Gay experience. Women's love. I'm not a homophobe, but I don't understand why gay parades are needed. Why you need to show your orientation

Igor Kon

Sexual orientation and homosexual behavior

An unnamed vice

In "Private sexopathology" homosexuality is interpreted as one of the many violations of psychosexual orientations, "distortion of the orientation of sexual desire and forms of its implementation." With clinical experience and a sufficient supply of Latin and Greek words, one can easily create a special "ism" for any individual erotic preferences. However, why multiply the number of "essential" categories when a phenomenological description is quite sufficient?

Homosexuality falls out of this range in a number of ways. First, it is a widespread phenomenon. According to estimates by various authors, from 12% to 56% of men and from 1% to 34% of women have an exclusively homosexual orientation. Episodic or temporary sexual contacts have at least a third of the male population. Secondly, this problem is of fundamental theoretical importance. The nature and genesis of homosexuality are just as important for understanding the general patterns of the formation of sexual orientation as the clinic of transsexualism is for the theory of sexual differentiation. Thirdly, homosexuality and attitudes towards it occupy an important place in the system of sexual and sexual symbolism of any culture, and it has its own cross and transcultural, phylogenetic constants. Fourth, unlike most paraphilias studied almost exclusively by psychiatrists, although some of them have certain sociocultural backgrounds (voyeurism and exhibitionism involve tabooing nudity, fetishism distinguishing between erotic and non-erotic objects, etc.), homosexuality is an interdisciplinary "plot" that occupies one from the central places in any branch of modern sexology. Fifth, this theme is widely represented in fiction and art. Shamefully hushing up this fact means only disorienting the reader, including doctors.

What do we know about the nature of homosexuality and the laws governing the formation of sexual orientation in general? Let's start with a brief history of the issue. In ancient Greece, there was no noun "homosexual", the corresponding adjectives differentiated not individuals, but their erotic preferences or actions. The medieval concept of "sodomy", in addition to its ambiguity, also denoted not a person, but a type of forbidden action with which no particular social or psychological identity was associated. In the medical literature of the 19th century, the problem was posed differently. The word "homosexuality" became substantial and began to denote not only a special psycho-physiological state, illness, but also a certain lifestyle, a kind of human race, which differs from other people in all basic indicators.

Already the first special theories of homosexuality were ambiguous. According to the French psychiatrist Andre Tardieu, sexual attraction to people of the same sex is an innate moral and physical deformity, a consequence of degeneration, which is found even in a special form of the penis; the only way to deal with it is punitive measures, up to and including castration. On the contrary, according to the German lawyer Karl Ulrichs, who published 12 books on this topic in the 1860s, homosexuals (after the Greek goddess Urania, who was considered the patroness of same-sex love, K. Ulrichs called them "urnings") are victims of abnormal embryonic development. Based on the fact that the reproductive organs of the embryo are initially undifferentiated, Ulrichs believes that in Urnings the genitals develop according to the male type, while in the brain, which determines the direction of sexual desire, the corresponding differentiation does not occur. Urnings are people whose female soul is enclosed in a male body; although this condition is congenital and therefore invariable, it appears to be no more pathological than, for example, color blindness. Since Urnings are socially and mentally quite normal, it is cruel and unwise to persecute them.

After numerous unsuccessful attempts to find some anatomical and physiological signs of homosexuality, mental properties are in the center of attention. The famous German neuropathologist and psychiatrist Karl Westphal defined homosexuality (the term was introduced even earlier by the Hungarian doctor Karoly Maria Benkert, who also wrote under the pseudonym Kertbeny) as an innate change in sexual feelings. In 1882, the French psychiatrists Jean Charcot and Valentin Magnan reported in their article "Inversion of Genital Feeling" that they had successfully used hypnosis to treat such cases. Although it is difficult to understand how a congenital disease can be cured by hypnosis (and the authors did not question its innateness), the article had a great resonance and the term "inversion" has firmly entered the scientific language.

However, the clinical facts did not fit into the concept of biological predetermination. As a result, dualistic theories emerge. So, the Russian dermatovenereologist V.M. Tarnovsky at the end of the 19th century proposed to distinguish between congenital, genetically determined, and acquired forms of homosexuality arising from external influences, sexual excesses, a thirst for diversity, etc. However, is it possible to call the same word for phenomena that have such a different etiology?

