help me, i am in hell:all the burning questions.

hep me, i am in hell or:things aren't what they used to be.

this section of the homepage covers the burning questions. the ones that you just can't seem to answer no matter how hard you've tried. i am not a guru and hence don't have the answers, but i can help you allay your fears. [can someone hear the 'get right with me' opening bits yet?]

question:i'm confused - i seem to be looking at [men/women - delete with caution ;)] but i am of the same sex? what's going on?
answer:it could be [not necessarily] that you have some kind of orientation. most people fall into the simple class heterosexual, [feeling attraction toward the opposite sex] but some people feel only for members of their own sex. the clinical term for this is homosexual [from the greek homo - meaning one, or single]
some people feel attracted [equally or otherwise] to both male and female. this is referred to as bisexuality. [bi meaning two]

question:ok. i think i can deal with that, but is it just a phase? answer:most commonly, boys and girls around puberty go through vast changes in terms of make up, essentially, they're growing up and not sure of themselves, their bodies are changing...not always for the better, [or so they feel] they begin to develop social skills/graces, they discover actions/reactions - their bodies, what they can and can't do with them...new mental and psychological attitudes. all of these changes precipitate [lead to] some instability and experimentation. most men will have at least one or two experiences with other men and most women will do the same. having those experiences doesn't mean you are irrevocably homosexual, all they mean is that you were curious, which is no bad thing. having said all of that, being homosexual is not just a phase, it is who you are inside and if you feel attracted to another human being of the same sex it's not bad news.

question:sure. and next you're going to tell me that god is ok with all this stuff?
answer:actually. i am.
see, i think that god made everyone homosexual/heterosexual/bisexual - thus god wouldn't just make one set of people and not love them.

*blurgh* - how saccharine.
um. sorry.

question:ok...now that i feel alright with that, what does this mean in terms of my friends and family?
answer:well...now's a good time to bring up the issue of coming out.
to come out is literally to announce your orientation to those around you. it is not a light, easy or simple task.
to begin with, you first have to feel comfortable with your orientation, no matter what that orientation might be...if you're not comfortable with it, then keep thinking about it...don't rush the issue. take your time, be secure. remember that if your parents or friends see you as you are and that you're not covering up anything. if you're not comfortable with who you are, there are lots of places that can help you to examine your feelings and desires. homosexuality has long been abolished in psychological circles as a disease, so you can go there, if you can't afford that sort of money [who can? ;)] find someone you trust and confide in them, tell them what's going on and talk to them about what you're going through. usually this helps alot, since talking or writing things down brings tremendous clarity over what are and aren't the issues. once you've done that and you're comfortable, pick a real test-subject, some easy target, like a close friend. [not your confidante.] arrange a meeting in a neutral space, somewhere you can talk - but where it is also possible not to feel absolutely threatened, and, if need be, you can both get away if things don't work out and tell them. [here's the actual answer to your question. sorry it took so long to get here.] mostly, you'll find that they're just curious and want to know things, most of todays youth seem to have an idea that not only man/woman relationships exist. try to consider the questions that your friend is asking, or better yet, get the confidante to run through some of the more common ones, [how long have you known? etc] be courteous and help your friend to understand. as for your family there are three basic patterns - or ways the family deals with the news. the best reaction is what's known as the miracle reaction. [it's perfectly ok, we still love you.] the second best scenario [and one that most homosexual/bisexual/others] go through most often is the middle of the road situation [lots of pauses for thought, possibly even a little while of silence and then acceptance.] the worst scenario is, of course, the bitter parents [we don't want to see you ever again - and they mean it sometimes.]

question:what is a screaming queen?
answer:a screaming queen is one [usually male] who...er...screams alot. actually that's a bit of a misrepresentation. a screaming queen is sort of like your second aunt martha...you know, she comes in, makes a fuss about the decor, runs through the house yelling at the top of her lungs and...well... throws her arms around the next available human and faints?

but i don't have a second aunt martha...
neither do i. at least, not that i know of.

question:right...well, i've run into these people...they *look* male, but they're dressed up as women...what's going on here?
answer:this is somewhat common practice in the gay community and is know as dragging. wearing drag simply means affecting an alternate persona of the opposite sex. so, assuming you were male, you would dress up as a woman and wear make-up...etc, while, if you were female you'd do the polar opposite...ie, dress up like a man. the clinical term for this is transvestitism, or being a transvestite. and no, there is nothing wrong with being a transvestite either, it's simply an expression of who you are on the inside, some men really feel like women trapped in mens bodies and vice versa...one of the ways in which they feel more comfortable with this situation is to dress up like a lady and act like one. some transvestites even make money performing as their alter-ego.< the news. the best reaction is what's known as the miracle reaction. [it's perfectly ok, we still love you.] the second best scenario [and one that most homosexual/bisexual/others] go through most often is the middle of the road situation [lots of pauses for thought, possibly even a little while of silence and then acceptance.] the worst scenario is, of course, the bitter parents [we don't want to see you ever again - and they mean it sometimes.]

