Sexual Victimization of Boys by Men: Meanings and Consequences
by Richard B. Gartner, Ph.D.

This paper was published in the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy (1999), 3:1-33.


Abstract

Sexual abuse of boys by men and older boys has been misunderstood in the professional and lay literatures. Confusing same-sex victimization with homosexual orientation, many abused boys, and people they talk to about it, understand it as a sign of the victim's or the abuser's homosexuality. This confuses how a boy processes his victimization, whether he was previously headed for a homosexual or heterosexual orientation. Gay boys may see it as a sexual initiation rather than an abusive exploitation; straight boys may understand it as a sign that they are "really" gay. In addition, gay boys may fear that their orientation derives from their sexual abuse history. Both straight and gay boys may consider that the abuse is a sign that they are unmanly and weak.

 

Sexual Victimization of Boys by Men: Meanings and Consequences

In the outpouring of books and papers on childhood sexual abuse that have appeared since 1980, the emphasis has primarily been on sexually abused girls and their reactions to the abuse as women. While most writers acknowledge that boys are also subject to sexual abuse, the focus on women has misleadingly implied that the occurrence of sexual abuse among boys is rare. But, as Holmes and Slap (1998) conclude, "the sexual abuse of boys is common, underreported, underrecognized, and undertreated" (p. 1860); approximately one in six boys experiences direct sexual contact with an adult or older child by age sixteen (Urquiza and Keating, 1990; Lisak, Hopper, and Song, 1996). Often abusers are parents or other adults who violated positions of power and trust. This results in a shattering of the natural trust a boy has in the adults who care for him.

I have elsewhere (Gartner, 1999; see also Gartner, 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, and 1997b) addressed a number of issues related to the sexual abuse of boys and its aftermath as boys become men. These include how to define sexually abusive situations for boys; sexually abused men's social isolation and shame; the effects of masculine gender socialization on processing boyhood sexual abuse; the likelihood that sexual abuse of boys by women will be encoded as "sexual initiation"; the impact of boyhood sexual abuse on adult sexual and other intimate relationships; the benefits for sexually abused men of same-sex analytic group therapy; and the intense transference/countertransference interplay in the treatment of these men. In this article, I will focus on the meaning and aftereffects of same-sex molestation for boys, whether they are headed for predominantly heterosexual or predominantly homosexual orientations.

Same-Sex Abuse, Masculine Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation
Same-sex abuse is often interpreted as a sign of the victim's or the abuser's homosexuality. Yet victims are frequently headed for predominantly heterosexual orientations at the time they are sexually abused, and continue on that path, albeit with negative aftereffects; and, as discussed below, virtually all male abusers consider themselves to be heterosexual. Confusion of same-sex abuse with homosexuality or a gay identity gets further complicated when considered in the context of masculine gender ideals. In turn, they both interact with a man's understanding of his own sexual orientation and any ambivalence he feels about himself as an erotic, sexual being. These are all complex, interrelated subjects for a male victim of childhood sexual abuse. As such themes emerge in treatment, both therapist and patient may be unclear about which is the crucial thread at any given moment. A man may easily confuse shame about victimization with shame about same-sex behavior, or shame about homosexual wishes, or even shame about feeling sexual desire. It is important to track the patient's subtle shifts in focus as he moves from one of these feelings to another.

Most studies of boyhood sexual victimization demonstrate that boys are more often abused by men and older boys than by women and older girls. In one large sample of college men, among those who reported boyhood sexual abuse histories, 61 percent had male abusers, 28 percent had female abusers, and 11% percent reported having both male and female abusers (Lisak, et al., 1996). Thus, large numbers of men in the general population have histories of same-sex sexual victimization as boys.

