Same Sex Attraction: an Alternative View

An article by Fr. Anthony Percy on the Same Sex Attraction topic found in XT3. Let us know what you find interesting from the article in the comments section :)

Same Sex Attraction

I divide my presentation into two parts. In the first instance, I want to say something about one of our fundamental human desires – our desire for unity. Second, I want to make a few observations about the sexually saturated environment we live in. I hope that in doing so some light will be shed on same sex attraction.

A. The desire for Unity

Perhaps our greatest desire in life is to be one with ourselves, one with others and one with the Other – whom I call God. To be one with God, others and self is of course a desire to be at peace with God, with others and self.

It is no mistake, therefore, that the great commandment is: “Listen O Israel, the Lord our God is one God and you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, mind and soul.”

God himself is One – a Unity. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is a communion of love and truth – three persons who are distinct, but not separate. God is one.

In our frenetic modern world we need to take the advice of the great commandment and listen – that’s how the commandment begins. God wants to help us. He wants to communicate with us, but he can’t if we don’t stop and listen and reflect, not only to God, but to others, and importantly, to our selves.

The call God makes to us is to love him – to be one with him. And as we let ourselves be drawn to him we become one with him, with others and with ourselves. This is important. God wants “me” to be “me,” and if I let God have his way with “me,” then I will be “me” in the fullest sense. Thomas Merton (Seeds of Contemplation) once said that the reason people don’t become saints is because they refuse be themselves – that “they refuse to be their true selves.”

Many a philosopher, sociologist and psychologist have rightly noted that human beings deeply desire to be loved and to love. The desire to be loved and to love is nothing other than a manifestation of the deep, abiding desire we have within us for unity.

We search for this unity – consciously and unconsciously – in our human relationships. It is expressed in our friendships with both men and women.

Unity is not uniformity. This is an important point. When we fail to respect difference the result is uniformity and dependence. When we respect and love difference the result is unity and freedom. Difference is truth. This is especially true with sexuality.

We are either male or female. Pope John Paul II was insistent about this matter in his Theology of the Body (see my Theology of the Body Made Simple). A man is a particular manifestation or incarnation of what it is to be human. A woman is a particular incarnation of what it means to be human. Only when they form a one-flesh union in marriage do we have the fullest manifestation of what it means to be human. In this union between man and woman, humanity truly manifests the image and likeness of God.

Most people desire this one-flesh union. Celibate and married people alike have this wonderful desire to be one with someone of the opposite sex. Some of us express it in marriage, others like me choose not to do so, but rather channel the sex drive and the related emotions into a singular love we call Jesus Christ. This way the celibate life is not a negation – it is a reaching out to the Other.

This desire for unity with another human being of the opposite sex is dependent upon our being male and female. The male and female body literally fit together. When you love someone and want to be one with them, then you face them intimately and literally enter into them. The sexual organs of male and female are fit for this type of union. The man enters the woman; she receives him into her bodily person.

In addition, and this is equally important, the desire for unity also depends upon masculinity and femininity. To be a male is one thing, to be a man is another. To be a female is one thing, to be a woman is another. This maturation process – this transformation of maleness into masculinity, of femaleness in to femininity – is not a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t just happen. We have to work at it both personally and culturally.

That is to say, a cultural task awaits the newly born male and female baby. The task, with the help of significant others, is to become masculine if you are male and feminine if you are female.

Coming out of childhood the task is one of separation and formation of identity. For the girl, separation can be more problematical, since being female she easily identifies with her mother’s feminine identity. For the boy, formation of identity seems to be more critical.

The father is critical for both tasks. The father helps the girl separate from her mother. The girl finds it easy to relate to her mother since she is female, but the danger of dependence in the relationship exists if the father is not around and active in the life of his daughter. On the other hand, the father helps the boy to separate and to develop his masculine identity, since the little boy has spent most time with his mother. The father’s influence is critical to help the young man develop and nourish his masculine identity, otherwise delinquency is set in motion. The mother’s role should not be discounted, but usually mothers are not remiss in their responsibilities towards their children, although maternal irresponsibility is on the rise. The same cannot be said of men – hence the emphasis psychologists place on their role.

