TikTok Post 74

Hello again. Listen up, this is a most important message. If you did not view Post 73, it would be helpful to do so before viewing this post.  

            Boys do not directly choose their sexual orientation. Whether straight or gay, they discover it. There are, however, specific ways boys get off track and naively contribute to the inversion of their sexual instinct. Fortunately, there are necessary and sufficient means whereby they can extract themselves from the developmental trap into which life’s unplanned exigencies directed them. First, I will briefly consider the normal trajectory of sex-role identification for male children.

            Children are designed to mature through social engagements as they utilize together innate potentials and strengthen their relational bonds. Male infants are dependent upon the symbiotic relationship initially required with their mothers to sustain life. For a time, male infants may display stranger anxiety in response to their father’s attention and desire only their mother’s care. During the first year of life, male children learn to crawl, walk, begin to acquire language skills, and find rewarding interaction with their fathers. It is early on, in their first five years of life, that male children internalize the sense of being more like their fathers than their mothers. This is an extremely important time-sensitive phase of physical and social growth. It is that period when critical father/son bonds are established, and boys learn skills which prepare them to find a complementary rapport and relish interactions with other boys.

            As young boys merge and unite, they typically share the view that what doesn’t relate to boys’ life is anathema. During this phase, boys usually perceive girls and things feminine to be weak, alien, contrary to their male robustness, and connections to be zealously shunned. If the male child has bonded with his father and been “rescued from his mother’s apron strings,” he can make this important transition to secure masculine identification smoothly and confidently.

            Here is a key idea. It is this prepubescent estrangement from females and aversion to the female role that set male youth up for the necessary difference which, at sexual maturity, can spark erotic desires with those who are different--females. Eroticism is employed to bridge the difference between male and females and provide the fire for their productive union. Males who become gay have been unable to mesh sufficiently with others of their sex and could only admire them from a distance. Since their prepubescent peer network and socialization was largely or primarily with females, at psychosexual maturity, the difference which eros requires for arousal, is not with the females they’ve become quite like, but those inaccessible others of their own sex. Through lack of affirming inclusion and immersion in with other males during  early childhood, hero worship is likely to become eroticized.

            Major identification difficulties emerge when proper parent/child patterns of socialization are not experienced within their appropriate time frame. It is destructive when male children are too close to their mothers and so enmeshed in the world of femininity that they fail to connect with fathers and same-sex peers. Of course, fathers are often unavoidably required to be absent from the home during critical periods of male children’s physical and social development. The sustained dependence of male children upon their mothers can happen incident to a host of life’s unplanned events, from illness to death, divorce, absent, aggressive, and demeaning fathers, etc. Additionally, a boy’s male peers can also be abusive and reject him for any uniqueness they deem unacceptable.

            It hurts boys to be on the outside and unable to become an integral member of their group. Gay psychiatrist, Harry S. Sullivan, was first to amplify this important point-- that boys who became gay had failed to be included in chumship groups.

            Psychiatrist, Richard Green, recognized the problem when a young boy’s preferred group consisted of those of the opposite sex. He wrote, “… boys whose best friends are girls at age 9 are more likely to have male lovers at 18 …” Gay psychologist, Daryl Bem, coined the succinct phrase: “Exotic becomes erotic.”

            John Reid, author of The Best Little Boy in the World, poignantly sensed the unresolvable breach between himself and his camp idol.

            But, oh what I would have given to be Tommy's real best friend. God, how I wanted to be like him, to do the same mischievous , self-assured things he did, to have muscles and blonde hair and a smile like his. Nothing in our relationship would be disgusting, nothing unmentionable. Just to be like the Hardy Boys, two blood brothers, two cowboys... that's it: two cowboys.

            It did not take long for young Reid to recognize erotic draws to those whose masculinity he envied. He would have been close buddies with those highly capable boys had he experienced the same gender-role affirming developmental history.