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“When Your Feelings Are For
Other Guys”
by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker
(with Mike Yorkey) We’ve been talking about sexual attraction to women. But as you read Every Young Man’s Battle, you may have been thinking of how its themes might apply to your feelings for men. If that’s true, we’re fairly confident there haven’t been many people for you to talk to regarding this same-sex attraction. And the fear of being discovered or rejected has no doubt kept you silent. But the attraction is there. You didn’t choose to be attracted to men, but you are. You may have been molested when you were younger, and that started the feelings. Even though it was abuse, you couldn’t figure out why it made you feel the way it did. And when it came to anything related to church, perhaps all you heard was condemnation. There are many theories about why you have the feelings you do. Some of them seem to make sense, and some don’t. But let us share with you what we believe makes the most sense. We want to help you understand why you feel the way you do and provide some hope for you. When a Foundation is Laid From the time you were born, your development unfolded in relationship to your mom and dad. Even if one of them wasn’t there, that fact was part of your developmental process. When childhood development occurs in a healthy home where a young boy feels balanced love flowing from a father and a mother, the foundation is laid for heterosexuality. If your father was there for you and acted as role model while expressing his love for you, then that gave you a sense of security in your manhood and total identity. As far as maleness goes, then, you felt complete. The area in which you felt incompleteness would be in femaleness. In a mode of experiencing completeness, you would be attracted to the thing you didn’t have, the thing that would complete you —and that would be someone of the opposite sex. This is an over-simplification of course, but an accurate description of male attraction to females. If you were raised by an emotionally distant father, or a male who was cruel, abusive, or absent, you might have developed a different sense of who you are. You may not have experienced a secure sense of identity and manhood. If no other man in your life was able to provide that, such as an uncle or a grandfather or a coach, then you were left with a sense of incompleteness that you probably didn’t even know was there. The result was for you to be attracted to what would provide that sense of completeness, and that was another male. The reactions of other boys may have complicated this sense of “lacking” for you. For example, if you weren’t into competitive sports and preferred art and drama, you may have felt as though you were an outcast. Boys your age may not have connected with you, and, in fact, they may have rejected you in order to secure their own sense of manhood. Some boys like to play with dolls rather than army men. If that was you, it was a setup for experiencing rejection by other boys and later by men. So it was only natural that you would long for what you didn’t have, which is a feeling of maleness and a connection to other men. If someone who was experienced in homosexual behavior came along and seduced you, then you probably felt at least some of the acceptance and connection that you’d been longing for. Attraction to men can also be intensified by a repulsion to women. If you had a mother or other female caretaker who was unhealthy and either smothered you out of her own selfishness or was cruel to you out of her own depravity, it would interrupt the development of an attraction to women. The last thing you would want to have would be a relationship with anyone who was anything like the woman you despised. Your comfort level with women would be minimal. That foundation made you an easy target if you were approached by another man. If these things ring true in your life, you’re one of thousands of confused and searching men who long to know what’s normal and how to experience it. This is where your choices come in, because there’s much hope for you, if you choose it. Change is Possible The world will tell you that you must act on your feelings — sexualize them — and only then will you feel whole. They’ll tell you that while your family or church will reject you, you’ll find completion in a world where homosexual sex is good and the attention you’ve always craved is available. You can listen to the world, or you can here another voice that appears fainter but grows stronger everyday. In the 1970s, the growing gay movement, along with liberal psychiatry establishments, was part of a major shift in the thinking about homosexuality. They were successful in having homosexuality deleted from the American Psychological Society’s list of mental disorders. Dr. Robert Spitzer helped lead that campaign, which made him a hero of the homosexual community at the time. Recently, however, Spitzer has published the results of his latest research — results that have made him less than popular with those who used to praise him. “Contrary to conventional wisdom,” he wrote, “some highly motivated individuals, using a variety of change efforts, can make substantial change in multiple indicators of sexual orientation. “ Essentially Spitzer wrote that if you have feelings for the same sex, and you’re highly motivated to change, you really do have a choice in who you are, who you become, and how you feel about yourself. His conclusions are based on interviews with two hundred men and women who shifted from homosexual to heterosexual attraction and stayed straight for five years. The reasons they were motivated to change were due to being burned out over a highly promiscuous lifestyle, unstable relationships, the desire to marry, and matters of their faith. Three-fourths of the men and half the women were married after giving up a life of homosexuality. Choose Your Actions What this should mean to you is that while you didn’t choose to have the feelings you have, you can choose what you do with them. While many voices in the world tell you there’s no choice in the matter, there’s plenty of evidence that you do have choices, and you can make changes in how you feel about yourself and others. So, if your dreams consist of sexual interludes with men, if you fantasize about having sex with men, and if you long to be with and lust after a man, you can change all of that, just as a man lusting after a woman can change his mind and his heart. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. Our thoughts on this topic aren’t very popular. But, neither are many of the other ideas we’ve presented here and in the original book, Every Man’s Battle. In that book, we published our e-mail addresses, just as we’ve done in this book. Why? Because we wanted to know whether men were doing what we suggested. We wanted to know whether they were successful in experiencing victory over sexual sin. We would have never been asked to write this book [Every Young Man’s Battle] for younger single men if the results of publishing Every Man’s Battle hadn’t been so profound. Every day we are reading e-mails from men, young adults, and teenagers who have struggled for years and found hope for the first time — heterosexual and homosexual. Gays and straights are doing the things we suggested, and they’re finding a victory that had escaped them before. You can trust us when we tell you there’s a way out. You do have a choice, and that choice will lead you to what God wants for you and to the relationships He has prepared for you. The path you choose is your decision, and we hope that this book’s content will motivate you. You can do what many other men with the same feelings as you have done. You can change and be successful in developing a new life.
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