act out on those feelings with another person - because even if I were to no longer be with my future wife - I would not pursue sexual activity with another male not only because I don't want to have sex outside of a relationship that will eventually lead to marriage but because even if I were to have casual sex I don't want to have future guilt which I know would have if I ever had sex with a man again. They, my gay friends may say that this is still repressing myself, that the guilt is the problem not the act. I disagree and I feel I have a right to my sexual boundaries."
I respond: "you do have a right to those boundaries and most loving people and most professionals would take that as a given. What is most important is that you are bringing this issue out into the light and I know so many survivors of sexual abuse have had similar addiction and sexual preference issues and they may be helped by you. This piece isn't the end it's the beginning and you’re already healing but with hope this can continue that healing. I won't lie and say it will all be easy, you will get bad responses from some and even if they aren't bad some might disagree and cause you to doubt yourself, but ultimately coming out is the best, the truth is liberating though you will need help and nurturing and support along the way. I believe in you and will help you. "

I reach out to hug my friend and tell him I love him and now I must confess, as some of you might already have suspected, that my friend is me.

Part Two - Addiction

The drugs came for him later than for some, to fast forward in this narrative somewhat, but they came just the same. Beers with the boys, some buds here and there, it just seemed cool and rebellious and lined right up with both the classic psychedelic rock he listened to and the mid 90's New York rap that was rife with blunt references.
Harder drugs followed and yet he still went to college and got a job but was always living on the edge, a double life, angry, rebellious, stubborn, gleeful, iconoclastic, suicidal, mystic, loving, unreliable troublemaking, lawbreaker.
He cannot easily describe who he was back then, tempted to only emphasize the childishness and recklessness of dealing and using drugs and fighting and womanizing, he stops and recalls also being at times free of the tyranny of having to be and do what society told him to. He had rejected mainstream morality but was fiercely loyal to friends and always unbending and unyielding on a path toward truth, whatever that is or was. But despite the outward rebellion, he says he was always acting for an invisible audience. He essentially hadn't wholly and totally rebelled against societal influences and norms, in fact his very rebellious lifestyle wasn't a rejection of the norms but an attempt to reconcile divergent ones. Put it like this - the opposite of love is said not to be hate but indifference; so if he really wanted to truly reject society and it's socialization he would have been indifferent to it rather than intimately alternately hating and celebrating different aspects of it. He says his whole life revolved around a twisted idea that it was masculine to sell drugs, to get women to love him without necessarily loving them back and generally subvert society's subtle forms of manliness and competition by being willing to hurt others if they hurt him, compete outside the laws, and seduce and generally beguile women because they would inevitably reject him for a more prototypically masculine man. He says he feel he deserved to get his feel-goods and attention, however he could, for as long as he could.
He was playing with fire though. He casually and with libertine frivolity, coasted through life, trying every drug, meeting and romancing numerous women, partying and exploring and speeding and robbing and having guns pulled on him and fighting and cheating and giving and loving but pulling away or clinging desperately as subtly yet powerfully as storms brew and seasons change and trees bloom and wither and moons descend full of madness and savage gaiety.
He knew not what forces he played with, libido and desire and dopamine and serotonin and rage and grief and rejection and community. His friendships were intense, his loves sweeping but none sustained themselves, built on fantasy and theater and sweat and the spring/summer-like surge of early life's testosterone.
