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In the beginning were first memories, the crucibles in which personal identity is forged, accepted, or rejected. In the end, though, the memories stick. I do not have one first memory. I have only two that form an indelible insignia on my soul. They left me feeling different from other children because I never imagined that other children’s first memories were of a man lying on top of them as a six-year-old child forcing their mouths open with a large tongue and biting their tiny lips until they bled. The details of the molestation are not to be revealed in detail. They are real, and they are there, lodged in the contours of my soul.
Neither did I think of a mother weeping with tears formed like perfect blocks of crystal falling from a well made-up face into a plate of steaming rice and black beans could have been a memory that other children clung to as a source of love the way I did. Only I could stop her from weeping and make the face, twisted by agony, transform into a smiling work of art. I was different because I had the power of magic.
In both cases I believed I had the power of magic. The man who sexually molested me was a gentle person. He smiled afterwards and held me close to him. He quietly told me not to tell anyone. I believed that I had made him happy. Breaking the bond of confidentiality would destroy that happiness. The belief kept the shame and humiliation at bay. Only, a few months later, I put a plastic bag over my face and watched myself suffocate in front of a full-length antique Victorian mirror. Sobbing hysterically underneath the bag and, in an act of desperation, I ripped it off and collapsed to the floor, a crumpled heap of what felt like useless junk on a trash heap.
I held these memories without telling anyone of them until a few months ago.
My next memories are of my father who suffered from schizophrenia doting on me in an extremely loving way from about the age of seven after my parents’ divorce. He hugged me and always cradled me in a most unusual way; not in any way inappropriate, but in a manner that made me feel safe and strong. He once whispered to me that I would never be lonely in this world because our bond was like an eternal marriage of souls. He would never leave me. He would, he promised, always fill the void he knew I carried in me. He alone could do it. He held my small hands in his large ones as he said this and looked deeply into my eyes. Then he kissed me on my cheek.
Later, I would think of this as emotional pedophilia.
But I was also there for him. Twice when he confessed to me that he had tried to commit suicide by drowning himself, it was I who made him promise that if I just loved him harder and a bit more, that he would stay with me and never try to kill himself again. He agreed.
A few years later, just before I turned twelve, my father genuflected before me, took my hands in his, and told me he had to repudiate me and my brother. He was now married to Christ whom he loved more than anything or anyone else, including me. He could no longer be a father to me, he said. I would, perhaps, never see him again. My father told me to be strong, that God would make a soldier out of me, that the sacrifice was for a higher good, and that he was called out to be a father to the world.
I cried every night for the next five years.
During these times and to this day my mother leaned heavily upon me for emotional support. I was her confidante. I held my own emotional pain in silence and abeyance while I tended to hers and brought comfort and relief to her suffering. I felt like I had to be a ray of sunshine in our household as a child growing up in Jamaica. The indubitable message that I received from my mother was: Love me, but never leave me. There was the unspoken understanding that my loving another woman would be perceived and felt as a betrayal to her. I dated girls in my teenage years and even had sex with some of them; however, I cannot honestly say that I felt free to love another woman in my life besides my mother. Even to me, it began to feel like a betrayal when I made attempts to do so.
I believed all my life that I was born a homosexual. It was the only condition for acceptance—not from my family who readily embraced me, especially my mother, but society at large. At least it could be said that it was not an orientation of my choosing. The idea that I could have been constructed as one from pathological childhood conditions never crossed my mind. In years of psychotherapy the thought of my molestation along with a connection of parental abandonment and being a parentified child as causally responsible for my homosexuality was verboten.
So, what changed? What allowed me to correlate concrete incidents in my life to an identity status? I was raised as a religious child, and I was very religious then. Approaching the age of twenty, however, I became an atheist. Something switched. I discovered philosophy and the power of reason which, in my mind, became an absolute. I became an intransigent atheist for the next two decades. My family and I emigrated to the United States when I was twenty—this consisted of my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my brother. I went on to achieve all the goals that I had established for myself. I earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, I went on to write several books, I gave lectures on my ideas all over the world including America, and I became a full professor of philosophy shortly after turning forty-five years old. More importantly, I found love. I spent almost fourteen glorious years happily in love with a man eight years my senior with whom I intended to spend the rest of my life. But during those glorious moments of achievements a void in me kept widening. I experienced episodic moments of happiness. But an insatiable emptiness filled my soul. No amount of love or worldly achievements could satiate the hunger for something more. What it was I did not know.
At some point in my life, twenty years ago, I decided that atheism was not an option. I began praying to the Lord for grace. I inched my way towards belief several times, only to fall into the abysmal pit of agnosticism and atheism. Need was not belief. I just could not will myself into believing in God.
