Excuses, Excuses

We are full of excuses......

A colleague wrote to me and asked whether I thought being sexually abused as a child was a valid reason for a person's homosexuality - she calls it the "Abuse Excuse", something that she has discovered is used by something like 80% of all Married Gay Men.

There are lots of other statements:

"I was not strong enough to deal with the baggage of coming out......"
"I lived in a male dominated society......"
"I was raised in a family with a strong moral code......"
"I was brought up to believe that acting on my homosexual feelings was totally unacceptable......"
"I suspected that I had other feelings and did not date for a long time......"

Many of these statements are perfectly valid and explain what has happened to the individuals concerned, but with any excuse that is not valid, we should try to be more honest with ourselves, and to understand what really happened.

For instance, with the "abuse excuse", the abuse may have happened and that is perfectly valid, but not as an excuse for explaining a person's sexuality. Sexual abuse does not cause a person to be gay, but it does trigger emotions and feelings that a person may not have realised were there. The person who is abused, traumatised and never wants to go through the experience again, is probably not gay. The person who is abused, is traumatised, but realises that they do want to go through the experience again, is most likely to have gay tendencies which were already there.

To make it easier for ourselves in the latter case, why not try to come to terms with those tendencies, and understand ourselves better?

It has been said many times and I make no excuse for repeating it, but honesty is almost certainly the best policy in the long term.

It is worth saying that when a person has been caught "red handed", there is no limit to the excuses that can be used, after all, "When the stakes are high, always deny!". Here are one or two examples:

When found to have a collection of disks with pornographic pictures on them - "Don't you remember that I bought a batch of second hand disks which I had been assured had been formatted?....."
When discovered having condoms and lube in his work bag - "Some guys at work must have put them there as a joke!"
When discovered with gay links on his computer - "I have no idea how they got there - someone else must have put them on my machine" - A variation on this one is "A hacker must have put them on there!"
When found to have "crabs" - "I must have picked them up from the bed sheets in that hotel I stayed in a few days / weeks ago!"
When confronted with the truth - he tries to turn it around on his spouse and make her look the guilty party. This is probably one of the nastiest of them.
When discovered with gay porn on his computer - he tries to say that it was on the cookies as a result of pop ups from a popular social site. This is unlikely.
When found with sexually explicit messages on his phone from another man - "It was just a prank with a mate at work."
When discovered on the phone to his boyfriend late at night, "Oh, it's only my boss." Since when was he so conscientious at work?
When discovered with a magazine with pictures of naked men, "Oh, I was just comparing their penis size with my own."
When he was caught on a gay male porn site that he was a member of and was confronted, he said, "I was just curious to see what all the fuss was about and what it looked like..."
When his wife wanted to have sex with him, he claimed that he had erectile dysfunction (E.D.).

We are pretty good when in a tight corner, or are we? Think of the pain that can be caused.........

Some of these excuses try to hide a person's natural curiosity rather than an activity or guilt.

Curiosity

Perhaps they are bi-curious and want to know more. Why might someone lie? Almost certainly because they don't want to hurt their spouse - they probably love their spouse just as much as their spouse loves them. Also, they will have been embarrassed that the spouse might think that they are not totally straight?

Under such circumstances, it is worth talking it through so that both the bi-curious person and their spouse get to understand what it is really about. After all, there is no "crime" in being bi-curious - perhaps most people are. Only by being honest with oneself and by beginning to understand, can a person be honest with their spouse / partner.

Guilt

This is, unfortunately, a different story because it implies that a person is active with their curiosity, possibly going outside the relationship (see Extramarital) to explore their true sexuality. Again, only talking, openly and honestly, will get to the truth but this can take a very long time.