Another sexual anxiety is homosexual anxiety. Dis-cussing sexuality in general, or homosexuality and bisexuality in particular, can make people uncomfortable, if not frankly anxious. With a drive as strong as human sexuality—a force which draws on our biology, objects of desire, fantasies, behavior with others, our family/social/religious morals, and, possibly, our histories of abuse—it makes sense that people react strongly to views that differ from their own.
Because homosexual notions, feelings, behaviors, and histories have the capacity to evoke such complex anxieties, it makes sense to understand them more closely. Simply reviewing Freud’s basic tenet that we are all born with an inherent bisexuality (based on an infant’s love for his or her mother and father) can help to reassure any per-son struggling with a homosexual type of anxiety. An open-minded attitude can allow for conversations in which these anxieties can be worked through to unfold. Several common examples follow.
It is not uncommon for a heterosexual person to believe that he or she may be homosexual because he or she finds other people of the same gender to be physically attractive. This anxiety can snowball into deep concern; patients may even seek treatment in the emergency room late at night wondering if they are gay (known as homo-sexual panic). In many instances, it seems that this homosexual anxiety actually prevents people from pursuing heterosexual relationships.
In this seeming contradiction, a heterosexual who intensely desires the opposite sex—but fears emotional and/or sexual intimacy at the same time—may prefer to fear being gay. This stance keeps him or her from acting on his or her feared hetero-sexual desires. These homosexual attractions can thus hijack a man’s ability to be with a woman, or a woman’s ability to be with a man. In these instances, homosexual anxiety serves as a disguise for heterosexual anxiety.
Another common homosexual anxiety stems from longings for one’s absent mother, father, or other significant caretaker. A man who grew up with no father, or with a father who was physically present but emotionally removed, may consciously remember so painfully wishing that his father would pay attention to him. He may long for all that did not happen with his father, be it trips, sports, or simply regular emotional involvement. Though this man may feel as heterosexual as the next in his conscious desires and masturbation fantasies, he may find himself longing for deep intimacy with a man. He may then find him-self fearing he is gay because these yearnings leave him anxious and without the tools a male role model might have taught him about handling these feelings.
He may respond to these fears with compulsive heterosexual activity (the so-called Don Juan complex) to reassure himself that he is not gay; he may find himself experimenting with homosexual activity to test these desires; or he may find himself drinking excessively with men at bars or parties in male-bonding activities. The anxiety of being around and with men in more intimate settings may feel homosexual in nature, prompting him to use alcohol to treat his anxiety and thus attempt to bury these longings which feel so dangerous and forbidden. The same could occur reciprocally for a woman with her mother.
Other times the real issue is allowing oneself to come out—to acknowledge publicly what one knows and may have known for many years to be true about oneself: that one is gay. In my clinical experience, it seems that male homosexuality declares itself earlier and more firmly than female homosexuality. I have seen many more lesbian women who could imagine being with a man and raising a family than I have seen gay men contemplating the reciprocal situation.
Gay men and women commonly raise families with their same-sex partners. In these instances, the issue becomes allowing one to accept one’s true self. With devastating results, the psychiatric com-munity for years diagnosed homosexuality as a disease and attempted to correct the “illness” by providing reparative therapy. Homosexual anxiety responds to no longer feeling compelled to deny an aspect of one’s nature, a process which would be a part of any good psychotherapy.