Quote:
Originally Posted by Masood
I married and Yohoooo it worked I have kept my promise and i am following him but I am a hundred persent HOMOSEXUAL and my orientation has not changed a bit and not even for a day! Masood
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Masood,
You are a living example of the truism first articulated (for me, anyway) in the AIDS prevention and education movement. That is:
Behavior does not equal orientation.
People in the AIDS movement learned the lesson from the opposite end of the statement when they realized that when they targeted their message to gay men they were not reaching men who consider themselves straight but who have had or continue to have sex with men. AIDS planners learned that the cultural part of orientation is totally the product of a person's self-identification.
To return to the main thread, many gay men I know are or were married, and many of us have biological children, whom we cherish as you do yours. We mostly were following society's cultural dictates. Many of us wished when we got married that it would make us straight. Most of us, I daresay, found out very quickly that it didn't. We knew in the deepest parts of our hearts that even if we remained faithful to our wives we were no less gay. The crisis for many of us has been finding a way to lived authentically without hurting the families and partners we loved.
EDIT: I apologize to the originator of the thread for continuing the drift away from the topic of ex-gay ministries or so-called reparative therapy. If I weren't at work at the moment, I would have tried to figure out how to start a new thread with the quote from Masood.