Sexual Development or Abuse – Awakening or Scarring?

This is a tale that could not be told until now for many rea­sons. Not least of which is that there could well have been legal issues if oth­ers had become involved in res­o­lu­tion of the mat­ter. But legal res­o­lu­tion would have resulted in a very dif­fer­ent out­come and likely neg­a­tive impact upon my men­tal makeup that the mat­ter did not have as it evolved. But now, nearly fifty years later (or per­haps more than fifty years later since my mem­o­ries of the exact tim­ing of the events are not totally clear), I could not even state for sure if the oth­ers involved are still alive and I cer­tainly have no idea where they would be found if they are.

Some would argue that my expe­ri­ences would have scarred me for life; that I would never be able to develop into a nor­mal per­son. Well, those same peo­ple have a nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of a “nor­mal per­son”. So let us say some would argue that my expe­ri­ences would have scarred me for life and that I would never been able to develop into a straight het­ero­sex­ual per­son. But I did.

You see, my first sex­ual expe­ri­ences were male-male. They occurred at an age when I was first devel­op­ing the hor­monal changes between child­hood and early ado­les­cence. I was an inno­cent par­tic­i­pant. They occurred in the neigh­bor in which I grew up. Per­haps I was the vic­tim of an older preda­tor. These many years later, I do not remem­ber exactly how many years older. The per­son involved was not adult. But enough older, that had the events become known, I am almost cer­tain there would have been involve­ment by law enforce­ment per­son­nel. And this would have led to pub­lic­ity and noto­ri­ety and who knows what kind of coun­sel­ing. What I believe is that my feel­ings about the events would have been very dif­fer­ent after the coun­sel­ing. To this day I do not believe there was any mali­cious intent.

The “talk” between par­ents and chil­dren came at some­what older ages in those days. Chil­dren were per­ceived to develop more slowly. Soci­ety was also per­ceived to be much more inno­cent than it is today. In many ways it was, but in many ways the inno­cence was a cha­rade that would be bro­ken down by the rebel­lions of main-stream white, middle-class soci­ety to come a few years later.

To me, I was intro­duced to sen­sa­tions that were new and excit­ing. I quickly fig­ured out that what was hap­pen­ing needed to be pri­vate and kept it so. That part of my life ended after not too long a period. I grew up more. I devel­oped more. All of my atten­tion quickly turned to humans of another gen­der. But as was the norm for the time, expres­sion of desires was heav­ily sup­pressed, except for per­sonal grat­i­fi­ca­tion, for many years to come (if you are of a younger age you prob­a­bly can­not com­pre­hend just how much has changed — try to imag­ine a time when even adults had dif­fi­culty buy­ing con­doms in some towns).

Every time I hear some­one rant­ing about preda­tory homo­sex­ual activ­i­ties or about efforts to turn chil­dren gay I am totally amazed at how naïve these peo­ple are to believe that each and every same gen­der inter­ac­tion involv­ing younger peo­ple is some­how a preda­tory activ­ity. I firmly believe that among same-gender inter­ac­tions between younger peo­ple there are some cases that truly are hor­ri­ble cases of abuse. But I also believe that there are cases that are noth­ing more than young peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing the world.

What I do not know is how many there are of the two kinds. Soci­ety has such a stigma around the topic that it can­not be dis­cussed. That is why peo­ple like me, peo­ple who expe­ri­ence no harm, are never included in any sta­tis­tics. How many more are there like me? I fear we will never know. I fear that even those who expe­ri­ence no harm but do speak will be told that they expe­ri­enced harm and will be trau­ma­tized not by the events but by how they are han­dled after they speak up.

But I will never really know how many there are of the two kinds because this is a topic we do not talk about. I remained silent for fifty-or-so years. Not silent because I was trau­ma­tized, silent because speak­ing up would have caused me so much trauma. We as a soci­ety have a real prob­lem when our reac­tion to some­thing causes harm that was never there to begin with. We need to grow up. Every once in a while, I feel I was a very mature young human — at least about some subjects.

Is Still Here