In the end, broken and metaphysically exhausted, I cried out for grace in desperation and, shortly thereafter, I had a rapturous conversion experience. I, indeed, had been granted grace. After a lifetime of rejecting God—he chose me. I renounced my previous gay lifestyle and since then have taken a vow of chastity. That was around two years ago.
I can only say that surrendering to God granted me freedom from the endless pursuit of love from another man. It opened a space inside of me that filled with a deeper and greater love. Gradually my physical attraction to men—much to the amusement of my friends—dissipated. The thought of a relationship with another man ceased having interest for me. Celibacy seemed like an eternal reprieve from chaos, and a life that was more aligned with the will of God.
It was then that I began to think more consciously of my sexual molestation. The details had always been seared in my memory, but I had trivialized its significance in my life. I had told myself all these years that it was not molestation. It was this just a “thing” that had happened to me. I slowly saw that when one’s first induction into sexual activity is coerced and is performed with gentleness that one simply normalizes that activity. If, simultaneously, one felt safe and protected by one’s molester then, the damage is inestimable. I felt it was wrong in my soul. I felt shame and embarrassment. The taste of blood lingered in my mouth for two days after. This person, part of our household staff, took me for walks, hugged me, and often threw me up in the air and caught me before I fell in a delightful manner into his arms. Could it have been love that a lonely child was feeling?
Against the backdrop of a mother whose physical beauty I found mesmerizing and whose side I seldom left, and a father whose abandonment left me aching for the protective embrace of older men, I began to look at my life unsentimentally—detachedly, as a clinician would. Who was I before the world told me what I had to become? Who was I before alien forces in the world shaped me into something antipodal to who I was originally? That is, a consecrated being stamped with the imprimatur of God’s perfection from the moment of conception in my mother’s womb.
Homosexuals, I now remain convinced, are made—not born. Many claim that they knew they were different from their earliest memories. But the question remains: what unconscious forces and undetected phenomena preyed on the child’s life which forged the foundations of a sexual orientation, a sexual orientation that too often manifests itself pathologically because the individual is held captive to both a myth of how he came to be gay, and ignorance about the foundations of his sexual identity? I have never in my life met a gay man who hailed from a home with a strong bond with his father? I have never met a gay man who was not in some form of emotional partnership with his mother all his life. I have rarely met a gay man who was not promiscuous.
Polyamory and promiscuity are constitutive of gay culture. Monogamy is a rarity. That most gay men are sexual addicts is not some dirty secret in the gay world. With the ready availability of hook-up apps, the statistics on the sex lives of men I researched and came upon have, more than likely, quadrupled. For homosexual relationships, the meaning of “committed” or “monogamous” means something radically different than in heterosexual marriage. In all the studies I looked at including past Pew Research Center Studies, 43 percent of all gay men in Western democracies claimed to have had more than 500 partners in their lifetime, and nearly 30 percent claimed more than 1,000. The sexual peccadilloes of such men did not decrease markedly after marriage for the simple reason that 50 percent of all gay male marriages in the United States begin as open relationships where men continue to have sex with other men on the side.
There is, from a religious point, a mockery and desacralization of marriage here that is taking place. But one doubts that it is because gay men seek to deliberately mock the institution of marriage. It is that gay male culture is ill-equipped to prepare its members for the institution of marriage. Given the socialization of gay men in a sexual culture that prizes sexual promiscuity, is rift with drug-taking, worships the cult of youth and beauty and, by the anatomical design of two sexually conjoined men, is not equipped for natural procreation, it allows for a redefinition of marriage according to gay men’s wishes, desires and intentions. In fact, in October of 2022, a New York Judge ruled in favor of polyamorous relationships. The decision came in the case of West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill, decided by New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan, who concluded that polyamorous relationships are entitled to the same sort of legal protection given to two-person relationships.
It will only be a matter of time before an argument is put forward for why two brothers should be allowed to marry. In June 2017, Columbia became the first country to officially recognize a threesome homosexual marriage.
The Marital Equality Act of 2015 was an experiment. It went beyond granting equal rights to gay. It was an attempt to solve an existential problem by political means. The unconscious political and empathic motivations of progressive heterosexuals who support gay marriage stem from, I believe, a drive to legitimize, tame, and conquer the gay sexual imagination.
That most gay men are sexual addicts is reason enough to consider whether an over-coating of legalized gay marriages can ameliorate the underlying causal contributors to said addiction.
Most gay men by nature of their sexual socialization within gay culture are moral secessionists; outlaws who will never capitulate to their own fantasies of being normal and just-like-everybody-else. Nor will they fulfill the unrealistic expectations of progressives who think they can, through institutional re-socialization via traditional marriage, mold gay men into a model of social and behavioral predictability.
