September 03, 2003
ex-gay literature
My mom's bought me books from Focus on the Family (that should be a warning right there) and wants me to read them. I read one of them, Restoring Sexual Identity by Anne Paulk, with the accompanying booklet on the causes of female homosexuality. I couldn't get more than three or four chapters into the other, Coming Out of Homosexuality by Bob Davies and Lori Rentzel, before wanting to hurl it across the room.
How do I put this nicely... you know what, why bother.
It's bullshit. Smooth, friendly, I-just-want-to-help therapeutic-sounding pseudo-scientific bullshit that I'm sure is meant in the nicest way possible, but bullshit nonetheless.
All the testimonies focus on the women feeling "unfeminine" and trying to osmose femininity through lesbian relationships. When they magically learned to embrace their womanhood, they were free to be the man-lovin' woman God intended them to be.
I'm sorry, how often must I repeat this: I have no fucking problem with being a woman. I am happy to be a woman. I like having breasts and I don't want a penis. I enjoy wearing nail polish and jewelry and other such girly things. I hate football, I like long hair, and I like interior decorating.
They keep coming back to is this characterization of lesbian relationships as being based on emotional dependency. I don't think you'd have to look far to find heterosexual relationships based on emotional dependency, either. Just because those women never had a healthy relationship doesn't mean that no lesbian ever does.
Also, the extreme focus on childhood abuse, especially sexual abuse. I don't remember any testimony that didn't have the obligatory molestation in it. Apparently that's one of the main causes of lesbianism. I can say with complete and utter honesty that throughout my childhood, I was never abused, physically, emotionally, verbally, or sexually. I have never been molested. Never been raped. My childhood was actually rather good. I don't want to be insensitive to the women that were, but if they're going to say that's the key cause of lesbianism, then (a) what about lesbians who were never abused, such as, oh, me? and (b) what about women who were abused and are currently heterosexual?
That leads into their painful Freudian psychoanalysis of lesbian desire. As far as I can make out, lesbians' fathers were either too distant and unavailable, or too present and available to identify with. So my dad was pretty much damned if he did and damned if he didn't. Mothers get off a little easier, in that they just have to be unavailable; if you so much as walk out of the room while your baby is attempting to establish a bond with you, you're dooming your child to homosexuality.
My dad isn't an emotionally demonstrative guy, being rather quiet and introverted (I'm a lot like him), but I never remember thinking that he didn't love me. And my mother, a dedicated stay-at-home mom, is about as far from emotionally distant as you can get. I think I can safely assume that my homosexual orientation is not a result of a failure to properly resolve an Electra complex or the like.
The other book... I'm not even going to get into it. I'm too disgusted. It appalls me that people not only believe this, but base their politics around it.
But I promised I'd read them. (Never promised I wouldn't shred them on my journal. I don't make promises I don't intend to keep.) So I did. For all the good it did me.
She also wants me to talk to someone she knows, who is "SO great and SO wonderful, if you'll just listen to him I promise I won't bother you anymore..." He lives in a different state, so we were going to do a phone call, but the day of the call he was out of work sick. And my mom broke down in tears that I wouldn't be able to talk to him.
The books and all would be funny if it were any other situation but this one, where my mom really wants to believe what they offer: a solution, a way to fix everything and make it better again. That if I'll only try hard enough, I can be "fixed" or "healed" and we can go back to being a Happy Shiny Family again.
It wouldn't be nearly as painful if she wasn't doing it all because she loves me. Everytime she says how much she wants to help me and hugs me, it breaks my heart. I don't want to see my mother hurting like this. If I could do anything about it, I would.
But she's got to understand, sooner or later, that this isn't a problem to be fixed or a sickness to be healed. This is simply what I am, how I've been made. It's not an overlay or a taint, like my depression or something like that. It's deeply fundamental to my personality. This goes down to the core of my soul.
Which, I might add, is not in danger of eternal hellfire, thanks very much.
How do I put this nicely... you know what, why bother.
It's bullshit. Smooth, friendly, I-just-want-to-help therapeutic-sounding pseudo-scientific bullshit that I'm sure is meant in the nicest way possible, but bullshit nonetheless.
All the testimonies focus on the women feeling "unfeminine" and trying to osmose femininity through lesbian relationships. When they magically learned to embrace their womanhood, they were free to be the man-lovin' woman God intended them to be.
I'm sorry, how often must I repeat this: I have no fucking problem with being a woman. I am happy to be a woman. I like having breasts and I don't want a penis. I enjoy wearing nail polish and jewelry and other such girly things. I hate football, I like long hair, and I like interior decorating.
They keep coming back to is this characterization of lesbian relationships as being based on emotional dependency. I don't think you'd have to look far to find heterosexual relationships based on emotional dependency, either. Just because those women never had a healthy relationship doesn't mean that no lesbian ever does.
Also, the extreme focus on childhood abuse, especially sexual abuse. I don't remember any testimony that didn't have the obligatory molestation in it. Apparently that's one of the main causes of lesbianism. I can say with complete and utter honesty that throughout my childhood, I was never abused, physically, emotionally, verbally, or sexually. I have never been molested. Never been raped. My childhood was actually rather good. I don't want to be insensitive to the women that were, but if they're going to say that's the key cause of lesbianism, then (a) what about lesbians who were never abused, such as, oh, me? and (b) what about women who were abused and are currently heterosexual?
That leads into their painful Freudian psychoanalysis of lesbian desire. As far as I can make out, lesbians' fathers were either too distant and unavailable, or too present and available to identify with. So my dad was pretty much damned if he did and damned if he didn't. Mothers get off a little easier, in that they just have to be unavailable; if you so much as walk out of the room while your baby is attempting to establish a bond with you, you're dooming your child to homosexuality.
My dad isn't an emotionally demonstrative guy, being rather quiet and introverted (I'm a lot like him), but I never remember thinking that he didn't love me. And my mother, a dedicated stay-at-home mom, is about as far from emotionally distant as you can get. I think I can safely assume that my homosexual orientation is not a result of a failure to properly resolve an Electra complex or the like.
The other book... I'm not even going to get into it. I'm too disgusted. It appalls me that people not only believe this, but base their politics around it.
But I promised I'd read them. (Never promised I wouldn't shred them on my journal. I don't make promises I don't intend to keep.) So I did. For all the good it did me.
She also wants me to talk to someone she knows, who is "SO great and SO wonderful, if you'll just listen to him I promise I won't bother you anymore..." He lives in a different state, so we were going to do a phone call, but the day of the call he was out of work sick. And my mom broke down in tears that I wouldn't be able to talk to him.
The books and all would be funny if it were any other situation but this one, where my mom really wants to believe what they offer: a solution, a way to fix everything and make it better again. That if I'll only try hard enough, I can be "fixed" or "healed" and we can go back to being a Happy Shiny Family again.
It wouldn't be nearly as painful if she wasn't doing it all because she loves me. Everytime she says how much she wants to help me and hugs me, it breaks my heart. I don't want to see my mother hurting like this. If I could do anything about it, I would.
But she's got to understand, sooner or later, that this isn't a problem to be fixed or a sickness to be healed. This is simply what I am, how I've been made. It's not an overlay or a taint, like my depression or something like that. It's deeply fundamental to my personality. This goes down to the core of my soul.
Which, I might add, is not in danger of eternal hellfire, thanks very much.
# posted by Liadan @ 4:57 PM 
