In the first article, we have spoken on what homosexuality is not, and criticized several false ideas that are, alas, widely circulated and propagated: homosexuality is not an hereditary condition, it has no roots in the genes; it is not caused by abnormalities in the hormones, and not by special structures in the brain. There are no ground for thinking that adult men or women with homosexual feelings are physically or biologically different from other men or women. If these persons had not been subjected to certain obnoxious psychological influences in their childhood and adolescence, they would have grown up as normal heterosexual men and women, quite the same as the overwhelming majority of people (only about 2% has homosexual inclinations). In effect, the homosexual “orientation” is the effect of a crippled emotional or personality growth, of a psychological malformation during childhood and adolescence.
Let us first come to the heart of this emotional deformity and then consider the childhood background factors (family and “peer” factors) that have paved the way to it. To be clear: with “homosexuality” we do not mean most same-sex attractions or infatuations such as may occur in adolescence (puberty), and which more often than not are transitory. They may emerge in the initial stage of the teenager’s sexual development when the sexual instinct is not yet fully deployed; but after the discovery of the natural object of this instinct, the charms of opposite sex, they disappear. Only when an adult person continues feeling strongly or predominantly attracted to the same sex and not, or hardly, to the opposite sex, can we speak of a homosexual “orientation”. The popular word “gay” is particularly used for practicing homosexuals, but may also insinuate that someone “is” a homosexual, has a different sexual nature—and this suggestion is false. And altogether misleading it is to speak of “gay children”. Some boys may behave less boyish than others, some girls less girlish; there are children who are at risk to develop in the wrong direction, but there are no “gay” children. Labeling children that way is doing grave injustice to the child or adolescent, it even may contribute to the kind of inferiority complex which eventually can inspire the homosexual attraction.
The importance of adolescence
The time-frame that is crucial for the formation and (gradual) fixation of homosexual feelings is adolescence and pre-adolescence. No doubt, the foundations of “character” or personality are laid in childhood, that is, many characteristic habits of behavior, thinking, and feeling are developed since the child’s tender years. However, many important personality traits and especially the typical traits of a person’s emotional life and predominant motives take root more definitively during puberty, roughly the period between 10 and 18 years. Developing habits of thinking and acting before that period may still change, much easier than after the young person has crossed the threshold to biological adulthood. I want to emphasize this because since Freud, the idea has been popularized that same-sex attractions would already be irreversibly fixated in early childhood; around age 4, one’s sexuality would have been for ever determined. That is a myth. Certain behavioral habits and mental attitudes which can predispose to a later homosexual development may already be in the process of formation during the child’s tender years, but its sexual development proper takes place much later and is not decided before late adolescence or beginning adulthood. These possibly predisposing personality traits, though, can always change, during childhood as well as pre-puberty and puberty. For instance, even many decidedly effeminate boys do not eventually become homosexually inclined and the great majority of “tomboy” girls, even girls who have cherished the wish to be boys for a longer period of time, grow up to be normal heterosexual women. Whether effeminacy or tomboysihness leads to same-sex attractions depends on several circumstances or factors, among them, the teenager’s peer contacts and friendships, the way he (she) is brought up and guided until adulthood by the parents, teachers, and others; and last but not least, the teenager’s own will and moral and spiritual choices.
The gender-inferiority complex
Transitory same-sex interests and sexual experimentation are not uncommon in the phase of immature sexuality that puberty is. A small minority of teenagers however remain stuck to such same-sex interests that normally disappear without leaving a trace, they do not enter the next phase of development which begins with the erotic discovery of the opposite sex. In fact, they remain in their teens, sometimes in their early teens, with regard to their erotic feelings and in many other respects. Their homosexual attractions may even intensify as they become older. Why? Because with them, these same-sex attractions are produced and impelled by an inferiority complex about their sexual identity. These adolescents suffer from the idea (the self-view, the feeling) that they are different from their same-sex age mates; different, in the negative sense of inferior, of less worth, with respect to their masculinity or femininity. We can formulate this also as follows: they have the feeling that they do not belong to the masculine or feminine world of their same-sex age mates, that they are not “one of them”. The feeling of not-belonging may motivate a “longing to belong”, and it is this longing to belong to the community of boys (girls) that inspires homosexual fantasies when the teenager’s erotic feelings are still immature. The less confident a teenager feels about his manliness (her womanliness), the less accepted in the world of their own sex, the less friends he (she) has, the more lonely he(she feels, the stronger their erotic fantasies about persons of their own sex may become. Below we shall analyze this particular longing to belong a little more; at this point we have to notice that in same-sex attracted adults, these feelings of “gender inferiority”, plus the ensuing longings for same-sex affection, are still fully there. Emotionally and in various aspects they remain the same frustrated and longing children or adolescents of their past, 14-year olds or 16-year olds. Their personality maturation has (partly) come to a halt around that age. Even though aged 30, 40, or 60, a significant part of their personality is still the “child of the past”, or the “adolescent of the past”.
