Being a Late Bloomer (Gay).

In My Humble Opinion
1

Something I have always wondered, probably since I was a child, what does it mean when you are a late bloomer, in becoming gay?

When I was a little child, I for the most part assumed I was heterosexual. I had no reason to believe otherwise. Although, in hindsight, even early on, there were some signs (which I will gladly share, if someone asks). Then when I turned 12 or 13, everything changed. I seemed to become predominantly gay almost overnight. Literally. It was no more a choice, than being hetero was a choice. And I slowly struggled to accept it, and come to terms with it.

Now, it is quite a few years later. And I have accepted who I am. There is nothing I can do about it, and nothing really wrong with it (though the Republican Party may still not agree).

What could it mean, to be a late bloomer, in regards to homosexuality? And (although this is GQ, I still have to ask), are there any other late comers out there, and what have your experiences been?

:):):slight_smile:

EDIT: To be more specific, I mean what could cause it, and, if anything else, could it be a sign of? Was it something in-utero? Was it something ex-utero? And could I suddenly change back someday? And as I said, what else does it say about me, from a purely psychological aspect, that is?

2

Isn’t it pretty common among heterosexual boys not to be interested in girls until around they time they hit puberty? How is what you’re talking about different from that?

3

Not from what I have heard. In fact there was a doper, who posted this thread (maybe I will find and and post it here), that he knew what kind of man he was interested in, even as a young child.

But you bring up a good point. Maybe it is different for ever person.

4

Why should it matter what causes it? It is what it is - likewise, if at some point you should feel differently. There’s nothing wrong that it “says about you”, one way or the other. There is no one way to be gay or straight or anything else, nor is life a matter of binary, still less of fixed, choices.

The only way any of this becomes a problematic issue is if it hurts other people. And if there are people telling you otherwise: that’s their problem, not yours.

5

Since I doubt there is a definite GQ answer to this, and the OP is asking for personal experiences, let’s move this over to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

6

I’m bisexual. It took me a long time to figure out that I was attracted to women, because I was also attracted to men. I came of age when people were finally talking about homosexuality, because or AIDS, but not bisexuality. There’s still a lot of misunderstanding about bisexuality, but even when it was talked about, by the time I was in college, the stereotype-- or more than that, maybe even the quintessence-- was someone who pretty much exclusively did menage a trois, or at least couldn’t possibly be monogamous-- has to have a woman AND a man in her (or his) life at the same time).

That’s not been my experience. I was in one long relationship with a woman, and eventually I married a man. I am fully committed to him. Now, it could have been a her-- it was luck of the draw-- but as it happens, I am essentially living a heterosexual life, although it doesn’t mean I don’t find an occasional women, just like I find an occasional man, attractive.

My point it, the OP could be bisexual, or at least somewhere toward the center of the Kinsey continuum, even if he is on the gay side-- say, an 4.5, or a 5.

That would mean that the OP had legitimate hetero impulses, but simply gay won the day when the hormones were surging.

He might be attracted to a woman some day, but it would not be “turning back,” it would be part of his normal sexuality.

Sexuality is not a dichotomy. There are some people, I’m sure who are fully gay or fully straight, and other people who are square of the center of the Kinsey continuum. Most people fall to one side or the other-- essentially, straight people with the potential of being attracted to the same sex, or gay people with the potential of being attracted to the opposite sex. Probably most people fall into those last two categories-- but there are no terms for them, other than Kinsey numbers.

The scale looks like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6

Assuming that produced right, a 3.5 is a perfect bisexual, a 6 is a gay person with no heterosexual attraction whatsoever, and a 1 is a straight person with no heterosexual attraction whatsoever.

I am somewhere around 2-2.5. Someone who experimented with being gay in college, but then never though much about it again might be a 1.5. I know people who call themselves gay, but have occasionally had heterosexual “friends with benefits.” They are not capable of deeper relationships with straight people, though. They are probably 5s. Maybe 5.5s. People who label themselves bisexual are not necessarily perfect 3.5s. Most of them probably fall between 2.5 and 4,5.
ETA: Not a good representation of the scale. Limits of the site. You can Google it.