As they attempt to process their abuse histories, many of these men are trapped by cultural norms that regard "real" men as being in charge of themselves and, therefore, who cannot be victimized, that masculine men don't express emotions, and that men are competitive and resilient, and "independent" rather than "needy." Men abused as boys may be particularly affected by these norms, which can create great confusion and internal turmoil for them. In addition, self concepts in relation to both sexual orientation and gender identity have not yet coalesced for boys and adolescents. Fears, prejudices, and misinformation about both sexual orientation and gender identity are particularly prominent in adolescence, when both are being consolidated. Because of their traumatization, sexually abused boys may continue to understand their own or others' masculinity and orientation in the literal and concrete way they conceptualized them at the time they were victimized (Shapiro, 1994). Thus, sexual abuse may cause boys to retain the black-and-white views of homosexuality, heterosexuality, masculinity, and femininity that are characteristic of childhood and adolescence.

A sexually abused boy may have particular trouble in relation to sexual orientation and masculine identity if he encodes his experience as a "feminizing" victimization. In the context of their masculine gender socialization, most men cannot even visualize themselves as victims (Morris et al., 1997). Lew (1988) explains that "our culture provides no room for a man as victim. Men are simply not supposed to be victimized. . . . If men aren't to be victims . . . , then victims aren't men" (p. 41). Or, as Crowder (1995) puts it, "Our culture has no mythology to identify the process of male victimization and boy victims are emasculated by this bias. They are either seen as being like a woman and therefore feminized, as being powerless and therefore flawed, or as being interested in sex with men and therefore homosexual" (p. 12).

Masculine gender identity struggles are rooted in a fear of forfeiting a self-definition as a man. This self concept can be thought of as achieved through disidentifying with qualities that signify being female (see Greenson, 1966, 1968; Stoller, 1968, 1985; Fast, 1984; Weeks, 1985; and Pollack, 1990, 1995, 1998). The disidentification with femaleness seems to originate in a very young boy's need to define himself as different from the mother with whom he identified in his earliest years. In this schema, "homosexuals" are seen as men who have not successfully differentiated themselves from their female identity. Since women and "homosexuals" are seen as passive and penetrable, men must experience themselves as active and impenetrable to maintain a sense of themselves as men. Therefore, sexual victimization brings up concerns about sexual orientation when a boy equates victimization with passivity, and passivity in turn with homosexuality (Nasjleti, 1980). This is especially true when a boy is sexually victimized by a man. Such a betrayal is apt to be regarded by the boy or by anyone who hears about the molestation as something to hide, specifically, a worrisome indication that the boy is gay (see Johanek, 1988; Sepler, 1990; and Struve, 1990). Fears of homosexuality thus may especially interfere with the ability to process same-sex abuse, whether a boy is headed for a predominantly heterosexual or predominantly homosexual orientation.

Molestation by a man is likely to undermine any boy's sense of both his gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as bring up worries about why he was chosen as a victim (Nasjleti, 1980; Finkelhor, 1984; Bruckner and Johnson, 1987; Dimock, 1988; Lew, 1988; Bolton, Morris, and MacEachron, 1989; Struve, 1990; Mendel, 1995). In most instances, sexually abusive behavior is fundamentally about power and aggression rather than about sexuality. Even when homosexual desire is not the motivating force in a molestation, however, as Pescosolido (1989) notes, "[T]he victim's perception is that of being involved in homosexual behavior. As a result, [he] is left with emotional confusion regarding his developing psychosexual identity. Essentially the victim may believe that something within himself almost magically communicated a homosexual invitation prompting the molestation" (p. 89; emphasis added).

Pescosolido adds that there is even more uncertainty for the victim if he becomes erect or ejaculates during the abuse (see also Ehrenberg, 1992). While these are the normal physiological responses to stimulation, the abused boy may feel they provide proof of his participation in the act. Thus the boy, and later the man, may ask himself, "Was I chosen because I seemed interested? Was I interested? Did he know I was not man enough to resist? Did my 'femininity' or 'sissiness' show enough to attract his attention?"

