Why I Do the Sexual Things I Do

I do not understand what I do.

Paul, the Apostle

A few years ago our community's book club read Jay Stringer's Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing. More than any other book I've read, let alone a "Christian book," Unwanted helped me more closely examine why I do the sexual things I do. It illuminated my top-level attraction for men, as well as some of my deeper-level kinks, fetishes, and desires.

This book is a dive! Submerge at your own peril (or perhaps triumph?).I've been rereading Unwanted for therapy, and it continues to reveal my uncomfortable reflection – all of it, all of me. It often feels like fluorescent lights buzzing overhead at midnight. And yet Stringer's premise encourages me: sexual brokenness almost paradoxically revealing paths to healing.

Rather than collapse on the specific nature of our sexual struggles, what if our kinks, our fetishes, and our repeated sexual patterns revealed something vital about our past, pointing us a healthier, more integrated way forward?

Instead of fluorescent lights scalding me from above and within, what if my sexual shame (including the fetishes I can't write about) could serve more as a lighthouse at midnight, my decades-long desires, once lost at sea, now lighting my way home?

Reading (and now rereading) this book, I'm discovering several levels to my sexuality. The deeper I dive, the deeper it seems I must still go. The nature of some of my sexual desires, starting top-level with my same-sex attraction itself, have grown much clearer; for others, the water still feels thick with oil, the light hazy and refracting rather than reflecting much clarity.

So, let's start at the top of my sexuality and work our way down – as far down as I'm able to delve today, anyway.

Why I Find Men Attractive

While other queer or otherwise SSA (same-sex attracted) folks may not so easily explain their sexuality, I've reached a point where I can confidently explain mine: I lacked close friendships with other boys growing up, and I sexualized them. I'm attracted to men because they've always felt "other" to me. This sense of the "masculine other" goes all the way back to first grade.

In the great "nature vs. nurture" debate, I'm sure there's also a healthy dose of "nature" to throw in with my (lack of) masculine "nurture." I grew up as a more sensitive, creative boy, after all, feeling and thinking and desiring all sorts of things most boys do not: adventures and sleepovers and long drawn huggles (hugs+cuddles).

It's just how I was; it's how I still am. The combination of my nature and nurture helps me understand why I became a boy only attracted to boys. Why I'm a man only attracted to men today.

It doesn't mean I necessarily like the end result of connecting those dots. But I do understand it. This understanding has given me a significant level of peace with my sexuality today.

Beyond my emotional void with other males, I also lacked masculine self-assuredness as a boy. Does this count as "nature" or "nurture"? Perhaps a bit of both.As I consider what draws me to men, I realize what I've long lacked and thus envied in others: masculine confidence. Not the obnoxious, braggadocious sort, but the kind which simply knows to be masculine, as if it's innate to a man's blood. His way, his being.

I never felt this masculine envy and subsequent disconnect more viscerally than my lone summer working at a Christian boys' camp in my mid-twenties.

Yes, many of my fellow counselors were objectively attractive. Hot, even. Why were they spending a summer at camp and not modeling somewhere?Beyond the abs and biceps, these guys were also objectively, intrinsically male. Male, together. Constantly shirtless and playful and often immature in one sense, and yet also vulnerable and empathetic and spiritually mature in another.

They loved Jesus, they loved working with kids, and they loved being guys with one another – roughhousing and praying and worshipping together all the same.

It took me the vast majority of that summer to stagger there, but when I finally started to reach their hallowed ground of shared maleness, I discovered a significant solution to my masculine envy – a "way to healing," to borrow Stringer's language.

Rather than run away from men, or stare hopelessly from the sidelines, I steered into the masculine storm, attempting relationships with the once unreachable straight, hot, shirtless, confident men around me.

I talked to them, insecurities abounding.I took off my shirt with them, my body image near-crippling.In essence, I faked it until I, indeed, made it.Moving beyond that summer at camp, I've been "faking" my masculinity for over a decade now, and this "masculine steering" still feels unnatural. I constantly hear alarms blaring that I am not worthy any time I enter a new group of men or attempt to connect with them.

But the alarms aren't as shrill today as they were at the start of camp.Oh, I still notice the attractiveness and confidence of my male friends. Confidence I still wish I had. But I am also noticing they don't feel as "other" anymore. The more we connect, the more we engage, the more I see they're just as messed-up as I am.

These men are just as beautiful as I am, too. A glint of an infinitely creative God.

As I step more into masculine self-assuredness, as I become confident, I start to ask myself if that hot, mysterious, confident guy across the gym floor really has as much to offer me anymore?

I mean, don't get me wrong: I still enjoy covertly staring at him – admiring God's handiwork, so to speak. But I also don't think my heart yearns for him with quite the same soul-sucking propulsion that I once did. I've been intentionally stepping out with men for many years now, and I'm realizing more of this hard yet simple truth.I am masculine, too.

Why I've Watched Gay Pornography

The next level down from the envy propelling much of my "real world" same-sex attraction revolves around the gay pornography I've consumed. It's bizarre to consider: the stuff I'm drawn to watch today absolutely has roots in my childhood.

