Why Men Become Homosexual
September 17, 2010
ANTHONY ESOLEN, in two recent articles at Touchstone magazine, offers ten reasons why homosexual marriage is wrong. I highly recommend his arguments, which are aimed at a non-religious audience. In the last of the two articles, he offers a compelling account of why men become homosexual. The perfectly normal desire for male companionship and approval leads to an obsession with male love. He writes:
Before the current wave of political advocacy, many psychologists who studied homosexual men did come to some plausible conclusions about the same-sex attraction. From their studies and from what I know about the nature of boys, I offer the following alternative theory to explain male homosexuality.
I accept the word of male homosexuals who say that they have always felt attracted to other males. There is no reason to doubt them on this. They believe that this attraction makes them different from their brothers — and this is where they go wrong. The plain fact is that all boys have a deep need (again, this is something hard to explain to women) for male acceptance and affirmation. All boys are attracted to the athletic, the popular, the gregarious, the cheerful, the clever boy, or man, as the case may be. This need is expressed in various ways: sometimes by shutting girls out of the club; sometimes by horseplay; sometimes by the violent high spirits of a gang; sometimes by initiation rites involving blood; sometimes by sworn devotion to a higher cause. In every boy there is a strain of the Tom Sawyer who organizes the other boys around him, or of the boys who look to a Tom Sawyer. The art of every culture testifies to these powerful (and difficult) friendships: Gilgamesh, Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Kidnapped, The Iliad, Star Wars.
That is the single assumption I make; and even homosexuals unwittingly testify to it. From it, all else follows. For suppose the boy has a cruel father, who makes fun of him for being slow or fat or clumsy. Or suppose the boy is naturally shy, and is rejected by the local boys — and can only watch their rough games resentfully yet longingly from the kitchen window. Or suppose the boy’s older brothers ignore him, and he watches in envy as they catch the football or flirt with the pretty girl. Whatever the cause, suppose a boy who is rejected by the most important males in his life: the neighborhood boys, or his brothers, or, most perilously, his father.
The longing for male companionship does not go away; and remember, the boyish friendship is expressed with an active and frank physicality. What happens now may depend on other factors: the presence of some one friend in whom he can trust, or a loving father who will make rejection by the other boys pale in importance. Failing that, the boy must struggle on his own to define himself as a boy, or must accept that he “deserves” to be rejected by the others, because he is not a real boy. This struggle is for the central fact of the boy’s existence — and that too is unwittingly supported by homosexuals, who alone among people of all kinds of sexual habits associate their very identities with their longings.
Soon enough, the boy reaches puberty, and the longing assumes a new character, influenced by the boy’s new capacity for sexual arousal and his developing, and often chaotic, feelings of sexual desire. The same kind of bodily fooleries that help form the identity of other boys — for instance, nude bathing or semi-public urination or the common shower after an athletic contest — become for him moments of great dread, or desire, or both at once. Hence the compulsiveness of the homosexual’s behavior: like other compulsives, he scratches at a wound that will not heal; he visits again and again the site of the painful memory; he aches to fulfill a longing whose source he can no longer rightly recognize. Most boys grow out of this silly stage; the homosexual, who was denied the chance to undergo it in the normal way, returns to it, as if compelled. Hence the exhibitionism and other forms of public behavior that one might expect in a prepubescent boy — if the boy were deeply disturbed.
What the male homosexual longs for, sexually, is what every male needs, and that is simply affirmation by other men. It is to know that you belong, you are a man, you can be relied on in a fight, you have what it takes. If a boy is given this affirmation, then, barring a rape or something else unspeakably bizarre, he will not become a homosexual. This too is a plain fact: it is a sufficient condition for the nonappearance of the syndrome. If a father affirms his son physically (for the rough touch of a good father’s love is never forgotten by the son), then the son will identify with the father. He will know he is a boy, to follow his father in marrying a woman and having children by her.
Thus male homosexuality is a corruption not of the relations between men and women, but of the relations between men and men: it is an aberrant eroticization of male friendship. And that explains the unimaginable promiscuity. What a man seeks in a woman is not what he seeks in a man. Husband and wife may be “friends,” but in the first instance they are both less and more than that. My wife is not an alter ego; we do not stand side by side to conquer the world. But I find in her what I lack in myself. She is the mysterious one who is not like me; and my love for her is quite unlike my love for my friend, who is like me. There is nothing casual about marriage, but friendship descends from the summit all the way down to pleasant and passing acquaintances. If it is friendship that male homosexuals seek, then we might predict many of their otherwise inexplicable behaviors. Friendship is not exclusive; one can never have too many friends; friendship is often celebrated best in boisterous groups; to live even a week or two without the feeling that one has a friend is agonizingly lonely.
But the hope that homosexual relations can ever really fulfill that need for the affirming friend is, in the end, delusive. The homosexual knows better than anyone that something has gone awry with him; hence his own vacillation between insisting that he is normal, and his flaunting of behavior that if performed by anyone else in any other situation he himself would despise….