7

I don’t think you are a late bloomer. First developing an interest in sex/romance at around the time puberty begins seems pretty typical to me, regardless of sexual orientation.

I had assumed this thread was going to be about people who don’t identify as gay or bisexual until well into adulthood. Anecdotally this seems to be more common with gay/bi women than men. (There are men who stay closeted for a long time, but most seem to be aware that they are in the closet.) Actress Cynthia Nixon is a famous example, but I don’t know if she may have privately considered herself to be bisexual even before her first relationship with a woman in her late 30s. I have heard other women say that they really had not been attracted to women until they met “Ms. Right” as an adult, though.

I’ve heard speculation that there may be something biologically that happens to some women in adulthood that causes a change in their sexual orientation, but I don’t know if there’s any real evidence for that. I could believe that at least some younger women are confused because of lingering old-fashioned idea about women’s sexuality in general (e.g. “nice girls don’t”) and may not figure things out until they have more life experience. And like RivkahChaya says, there are also bisexual people who skew one way or the other. Someone who’s generally inclined to want an opposite-sex partner has little reason to go looking for a same-sex partner, and might go years without happening to meet someone of the same-sex with whom there’s enough mutual attraction for anything to develop.

8

It seems it varies a lot from one kid to another. That mostly based on what I read on the internet, and for the most part on the SDMB, not on any scientific study or serious articles I read.

I had sexual interests (even though I didn’t know that “sexual” was a thing) early on (I could recently date it precisely at the age of 7 at the latest), and they even already included things that would stay my sexual kinks. While I discovered that many people seem to have had exactly zero sexual feelings until they reached puberty.

Also, many people discover masturbation very early, some even unable to remember a time when they didn’t masturbate, so before 4 or so. Having discovered it late (at 13), I wouldn’t know personnally how it goes for small kids. They could masturbate just for the physical pleasure, or they could fantasize like teens and adults do. However, I remember reading in autobiographies about kids (pre pubescent) fantasying about women while masturbating. So, they had to have both sexual interests and a defined sexual orientation early on. Probably people who began to masturbate early could tell whether they had such fantasies or not and since when.

On the other hand, my own sexual orientation only became clear quite late, during my teens. The earliest you go, the more “bisexual” I was. Even though I think I always had a preference for girls, I had an interest in boys too, and I wasn’t blatantly more heterosexual during my teen years. Incidentally, a large number of people don’t believe that such an ambivalent “phase” can actually exist during adolescence, assuming that those kids are either pretending to have homosexual interests to make themselves more interesting, or pretending to have heterosexual interests because they reject their homosexuality. Presumably, people project their own experience (sexual orientation clearly determined early on) and assume it’s the same for everybody. It irritates me quite a lot since I know for a fact that one’s sexual orientation can be “undetermined” at 15. And it’s not even bisexuality, because it eventually turned out that I was heterosexual (at least 99% so). Or at best, if not undetermined, it’s a real “bisexual phase”.

Finally, I would mention that a friend of mine discovered he was homosexual around 40. This completely floored me that one could live so long without knowing it. Even more so since I had been certain he was homosexual (but not disclosing it) since I had known him, based on his behaviour around men (and wrongly assumed that his business associate was in fact his lover). It really was a revelation for him (he met a guy, fell in love, and from then on, was homosexual), he told me that he never had homosexual thoughts or fantaisies before. I still can’t understand how it’s even possible.

So, to sum up, people are different, and you can’t assess that sexual orientation is fully determined at birth and unchanging. This narrative IMO is more political (and even more specifically American, intended to fight the “homosexuality is a sinful choice” narrative common there. The idea was at first poorly received by the French gay community, for instance) than real. I do not deny that many homosexuals might have felt so since early childhood, I just state that it isn’t an universal experience. And in particular, many people seem to have had no kind of sexual interestat all, hence no sexual orientation, until puberty (even though it could have been latent, at least they weren’t aware of it).