Clinical work with Greg illustrates a number of these confusions about masculine gender identity and homosexual orientation. He was a boy growing up gay who had already in some ways integrated or accepted his sexual interest in men before he was abused by his father and grandfather. (These early abuse experiences set the stage for a prolonged sexually abusive relationship with the pastor of a religious cult when Greg was a young adult). Indeed, Greg's early recognition of his homosexuality actually helped him confirm for himself that he had been abused.

Greg remembered being interested in boys and men from early childhood. As an adult, he recalled his earliest pubescent fantasies and came to feel that they were confirming evidence of sexual abuse by his father. Although he had clear memories of his grandfather exposing himself to Greg when Greg was of latency age, his memories of abuse by his father were more shadowy. But he told me, with great embarrassment, that as a young adolescent he had had overwhelming, frank, consuming sexual fantasies about his father. Later, he began to think this was abnormal, and said, "I used to think it was because I was gay -- yet another shameful thing about being gay -- that I had sexual fantasies about my father. Then, as I grew up, I suddenly wondered -- do straight men have sexual fantasies about their mothers? I don't think so -- not like I did, not all the time. Something was definitely going on between us if I was having fantasies like that. But I always thought it was just me and my dirty, evil mind." Thus, while Greg was never in doubt about his homosexual orientation, the way he thought about his homosexuality (and, indeed, his sexuality) was adversely affected by his sexual abuse.

Greg discerned at one point that his bewilderment about his gender identity as a boy might have been related to a similar confusion on his father's part. He revealed that his father used to say to him when he was small, "When I was your age, I was a girl." At first, Greg interpreted this as an example of his father's inauthenticity. But as we investigated the meaning behind the father's words we both began to wonder what the father's fantasy had meant. Given his father's general inexpressiveness and rigidity, it seemed impossible that he was playfully conveying a flexibility about his own internalized gender self-concepts. We wondered whose "girl" the father had been. His mother's? His father's? Was the father ever allowed by them to be a girl, whatever that meant to him? Or did he have to hide his fantasy from the adults in his life? Had the father been abused? Did he feel like a girl because of such childhood sexual abuse? Greg noted that when he was a child his father had often acted in hypermasculine ways. For example, he used to do handstands on the beach and show off his physique. Greg now wondered whether this was a counterphobic reaction to a "girlness" he felt inside. He also remembered that, unusually in their culture, his father had not minded when Greg dressed up in girl's clothes as a little boy, though the father later seemed ashamed of this behavior. Was Greg living out unresolved gendered fantasies for his father?

We then wondered about his father's reactions to Greg's homosexuality. Did the father himself have secret homosexual wishes as represented by the fantasy that he had been a girl when he was young? Had he communicated these wishes to Greg by saying he used to be a girl? Had whatever sexuality that went on between Greg and his father, whether overt or covert, been an acting out of such homosexual desires on the father's part? Or was it a representation of the power relationship between the two, as sexual abuse and rape often turn out to be? Considering questions like these gave us a more complex understanding of Greg's responses to his abuse as well as to his homosexuality and self-concept as a man.


Primary Object Choice and Gender of the Abuser
A boy's confusion about his masculinity and sexual orientation is particularly problematic if his abuse runs counter to his own object choice. Men are especially likely to think of their abuse as "sexual initiation" if the abuser is not a parent and is of the same sex as the boy's eventual primary sexual object choice. In other words, a straight man who was abused by a sister or a female baby-sitter, or a gay man who was abused by an uncle or a male camp counselor, often thinks of the episode as one he should have liked or actually did like, rather than as anxiety-laden or abusive.

Thus, a boy who has been headed for a predominantly heterosexual orientation is likely not to consciously consider molestation by a woman to be abusive. If he is abused by a man, however, he may perceive the very fact of his molestation as a shameful sign of "queerness" or femininity (Sepler, 1990; Struve, 1990). He may fear that he somehow invited the abuse and therefore is "really" interested in men. Or he may wonder why he was chosen by a man as a sexual target, and whether having been chosen means he is "truly homosexual." Whether he is aroused or not during the abuse, he may fearfully assume he is "really" gay.