Under it all, he felt sad, different, hurt and inadequate. He stops to ask me as I take notes how I am going to phrase the idea of him being inadequate; even now afraid of being a cliché, as he believed then he was grander than these pop psychology narratives about human developmental dysfunction. But as we talk more he agrees it cannot be reduced or refined more than this simple idea that he didn't feel competent as a male in his world.  He didn't feel he could succeed, except on these fringes, succeed at creating an "interesting" life, full of diverse people and some good art and ideas and some primally satisfying music, succeed at getting laid and admired by some relatively decent women, succeed at finding drugs and succeed at selling them to finance this whole lifestyle. When women he claimed he didn't really want long-term left him, when his attempts at art failed in the distraction and whir of daily hustling and partying - because despite the myth of the bohemian and chemically exploring artist, art requires yeoman work - he felt dead and empty and hopeless. He felt like a punk, a pussy. Sure, he had faced guns, beat off attackers in random alcohol-fueled or jealousy over women inspired combats, always escaped the police and provided the drugs people needed, always been into something exciting, always had people who wanted to hang and ride with him, despite all this he couldn't do anything that would last, build anything that endured, he kept accumulating knowledge and experience, but what could he do with it other than use it as his daily con-game to intrigue those humans he floated along with, either entertaining or annoying them or both. He wanted real love; real lasting bonds and part of him hated himself for even wanting it. He slowly fought himself and something was slowly convincing (something winning) him that he was weak, feminine, an unreliable, superficial, sensitive, moody bitch obsessed with appearances and feeling good who had none of the grit and dedication to do anything truly great in life. He could just survive and sustain his sensual desires. He wanted more but thought he had been driven too far into madness and nihilism, degenerate hedonism, and strangely but not really that strangely, if we look at how societies have often subtly labeled homosexuality, he began to think he was gay.
He says that this idea he was gay was both homophobic and self destructive and open-minded and liberating. How could it both? Well how can anyone deal with the myriad of influences they face unless they simply conform and become either updated versions of their parents or their exact foils reacting to their flaws by perfectly modeling opposite traits?
He both used thinking he was homosexual as a cheap shortcut to avoid facing the fact that immaturity and indulgence were his true obstacles to being a successful man and used it as part of a healthy skepticism about all the restrictive roles society may force us to play. He tells me he loved his male friends so deeply it scared him but never physically felt attracted to them, but as is actually pretty normal, he found what adults later find in spouses ,support and intimacy with them, to the extent that petty criminalistic and irresponsible partying overgrown teenagers can give each other such things.
He also describes some positive and lasting spiritual epiphanies he experienced, that weren't necessarily caused by drugs but accompanied the same willingness to reach out into the beyond, past the typical thinking and behavior that doing drugs necessitates. Paradigm-shattering drug and relational experiences these were, as he knew so many people so intensely, people differing widely in culture and class and education and background and shared with them the vital life-force old men dream of possessing again,  that by its nature is fleeting and in it being fleeting finds its never-again-but-worth-it power.
He interrupts my note-taking here and asks me to read what I have written down. He listens, then sits back in silence for a moment.
"You can keep all that stuff but write this down - italicize it, bold it whatever, but this is the truth: I fucked and got fucked by men, I have been with dozens of women but that fact remains and you and those who read this can make of it what they will."
He tells me that all the stuff that preceded this bold statement was half-bullshit, self-important, mentally masturbatory, and no one cares about it, they just want to know what he is. He is bisexual and it doesn't matter that he hasn't been with a man in almost a decade and he is now in relationship with a woman he plans to marry, what you do in this life defines you and people don't have time to look at nuance, the outliers, the exceptions and the gray areas, they need you in categories so they can protect themselves from you or use you, life goes too fast and we are too distracted with producing and consuming and escaping and returning to confront the indefinable humanity that stares back at us from our own mirror much less this that we might confront in others.
He wants to stop. He says I can publish what we have so far. But I insist he needs to go on to the parts he alluded to when he first asked me to do this -the parts where the Christians put him in their box based on his same sex experiences and the homosexuals put him in another, and he didn't belong in either he didn't belong in any box, he belonged in freedom and he had claimed he had found this freedom but now he was retreating to his own box once again having his Freedom taken away but this time by himself. He returns to our table and agrees to continue.
So I ask him what is he trying to say here, do here? What about his personal experience is worth hearing? How might it help others?