question:what are these words i keep running across? butch/dyke/fem/queer?
answer:this is some of the argot [jargon/slang] used in the homosexual communities to denote certain things. a dyke is a more common term for lesbian women [be careful though - not all lesbian women enjoy being called dykes.] butch refers to how heterosexual [i know it sounds silly] a homosexual man actually looks. ie, drinking beer and fixing cars is butch. the fem is the natural opposite. fem is simply an abbreviation of effeminate, or men who have lady-like mannerisms. queer is the more common term for homosexual.o dangerous territories here?] unlike adults, children can't make this kind of decision for themselves and it's a bit stupid to expect that they feel the same way for the paedophile in question. more often than not, they're very, very confused and the paedophile is abusing that confusion to his gain. this is not good relationship material at all. actually it's just not good, period. we are not living in ancient greece and we have evolved somewhat since then.

question:um...you were abused, right? which is why you feel so vehement about this subject?
answer:err. yeah, actually i was. for more information go have a look at a warm place. if you want to tell your story, or you'd just like someone to talk to, please feel free to mail me...when i can, i will reply.
mail me now, if you'd like, at:greywolf@serpentine.dynip.com
or, here's a nicodemus caine mailto button, which you can use to get hold of me from this page.
hugs to those who can and waves to those who can't.

um...i'll try not to bring that up again...sorry.
it's ok. i just get kinda carried away sometimes :)

question:ok...now that i have an idea of who i am, how do i find people like myself?
answer:the first thing you're going to want to do is learn as much as you can about the community...there are many decent [and not so decent] places for you to pick this sort of informaton up. unfortunately this is pretty much a situational thing, so i can only give so much help here.
a good place to start is the library, or a decent bookshop. most libraries have catalogues on computer that you can peruse to find almost any subject under the sun.
of course, a bookshop will help with the slightly more esoteric books, but generally a library is good value for money.
once you've found out something about the community, explore safe places. there's usually some kind of church or extramural places where you can go to meet people, but where there is no hunt at all. mcc is usually a nice starting place, since it's like a church, only it's homosexual in nature. if you don't know how to find mcc, or something near it's equivalent, look in the telephone directory, there should be a listing somewhere for at least one branch close to you, another thing to look for, while you're there is a gay and lesbian switchboard. often the people on the switchboard can tell you more directly what's going on than most other written sources can.
you may also want to get involved in that dreaded past-time known as 'bar hopping.' only, be careful, since it's here that people will be relatively out to get you, or you might be out to get them, or something. it's an almost positive fact that all you'll find in bars and suchlike places is sex and not much more, so unless you're ready for mostly predatory encounters, stay far, far away.

the parents section[tm] or:oh no! more revelations

question:i'm a parent...my son/daughter has just turned on me and told me that he/she has an orientation... what happens now?
answer:firstly, it's important to know that your son/daughter hasn't turned on you, they're actually reaching out to you, because they feel that it's important that you know about who they are...for them it's coming clean for the first time in a really long while...they might have been battling this thing for a considerable length of time and now feel happy enough with it to let you know who they really are. in essence, they haven't changed at all, it's just that now their significant other is going to be of the same sex. what happens now is that life goes on as it did before.

question:but i feel so...guilty...as if i were responsible for them turning out homosexual...i can't believe that i turned out someone like this...
answer:while you had a large part in the upbringing of your child, their orientation is something seperate, an almost different issue entirely, you no more persuaded them to be homosexual by your words/deeds/actions than you might have persuaded your other sons/daughters [if you have any] to be heterosexual, it's a built-in, bioloFf>

question:i'm a parent...my son/daughter has just turned on me and told me that he/she has an orientation... what happens now?
answer:firstly, it's important to know that your son/daughter hasn't turned on you, they're actually reaching out to you, because they feel that it's important that you know about who they are...for them it's coming clean for the first time in a really long while...they might have be i might point out that the 'gay gene' as it is called probably isn't passed on the way most ordinary genes are. [where they pertain to the x/y dominant/recessive biological heirarchy] instead, it's almost as if the 'gay gene' tends to float around the collective gene pool as opposed to the specific familial pool. what all of that boils down to is that it is technically possible for you to produce a homosexual child even if your entire family doesn't include a single homosexual member.

question:then, if it's genetic, my child has to be abnormal?
answer:no, you child is no more abnormal than a left-handed child, or a child with green eyes, or a child who has two left feet when dancing.

