I was reading this review and wondered. Do most gay people go with the flow of their same sex attraction, or is it usually suppressed and fought against?
LGBTQ therapy specialist here. The answer is that it depends on a lot of factors, including but not limited to the person’s cohort, historical and contemporary events related to sexuality, the person’s family culture(s), the person’s religious beliefs, the person’s larger communities, etc. Neither my partner nor I struggled at all, but I know many people both personally and professionally who have (or do). I’m not sure that it’s particularly predictable.
Part of it depends on your age. I’m 60, and when I was a kid, in the '50s and '60s, ***nobody ***was out. Homosexuality was either a sin or a mental disorder, and those were the only options. For me, self-acceptance didn’t happen till my mid-thirties, and it wasn’t an easy thing to achieve. Up until that point, I acknowledged my feelings, and sometimes even acted on them, but there was always the idea that someday I’d get into therapy, and get “fixed.”
Kids today at least know that there are openly gay people in the world, plus other people who consider it “normal.” We didn’t have that. (I’m not saying that kids today have it easy; I’m only saying that their problems can be different than the problems we had.)
I fought and suppressed my feelings until I was 24, only to be pleasantly surprised at the near-universal acceptance (and in many cases, the utter lack of surprise) when I came out.
My WAG is that everyone does to an extent, even if that “battle” ends in minutes or seconds.
I didn’t at all. I moved directly from Sheesh, so I’m gay just as I suspected to How do I keep the people at school from finding out until I’m ready? with no interval of I can’t possibly, oh shit.
I just watched a documentary on Truman Capote.
According to the show, this is one cat who never fought with his “gayness”.
Actually IIRC TC wrote about a scene from his childhood where he stole some of his mother’s jewelery, and gave it to the local hoodoo lady/gypsy and begged her to turn him into a little girl, so I imagine there was some sense of “displacement”, even if it wasn’t fought against.