He tells me the second man he had a sexual experience with was a transsexual. This man hadn't yet become fully a woman but had breasts. My friend had had a few experiences with a gay friend of his before that but hadn't enjoyed them, they occurred during alcohol and cocaine fueled moments and one time out of three there had been a woman present too, a woman my friend was highly attracted to.
The experience with the transsexual was at the end of my friend's addiction; a week after it he stopped doing all drugs altogether and hasn't touched them, not even a drop of alcohol or a puff of marijuana, at all in the ten years since.
Tremendous shame accompanied the last act. It was with a stranger, he paid for it, he had been on large amounts of coke and xanax at the time. He had spent a grand on three other "escorts" a day before but hadn't been able to perform due to the effects of the coke.
His "manhood" had been taken. The incidents with his friend previously hadn't gone that far. He felt dirty and animalistic. He stopped doing drugs partially because of those feelings but also because he was broken up with by a second girl in the span of a year because his moods were so out of control and both women had had substance abuse issues also. He had also gotten laid off as had everyone else at his company and he hadn't prepared for the need to find a new job.

Part One - Childhood

A friend approached me recently. He said he had an important story to tell and he wanted my help putting it into words. It's a story about sexuality, identity, culture, even addiction and it deserves to be heard.
Before I begin I want to say that everything about this story is true except a minor detail, one that I will clear up by the end of this piece, one that needs to wait to be cleared up because of issues of privacy and issues related to judgment, issues that not coincidentally are part of the reason this story needs telling.
   My friend, to put it out there bluntly, might be considered "bisexual". But when he is asked about this he gives a rather long answer, one that might not be satisfactory to either extremes of opinion about this issue of sexuality. But this is exactly, he tells me, the reason he feels deeply compelled to share his story after years of only trusted friends and professionals having heard it, in all its important detail. It's precisely these details, he explains, that he feels get lost in the highly politicized climate that surrounds the issue of "homosexuality".
So let's go back a little into his past as a way of beginning. This friend tells me he always liked girls, loved them in fact, he tells me a story about him being only 5 or 6 years old and playing with his friends a game where they were telling each other little fantasies they had or wishes actually, they went around a circle and each said something they wished for. He doesn't quite remember what his friends' wishes were, but he imagines they were either fantastic or mundane, the ability to climb a wall like Spider-man or a new Huffy bike. His wish, on the other hand, appears quite precocious in retrospect. He wished to have a "girlfriend" by his next birthday. He says he remembered feeling a sense of disappointment; that he kind of knew that he wouldn't get a girlfriend and not because he was only 6 and it wasn't even feasible - I mean what would they do in terms of "dates”? It would be a relationship in name only. He says that he felt he wasn't good enough to have one, that a girl would never like him, though he admits he may have imposed this feeling onto the memory subsequent times he remembered it, so that the remembering of the event coalesced emotionally with the event. That in other words, he may have felt this rejection later in life, maybe say when he was 12 or 13, and thought back on his earliest desires and now remembering both the original memory and the memory of remembering it later, the whole original event has had later feelings imposed on it.
He then tells me how when he moved from one town to a larger city that he first came into contact with the idea of a homosexual. He hadn't even known what one was before this move, one that occurred around age 8. Perhaps this is a testament to the secrecy and repression that surrounded sexuality only two decades or so ago. But in this new area he was quickly introduced to the idea, and it was in a wholly negative way. The words “faggot" and "queer" and "pussy" were all thrown around lightly and he didn't quite understand them and sadly they were thrown at him more than others because he was a little different, a little more sensitive and full of energy and life.
He remembers remembering (once again that strange thing where the past has layers and isn't this distinct thing but alters each time it is recalled) something from his old neighborhood, something that happened to him before moving. He remembers remembering this while standing on the black top of his elementary school playground as the words "homo" and "queer" were being causally flung about. He remembers remembering how an older kid maybe 10 or 11 had touched him and got my friend to touch him, while both were naked in a closet, when my friend was 6 or 7.
