loss

THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE

In one's reading of homophobic, anti-gay material, among all the lies and misinformation put out, one constantly comes up against the insinuation that many young gay men have lost their innocence to the predatory stalking, hunting and ensnaring of 'sick' older queers. They were 'normal' until they were 'recruited' to a life of sin and homosexuality by the ambassadors of Sodom and Gomorrah. The "He was all right until he met ….." type of thinking is very popular. Not being a psychologist, it seems to me though that this is a simple transference of (perceived) guilt on the part of parents concerning their son's sexual orientation. They don't want to accept the responsibility that they may have raised a gay child, and so the same-sex object of the child's affection is an easy scapegoat for his malaise.

However, I think that a fatal underlying flaw of this type of logic is the confusion between innocence and virginity. Many of us experiment with homosexuality during puberty, and often with school friends who are our contempraries. Among my acquaintances, anyway, there seems to be a minimal number who had no homosexual experiences before they were adults, and only become homosexuals through being seduced by older men when they were adults themselves. Having a gay orientation had its logical culmination in the loss of their virginity (if this is taken to mean penetrative sex). The tension and desire for same-sex contact became so great, that when presented the opportunity, they were ready to jump into bed with almost anyone who showed interest in them. It's a simple case of releasing pent-up desire which has been frustrated through restrictive social or religious mores during their teens. Seduction of the innocent should not be seen as synonymous with the loss of virginity. The former is emotional, the latter simply physical.

Looking back on my life, I feel that my innocence was lost through no sexual liaison or virginity surrendering rite of passage at all, but through my encountering the hate, horror and bigotry of homophobia. The point at which I was robbed of my innocence was when I discovered that all people weren't nice and decent, as I had been taught, especially if you knew that you were not one of the Apollos at my all-boys' school, who had rugby as a matric subject. It was these contemporaries whose sneering at and labelling with hate-laden names of any boy who was not the same as them, that drove me to hide my inner self. They created the loathing, the self-hatred and the fear at being different which I had to endure for years. They made me a liar and subversive. It was the worst sin in the world to be labelled 'queer' in those days. They stole my innocence by insisting that the innocent child that I was had to resort to subterfuge and deceit in order to simply survive. And all the time their rampant homophobia was encouraged by my faggy, 'bachelor' teachers, who in retrospect I can only view as traitors to their own. Sad little men, trapped in sad little closets, wallpapered with anachronistic Latin, Greek and History textbooks. Their escape mechanism, surrounding themselves with the past to avoid facing their present. And the parents. The parents also made their contribution. Those parents whose sado-masochistic pornographic lives masqueraded as 'Christian values', based on more hatred, intolerance, domination, isolation, vilification, guilt, rejection and infliction of suffering on others, than any Jeff Stryker video. The moral rectitude of hate which was their daily lives and which was imparted to their sons.

No, my innocence was not lost to the first man with whom I had real gay sex at the age of 21. It was taken from me many years earlier by straight society.