Meanwhile, a boy with even a partial awareness of being headed toward a predominantly homosexual orientation may be repulsed and frightened by sexual activity with a woman. When the abuser is a man, however, he may feel excited by what he considers a "sexual initiation." On the other hand, sexually abused boys who are predominantly homosexual may feel the abusive experience prematurely rushed them into defining themselves as gay. The problem is thus made more complicated when we take into account how far the boy's conscious understanding of his sexual orientation and identity has developed at the time of the abuse.

Among the gay men I have treated, many did not initially encode premature sex as betrayal. Men in this subgroup considered the sexual events they experienced to have been pleasurable, even though each demonstrated sequelae that suggested the experiences had abusive and traumatizing aspects. Owen, who is discussed at greater length below, maintained that at age twelve he could not have been abused by an older man because he was already interested in sex with men. It was not until late in his psychotherapy that he considered whether his life-long propensity to be exploited and to feel victimized might be related to this early "affair." Similarly, as a boy and adolescent Jared thought he was not especially affected by what he considered excited, willing, and pleasurable participation in sex at age five with a teenage boy. In his case, however, he realized before ever entering therapy that the experience had severe, adverse effects on his adult relationships.

The picture is very different when the abuser's gender does not match the boy's eventual predominant primary object choice. What follows are brief examples of the likely reactions of boys abused by adults of the opposite sex from their eventual predominant primary object choice. Yale, for example, was a gay man who was abused by a nun when he was a second grader. His scornful attitudes toward others, especially the women in his adult life and the presumably straight boys he seduced in high school, were closely connected to his continuing clear inner sense of having been abused and exploited by her. He openly loved "getting back" at heterosexuals, whom he considered to have mistreated him in many ways all his life. Conversely, Quinn, a straight man who was abused by his grandfather for years from the time he was a preschooler , and Harris, a straight man abused by his father during his latency years, both felt victimized and continued to harbor both rage and dread about men, particularly those in authority. Each felt a mixture of fear, yearning, and contempt about the possibility of intimate relatedness with other men (see the discussion of these issues below).

Encoding Male Abuse of Homosexual Boys
Like a heterosexual boy abused by a woman, if a boy growing up to be gay is abused by a man he may think he deliberately sought or at least enjoyed his victimization. Such sexual activity may indeed sometimes appear consensual. In most cases, however, true assent is not possible in this interaction. Children do not have the capacity to give informed consent to sexual activities with adults. A child is not developmentally capable of considering or comprehending the emotional implications of sexual behavior with an adult. For this reason, sexual acts between children and people who have power over them are implicitly abusive. This is true if the power derives from the actual structure of the relationship (as in the case, for example, of a child abused by a baby-sitter, teacher, or parent). But it may be equally true if the power is inferred by the child because of the age difference between him and the abuser (as in the case, for example, of a young boy abused by a neighborhood teenager who is not his caretaker). It is also usually true even if the child appears to ask for or participate in the sexual activity. There is a big difference between the inviting flirtatious behavior characteristic of children whose sexuality is beginning to emerge and a child's actual wish, for example, to have a penis in his mouth. When this difference is ignored, the child is abused by having the natural developmental unfolding of his sexuality violated and hurried into awareness. His very childhood is assaulted.

I differentiate here between abusive behavior and the traumatic or nontraumatic impact of this behavior. Sexually abusive behavior involves using a power relationship in order to satisfy the abuser's needs without regard to the needs of the person being abused. By contrast, trauma refers here to the devastating effect sexual abuse usually has on the victim. It is possible for a child to be abused without suffering severe symptoms of trauma. Behavior that is abusive and betraying may therefore in some cases not be traumatic to the victim. In these relatively rare situations, a boy who has been sexually abused may not feel traumatized, particularly if he is past puberty, if the abuser is the same gender as the boy's sexual object choice (whether same or opposite sex), and if the abuse was not violent or otherwise obviously coercive. However, the nontraumatic impact on the victim does not make the behavior itself less abusive. The adult is acting to alleviate some sort of internal psychological pressure. However he rationalizes his behavior, he is not acting in the interests and needs of the child, who in most cases is better served by not being sexual in an "adult" way.