question:but...isn't it against the bible, to be homosexual, i mean? answer:no, it's also not against god, since god made everyone, including your child, god must love your child, i highly suspect that god would make someone he didn't love. remember that god makes people, people assign labels to god's creations...thus it is people who have decided that homosexuals aren't good/right/proper...god, as far as i can tell didn't even have a hand in that.
as for the bible and the church...most churches are slowly, but surely beginning to rethink their attitudes toward homosexuals, [and others] naturally, there won't be a miracle change, because church leaders are essentially human too, but there should be little steps all the time. remember that if a church goes forward it's going to be pretty difficult to pull them backward.
thus, if the church is changing, then the way we read the bible is also changing. so, for example, it's been found that the sodom incident was more about hospitality than homosexuality. [think about it, though, you'd be pretty hard pressed to have found an entire town of gay people in the bible.]
also, 90% of what's in the bible is no longer relevant to us anymore, [some of the rules and regulations...] according to the old testament, for example it is required that men do not have long hair. if we really intended to take the bible that literally, well...i don't really see a place for people like kurt cobain and others who have excessively long hair.

question:so...that means that the bible is totally and utterly wrong?
answer:no. the bible just has to be re-interpreted for our time. it's possible for anyone to take anything and then bend it out of context, which is often what the moral right tend to do. their view of things is extremely slanted... and alot of their quotations work because they're taking only bits at a time and not the entire passage, thus they are using their version of 'the truth' to get everyone to believe them...and often it works, because the moral right use fear-inducing tactics...they also tend to play up our inherent and deep-seated fears/angers... portraying your homosexual child as a monster, or sexual pig, when i'm pretty sure that you can see that your child is as ordinary as what you are, he/she probably rides horses, or drinks milk, or fixes cars, or something similar.

question:ok...as a mother that means that i'm going to have to get used to the idea of having no grandchildren, then, i suppose?
answer:just because your child has an orientation doesn't mean that he/she won't have any children...there are lots of ways for your child to circumvent having children the ordinary way...adoption has always been out there and new surgery allows women to bear children from men without having intercourse, it's more a question of 'does your child want to have babies, or a family of that sort?' which is entirely up to him/her.

question:is there any way in which i can alter my son/daughter so that he/she turns out heterosexual?
answer:any technique that claims it can reverse the natural instinct of any person only works up to a point and then breaks down. since the behaviour is inherent and not learned it can't be unlearned. the effects of shock treatment/behaviour therapy/other behaviour altering techniques does more or less the same thing. most of these techniques revolve around replacing one type of stimulus for another, for example, in shock therapy, the pleasure stimulus associated with looking at a member of the same sex is replaced with a negative stimulus - a shock. in the short-term this is ok, since it sort of works. the patient recalls the shock that he/she got when looking at the homosexual partner, but after a while this 'miracle cure' is reversed, since the brain doesn't actively invoke the stimulus all the time. think of it this way, you've probably gone to see a performing artist, whoever that artist might be. for a while the memory of what it was like, standing there, being part of the crowd was pretty vivid, but now, when you try to recall it, you only get a vague sensation of what it was like to have been there doing that.
so, in this case one of two things has to happen, either the patient continues the treatment, [which is not a nice way to spend the rest of your life] or the natural, inherent behaviour has to return to the surface.
what i'm getting at is simple, don't try to change what is inside. you wouldn't like it very much if someone told you that you could no longer see your husband/wife, because they are inappropriate, for whatever reason. don't just think about how happy it's going to make you to have a 'normal' child, also bear in mind how your son/daugher might feel while undergoing this forced treatment.

question:and school? and the outside world? how can you advocate for my child to go out into that morass of...well... inhumanity? answer:alongside your son/daughters coming out is also the issue of what you as parent have to do to come out. since this isn't just a once off, 'i've told you and now you can deal with it,' situation, you're going to have to either do one of two things, hide away, or come out into the open. as your child found, this is no easy task. for one, try to find out about how things now work, try to find out about your son, or daughter and what activities they pursue within the community, [without being pushy - if your child doesn't want to tell you, that's their perogative] then try to find out how things fit together. once you've done that, start having a look around, even go visit an mcc, or something, just to see for yourself that all homosexual people are exactly like heterosexual people, there are no monsters, or any other creatures around you. after you've met a few homosexual people it'll become alot easier for you to accept them as they are and once you've done that you can start telling people, remember that you have to feel comfortable enough talking about it, since there are inevitably going to be questions that you are going to have to fend and if you can't fend those questions, then your friends and the people around will sense that you're potentially uncomfortable with your child and the way you feel about the whole thing. your child isn't wrong, or blasphemous, or anything like that, in fact, for them life is now alot easier than it was when people of a generation before them decided to start this whole business of coming clean. it's a journey kind of like driving to kansas...you're going to see and learn alot, but don't be afraid, once you get there everything is going to be just fine.

hm. that seems to be about it...if you've any questions for the help me, i am in hell section of the homepage, i invite you to press this nicodemus caine mailto button, or mail me at:greywolf@serpentine.dynip.com.

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