Jim Andris, Facebook

Homosexuals seek a valid identity

By Jim Andris, For The Alestle

Homosexuals are expected to deny themselves in almost every primarily heterosexual context. The result is a negative, guilt-ridden, self-concept that few homosexuals manage to change. Barbara Love and Sidney Abbott in Sappo Was a Right-On Woman write that a lesbian's participatiort in· the rites and activities of most church denominations is conditional on her acceptance of homosexuality as a sin in and of itself. Even though she loves another woman deeply she fInds herself expected to deny this beautiful experience at work, to straight friends and to her family.

Many homosexuals are disowned, or at least go through a period of. alienation, if they
honestly confront their family. This isolation from family is different from any other discriminated group.

Often homosexuals have hidden their preference through adolescence, and hence have felt different and alorie.

Laud Humphreys, in Out of the Closets, writes that homosexuals share with all oppressed groups self-hatred and the search for a valid identity. Far from being the sex maniacs that some stereotype them as, mosth omosexuals live a lonely, miserable llfe. Humphreys quotes an anonymous letter to a gay newspaper: "I am totally in the closet. I have no friends. I have no contacts. I live a repressed, lonely, miserable
life. I wish I were dead."

Peter Fisher in The Gay Mistique points out that the implicit heterosexual values of the. psychiatric establishment (and the family doctor) and their view of the homosexual as sick precludes self-acceptance for many gays. He writes that students with suspected
"gay tendencies" are sent in for counseling, with the implication that something is wrong with them.

A recent presentation by Bill Gish to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War documents the pressure toward self-hatred in the army. "The only thing worse than a "cock sucker" that a sargeant could call you was "pussy", thus neatly illustrating the shared status of women and homosexuals in a patriarchal society. Both implied that you were less than a man and it is my shame to admit that we ·shared with the sergeat the belief that a "man" was the only thing one would choose to be." Many males will recall the standard put-down in high school: "queer", "faggot", "fairy".

Humphreys' suggestion that gays search for a valid identity, often is true even when the gay person enters the gay subculture. Abbott and Love write: "Like the schizophrenic, the Lesbian creates a false self, a facade or front, which she interposes between herself and the world. Only her lover and a few close friends may ever see her as an integrated being."

Often, forced to a gay bar for the sake of companionship, the Lesbian is forced to compete in a sexual market place with which she doesn't really identify.

Homosexuals may go for many years in adolescence wondering just who they are
and if there are any other people like them, especially if they do not live in an urban area. They are emmersed in a heterosexual culture which is essentially anti-gay. The movies, TV, most of the popular music, the accepted social functions, all of these give their message: you are not important, not worth the time, you don't count, you don't exist.