Now despite him having been too small to have a girlfriend when he first wished for one, and thinking he wouldn't get one, my friend relates to me that there were actually  instances of sexual contact with other female children that had occurred.  He had tried to engage in what his other little friends had told him was "humping" with other girls his age - his friends were present with him along with the two girls their age at one of the incidents. Now this, he learned later, is called "sex play" and though it should be discouraged by parents, most experts say it is normal and just curiosity. But what is interesting, my friend says, is that at age 10 in his new town when he reflected on having been touched by an older boy (and having touched the older boy too upon the older boy's urging ) he thought nothing of these other incidents with opposite sex children his own age . Was it that my friend knew that because the older boy was older than him that it was more problematic this incident, that it was more an instance of abuse or molestation rather than relatively benign sex play between children more closer in age to each other? No. My friend's ten year old self didn't see this same sex incident differently because he had been victimized; he saw it differently because it had been with another boy and that made him a "faggot", a "queer", in the eyes of his new peers.
He didn't think about that same sex incident again for ten years. He grew slowly and navigated adolescence awkwardly, growing taller but voice remaining  child-like in its tenor, as shorter boys sprouted muscles and hair and shouted with suddenly deep voices. He remembers feeling ugly and weird, and this is hardly a unique experience among teenagers, but he looks back and sees subtle abuse coming from many directions. As I talked to him, he sort of anticipated the common more conservative and right wing response to tales of bullying and he is quick to tell me that he didn't shrink from competition or even outright combat during this time in his life. In fact, he became a sports obsessed boy, quickly putting away his fantasy novels and toy soldiers and replacing them with the equipment of every season's sport, beginning around the age of 12. No, he tells me, it wasn't that he just couldn't handle the normal and natural boyish scrapping and scraping, it was the behavior of much bigger kids and even adults that to him qualified as abuse and had long lasting psychological effects on him, including affecting his later sexuality.
He tells me of several instances of being viciously attacked by boys much bigger than him for no discernible reason. He wonders if some of it wasn't personal at all, if it was just that downhill slide of violence that must have originated in the home where perhaps alcoholic fathers were beating these boys and they were redeeming themselves, yet copying the same behaviors, by beating on others much smaller than they. My friend is at pains, it seems to me, to emphasize that he often fought back and "held his own" when feasible; that he wasn't always a little coward, Though he admits there were times when weary of fighting, he simply let himself be punched when confronted and attacked, or took different routes home to avoid the incessant assaults altogether.
When he tells me these caveats, insists on qualifying his stories I want to stop him and tell him "John (not his real name) you were a child!  No one thinks you were a coward and even if you were hesitant to fight that is and was a good thing. As you told me, this violence was mostly senseless and pointless, and you hadn't had your natural humanity beaten out of you like these bullies had and were simply refusing to hurt or get hurt over nothing." Before I can say this however he wants to tell me how when fighting kids his own age or younger than him who attacked him he could and did "hold his own" and he even describes swinging on a much bigger kid first and getting a nice shot in before the kid beat him up.
Here I see exactly what he is describing. He was abused,  it is very clear to me, and the physical violence he endured ( he counts at least 40 instances of violence in his first 20 years but hundreds of threats and almost fights or near fisticuffs ) was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Talking to this adult in his 30s, I realize that the child he describes who didn't want to fight, and often was clearly puzzled by the senseless violence he faced, was actually in many ways healthier and more humane and human than this adult sitting across from me talking about who "won" fights from 20 years earlier and alternating between shame and glee as he describes moments of passivity and moments of triumph when he fought bravely and even "beat his opponents". To this point, his favorite story involves his first year in this new neighborhood and how a piece of jewelry he wore got him called names every day and how four different times he punched classmates right in their eyes. This piece of jewelry, in an instant of ironic justice, actually caused more pain to these "homophobic and ignorant little bastards who were taunting me for being different and assuming they could begin physically hurting me, but were sent balling their eyes out to the teacher as the very thing I wore, a ring, had been smashed into their eye by my fist ".