Theoretical debate about the "cause" of homosexuality continued into the early 20th century. Forel and Moll considered it a sexual perversion, a specific psychopathology. KraftEbing and Ellis saw in him an anomaly similar to color blindness, to which the word "mental illness" does not apply, since homosexuality is compatible with normal mental functioning. Hirschfeld and Bloch considered homosexuality to be an inborn predisposition, a kind of idiosyncrasy that should simply be accepted as fact. At the same time, Hirschfeld, following Ulrichs, considered homosexuals to be a kind of "third sex", an intermediate stage of development, an intersex state, when the bodily properties of one sex are combined with the sexual or emotional characteristics of the other. Based on the concept of the innateness and incurability of homosexuality, Hirschfeld persistently sought the abolition of his criminal prosecution.

For all its humanistic pathos, the monocausal theory of homosexuality ran into insurmountable difficulties: along with people whose heterosexual or homosexual orientation is exclusive and persists throughout their lives, there are people whose heterosexual and homosexual hobbies alternate, replacing each other. Maybe the point is not in an innate predisposition, but in the peculiarities of individual development? This is how Freud posed the problem.

"From the point of view of psychoanalysis, the exclusive sexual interest of men in women is a problem that requires clarification, and not a self-evident fact based on an attraction that is ultimately chemical in nature." Same-sex love rests on the same psycho-physiological prerequisites as heterosexual love, and the final ratio of both is determined only in the process of individual development. And although "differences in results may be qualitative, the analysis shows that the difference between their determinants is only quantitative." Homosexuality is not a mental illness in the usual sense of the word, but the result of specific conditions for the formation of personality in early childhood, which are impossible to "remake" in the future.

The next blow to the substantialist concept of homosexuality came from Kinsey, who showed that both in behavior and in erotic attitudes, homo and heterosexuality are not independent entities, but the poles of a certain continuum, so that one can speak of degrees of hetero, homosexuality. In order to obtain reliable data on the spread of homosexual behavior, Kinsey constructed a 6-point scale, on one pole of which are exclusively heterosexual persons who have not had any homosexual contacts, on the other exclusively homosexual persons who have no heterosexual experience, and in the middle are those who also have one. , and another experience. Another similar scale no longer measured behavior (sexual contacts), but emotional reactions, erotic feelings of respondents to persons of their own and the opposite sex.

The Kinzie method gave interesting results. First of all, homosexual behavior turned out to be much more common than was commonly thought. Among the men surveyed by Kinzie, 48% admitted at least one homosexual contact in their sexual experience, including 37% with an orgasm, 25% of men between 16 and 55 experienced several such contacts; 18% had at least 3 years of approximately equal number of homo and heterosexual contacts; 10% of men during this period (at least 3 years) led an exclusively homosexual life, and 4% remain homosexuals. Of the women surveyed, 28% admitted to having had erotic feelings for other women at least once; By the age of 40, 19% had at least one actual homosexual contact, and 12% had an orgasm, 1% of women led an exclusively homosexual life.

Although these figures are by no means normative, their analysis led to two important conclusions: 1) homosexual behavior is not identical to the stable homosexual orientation of a person: the same individual can behave differently in different situations and at different periods of his life. Personality is not a mechanical sum of actions and any labels must be handled with care; 2) sexual behavior and erotic experiences often do not coincide. Even in Kinzie's sample, cleared of explicit homosexuals, homoerotic dreams and fantasies were recognized by 14% of men and 9% of women; in people with a "mixed" sexual experience, the mismatch of behavior and attitudes is much more common.

Heterosexual and homosexual individuals, according to Kinsey, differ from each other not fundamentally, but in terms of the amount of heterosexual and homosexual experience they have, and social conditions play an important role in the formation of exclusively homosexual behavior, in particular, stigmatization and ostracism to which society subjects the "exposed" even if it's just a single experience.

These facts are essential not only for understanding homosexuality; they also show the difficulty of interpreting behavioral statistics, especially in the middle of the scale. Behavior in which homosexual and heterosexual encounters are equally represented formally appears to be equally bisexual. However, 90 and 90 pins are not the same as 9 and 9; 20 contacts with 5 partners is not the same as 5 contacts with 20 partners, etc. Moving from behavioral statistics to typology requires complex qualitative analysis.

The first to take up the matter of genetics. Experimental studies have shown that the violation of the genetic code in fish and frogs causes irreversible changes in their sexual behavior: genetic males behave like females and vice versa. The inversion in these experiments affected not only sexuality, but all animal behavior, which is more analogous to transsexualism than homosexuality, which is only rarely combined with a general somatic and behavioral feminization of the male and masculinization of the female individual. The possibility of genetic manipulation of an individual's sexual orientation without changing the general scheme of sex-dimorphic behavior seems to be more than doubtful. As mentioned above, already in the 19th century, scientists tried to explain homosexuality by the properties of the physique, and today homosexual behavior is sometimes associated with a physique that does not correspond to the genetic sex and is explained by congenital hormonal disorders.

