If he says he’s gay, he probably is. Or at least not straight. It’s really quite common to know your orientation by that age.
I am in favour of saying “bi” unless you’re really, absolutely sure, just so that you don’t have to come out a second time. And if you’re very young and/or inexperienced, you’re less likely to be absolutely sure. Kids that age are also less likely to be absolutely sure that they’re straight, but at least if they get together with someone of the same sex later they only have to come out once.
If he says he’s gay, he probably is. Or at least not straight. It’s really quite common to know your orientation by that age.
I am in favour of saying “bi” unless you’re really, absolutely sure, just so that you don’t have to come out a second time. And if you’re very young and/or inexperienced, you’re less likely to be absolutely sure. Kids that age are also less likely to be absolutely sure that they’re straight, but at least if they get together with someone of the same sex later they only have to come out once.
I would just like to point out that when you ask a teenager anything about their feelings or why they feel someway the answer will very likely include the words “I don’t know, I just do”
It takes time and more directed conversation to get to the bottom of what they’re actually thinking.
I suspect that “just don’t understand it” from the other end is at the root of a lot of homophobia. I’ve never been a fan of explaining gay bashing as gay bashers are afraid of something within themselves - I think its as likely to be that its such a completely alien idea to them that it must be wrong.
I was attracted to girls by the time I was 5 or 6. Sure, they still had cooties and my attraction certainly wasn’t the same then as it was when I finally hit puberty but if you asked me if I’d rather hold hands with John or with Jennifer then the latter would have been my answer every time.
I had crushes on girls since I was 6. As a 6 year old in 1960, I didn’t know that there was anything besides opposite-sex attraction, but given context and a vocabulary to go with it, I’d have been able to say at that age that I was straight.
For much of my childhood, all that “do you like me, yes/no” written on bits of paper stuff just seemed like a ridiculous complication.
My realization that I was, in fact, straight, came when I was 12 after having been informed that I was “reeeeeal weird” because I didn’t like certain Official Heartthrobs (one was a blonde with a low IQ, I like dark hair and smarts; the other a bad boy, I like reliable men). I thought about it a bit and realized, one, that I liked guys but not just any guys, and two, that there was no way sexual orientation could be a choice, it simply didn’t make sense to call it one (at that point, the “homosexual lifestyle” and whether sexual orientation was a choice were pretty big issues). I reckoned other people couldn’t choose who they found attractive any more than I could choose to find those two particular guys attractive. Or Rachel Welch.
At 5-6 years old I had a regular, opposite-sex, doctor partner. It was a lot of fun. And I remember getting totally squicked out at a slumber party with two of my girl friends who tried to initiate some doctor-type play. It only felt good and right with a boy.
I consider myself straight, and have only ever had crushes on boys. I have never once, in real life, met a girl or woman that I wanted to kiss. On the other hand, the only porn that turns me on is girl on girl. Go figure.
I believe this boy 100%, if he changes so what? This notion that you have to have sex to find out if your straight or gay to me is just stupid-plain nonsense. You can abstain from sex and dating, but you mostly know your orientation. Plus some people have sex early and still are confused about their sexuality.
I knew as a young child(straight 20- something male)that I liked women, from characters in a book to characters on television and movies. And in school I had crushes on girls, and to this day I have yet to find men sexually attractive. I can appreciate a good looking man, but I can never imagine having sex with a man. I am not into the male physique, or anything.
I don’t dismiss others experiences, some people are conflicted and fluid sure.
But having sex will not help you decide if you are gay or not. Being into women has always felt right for me, even as child.
I remember when mom or dad talking about homosexuality to me, I used to find it strange that a person would be into their own “kind”.
But many people like that were either conflicted, meaning they knew to some extent since they were young, or full on knew but decided to stay in closet for either reasons and marry women and have kids.
But I don’t buy that anyone was straight and suddenly at the ripe age of 60 find themselves attracted to men.
Vast majority of closet gay men knew they were gay, even if others in their lives did not.