Some boys who seem willing to engage in sex at the time, or who even appear to welcome it, may nevertheless suffer traumatic responses from their sexual exploitation. An adult has no way of knowing whether a specific boy will be traumatized by a sexual experience. For example, Abe was a gay man who as a boy was locked into a relationship with his narcissistic mother that was simultaneously sexually overstimulating and verbally abusive. By age twelve, he was regularly looking to be picked up by older men. Many of these men were interpersonally cold and hurtful to Abe during sexual encounters. Yet at the time he felt good about being chosen by them. It did not occur to him until he was in his fifties that he had perpetuated with them a pattern of being exploited and abused, and that they had been pedophiles who took advantage of his neediness, an interpersonal pattern he had continued throughout his adult life.

Gay men have occasionally asserted -- sometimes convincingly -- that they were not hurt by premature sexual experiences with men. Far more often, however, as in Abe's case, there are both subtle and obvious negative sequelae. The possibility of trauma is therefore always present. Since it is not possible for an adult to know whether a set of behaviors will be traumatic to a boy, I believe that an adult's sexual behavior with a child is exploitative and abusive even if in a particular case the results turn out to be benign and/or nontraumatic.

We have to be very careful when considering this issue, as gay boys are likely to think of premature sex as "sexual initiation." Later on, as men, they may continue to think of their early sexual experience as positive, and not connect it to a whole range of symptomotology often associated with sexual abuse histories. These may include social isolation, nonintimate relationships, sexual dysfunction, dissociative episodes, secrecy, shame, emotional and behavioral constriction, suicidality, inability to control rage, and compulsive behaviors like drug addiction, alcoholism, gambling, overeating, and sexual compulsivity. Such symptoms are more likely to be present in men with histories of premature sexual activity who come for treatment -- even those who do not consider sexual abuse to be a problem -- than in nonabused men who enter psychotherapy.

Nevertheless, if a man claims that premature sex that took place in an abusive situation was not traumatic, or even claims that it was desired by him, this must be accepted as a possibility. At the same time, the therapist should continue to listen for other, less conscious reactions. For instance, the therapist should evaluate whether the patient has an exaggerated capacity for denial and a consequent inability to appraise realistically the effects of abusive behavior. Likewise, the therapist and the abused man need to look at how the man's life is going, assessing, for example, whether on some level there are repetitions of abusive patterns in his current relationships, and judging whether there is a general emotional sparseness and constriction in his life arising from deprivations that accompanied the betrayal. Even if we accept the man's positive or neutral feelings about the experience and his belief that the outcome was benign or positive, the therapist may need to help him come to terms with the feelings that he was exploited.

Encoding sexual victimization by a man may be especially complicated because being involved in erotic same-sex behavior may itself be experienced as shameful, and may give cause for others to consider the boy himself depraved or wanton. Wright (1995) describes how a thirteen-year-old boy, not a hustler, was arrested along with the adult man who was having sex with him. Instead of being treated as a victim of a crime, however, the boy was himself charged with sexual immorality. This makes sense only if we believe the socialized masculine gender norm that boys, whether gay or straight, are in charge of themselves, sexually and otherwise, and therefore are totally responsible for all their actions.

Consider Owen, who came to treatment in his retirement years. He was a man with complex reactions to his homosexuality, to being exploited by his family, and to his sexual betrayal by an older man throughout his adolescence. The complexities of these experiences led him to believe for the rest of his life that he had not been sexually abused, even though he freely acknowledged that if he were to hear of a child going through experiences identical to his own, he would try to protect the child from them.