— Comments —
Josh F. writes:
It’s not important for traditionalists to argue about whether homosexuals are a product of nature and/or nuture. It is only important for traditionalists to know that radical liberals KNOW that
homosexuals can be made in a myriad of ways. The goal of our “default elite” is to homosexualize the masses. They understand that the homosexual nature is a very subservient and self-annihilating nature. Our “default elite” stay as such through the radical autonomizing of the masses. This, first and foremost, means to completely emasculate the males. That our “default elite” has an increasingly particular “butch” look to it and hides ever so cleverly behind “feminism” when it’s pretty, it should be understood by traditionalists that liberalism is the political manifestation of the homosexual nature. Remember, homosexuality isn’t just expressed physically, but intellectually and spiritually, too. Homosexuality (self-sexualization/asexuality/self-annihilation) is Radical Autonomy.
Josh adds:
I would also say that it seems quite a leap to suggest that a young boy with bad relations (physical, verbal, sexual) with a father or adult male authority would then go on to be sexually attracted to men. I don’t see a real logic to that. It seems that homosexuality is either rooted in the adverse pre-natal environment or an adverse relationship with a mother or adult female authority. This seems a far better explanation for a future sexual attraction to men by a male. But ultimately, it would seem that homosexuality is rooted in an adverse relationship to mother and father (absent, abusive or otherwise). Homosexuality is the fundamental expression of one’s radical autonomy.
Laura writes:
The idea of a stern father leading a boy to homosexuality does seem far-fetched, but his other points about the desire for male affirmation seem plausible.
I agree that it’s wrong to get hung up on why men and women choose homosexuality. One can easily over-psychologize the issue and deny that free will is involved. I do think, however, that the psychological and spiritual reasons, including the effects of child sexual abuse, are worth considering and attempting to understand. Many men are choosing homosexuality under the sway of cultural approval of homosexuality so it’s hard to disentangle personal reasons from this larger factor. The desire to flee the responsibilties of adulthood seems to be a major psychological reason as well.
John E. writes:
I’m having a hard time determining how Josh doesn’t see the logic behind Esolen’s point about the absence or cruelty of a father leading a boy toward tendencies of same-sex attraction. It makes sense that if a boy’s hunger for male attention–most especially from a father–reflects a developmental need, and that need is never sufficiently met as he develops physically, that hunger for male attention would tend to manifest itself in a disordered sexual attraction to males as the boy reaches puberty. I don’t know how much proof there is as to cause-effect for this scenario, but it does not seem far-fetched, nor a grand leap in logic.
I agree with Laura that there is a danger of “over-psychologizing,” but it does not appear that Esolen is in danger of that. Many people in our day do will to brazenly live out an autonomous defiance of the natural order of things, but Esolen comes nowhere close to justifying that disordered behavior here, but rather attempts to explain the disposition many men find themselves in today, often by minimal or no fault of their own, with the intent to offer remedy for a disorder.
Brendan writes:
An interesting theory.
In my own experience, the more common “background” for a homosexual guy is the combination of (1) uninvolved father (not necessarily harsh, but uninvolved, perhaps due to work or general aloofness and so on) and (2) overbearing, dominant mother (and sometimes one who is deeply critical of the father in front of the boy). Usually it’s both. And the guys who turn out homosexual from this are usually (1) passive homosexuals who (2) identify much more with their mothers than with their fathers — in other words, they are kind of feminized, in persona, and have eroticized that as well. But, the interesting thing is that not everyone in this situation becomes homosexual. There seems to be a particular personality type, when combined with this family situation, which results in a homosexual persona (apart from having been sexually abused). One of my sets of cousins, for example, had that family scenario, and of the four boys (in a good Irish family of 6 kids), two did turn out homosexual, but two did not. It’s a mix of personality, I think, and the family situation when growing up.
Laura writes:
In an earlier age, possibly none of your cousins would have lived as homosexuals, though they might have struggled with homosexual desires.
Josh writes:
I would respond to John E. by saying that although a father or male authority figure can certainly emasculate a son or boy, it does not follow that this would provoke a sexual attraction towards males. It seems far more likely to produce a sexual aversion to females.
What are we talking about other than a sense that young males of today feel weaker than the female? Young males are choosing de facto homo-ism because they fear the female. Some of those males had those fears amplified by fathers who didn’t get the little man they wanted in a son.
It seems that the illiberal father that produced the homosexual son is too ideologically convenient. Even the father absent can “make” a son homosexual. All the bases are covered in inexplicably liberal fashion.
A reader writes:
Another factor concerning orientation: if the child was sexually molested. The child may block the incident out of memory until even decades later when it may resurface, but the influence is there.
Ted Chan writes:
In response to Josh, I would recommend the NARTH website, particularly this post. Maybe NARTH lacks credibility among some of your readers, but I think their writings drawn from their experience with homosexuals seems to confirm rather than contradict Dr. Esolen’s theory.