An inferiority complex means that feelings of inferiority have become almost autonomous in the mind, anyway, very strong and domineering. The same as with other inferiority complexes, the specific gender inferiority complex does not appear out of the blue. In the majority of cases, the masculine side of the “pre-homosexual” boy’s personality was underdeveloped, as was the feminine “identification” of the “pre-lesbian” girl. Masculine and feminine personality traits are increasingly important since the onset of puberty, when the youngster compares himself (herself) more explicitly than before with same-sex age mates in regard to the physical and psychological dimensions of virility and femininity. That is the reason why inferiority complexes about one’s maleness or femaleness for the most part originate in adolescence and pre-adolescence. Then the later homosexual man was painfully aware that he was lacking in boyishness, in masculine fighting spirit, daring, “hardness”, toughness, or popularity as “one of the boys”. Then the woman with lesbian tendencies felt less charming, attractive, less girlish, less popular among the other girls. Gender-inferiority feelings may have already emerged before, but less intense. Between 10-18 years, they may grow to become a fixed part of the youngster’s self-view or “identity”.
Self-pity and inferiority feelings
Now we must consider an important component of this gender-inferiority complex, this frustrated “inner child of the past” that puts its stamp on the whole personality of the person with same-sex attractions. By nature, children and adolescents are self-centered. Their “ego” is the center of the world. The essential characteristic of the process of becoming emotionally mature, which normally evolves during adolescence, is the shift from the prevailing self-centeredness and self-directedness of childhood to increasing other-directedness. The mature person has developed his capacity to love others and arrange his life accordingly; this implies recognizing and assuming one’s concrete responsibilities, enhanced awareness of one’s duties and tasks. Thus growing to maturity goes hand-in-hand with diminished ego-centeredness, self-seeking, and feelings of ego-importance. However, an inferiority complex blocks, or at least considerably thwarts, the healthy growth to maturity, keeps the young person attached to the self-centered “ego” of (pre-)adolescence, with the particular frustrated emotions, habits of thinking and behaving which marked him (her) at that particular period. That is true for people with inferiority complexes in general and it is true for people with same-sex attractions. To repeat, they remain “grown-up teenagers”, however, not happy teenagers. And the self-centeredness and self-directedness of unhappy teenagers intensify because of spontaneously arising feelings and reactions of grief.
For children and adolescents it is very difficult to relativize themselves and their painful experiences, especially hurts of their self-esteem. They feel depressed, but in the way that is typical of their age, that is, they feel deeply sorry for themselves. Self-pity is the instinctive reaction when a child or adolescent views himself as disfavored, underprivileged, outcast, in short as a pitiable creature. Self-pity in childhood and adolescence can rightly be called self-dramatization, because the young “ego” tends to feel unique in its sufferings, to feel a victim, a tragic little person, a martyr. Self-pity functions as self-comfort, the same way as pitying others who suffer may give them comfort, warmth, relief. However, the problem with self-pity is that it easily becomes habitual. For it is a gratifying form of self-love, which on the one side may help to overcome or “digest” traumatic experiences, especially hurts to the ego – crying and complaining may relieve – but on the other side can become chronic, a strong habit, an addiction. Actually, persons with an inferiority complex have also “poor-me” feelings; “I am only … poor me”. Many manifest a tendency to complain about themselves, either about their fate, their life, their past or future, their capacities, their physical qualities, their achievements, their faults, etc. Their feeling a victim seeks, as it were, justifications for feeling pitiable, wronged, slighted. The self-pity tendency, which may become so strong that it is not exaggerated to call it a “complaining sickness”, often goes along with anger and rebellion. For the inferior-feeling teenager-in-the adult is likely to see himself as unjustly treated or insulted; clinging to the self-view of the “injured innocence”, he may chronically feel indignant, rebellious, angry. Inwardly, people with an inferiority complex, including homosexuals and lesbians, are not seldom “injustice collectors” (There is always something to justify their feeling wronged).
