Growing Up Gay

Dec. 15, 2000 -- Locker rooms are a part of American culture most boys take for granted -- eventually. "Sure, it's embarrassing," says one straight friend. "It's also a comparison kind of thing."

But for 19-year-old Jess Bowling -- a gay Atlantan who came out to his family and friends earlier this year -- his first trips to the locker room after P.E. class had another dimension. He remembers being "fixated" on the naked bodies he saw," he tells WebMD.

It's not uncommon for such commonplace situations -- like sleepovers and showering at school -- to create a confusing mix of arousal and frustration in gay boys, says Sidney Phillips, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn. And because those feelings sometimes create shame, many gay boys grow up repressing them, he says.

Phillips is currently writing a paper describing this scenario. His objective: to help parents and teachers understand what the normal course of development is for gay boys -- who can spend their adults lives trying to unload the emotional baggage picked up in those early years, he says.

"Locker rooms, sleepovers with friends, even common child-rearing practices create constant stimulation -- overstimulation" for a gay boy, Phillips tells WebMD. "It's a wholly different experience for the homosexually inclined boy to take a shower with his father or sleep with his brother than it is for a heterosexual boy."

Further complicating the picture, he says, is a quite different version of the Oedipal drama -- with mother as main rival and father as primary love object. In the gay boy's family life, that struggle may actually cause the stereotypically absent or withdrawn father.

"It's not that absent or withdrawn fathers create homosexual sons, but rather the opposite ... the boy's attraction precipitates the father's withdrawal," Phillips says, an action that could well lead his gay son to seek out childhood love affairs -- even with heterosexual boys.

Such relationships, he says, "are clearly an effort by the homosexual boy to heal and repair the effects of paternal withdrawal and revulsion." And they predictably end the same way -- with the heterosexual boy eventually turning his attentions to a heterosexual girl.

"For the gay boy, the pain would be unbearable because it has to be kept secret," says Phillips. To compensate, these boys often develop the delusion that their straight friend was really gay, like them, but afraid to admit it.

"Even though it ultimately was not an erotic triumph, since the heterosexual boy always gets his girl, the gay boy possibly for the first time basks in the warmth of another male's love," says Phillips. "There is the hope that some day, some how, someone will love him completely."

But if this longing goes unrequited -- if the gay boy experiences only the overstimulation of everyday life, the shame it evokes, and the need to hide his feelings -- it becomes the classic description of the homosexual closet, he says.