The truth is that the rampant promiscuity in gay male culture transcends the human desire for novelty. It is rooted in brokenness and despairing emptiness, in the loss of deep human connection to a parental figure, and to trauma. A relentless pursuit of sex that continues even outside the sacred bonds of marriage (the common taking on of a third person) in gay marriage, is a sign that chronic emptiness and a basic absence of impulse regulation, betray intractable foundational pathologies at the heart of gay sexual orientation.
I write from a lifetime of observation and deep introspection. One must cease the rebellion in one’s heart and accept that traditional marriage and heteronormativity are the natural ordering of the universe. Heteronormativity is the concept that human beings fall into distinct and complementary sexes and genders (man and woman) with natural roles in their respective lives. It postulates that heterosexuality must be the norm, and that sexual and marital relations are only fitting between people of opposite sexes.
Gay sex as a lifelong activity even if practiced within the registers of legalized marriage has never been the norm historically and will never be the norm. More importantly, it can and should never be the norm because it abolishes the regenerative principle of biological procreation.
Heteronormativity is the normative standard of an objective sexual reality not because heterosexual sex is intrinsically more pleasurable than gay sex, but because it is the only regenerative means by which mores, norms, values, principles and, therefore, a rational civilization are possible. And a civilization is the only social milieu in which any human being can matriculate as human rather than as an animal or some social monstrosity.
If civilization were left exclusively in the hands of gay men and heterosexuals were eliminated from the earth, it is not only obvious that the species would die off—that is putatively obvious. What is less obvious is this: we would live in a state of moral ferality.
This is because the evolutionary basis for morality stems from an ethic of care from which the procreative impulse, centered on care for the helpless young, emerges. In a world in which moral imagination need not extend beyond one’s sexual pleasure to care of one’s progeny and theirs as well, one is dis-incentivized from creating a system of morality that speaks to preserving the species in perpetuity.
When one’s personal identity and rational self-interest are tied to the protection of one’s young and their offspring and one accepts that morality is a code of values that secures and preserves the foundations of human well-being, then one’s sexual identity is in some sense undoubtedly a pre-foundational precursor to a moral identity.
The laws of heteronormativity are as invariant as the laws of nature. Exclusive homosexuality is, generatively speaking, incapable of producing the evolutionary stratagems from which morality is derived.
This is not easy for someone who once had a deeply rooted gay identity to admit. It is, however, the truth. What is rampant in gay culture is a radical subjective self-acceptance without a desire for internal self-examination that would lead to emancipatory feelings of shame, guilt, and pain. So long as gays believe they are born that way then there is no incentive to form a moral covenant with themselves to explore their brokenness and repressed trauma. Theirs is a crisis of meaning with questions that demand answers; questions such as: how do I get beyond a life that is exclusively focused on the genitalia of others? How do I procure an understanding of the trauma and the calamity of my past that fuel the non-regenerative behavior of my present existence?
I think that every indiscriminate casual one-night stand or the endless series of hook-ups that that are the never-ending rites of passage of gay life—hence the ubiquitous description in gay profiles: looking to play—are forms of arrested development. They are redolent of a child’s endless indulgence in a world of romps. And they are antithetical to the achievement of sustained love gay men claim to be looking for.
These endless hook-ups and cruising for sex are maniacal and tragic attempts to reassemble the fragmentation within the psyches of gay men into something whole. It is, I believe, repetitive efforts to make a connection to the primal scene of oneness and an empathic union with an emotionally lost parent. In the case of molestation, hook-ups are an attempt to neutralize the repressed pain, shame and humiliation inflicted by one’s abuser by eroticizing and internalizing the abuse. If one owns it, so goes the unconscious belief, one has minimized the evisceration of one’s dignity. But that is never the case.
I prescribe no foolproof solutions for those who face the void and the abyss. Each must make his way out of it. I suspect disabusing oneself of the shibboleths and mythologies that cloak one’s childhood, and mourning and grieving for the disowned self might be a place to start. For me, surrendering to God, and praying that his will and plan for my life supersede my own temporal needs and desires, were the places to begin my journey. The renunciation of my homosexuality and living a chaste life has brought me a peace and joy I could not have imagined. I am filled with plenitude and a simplicity of being that manifests itself in pure stillness. There is no longing, no ache for another, no desire for flesh that can only lead to a crumpled heap of brokenness with zero knowledge of which way to go. Now there is only a continuous light, equanimity, and moral freedom. They have brought me back to myself. For the first time in my life, I can say: I am free. And I have come home—at last.
