GAY AS SELF REINVENTION

by Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D.

I would like to propose a socio-analytic view of the formation of gay identity. This view is based upon the perspective I have gained from the clinical treatment of over 400 homosexually-oriented men during eighteen years as a practicing psychologist.

“The gay identity” has been portrayed as a civil-rights and self-determination issue. We Americans, who love freedom, have loved it too much and have lost our moorings. Our most influential institutions–professional psychology and psychiatry, churches, the education establishment, and the media–have fallen to the gay deception. Because gay is, I am convinced, a self-deceptive identity.

“Gay” is Not “Homosexual”

First, let’s begin with the understanding that I will not be speaking about the person who struggles with same-sex attraction, but rather the gay-identified person–which is to say, that person who is ego-invested and personally identified with the idea that homosexual behavior is as normal and natural as heterosexual behavior.

Secondly, I wish to clarify my belief that there is no such thing as a gay person. Gay is a fictitious identity seized upon by an individual to resolve painful emotional challenges. The man who recognizes that he has a homosexual problem and struggles to overcome it is not “gay.” He is, simply, “homosexual.”

To believe in the concept of a gay identity as valid, a person must necessarily deny significant aspects of human reality. The foundation typically begins with a significant denial of human reality during early childhood.

I’d like to propose a three-step, psycho-social model for the development of a gay identity–first, beginning with the prehomosexual child and his gender distortions; second, with his later assimilation into the gay counterculture, which fosters those same distortions about self and humanity; and finally, concluding by describing how the gay community’s self-deception has expanded into the further deception of a large portion of society.

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