Craving for same-sex affection
The homosexual attraction itself is animated by teenage self-pity, self-dramatization. Far from being a hopeful, optimistic longing, it is a pathetic, tragic craving. The teenager who feels a loner in the boyhood community, not like the other boys and young men, tends to admire boys who in his eyes possess the things in which he is wanting: daring, combativeness, a manly way of presenting themselves, manly beauty, and the like. He envies them. He may start fantasizing about getting attention from such “idols”, about being their close and exclusive friend. That would mean recognition and acceptance by the “men”, belonging to them. It are daydreams, however, which lock him up in his self-view of pitiable inferiority even more. Actually, such fantasies feed his self-pity and block possible healthy attempts to participate in the activities of his peers . And here may also readily come in the sexual element. In adolescence, adoration of some real or imagined same-sex idol, of his behavior and physical appearance, is close to infatuation and may easily get erotic overtones because it is a sentimental longing for affection. The more lonely and tragic the child feels, the more powerful his wishful fantasies, the more “hallucinatory”, and the more he tends to escape reality in his daydreams (For the pre-lesbian girl, the story is similar). Again, all this does nothing to compensate for his position of non-belonging to the community of boys and men, on the contrary, it makes him attached to his unmanliness feelings and dramatic longings. Amsterdam features a so-called “homo-monument”, actually a product of gay propaganda, yet engraved in this unimpressive piece of stone is a text of a homosexual poet which accurately sums up the essence of same-sex desires: “For friendship, such a boundless longing”. The pathetic, self-dramatizing aspect of this longing is clearly expressed; and “boundless” is a correct term, too. The fulfillment of the – sensual –longing for a same-sex lover is an illusion indeed, therefore it is never satisfied. In consequence, homosexual partnerships are inherently not stable, nor enduring, not “faithful”, because both afflicted partners chase a chimera, a self-directed fantasy. Both are locked up in themselves, in their childish or teenage “me-ness”, self-centeredness. In essence, their “love” is not real love, but puerile sentimentality, and – appearances are deceptive – basically immature self-love, selfishness. That may sound harsh to some, but we should not gloss over reality with the varnish of false sentimentality. Moreover, good-intentioned and sincere persons with homosexual problems, who do not want to decide for a homosexual lifestyle and rather wish to change, are best helped with a realistic confrontation with their inner situation. Looking in the mirror of self-knowledge is a condition for any constructive change.
A prominent problem in puberty is masturbation. Since the sixties of the past century, and under the influence of the destructive ideas of people such as Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956), secretly a gay man himself who was steeped in sexually pervert behaviors and throughout his life enslaved to masturbation, intensive propaganda has been made to present this self-seeking activity in the sexual education of juveniles as innocent and healthy. Psychologically and morally, that is a blatant untruth. Even a liberal-minded, non-Christian psychiatrist as Freud’s daughter Anna, deplored the negative effects of the abolition of the struggle of the young person with impulses of self-gratification on his character strength and overall self-discipline. Particularly adolescents with low self-esteem, or whose social or family environment is not stable or unhappy, and those who miss the personal affection and guidance that is so important in that stage of their personality development, may fall victim to a near-compulsive habit of sexual self-indulgence that reinforces their self-centeredness. Pre-homosexual teenagers and those having their first same-sex “crushes” belong to this risk group. It is a small step from wishful daydreaming about idolized same-sex friends and friendships to the imagining of physical intimacies with them. Bondage to same-sex masturbation fantasies marks many adolescents and young adults who are on the way to get firmly fixated to homosexuality. Impelled by loneliness, depressive moods, and inferiority feelings, they increasingly withdraw into themselves and nourish their same-sex desires, until, at one point of time, they may feel an irresistible urge to look for real-life contacts. The role of pornography, so easily available these days through the internet, as a powerful stimulus of immature imaginations of every sort needs no further elucidation.
Family background factors
As said in the beginning of this article, complexes of masculine or feminine inferiority often develop in reaction to determinate influences and relationships within the family and the same-age peer group. In the upbringing of the vast majority of male homosexuals, the mother was too important and the father psychologically too much absent, sometimes even overly negative to his son. This basic pattern has several variations. The mother may have been overprotecting, over-anxious, doting and even adoring, domineering, overly interfering, pampering, or too restrictive. The father may have been weak and insecure (a weak role model of manliness), or not much interested in the boy, or negatively critical, sometimes even rejecting. As a result, the boy was too much mother-attached and insufficiently bonded with his father. Normally, a boy must feel belonging to the world of his father, more than to his mother’s world, for belonging to father engenders male self-confidence. Pre-homosexual boys mostly did not have much of this feeling, many rather felt “more like mother”, imitated her more than their father. Many mothers of homosexual men bound their son too much to themselves, because of certain personality weaknesses, shortcomings, or imbalances, because of marriage problems, because this particular son was physically handicapped, or because of other circumstances. Objectively, many fathers neglected their functioning as a father with respect to this particular boy, because they were already older, because they left the boy too much under the tutelage of their wife, because they were too busy, after a divorce, because the boy was illegitimate, and because of varying other circumstances. As a result of these combined parental influences, the boy’s masculinity and his self-confidence as a boy (as a man) remained underdeveloped. His personality was often characterized by traits such as a want of daring and normal aggressiveness, fearfulness, weakness, over-dependence, softness to himself, infantile habits, too feminine attitudes. That was the reason he could not cope with his peers and landed in the lone-wolf position among them. In addition, the “mother’s boy” and the over-anxious boy may become the object of teasing, ridicule, or mobbing by his age-mates. Such are the factors behind most (pre-)adolescent self-views of defective maleness and not belonging to the boyhood and manhood world, in other words, to the specific gender inferiority complex we have depicted above.
