Life Is Short #1

I had a dysfunctional childhood.  I was born prematurely, and I think I never felt ready for the world.  Neither of my parents were particularly loving.  Both parents were judgemental.  Our mother (I had six siblings) was more responsible than our father, holding the family together after he abandoned it.  During the years when he was with us, he was often frightening and violent (although I hasten to say that he wasn't the worst brute in the world).  Nonetheless, when he left, we were all relieved.  He left us in a large house in a wealthy town, and my mother didn't have the money to keep the house going.  She sold the house and moved us to another state, where she got a job.

Although I believe that homosexuality is an intrinsic thing, I do think that life circumstances can affect it.  (Saying this isn't "politically correct", but I believe it.)  Thus, my intense desire for male sex may have something to do with having an unloving father.  An attractive man who allows me to suck him or make love to his body (i.e., have access to his body) is revealing his acceptance of me (acceptance I never got from my father), which represents love.  My father didn't love me or accept me, so I continue to seek it as an adult.

Along the same lines, my mother was a somewhat frightening figure, and so my lack of attraction to women's bodies is all the more intense.

If you are reading my articles from the beginning, you'll recall the young man in the first article who was looking for a father figure.  The difference between us is that I sexualize my need for a father, and he doesn't.  I sexualize it because I am gay, and he doesn't because he is straight.  So yes, being gay or straight doesn't result from childhood trauma, but the way one relates to it can be affected by childhood trauma.

There is more to my story than just my childhood.  Now, in old age, I have very few friends (I'm not sure why).  My loneliness seems to increase my sexual desperation.  When I was younger and was actually getting some sex, I could go for long periods without it and still feel somewhat content.  Now that I'm not getting any at all, it is all that I want.

*          *          *

I came out of my childhood with extremely low self-esteem, so much so that I was terrified to approach a man.  I certainly didn't consider myself attractive.  I remember once seeing a man standing in front of a building on 72nd Street near Riverside Drive in N.Y.C..  He was young and attractive, and he looked straight at me.  I was so terrified that I couldn't approach him.

For a while I wore a lambda button, hoping that it would help me pick up men.  I sat down near an attractive young man in a fast-food restaurant one day.  He saw my lambda button and started to talk to me; I was so terrified that I jumped up and left the restaurant.

My low self-esteem expressed itself in other ways, too.  After my father abandoned the family, my mother couldn't afford to give me much of an allowance, so I was chronically poor during my childhood.  When I moved onto my own in N.Y.C., I rented a room in an apartment that had been divided up into rooms.  I wanted music in my room, so I bought a radio.  The radio cost something like $25 (in the 1970's).  For me, that was a huge extravagance, and I felt extremely bad for spending so much money.  I mean that literally:  Spending so much money made me feel like a bad person!  (The cost of electronics has come down since the 1970's, and a similar radio today wouldn't be much more expensive.)

There were other things that gave me low self-esteem.  I was a little chubby as a young adult.  Also, I hadn't been athletic in high school, and I didn't have big muscles.  I quickly came to see myself as puny.  I also didn't have a sense of style, meaning that I didn't know how to dress.  In both high school and in the years after high school, I would ogle the athletic young men who knew how to dress to maximize their sexiness.  Those were the men I wanted -- not the ordinarily ones like me -- but I knew I was out of their class, so I would rarely approach them.  Consequently, I was alone and unloved most of the time.  It didn't help that my dick was only 5-3/4 inches.  In every respect, I didn't have the equipment -- physically, psychologically or stylistically -- to compete in the gay world.

In my late twenties I lost my excess weight in Overeaters Anonymous, but that didn't mean my body was suddenly gorgeous.  I still didn't have a lot of muscles, and I hadn't been able to eliminate every bit of fat, such as the fat around my waist (my love handles).  Also, by my late twenties I had started losing my hair.  As a result of all this, by my late twenties I had resigned myself to being an average-looking cocksucker, and my sex life consisted of mostly anonymous encounters.  That's not to say that I didn't have any relationships at all.  I did, but none of them endured, and I certainly didn't find a soul mate.

[This article isn't finished.]