Homosexual Drives
The ” Search for Love and Affection”
“Male affect starvation”, Green (1987, 377) believes, “may motivate the later search for love and affection from males.” Many modern homosexuality investigators have made this point. It is true provided one takes the masculinity inferiority complex with its self-pity into account. The boy may indeed have painfully missed the esteem and interest of his father, in other cases of his brother(s), or of his male peers, which made him feel inferior to other males. The ensuing urge for love is in fact the urge to belong to the men’s world, to receive the recognition and friendship of those to whom he feels inferior.
At this point, we must avoid a common misunderstanding: There is a popular idea that people who did not receive (enough) love in childhood and who were psychologically affected by it will be cured if they now receive the lacking quantity of affection. Several therapeutic approaches have been based on this premise. But it is not that simple. First, it is not the objective lack of love that counts so much as the child’s perception of it — and that by definition remains subjective. Children may misinterpret their parents’ behavior and, with their tendency to dramatize themselves, may imagine they are not wanted, that their parents are terrible, and so. Beware of taking the adolescent’s view of his parents’ treatment of him as an objective report!
Moreover, the “void of love” is not filled simply by pouring love into it. To be sure, that would be the solution the adolescent who feels lonely or inferior himself seeks and believes in. “If I receive the love I missed so much, I shall be happy,” he imagines. But in accepting this theory one overlooks an essential psychological fact: the existence of the attachment to self-pity. Before the young person has become wont to experience himself as pitiable, affection indeed can help overcome his frustration. But once the “poor me” attitude has taken root, his love-seeking is no longer a functional, remedial drive, objectively aimed at reparation. It has become part of his self-dramatizing attitude: “I shall never get the love I want!” It is an insatiable longing, never to be fulfilled. The search for same-sex love of the homosexual is a yearning that will not stop so long as the “poor me” attitude from which it flows remains alive. It was Oscar Wilde who complained, “I have always sought love and all I could find were lovers.” The mother of a lesbian daughter who committed suicide observed: “All her life, Helen was looking for love,” but of course she never found it (Hanson 1965, 189). Why not? Because she was addicted to her adolescent self-pity about not being loved by other women. Put otherwise, she was a “tragic adolescent.” Homosexual love stories are dramas, not only frequently but by their essence. The more lovers, the less the sufferer will be satisfied.
This mechanism of pseudo-reparation that operates likewise in other affection-seeking people, and many neurotics recognize in themselves. For example, a young woman had a series of male lovers, all of whom were comforting father figures to her. She felt badly treated by each of them in his turn, for she constantly pitied herself about not being loved (her relationship with father had been the starting point of her complex). How can affection cure one who is obsessed with the tragic idea of being “the rejected one?”
Seeking love as a means of comforting one’s hurts may be passive and ego-centered. The other person is there only to love the “poor me.” This is begging for love, not really mature loving. A homosexual may feel that he is the affectionate, loving and protecting one, but in effect this is a game to attract the other to himself. It is all embedded in sentimentality and is profoundly narcissistic.
Homosexual “Love”
The self-pitying adolescent admires exactly those who possess — as he sees it, anyhow — the characteristics he is lacking. As a rule of thumb, the heart of a homosexual’s inferiority complex may be deduced from the traits he or she most admires in others of the same sex. If Leonardo da Vinci sought uncivilized boys of the street, we have reason to suppose he viewed himself as overly well-behaved and well-bred. French novelist Andre Gide felt he was an inhibited Calvinist boy who could not make contacts with the more adventurous boys of his age, and from that frustration sprang his frenetic admiration of boyish “good for nothings” and his longing for playful, intimate friendships with them. The boy with the worrisome, nonaggressive mother started admiring “soldier types” because he felt quite the opposite. Most homosexual men feel attracted to “masculine” young men, athletic types, men who are cheerful and make friends easily. Their masculinity inferiority complex becomes more apparent by that — effeminate men are unattractive to most homosexual men. The stronger a woman’s lesbian emotions are, the less feminine she usually feels, and the more she looks for feminine types. Both partners of a homosexual “couple” — at least initially — are attracted to traits of physique of behavior in the other with regard to maleness that they feel they themselves do not have. In other words, they view the other’s masculinity of femininity as “better” than their own, although in fact both may be deficient in masclinity or femininity. It is the same as with other inferiority complexes: one looks up to other people who are thought to possess the capacity or trait with regard to which one feels justified. Apart from that, the man most desired for his mascline qualities or the woman most desired for her femininity is hardly ever available for a homosexual man or lesbian woman, because precisely these types are usually heterosexual.
For the adolescent who feels inferior, admiration of idealized same-sex types produces eroticization. For what is desired is a close, exclusive, affectionate intimacy, warmth for the poor desolate soul one is. In puberty, not only is it common to idealize a person or a type of person but also to experience diffuse erotic feelings in connection with such persons. The need to be affirmed by an idol whose body and appearance are so highly admired, sometimes with desperate jealousy, may become a desire to be caressed and cherished by him or her, leading to erotic reveries.
A boy who feels like a sissy may in his fantasy be aroused by what he in his immature view sees as masculine symbols: men in leather clothes, with mustaches, driving motorcycles, aand so on. Many homosexuals have a sexuality centered on fetishes. They are obsessed with underwear, a large penis, and so on, all indications of their pubertal sexual life.
Adolescent eroticization of same-sex idols is not extraordinary in itself. The relevant question is why it becomes overwhelming in some, blocking most, if not all, heterosexual interests. The answer, as we have seen, lies in the adolescent’s deep feelings of inferiority in relation to his same-sex peers, his feelings of “not belonging”, and his self-pity. There is a parallel phenomenon in heterosexuality: girls who most hysterically idolize male pop-stars are likely to be the ones who feel lonely and think they are unattractive to boys. For the homosexually inclined, the stronger the feeling of being hopelessly “different”, the stronger the fascination with same-sex idols.
Aardweg, G. (1997). The Battle for Normality: A Guide for (Self-)Therapy for Homosexuality. San Francisco: Ignatius Press