Of course things don’t always go according to plan. A priest friend of mine claims that there are two types of families – dysfunctional ones and really dysfunctional ones! Many psychologists have noted that often same sex attracted men have deficient relationships with their fathers and so their sense of masculine identity is not well formed. They enter into same sex attracted relationships to satisfy this unconscious need. That is, by entering into erotically charged relationships with other men, they are in fact reacting to a deep need that has not been met in their lives – that of being one and at peace with their masculine identity. In other words, their sexual desire for a person of the same sex is in fact a manifestation of the deep human desire for unity.

Consciously they desire unity with a person of the same sex, but unconsciously they are seeking to satisfy the desire for personal unity. They are searching for something they do not possess and deeply desire – masculine identity – and they are searching for it in the wrong place.

Not surprisingly, the therapy for same sex attracted men is twofold. One, they need to bring into consciousness the “father-wound” which causes an identity crisis and second, they need to enter into good wholesome relationships with men, without the relationships being sexually expressed.

The issue is obviously more complex, but I take my queue from people like Rick Fitzgibbons (Cf. Origins and Healing of Homosexuality), Joe Nicolosi (Cf. NARTH [National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality] website) and Bartholomew Kiely (Cf. The Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons: A Psychological Note, Osservatore Romano, 12 January 1987, p.6-7). All of them agree on the essentials: there is a wound, most likely from the father, perhaps from the rejection by the peer group and the homosexual behaviour is a form of unconscious acting out to satisfy a gender identity problem.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church recognizes not the origin of the wound, but the wound itself within the same sex attracted person when it says:

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, [this does not mean sinful, only homosexual acts are deemed so] constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. (CCC 2358 – My addition in the brackets)

B. Our sexually saturated society

It was G. K. Chesterton who said in 1926 that “there was more madness coming out of Manhattan than out of Moscow.” Moscow was a symbol for the communist revolution, while Manhattan was a symbol for the sexual revolution.

Communism proved an abject failure and has largely disappeared off the radar – although not completely. The sexual revolution continues on unabated. It has been a failure judging by the dislocation of so many peoples’ lives through marriage break up, family break down and sexual perversions of many varieties.

What has happened? To my mind a number of factors are responsible for the sexual revolution:

1. Society has reacted to an excessively puritanical view of sex
2. Easy access to contraception: Sex as recreation
3. The explosion of pornography in all media forms
4. The confusion between erotic love and sexuality
5. The decline of supernatural faith

I will say something about ii, iv, and v.

ii) It was Freud who said that at the heart of all sexual perversion is the dissociation of sex from procreation. For those of you who are interested in this intriguing and critical topic I direct you to two sources – Pope Paul VI encyclical letter called Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) published in 1968 and available on the Vatican website and Pope John Paul II Theology of the Body (and a summary argument found in the apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio, also on the Vatican website).

Freud’s insight should not be discounted. For when a couple deliberately intend to exclude life from their sexual acts they not only reject life, but in some mysterious way reject the very dignity of their spouse. I am not saying they do this deliberately, although it is not hard to see how a young man can “use” his girlfriend in having sex with her outside of marriage.

What I am saying is that when a couple directly exclude the possibility of children from their sex-act they discount an important dimension of what it means to be human – the potentiality and ability to generate and conceive life. That gift is intimately tied up with what it means to be human. To put it another way, isn’t there something exciting about engaging in an act that is full of love which has the possibility that another human person will come to be? Directly acting against this fundamental human value damages the view husband and wife have of each other. This may well be the reason why those people who are involved in natural fertility management have observed that when a man has a vasectomy, his wife begins to notice other men. Her husband is now a different man to the one she once knew.

So, what seemed to be a rather innocent act – sex without babies – has led to a loss of love between husband and wife. Pleasure is the only remnant and that won’t sustain a relationship for long. In fact, with babies and love dislodged from sex, pleasure takes centre stage. The Pandora’s Box is open. What would be wrong with solitary masturbation, fornication, adultery, oral sex, sex parties, mutual masturbation, etc.? Since all that is left of sex is pleasure, it can now become a sort of casual indoor sport. The value of the sex-act as a love and life act is no longer in play.