Reminds me when I hear sometimes some refer to George Michael and his music career prime, and comment along the lines that “back when he was straight”. He NEVER was straight, he just did not come out but he knew he was gay.
In 2004 I watched his biography on VH1 and he mentioned that in hindsight he was into boys since his early teens.
Key words, in hindsight. It’s perfectly possible to be attracted to your own sex but be so convinced that it is wrong to be homosexual, or to have completely the wrong idea about what it means, that you don’t realize it.
It’s part of what happened to the author of this book. Both the notion that “homosexuals = nasty people, I = nice, therefore I <> homosexual” and the notion that homosexuality involved exclusively acts and interests which do not happen to match his own. Since he wasn’t interested in those specific things, he wasn’t homosexual, right?
That may be true for most gay bashers but there is a subset of them that really are gay or bi themselves and trying to fight it internally by vocalizing their self-hatred very publicly like this one for instance. The general pattern is that they will tell others that being gay is a choice and that they have to resist all temptations.
Uh, it doesn’t work that way for most people. Most straight men don’t have to do anything to resist gay temptations any more than they have to resist the urge to bash themselves in the head repeatedly with a hammer. It is just never an appealing option.
I have never been a fan of the idea that almost everyone is somewhat bisexual on a sliding scale. I am not and I don’t think most other men are. I can’t speak for women. I agree that, if a 14 year old tells you that he is gay, he almost certainly is even if he has never had any sexual contact. This isn’t like trying on different styles of clothes to see what fits you best, you generally know quite well beforehand which is yours. I started lusting after women (well, Lynda Carter and Barbi Benton in particular; my father was worried I was gay because I had lots of Wonder Woman dolls and posters in my room back then; you should have thought the opposite Dad because that was the direction I was going) when I was about 5 and my tastes in women have have never changed from that incredibly specific look to this day.
If he’d never had crushes, sure, I could see there being some question. It’d be unlikely but possible that he determined he was gay for other reasons, like maybe simply not being attracted to women. (He might be asexual or a late bloomer.) But if you’ve had crushes on the same sex, and not on the opposite sex, I think it’s fair to say you are gay.
I doubt most people figure out their sexuality after having had boyfriends or girlfriends. I know I didn’t.
What’s something that fourteen year old boys spend a lot of time in their room doing?
What do they think about why they’re doing it?
If you ask a 14-year-old boy how he knows he’s gay, do you think he’s gonna talk about what he’s thinking about in his room?
I would not doubt a 14 year old who was positive he was gay. It’s obviously quite possible and happens all the time. However, I don’t think you can firmly state the opposite–that if you are gay, you’ll know by the time you are 6. A lot of my high school students are still conflicted about their sexuality–or are, basically, “gay-ish”.
I think there is a selection sample error going on right now between older and younger generations. Even 20 years ago, if you were sorta gay-ish–attracted to women, totally capable of falling in love with women, but also somewhat attracted to men, you almost certainly identified as straight. Why wouldn’t you? The downsides to being gay were tremendous, and it was in no way really required: if you could be happy in a heterosexual framework, you drifted that way. What this means is that the only people who identified as gay at all were firmly gay: people that were not wired to be attracted to women at all. So all our accounts of “what was discovering your sexuality like?” come from people who found that process pretty unambiguous. Those that had ambiguous feelings nipped them in the bud.
These days, that’s not the case. I have a surprising number of students who really question their own sexuality and talk about that questioning. There are plenty of kids who at 14 really aren’t sure. I guess my point is that while we should believe the kid who knows he’s gay, we also should believe the kid who still has no clue.
A 14-year-old “coming out” wouldn’t surprise me- I knew I was straight back in first grade, when I really wanted to see what my teacher would look like naked.
Speaking as a paraphiliac (I have some strange fetishes, directed towards the opposite sex) – I certainly knew as far back as first grade! I’m sure that a lot of people, gay, straight, or slightly-crooked like me, know their basic orientation at about that age. But perhaps not everyone…