Owen grew up in a family whose roots in its Midwestern community went back many decades before his birth. His family was respectable and hardworking, though never wealthy. Indeed, during Owen's formative years in the Great Depression they were quite poor, although never in an absolutely disastrous financial situation. The oldest of six, Owen was raised with a strong sense of duty to his family, and in particular was given considerable responsibility for his younger siblings. This became more pronounced when a younger sister became an invalid for several years due to a life-threatening debilitating disease requiring frequent hospitalizations and constant, special care.

Owen's interest in other boys was well established by age eight, when he was involved over a period of time in consensual sex play with a ten-year-old friend. At age twelve, Owen began a long-term "affair," as he called it, with Calvin, a twenty-nine-year-old man. Calvin was a man of some wealth, a member of the town's most prominent family. He openly courted Owen, though the sexual nature of this courtship seems not to have been apparent to others, and showered him and his family with various gifts and favors. He was a constant visitor in Owen's home. He owned a car, something of a rarity in the town at that time, and willingly gave rides to various members of the family. Owen recalled his father requesting him to ask Calvin if the father could use the car, so it appears that the specialness of the relationship between Owen and Calvin was clear and openly acknowledged. Owen was ashamed of having to ask Calvin to do such favors for his family, but only in therapy nearly sixty years later did he begin to think about how the family used him to get what they needed from Calvin. Owen's father once asked him if Calvin ever did anything with Owen that "he shouldn't." Owen quickly answered "No," and the question was never brought up again, even when Calvin took the family on vacations at his own expense and shared a room (and bed) with Owen while the rest of the family shared another room.

When Owen went away to college, the sexuality in the relationship with Calvin ended at Owen's request, though a friendship continued until Calvin's death. After Owen married. Calvin also married, and even asked Owen to be his best man. Owen declined because he was afraid that somehow people would know that he and Calvin had been sexually involved if he filled this role (see below for a discussion of the self-discordant nature of Owen's homosexuality). Calvin later had children of his own, and only in his treatment with me did Owen begin to wonder whether Calvin had abused his own children.

It was in the context of our exploring Owen's attitude toward his homosexuality that he told me about his "affair" with Calvin. Owen never considered the relationship to have been abusive, even though, as stated earlier, he acknowledged that if he heard about such a relationship between a twelve-year-old boy and a twenty-nine-year-old man he would feel it was inappropriate and exploitative. But he maintained that there was no abuse from Calvin because Owen knew how interested he was in sex with men and with Calvin. Owen insisted that since he had always loved sex and was delighted to be sought out as a sexual partner by nearly any man, he could not have been abused by Calvin. Equally important, and not unrelated, Calvin was very loving in manner to Owen and emotionally supportive in a variety of ways. This support was largely lacking elsewhere in Owen's life, where he was expected to nurture his younger siblings while much of the parental attention was focused on his dangerously ill sister. In addition, for many years Calvin was the only person Owen knew who seemed content about his homosexuality.

It was almost an afterthought for Owen that he never felt he loved Calvin, and was far more interested in boys his own age. That Calvin loved him was sufficient for them to have a six-year "affair." This seems to be primarily related to Owen's inner sense, which lasted all his life, of being homely and perhaps unlovable. He experienced himself simultaneously as highly sexual but unattractive, and learned that sexualized responses from men, starting with Calvin, ultimately made him feel both loved and sexually fulfilled. He therefore could not imagine that such attentions could be abusive.


The Fear That Sexual Abuse Turns a Boy Gay
A boy like Owen, with an early consciousness of being gay, may welcome aspects of his sexual experience with male predators, especially if he has felt isolated and freakish in relation to his sexual desire. This attitude is discussed more fully below. On the other hand, such a boy may feel hurried into considering himself gay. For boys like this, there are complicated questions about their victimization beyond those heterosexual boys might ask themselves. Such questions might include, "Did I ask for it? Was my interest in men so obvious? Did I really want it? If I found it exciting does that mean it was not a molestation?" and, finally, "Is this why I'm gay?"

