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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13828
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It's as good a place to start as any. I was born small and helpless, able to cry, able to smile, able to giggle. I could sleep, wake, poop, pee and eat. I'm told my eyes focussed on things and I paid attention. In other words I was a normal baby.
What I was not was heterosexual, nor was I "anysexual". I was simply a little growing and learning machine. I did the usual maternal imprinting thing and was able to recognise my mother and presumably my father.
I became body aware at around four years old as far as my memory says, and that was because I was alwasy being told, like all little boys, "Don't play with yourself". I continued to play with myself.
I wasn't particularly aware of other people and their bodies until I was seven and we had to change for games at school. I was not homosexual nor heterosexual at this point. I was a curious kid who just wanted to see.
As we all developed I learnt about sex. It was interesting, the more so because it was taboo. I was very interested in girls and had immature fantasies about them based on a total lack of knowledge. Was I heterosexual at this point? I knew very few girls and had played doctors and nurses with none of them.
From about the age of ten onwards we all talked about sex and willies and how to masturbate, and whether it was right that a stiff willy pointed upwards or straight out or wherever. And we talked about girls and what we would do to them. Not with. To. But was this heterosexuality? If so, what made me heterosexual?
The point to this? I think simply that, until puberty, any sexuality is probably a learned response, potentially to peer group kids also learningthe response. I suspect that puberty switches on the things we were born with, but not "born as".
We are all born with latent sexuality, but we are not born as sexual beings. We grow, test, explore, even practice. But at puberty the whole thing switches on and we get what we were given in the first place.
Some will say "I knew I was gay at the age of 6", and they probably are right. I can rationalise my homosexuality back to an early age, but I was not concious of it. They may be 100% correct or they may be rationalising, too. Or a bit of puberty chemicals, just enough, may have leaked out early and they got to open the puberty present early.
I do know this, though
I learnt to be heterosexual. It was a received behaviour. I never learnt to be homosexual. That was a behaviour I did not want.
[Updated on: Thu, 11 January 2007 23:52]
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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