Gay in the closet
My 50 years of Gay (But most of it was spent deep in the closet)
Michael* ponders how his life might have been if he’d felt capable to come out as gay earlier in experience, and how community team support can make a difference now . . .
OK, in retrospect I’ve probably been gay for more than 50 years, but it was around 1967, when I was at the tender age of 13, that I began to see my friends in a unused light, and it dawned on me that some of them were rather good-looking.
Prior to this, I’d always preferred to be around other boys, girls just didn’t interest me.
I remember at primary academy, when I was probably only about 5 or 6 years old, I used to prefer existence with the other boys, and as I got a bit older it was boys that I spent my playtimes with, both in and out of school.
There were lots of girls in the neighbourhood, but it seemed that boys played with boys, and girls played with girls, and that suited me perfectly.
At the age of 7, I had been enrolled into the Cubs, so even more of my spare time was spent with other boys. In reality, I remained an active member of the Scouting movement until I left home for university some 11 years later.
Starting secondary scho
The Closet: Psychological Issues of Being In and Coming Out
In the jargon of contemporary homosexual society, those who mask their sexual identities are referred to as either closeted or said to be in the closet. Revealing one's homosexuality is referred to as coming out. Clinical life with gay patients reveals hiding and revealing behaviors to be psychologically complex.
Homosexual Identities
In the developmental histories of same-sex attracted men and women, periods of difficulty in acknowledging their homosexuality, either to themselves or to others, are often reported. Children who grow up to be gay rarely receive family aid in dealing with antihomosexual prejudices. On the contrary, launch in childhood--and distinguishing them from racial and ethnic minorities--gay people are often subjected to the antihomosexual attitudes of their own families and communities (Drescher et al., 2004). Antihomosexual attitudes contain homophobia (Weinberg, 1972), heterosexism (Herek, 1984), moral condemnations of homosexuality (Drescher, 1998) and antigay aggression (Herek and Berrill, 1992). Hiding activities learned in childhood often persist into young adulthood, middle age an
The Closet
Teaching and Learning
by Amin Ghaziani | September 27, 2017 | Summer 2017
How many Americans do you consider are gay or lesbian? Take a minute, think about it, and grab your best predict .
You’re probably erroneous.
Like most of us, you may have overestimated the population. “The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian,” notes the Gallup polling organization. The table below shows the responses that Gallup received in 2011 and then in 2015 to the question, “Just your best assume, what % of Americans today would you say are gay or lesbian?”
Only 9% of Americans correctly estimate the size of the gay and sapphic population at somewhere under 5%. Why are we so far off? Part of the explanation comes from people’s misunderstanding of social statistics. We build similar mistakes when we estimate the size of racial and ethnic populations. Gallup remarks, “Americans estimate that a third of the U.S. population is black, and consider almost three in 10 are Hispanic, more than twice what the actual percentages were as measured by the census.” The beat educated you are, the lower (and m
The ‘Global Closet’ is Huge—Vast Majority of World’s Lesbian, Gay, Bi Population Hide Orientation, YSPH Explore Finds
The vast majority of the world’s sexual minority population — an estimated 83 percent of those who identify as dyke, gay or bisexual — hold their orientation hidden from all or most of the people in their lives, according to a new study by the Yale School of Public Health that could have major implications for global public health.
Concealing one’s sexual orientation can lead to significant mental and physical health issues, increased healthcare costs and a dampening of the common visibility necessary for advancing same rights, said John Pachankis, Ph.D., associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health. He co-authored the study with Richard Bränström, an associate professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and research affiliate at Yale.
Published in the journal PLOS ONE, the study is believed to be the first endeavor to quantify the size of the “global closet” in instruct to gauge its public health impact.
“Given rapidly increasing acceptance of sexual minorities in some countries, it might be easy to assume that most sexual minorities are