Any boy growing up gay in our society is likely to endure painful psychological and social struggles as he comes to understand his orientation and deal with people's reactions to it. In reacting to these struggles, he will probably go through a period of wondering about how he came to be homosexual. At such a time, he will look everywhere for an answer to the question "Why am I gay?" And, if he has been sexually abused by a man, it is easy for him to "blame" his sexual orientation on the abuse.

Many boys or young men who have been sexually abused share the commonplace view that sexual abuse by a man makes a boy gay. Beau, for example, took it as a matter of course that any man sexually abused in childhood was molested by men, as he had been, and grew up to be gay, as he had. He was astonished to hear that some men in the group for sexually abused men he was joining considered themselves straight and that some (not always the same ones) had been abused by women.

Paradoxically, however, a young gay man abused by a woman in childhood may use the reverse logic to account for his homosexuality. In that case, he may assume that fearful reactions to his female abuser generalized to all women, and made him later turn to men for sexual pleasure. Thus, whether the abuser is male or female, the betrayal complicates how the homosexually-oriented victim deals with being gay, and he may view abuse as the origin of his orientation.

But if we were to assume sexual orientation is changed or directed by sexual abuse, similar logic could be applied to heterosexual men. Thus, straight men abused by women would think their early sexual experience with women turned them heterosexual. If abused by men, they might assume that fears of men made them turn to women. But heterosexual men do not seem to consider these possibilities, nor is there any reason for them to do so. By the same token, there is no reason for gay men to believe sexual abuse caused their orientation.

Note that I am talking here about how the individual encodes experiences that coincide in his life. A boy or man knows he has been sexually abused and also knows he is attracted to men. As he puts together this knowledge, he is likely to add a causality between the two that is in fact logically specious. Interestingly, this conflict seems to get resolved for many sexually abused gay men by their middle to late twenties. Most gay men I have seen at this age no longer link their orientation to sexual abuse, a finding also reported by Lew (1988, 1993) and Gonsiorek (1993, as cited in Mendel, 1995).

Is there indeed a link between sexual molestation and subsequent predominant sexual orientation? As Mendel (1995) says, "The relationship between factors associated with childhood sexual abuse and sexual orientation is complex and controversial" (p. 169). In discussing the higher incidence of childhood sexual abuse among homosexual men, Finkelhor (1981, 1984) considers the possibility that boys growing up to be gay are more likely to be vulnerable to sexual victimization, but he favors the explanation that abuse fostered the homosexuality. This is contradicted, however, by the fact that most researchers believe predominant sexual orientation is established before latency, while most sexual abuse of boys occurs later (Mendel, 1995). Nor does it explain Simari and Baskin's (1982) finding that most of the abused gay men they studied had a clear sense of a homosexual orientation before their abuse or incest. I will return to the issue of gay boys being especially vulnerable to sexual abuse later in this paper.

The sexual confusion and homophobia seen in boys who were sexually abused by men is also discussed by Bolton et al. (1989). They conclude that there is no reason to believe that sexual abuse alone fundamentally changes or shapes sexual orientation, despite the conventional wisdom that premature sexual activity with a man can "turn" a boy homosexual. Like Lew (1988, 1993), Bolton et al. (1989), Gonsiorek (1993, as cited in Mendel, 1995), and Rosenberg (1995), my clinical impression is that sexual orientation is nearly always determined for reasons other than premature sexual activity. On the other hand, it is not at all uncommon for a straight man who suffered same-sex abuse to go through a period of sexual acting out with men, sometimes in a compulsive way, while he struggles to answer for himself whether the abuse either means he was always gay or turned him gay. A man named Andreas, for example, at one point in his thirties experimented sexually with men because of the numbness he felt during sex with his wife. Eventually, he decided he had even less interest in sex with men than in sex with women.

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