Tuesday, April 21, 2009

SPECIAL FRIENDSHIPS AND GAY SEXUAL EXPERIENCES

This post is dedicated to the concept of "gay sexual experience".
This is a concept that often emerges when I talk in chat with gay guys. The "gay sexual experiences" can be considered in several aspects:
1) As a kind of license for to be in gay sexuality on the basis of the theorem according to which masturbation is adolescence sexuality while sexual couple experiences are a passport to adult sex life.
2) As a kind of learning and exploring sexual life being somehow a couple.
3) As a gradual sexual approach toward another guy to which you feel a real affective transport but you don’t know his sexual orientation.
The point of view N. 1 implies sexuality not as a contact between two real guys but as individual skill. The younger guys are using terms like "at my age the other guys have already done such things”, guys about 25 and beyond, express themselves differently: "I have not ... I have never done." Guys over 30 use more melancholy like "I don’t want to miss the train", or worse "if not now I’ll never do…”.Despite the difference in terms of words we can see that these are people who give to their sexual initiation a particular value in itself, regardless of who is the person that will be their partner in the first experience. In essence there is an underestimation of the emotional dimension and an overestimation of the sexual one. The anxiety of the first time here is not the anxiety that captures a guy who is to make sex for the first time with a guy that he loves, but is the anxiety of making as soon as possible that first time, even with a unknown guy. You use the term "weaning" from the perspective of the guy who allows another guy to make his first sexual experience or even "losing virginity" from the perspective of those who experiment their first experience so much desired and finally realized, without any too specific sexual reference. Very often in such situations guys end up being more or less satisfied or frustrated according to the variety of the sexual performance and its correspondence to a model of gay sexuality derived from pornography. In this sense, terms like "we did everything" or "we had a full intercourse" are hiding the idea of sexuality as performance. Dominates the idea of being adults by the sex, the typical idea of boys not yet fully mature in emotional terms, but this is valid for all ages.
The point of view N. 2 represents a condition of a much more mature sexuality and it’s really satisfactory if the participation in the life of the couple is deep under the emotional profile. Each one of the two guys of the couple may consider the other as a necessary tool to realize his own sexual fantasies, and I would say that so the emotional dimension is quite marginal, but the idea of sexual experiences as a way of exploring couple sexuality can also be linked to a deep feeling of friendship and mutual respect, or to an even more emotional experience, which could be just an approach to the true emotional couple sexuality. I add that, often, sexual experiences born under serious relationships with the premise that "there is nothing too much serious", then slowly and almost imperceptibly consolidate prior to the establishment of a common share of sexual contact and then to create much more complex relationship in which emotions and sexuality interact. In any case, the point of view N.2 starts from the concept of a couple in which both boys have precise ideas about their behavior and can confront each other explicitly in a dimension of real sharing but it is a condition that is not very common for gay guys.
The point of view N. 3 is probably the most common among gay guys not declared for which a couple relationship or just a friendship that provides the opportunity to talk openly about gay sexuality is actually more a dream than an hypothesis. For these guys, and not just for the young but also for the thirties and beyond, the physical sexuality does not go beyond masturbation, at least for long periods. These guys fall in love anyway, even in many situations involvements are unilateral and in many cases they tend toward heterosexual guys or more often to guys that seam only weakly heterosexual, and guys who fall I love wit them don’t know with certainty their sexual orientation. It must be said that these special friendships are much more common than people think and cannot be reduced to the category of straight-gay relationship because in the building phase of the friendship operate many selective mechanisms, so the gay guy tends to drop the opportunity to automatically create serious relationship with a boy too markedly heterosexual or with a boy who does not offer to the first attempts to contact him an encouraging response. The guy who does not feel gay, on the other hand, accepts a relationship of close friendship with another guy only if he has no foreclosure to a deep emotional involvement that ties him to his friend. In short, neither of the boys comes by chance in a friendship like this. I must underline that I intend to refer to deep emotional relationships and really desired by both partners. The guy who is not gay is fully at ease within this relationship. The gay guy takes it instead at two separate levels, one of friendship and sharing where there is no place to anything explicitly sexual, and one not declared and implicit dominated by the sex approach. In particular, beyond friendship the gay guy sees the possibility of a love story and he lives the relationship in a tension towards a developmental dimension explicitly sexual that often is intended to frustration. The gay guy lives that friendship