You're Out. Now What?
A common clinical phenomenon has dawned on me just in advance of October 11, National Coming Out Day. I’ve encountered a number of gay men that are newly out in a bustling yet overlapping/six degrees of separation/”everyone knows your business” LGBTQ community. They pose some configuration of the basic question “well now what?”.
Even as a gay practitioner this can be a daunting social identity subject to address. I often refer clients - or we review it ourselves - to the Cass Model of Identity.
So where do we go? Two directions at least: on the one hand utter cynicism and on the other hand utter lovestruck lunacy. To be sure each has merits and drawbacks. Insecure attachment, which most of us display to some extent, keeps us on guard. The debilitating possibility of rejection is too great a blow to weather. If we avoid it altogether, we keep our egos intact. This of course comes at the significant expense of missing deep emotional intimacy with a romantic and/or sexual partner. The hopeless romantic experiences the inverse. A certain imperviousness to rejection hurls one through rejection to the moving target of “true love,” whatever the hell that is. Most of us lack this extreme band of imperviousness and when we face inevitable rejection need time to nurse our wounds and guard against further affront. These exist in a dichotomy, a wide-range spectrum of attachment styles and trajectories toward intimacy, or isolation. Likely you will find yourself vacillating on the spectrum, making adjustments in an attempt to best meet your needs with your ego intact. For more on gay courtship and intimacy in particular, check out http://www.alandowns.com/ and http://www.robertweissmsw.com/.
So all of this is somewhat heartening on the dating realm, whenever that seems feasible. What about sex?
Sex is anything but one size fits all. To my knowledge there isn’t a continuum that can contain it, even if you’re conceptualizing some kind of vanilla-kink continuum. So while there’s little in the way of direction, which can be frustrating and overwhelming, the silver lining is that you’re at the helm. You set the course.
A good place to get off - jump off - is masturbation. Nobody knows you better than you, and it follows that a good comfort level with your own body and sexual imaginings will translate to an at least passable comfort with someone else’s body - or bodies - and sexual imaginings. Therapy, and sex therapy in particular, is a critical tool in challenging guilt and shame around sex - including but not limited to masturbation - and enriching your sex life and relationships.There are about as many ways to masturbate as there are masturbators. So, it’s unlikely that you’re doing it wrong, and it’s likely a good idea to mix it up. Humans crave novelty and nowhere is this more apparent than in sex.
http://www.brightfire.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Journal-of-Homosexuality-1979.pdf
http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins.pdf
http://www.fau.edu/athenenoctua/pdfs/William%20Siegfried.pdf
http://www.jackinworld.com