I believe that sexual orientation is more fluid than most people assume, and quite a lot dependant on culture. I base this idea not only on my own experience, but on the existence of societies like classical Greece where homosexuality and homosexual love (as opposed to simply sex) was widespread, which couldn’t happen if there was only some fixed and small percentage of the population that was born homosexual, and on the prevalence of homosexual sex and homosexual relationships when men are stuck together (prisons for instance), which IMO couldn’t happen either if many people didn’t have a latent potential for homosexual attraction (I personnally can’t see how I could want to have sex with someone I’m utterly unattracted to due to biological factors, and I don’t think that I’m alone).

Basically, I believe that besides a relatively limited subset of the population that is absolutely, 100% homosexual or heterosexual, most people have a potential for both, with a more or less marked preference for either, and that this potential will be expressed or not, ignored or recognized, nurtured or repressed, depending on environmental factors, like culture and life experiences. I believe people are very different wrt sexuality (or wrt anything else, for that matter), and that most generalizations made (including those made by gay rights advocates, for instance) are wrong and based on either assuming that one’s own experience is universal and/or a desire to make everybody fit in convenient and simple categories.

Hmm…I guess this post would fit better in GD or IMHO than GQ, sorry for that.

9

I can’t speak about being a male homosexual, but as a retired schoolteacher I can tell you that the age at which a person becomes attracted to others has a wide range.

I taught seventh grade, and some kids came in to seventh already dating and fully interested in each other, while others would come in pretty well clueless. I used to kid that I had girls dressed like thirty-five year old cocktail waitresses in class sitting next to girls in pink fluffy sweatshirts with unicorns on them.

Kids would change as the year went on, but for many it wasn’t until the end of high school or even later where they really cared, or perhaps I should say cared enough to actively do something about it.

10

I may be the Doper you’re referring to. At the age of five, I had a spontaneous fantasy that was unmistakably sexual (though not genitally specific). It just occurred totally out of the blue, and involved a kid on our street who was tall and lanky. To this day, I’m still attracted to tall men who are very thin. The fantasy was also rather sado-masochistic, which is still an aspect of my sexuality. I have no idea how this fantasy came about, or why I have this particular preference.

For the next several years, I always had a crush on the prettiest/nicest/smartest girl in my class. There was nothing whatsoever sexual involved, just a sort of “puppy love”. I “knew” that someday I’d grow up and get married and have a family, because that’s just what people do.

I had no further sexual thoughts until puberty, at which point my homosexuality kicked in like an irresistible force. But it was still many years before I accepted it. In those years (late 50s-early 60s), there was NOBODY who was saying it was ok to be gay. The most liberal attitude was that it wasn’t our fault. So even after coming out in 1963, I still felt that someday I’d go to a shrink and be “cured”. Total self-acceptance didn’t come until I was over 30, after years of consciousness raising, reading and thinking.

You are not by any means a “late bloomer”. I’ve known people who didn’t come to terms with their sexuality until their 60s, after they were already grandparents. And they’re not as uncommon as you’d think.

11

Which makes sense for kids of any sexual orientation, at least given the psychological theory of latency: after initial development in which we figure out our gender and maybe go through Freud’s Oedipal stage, a child’s psychosexual development more or less goes dormant from the ages of somewhere between 3 and 7 (varies dependent on when the kid begins school?) and lasts until sexual development picks up again at puberty. Given this, and the fact that most of us don’t really remember a lot before latency begins, the OP doesn’t sound like a late bloomer. Just a kid who followed along the normal path.

12

I remember asking former Doper SqrlCub when he first realized he was attracted to boys, and his answer was basically, nearly as far back as he could remember.

Made sense to me. I had crushes on girls starting when I was six years old.

13

OP is surely in the “normal” range, which covers a lot of people. I knew early on I was a flaming heterosexual, but what others knew or didn’t know doesn’t make them an aberration.

14

And vice versa.

I do remember when I realized I was a straight female; I had just started 8th grade and one day, the boys looked a lot better than they had the day before. It was as if a switch was thrown.