in a heavily sexualized way, hi masturbates thinking about his friend but cannot tell him that. Apparently a mechanism necessarily leads to a situation of deadlock, but in reality things are very different. In about 50% of cases, the evolution of the forms of sexual friendship is realistic hypothesis. As I said elsewhere, often not explicitly gay partners of these special friendships are sexually confused young guys with an apparently typical heterosexuality but with a typically gay affectivity, in other words are guys with latent homosexuality. In other cases they are guys who manifest a partial bisexuality, and other times are still objectively straight guys involved in a kind of very open friendship, which may appear similar to homosexual behaviors. In all these cases the special friendship may have not only a profound sense in the terms in which it manifests itself initially but may also present possible developments sometimes unexpected and unpredictable because it can lead to the maturation processes of awareness on the part of the boy who seams not explicitly gay but can expand the boundaries of to include ways of acting which are practically impossible for any pair of straight friends. A gay guy knowingly engaged in these kinds of friendships, conceives sexuality only within that friendship, for him the sexual experiences are neither a personal qualification nor a way of living a shared sexuality but an attempt to involve his friend, also from the sexual point of view, especially if such a hypothesis seems to be credited by various behavioral signs from the boy. If a guy loves another guy in an authentic manner and not only to make him just a sex object, he corresponds to the needs of the guy who he loves, hi will never try to impose in any way his own views or sexual categories. However, even when the beloved appears straight, the gay guy assumes that, under the appearances there is something gay. Adapting to your partner is not then adjust to what he reveals about himself, which could lead to situation that could remain locked in stalemate, but encourage the growth of the awareness of the submerged part of the personality of his friend. The gay guy, just pushed by the idea of latent homosexuality of his companion, could never stop with him to behave as if his reputation was 100% hetero. The gay guy must somehow build in his mind a step by step way so that gay sexual experiences, more or less explicit, can awaken the homosexuality of his friend. This is usually a genuine therapeutic path towards homosexuality. In this way, if the gay guy really loves his friend, important assumptions must be taken for granted:
1) If my friend is really straight, I’ll love him anyway.
2) The path-based sexual experiences are essentially oriented to the happiness of my friend, so I can be happy with him and share a sexual contact, but the purpose is not primarily my sexuality but his.
3) I have no haste and no absolute goals, but I will always adapt to my friends times and to his real needs.
These conditions combine a selfish dimension linked to the final satisfaction of sexuality in a loving altruistic motivation which is to promote the sexuality of others. The sexual experiences which gradually the gay boy assumes and somehow tries to achieve, if he has the possibility, assume in him forms of inhibition of sexuality and are governed by certain principles:
a) must be avoided anything that creates or stabilizes the inhibition, the aggression, the insistence, the tones that indicate frustration or disappointment.
b) You must take for granted that the most uninhibited behavior gradually arise spontaneously in very relaxed and tied game moments of non-sexual intimacy.
c) You must avoid taking non necessary actions or just in the wrong moments, while the response to the verbal and non-verbal proposals of their companion must be accompanied by an immediate smile.
d) You must adopt the highest availability to your companion, both of time and of emotional response. Devote time to your companion is the ultimate sign of attention.
e) You must be remembered that the purpose is not to have sexual intercourse with your partner but to allow him to overcome the blocks and inhibitions through an approach to the gay sexuality as smooth as it’s possible.
f) When your partner takes a step forward in the direction of the acceptance of gay sexuality, it should be presented as perfectly normal, expected and obvious. When there is a refusal, partial refusal or referral to another time, it must be accepted as not frustrating and in the relationship nothing should change.
Of course, the way towards acceptance of gay sexuality for some guys is long and for guys with latent homosexuality it may not lead to any conclusion, that means could not lead and in many cases does not lead to the emergence of homosexuality at conscious level.
The way of the gay experience, progressively more explicit, to bring a boy with latent homosexuality to the awareness of his sexual orientation may be interrupted shortly or can be very long and tortuous, and often the dreamed result is not achieved at all. The awareness of this fact by itself is more than enough to remove boys that are not really in love from the idea of embarking on this difficult road and this way, very arduous and with uncertain outcomes, remains the prerogative of the only guys who have real profound emotional interest to their friend. For these boys the real satisfaction is not to realize their personal dream to share sex with their friend but a path, or a stretch of path, that aims ideally at least to a deeper reciprocal emotional life.
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