Kiely noted in his study of 1,000 same sex attracted men (Cf. A Psychological Note to The Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, Osservatore Romano, 1986) that there are three types of homosexual men. There is the real homosexual – that is, the man who is deeply attracted to other men. There is the occasional homosexual who has had a one-off experience and is confused about his sexual orientation and finally there is the erotic homosexual who engages in sex with other men for no other reason than it brings him pleasure.

The allure of contraception is strong. After all, if you can take an aspirin tablet for a headache, then why not take a pill, wear a condom, insert an IUD, have a tubal ligation or vasectomy to avoid a baby. Fertility, of course, is not a sickness as is the case with a headache, but the temptation is nevertheless strong. However, the effects of contraception cannot be ignored. The essential momentum of contraception is first a no to life, then a no to love and then just pleasure. Think for instance of this consequence. Normally in the sexual act only a woman can fall pregnant, but in contracepted sex no one can fall pregnant. This has clear implications for the “feminine genius.” The woman is stripped of her dignity of being the life bearer. That “space for another” (to use another phrase of John Paul II) is longer part of her feminine beauty. No longer is difference respected and loved, but the woman is now asked to be more like man. This surely has repercussions for relationships between men and women and sexuality.

Contraception, by dissociating sex from procreation, has clearly fuelled homosexual activity, since the message is that sex is about pleasure and not about life and love. If I can have sex with a woman and not bother about babies, then why can’t I have sex with a man? Why can’t I get together with any number of people, both women and men, and have sex party?

iv) Rollo May, an American Philosopher, noted that the “modern world has been in flight from eros and the vehicle it uses is sex.” (Love and Will, 1969, p.73)

There are a number of words in Latin and Greek which are used to describe the different forms of love. For instance, in Latin we have amor, dilectio and caritas. In Greek, we have eros, philia and agape.
When speaking of the love of Christ we use the words agape and caritas. It denotes the self-sacrificing love of Christ – a love unto death. Philia is the love of friendship. Dilectio is akin to the decision to love someone for their own sake. Amor is the basic emotion of love. Surprisingly enough, St. Thomas Aquinas says that this kind of love is more important than dilectio. That is, God is able to draw us to himself much more effectively by the love-emotion/passion of amor than we are able to draw close to him by our willing through dilectio.

Eros is the desire to love and be loved. Stanislaw Greigel has written that eros is essentially the “desire for the salvific presence of the other.” But what has happened is that the term has suffered a narrowing of meaning and now we understand eros to be solely concerned with the sexual drive.

It is not hard to see how this has taken place. We deeply desire the presence of another person and we sense that they will help to save us. Such was undoubtedly the case with Adam and Eve. But with sin and death entering the world, we easily confuse the desire for another person with a desire to have sex with them. Researchers, for instance, have noticed that young women, who are not appreciated by their fathers in any sort of meaningful way, will more likely enter into promiscuous lifestyles. They are searching for eros, but mistake sex for it.

The point is not that sex is bad (see my book, Sex Love in Christian Marriage) On the contrary, sex is a marvellous reality since it is supposed to be a profound experience of unity which actually serves the love between husband and wife. The mantra is: sex serves marriage, marriage serves family and family serves society. At the heart of it all, however, is not sex, but eros – the desire for the salvific presence of the other.

In relation to same sex attraction, I simply note what I have said above. Men who have an identity wound should be encouraged to construct many healthy relationships with other men, which do not involve intimate contact. This way they will come to understand the primary importance of eros and not sex as such. To desire another person, more often than not, does not mean that I desire to have sex with them.

v) “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen” – according to the Letter to the Hebrews (11,1). God promises us abundant and joyful life through the death and resurrection of his Son. We place our hope in this promise. Faith is also the conviction of things unseen. God is the almighty and providential Father who cares for us and thus relieves us of all worry and anxiety. God is faithful to his promises as we humans often are not. If we let go of this faith, then life changes dramatically. We are on our own and our task of walking the path of life becomes almost impossible. This holds true with our moral life – perhaps especially so.

Conclusion

Those among us who experience same sex attraction deserve respect, compassion and sensitivity. My experiences in the confessional or through various forms of pastoral counselling have confirmed this. Like all of us, they have wounds that can only be healed by entering into the wounds of Christ crucified and risen. In embracing Christ they will discover something even more marvellous – Christ embracing them.