Very frequently, the pre-lesbian girl had no confidential relationship with her mother—and it are above all the mothers who stimulate the girl’s development of her feminine nature, instincts, and self-confidence. Sometimes the father played too much a role in the upbringing of the girls while the mother was psychologically distant; in other cases, the father did not much value the feminine sex or was little interested in the girl and much more in her brothers. Some pre-lesbian girls have clearly been reared too much as boys. Such factors cause a girl to adopt boyish manners and interests (for she feels valued this way); more importantly however, they predispose her to the feeling, the self-view, that she is basically not like other girls, not a “real girl”. Many times also, an “ugliness complex” may have added to her feminine insecurity. She felt less physically attractive, less graceful, or physically too “masculine”. Her lack of feminine self-confidence made her reject to identify with the feminine “role” (in fact, her inborn feminine nature), the same way people are inclined to shun behaviors and roles that make them painfully feel inferior. In puberty, however, the pre-lesbian girl felt lonely, not one of the other girls, and she often had difficulty in making friends; then she started daydreaming about idolized girl friends or motherly girls somewhat older than herself, and about affectionate relationships with erotic connotations.
Labeling oneself a “homosexual”, a “lesbian”
Juveniles and young adults with strong and recurring same-sex fantasies are tempted to imagine that giving up their resistance to their desires and seeking same-sex contacts or lovers is the way to happiness. Many choose the easiest, but wrong one of the two options that lay before them: namely, either to admit the obvious reality that their dream is not natural, and not right morally, and that they should take pains to resist; or, perhaps in their desperation, suppress the voice of their reason and conscience and delude themselves into thinking that they belong to a different species of humans called “gays”. Then they give this label to themselves and claim their right to live according to their “nature”. In reality, this inner lie puts them on the way to sex addiction, increasing frustrations, shallowness and emptiness, no matter how skillfully some may play the role of leading a life of enjoyments. Their conscience is never quiet. Their life-story is monotonous: short-lived elations and kicks, but one failed relationship after another, obsessive sexuality and extraordinary promiscuity, loneliness and depressions, psychosomatic complaints, often alcohol and drugs, venereal diseases, HIV infections, suicides. Their average lifespan is shorter than that of the total population, and growing older, they live much more alone and without friends, no matter how many “lovers” they had in their younger years. It is true that the partnerships of lesbians last longer in comparison with male homosexuals, yet shorter than normal heterosexual relations and much shorter than marriages (even in our time), and they are rife with conflicts, jealousies, infidelities, and often more than normal explosions of partner-aggression. All homosexual partnerships are emotionally immature and unstable. So the inside story of the homosexual lifestyle is anything but glamorous and enviable. It is a steady, and sometimes rapid, decline into psychic, moral, and spiritual misery.
Hallmarks of the homosexual personality
The main characteristics that are concomitant with homosexual inclinations, and which grow over the more mature and healthier part of the personality in proportion as he (she) surrenders without resistance to a gay life, can be summed up in a few interconnected points: underdeveloped masculinity or femininity with respect to habits and mental attitudes; “gender inferiority complex”; permanence of teenage-emotionality and related puerilisms or infantilisms; tendency to immature self-pity (self-dramatization, self-victimization, complaining habit) and unresolved anger/rebellion; excessive self-centeredness (selfishness) and diminished capability to love. If we apply a diagnostic definition, the homosexual orientation is a character neurosis as well as a sexual neurosis. Objectively, persons troubled by these inclinations are in need of constructive help and those who have the will and wish to get such help should be given the opportunity to find it. For there is every reason not to remain passive and start the inner battle for normality, the younger the better, the sooner the better. This will be the theme of our last article.