Don’t come out to who you don’t want.įinally, don’t be mean. Of course, try not to stay too repressed and then let those bottled-up feelings turn you into a psychopathic murderer, or perhaps worse, very very homophobic, but your sexuality and gender are all yours. You don’t owe explaining yourself to anyone. Everyone-well, a lot of brands-will tell you you have to come out. You are a sex phoenix, and you’re rising from the ashes.Ī note on coming out. After all, why go through all of the boring drama of coming out and detailing exactly how you’re going to have sex to your own mother if you’re not going to actually be good at it? It’s time to transcend the dynamic of the jackrabbit and the wet flannel. You don’t have to be kinky-although you can also be as kinky as they come-but we are frankly superior in bed. But if there is one thing that unites every LGBTQ+ person I know, it’s that we are good at sex. It’s also time to get really good at sex. A healthy way to deal with this, though-which my therapist has strongly advised against-is to start calling those around you your “audience.” “Fans” also works, but the truth is that audience implies a much more generous, symbiotic, artistic relationship between you and this woman who is staring at you at the crosswalk. Sometimes you’ll like it, sometimes you’ll hate it. As part of the LGBTQ+ community, you will be forced into visibility. The people around you are no longer strangers, commuters, or fellow diners at Chinese Tuxedo. The scare quotes around “sex-positive” to describe that therapist are apt.A note on how you’re likely to be viewed after doing so. It is chilling that someone who behaved that way has ostensibly devoted her life to service. There is nothing positive about shaming a client for her desires, no matter how they deviate from the generic script of pro-social conduct pushed by supposedly well-intentioned people. Desires and fantasies are, for many of us, largely out of our control and, in their raw, immaterial form, innocuous.
When they become problems is when they manifest as potential harm to others, like in the case of someone determined to act out their abusive fantasies. In the realm of thoughts and fantasies, your interest in gay male sex is benign. It has little practical possibility of becoming a reality, and you aren’t really pursuing what practical possibility it does have (i.e., in the MMF threesomes that are difficult to set up and underwhelming to you, at any rate). I think the main thing to be cautious of when you have an intense sexual interest (that many would refer to as a “type”) is that you may focus on the traits that excite you (a big dick, blond hair, dark skin) to the extent that you ignore the person they are attached to. That is how a trait-based fetish can make someone’s life harder.
In your case, because you are not a gay man, you aren’t having gay male sex during which you could objectify the humanity out of a person. Your fantasies are not making anyone’s life harder, except for yours because of the distress they are causing you. And if in fact you are patronizing the porn of gay male sex workers by, for example, subscribing to their OnlyFans accounts, then, in your small, one-person way, you are actually making their lives easier. I entirely reject the feedback you received from this therapist, and I urge you to find a new one.
Maybe try a gay guy! That would be so you. Ridding yourself of an unwanted desire is not particularly easy and, outside of the realm of the anti-social, probably not worth the effort. Since you’re so into gays, I’m sure you’re aware of conversion therapy’s low success rate and legacy of trauma. Lehmiller described the success rate of this, however, as “modest at best.” For a previous column, social psychologist Justin Lehmiller told me about a method sometimes employed to rid someone of unwanted sexual desires that involves that person masturbating to right before climax and then switching images or fantasies to a desired one as they orgasm. If your desires weren’t bothering you or interfering with your sex life, I’d tell you to stay on the dudes-doing-dudes beat.