It started innocently enough: pocketing the weekly Kmart and Sears underwear ads from the kitchen table; stealing away from my family to wander the underwear aisles at Walmart; secretly searching for underwear-only images of cute actors on the family computer.

Do you see a theme?

Becoming an adult with a laptop and wifi and privacy, I googled images and videos of men in their underwear. This was the first time I masturbated to images on a screen rather than ones remembered or conjured in my mind.

My so-called "arousal blueprint" has been established since my youth: I'm deeply attracted to men in their underwear. There's also something about the search, the hunt, and this voyeuristic lens of looking at someone who can't look back.

I suppose this is one of those aforementioned "fetishes I can never write about."Oops."I'm way more attracted to men in their underwear than men who are naked," I once told another gay friend.

"Really?" he asked, stunned. "That makes no sense."

Well. Maybe so for you. But it's making more sense to me.

Sneaking peeks at men in limited dress went beyond underwear packages and websites. Throughout adolescence, I caught glimpses of my classmates changing in locker rooms. It wasn't "gay porn" in name, but it might as well have been in heart.

Even today, I crave those clandestine peeks at other men, still get a rush from whatever I may find when I search online, or whoever I may find when I enter my gym's locker room.

I am a literal peeping Tom, if ever there were one.

The "fix," a way toward healing then, much like my disconnect with and envy of men, seems to be running into the storm rather than away from it. Despite the lure of what lies around the bend, I feel as if I need to keep entering locker rooms and male-only spaces as someone fully qualified to be there. To continue hammering at my false assertion that I do not belong, that I am "other."

I'm still a long ways away from entering a male-only space like a Korean spa; the concept of sharing total nudity with other men is certainly another blog for another day. But for now, discretely changing clothes in a locker room alongside other guys discretely changing clothes is a good step.

I'm also learning that the physical qualities I admire and desire in the nearly naked bodies around me are available to me, too. I need not be a parasite that latches onto other masculine bodies.

I have a masculine body, too. I can eat healthily and strategically, I can work out intensely and regularly, and I can acquire something at least adjacent to the masculine bodies around me. I can even wear certain kinds of underpants that appeal to me, make me feel masculine in my male body.

This level down is much harder to resolve than the one above it, but I am seeing objective, physical progress with my masculine body. And some subjective emotional progress with my masculine heart as well.

Ultimately, I'm striving to show up and participate in my masculine life alongside other masculine lives rather than "peep" from afar. Which takes me one more difficult level down...

Why I've Hooked Up with Men on the Internet

Beyond my baseline attraction and envy for men from afar, I've also directly interacted with men online in illicit ways, "virtually hooking up," in a sense. Again and again I've wondered, with increasing angst, why I've fallen into this rut, why this specific sexual pattern continues to repeat itself, and how I may escape it.

Unwanted continues to give me language for the things I unconsciously do. Just as one arousal blueprint was drawn up by all those underwear ads, aisles, and Google searches from childhood, another blueprint has been writing itself and repeating for years, if not decades.Here's what I'm determining thus far.

If I'm never going to mess around with other guys in real life, if I don't necessarily want to do so as someone on the asexuality spectrum, then this virtual outlet seems to satisfy some minimal sexual desire toward experiencing sex without actually experiencing sex.

It's like I'm "peeping" on sex rather than directly having sex firsthand, and this loophole has a strong pull on me.

Does that make sense?I'm still uncovering the patterns and desires with this level, but I also feel the virtual hookup lifestyle is one in which intimacy is conveniently short-circuited. Why be vulnerable with a friend or a community when I can just get off with a stranger online? It's "vulnerability" in another sense – though never a vulnerability that lasts. Never a vulnerability that sustains.

If the "fix" to my homosexuality is authentic interactions with men, if the "fix" to my isolation and envy is to participate and not spectate, then how do I overcome the pattern of virtual hookups? This false intimacy?

I suppose the answer is the pursuit of real intimacy.And, well -- that sucks. I hate real intimacy.

Or, rather, I've been wounded after experiencing real intimacy. I've gotten really, really close with men, both gay and straight, only for them to leave me, or for some conflict to erupt in which I desperately leave them.

When you experience genuine intimacy with someone, only for that intimacy to be ripped away, the pain is searing. It makes you wonder why you ever bothered to open up yourself.

It certainly makes you wonder why you'd ever bother to open up yourself again.

False intimacy is way easier to find on the internet than true intimacy in real life. Fake vulnerability is a far quicker fix than authentic vulnerability.But at what cost? For how long?

My journey toward healing in this particular area of sexual brokenness feels like a longer haul. I must learn to trade out the wrong intimacy, again and again and again, for the right sort. I feel as if this will take many, many years.

But I do want to heal. I do want to grow. I do want to reopen my heart, despite knowing all too well that this reopening will leave me greatly exposed.

God go with me. And God go with you, too.

How have you considered the patterns of your sexual brokenness? Where have you found positive alternatives to your sexual proclivities?