However, differences in physique must be compared with the timing of puberty. Late-maturing teenage boys appear less masculine than their accelerator peers, but this difference almost disappears in adulthood. In addition, we may not be talking about a parallel genetic determination of somatic properties and sexual orientation, but about the fact that a physique that does not correspond to a sexual stereotype causes a number of psychological problems in a teenager, increasing the risk of his involvement in homosexual contacts.

Did not provide any specific data and human genetics. Genetics have not found any chromosomal abnormalities that distinguish homosexuals from other people. True, the use of the twin method at first gave sensational results. The American geneticist Franz Kallman examined 40 pairs of identical, i.e. genetically identical, developed from one egg, and 45 pairs of fraternal, i.e. developed from different eggs, twins, and one of each pair was a homosexual. In identical twins, concordance (coincidence) for homosexuality turned out to be one hundred percent, i.e. if one twin was homosexual, so was the other. In fraternal twins, such coincidences were not found. However, Cullman's work has attracted significant criticism. They pointed to the vagueness of his definition of homosexuality, the imperfection of the research technique, in particular the lack of data on the sexual specificity of the fathers and other male relatives of the studied twins. Too high a degree of concordance also aroused suspicion. The latest study of 28 pairs of twins confirmed high concordance for homosexuality in monozygotic twins and low concordance in dizygotic twins. The divergence of sexual orientations in monozygotic twins, defined by some studies as a rarity, also does not look unusual.

Psychologists point out that the coincidence of the properties of monozygotic twins can be explained not only by heredity, but also by their strong emotional attachment to each other and the difficulties of the psychological process of their individualization; relationships between same-sex twins quite often take on a homoerotic connotation that can be explained without the help of genetics. The latest genetic studies of homosexuality also take into account such factors as the number, sex and age of siblings (brothers and sisters), the age of the mother at the time of the birth of a homosexual child, etc. However, no one draws any definite positive conclusions.

In general, scientists tend to think that genetic factors probably play some role in determining sexual orientation, as well as the entire program of psychosexual behavior of an individual, but this influence is most likely indirect, which explains the wide variability of sexual behavior and the fact that some forms of homosexuality amenable to psychotherapy, while others do not.

Endocrinology comes to similar conclusions. The influence of sex hormones on the formation of sexual orientation comes down to practically 3 main questions: 1) do homosexuals detect any characteristic hormonal abnormalities; 2) whether people with certain endocrine disorders show an increased tendency towards homosexuality; 3) whether hormone therapy causes changes in sexual orientation. All 3 questions are answered in the negative. The level of testosterone in the blood plasma of homosexual men is generally within the normal range, and comparing them with this indicator with heterosexual men gives conflicting results (which is quite natural, given the variability of these indicators). In the light of the available data, it is considered very unlikely that post-pubertal hormonal abnormalities are responsible for the development of homosexual orientation in men, although the possibility that such endocrine disorders directly or indirectly contribute to or accompany homosexuality in some men cannot be ruled out. Approximately the same is the case with women. Although a third of lesbians have elevated testosterone levels, the majority remain within the normal range. Whether elevated, although still much below the male norm, testosterone levels can cause female homosexuality is unknown. In addition, these results may be the result of some unaccounted for features of the homosexual sample or an artifact of the measurement procedures.

However, the impossibility of a direct endocrine explanation of homosexuality does not exclude the possibility of the influence of more subtle neuroendocrine factors. According to endocrinologist Gunter Derner (GDR), homosexuality can be explained, at least in part, by the discrepancy between the genetic sex of the fetus and the sex-specific androgen levels during the critical period of brain differentiation. According to experimental data, castrated newborn male rats, having reached puberty, even after artificial administration of large doses of androgens, showed mostly homosexual behavior, and the structure of the brain of such feminized males resembled the brain of normal females. The hormonal response of such males to estrogen administration was also typically feminine. Similar differences emerged when comparing the responses to estrogen of a group of homosexual and heterosexual men. Another factor that Derner credits is that homo and bisexual behavior is most commonly seen in male rats whose mothers experienced stress during pregnancy, which typically lowers testosterone levels. Experimental testing has confirmed that fetuses and newborn male rats from stressed mothers have significantly lower plasma testosterone levels. Does it apply to people? Comparing the dates of birth of 794 male homosexuals registered in recent years by sexologists and venereologists of the GDR, Derner et al. found that significantly more homosexuals were born during the war years than before and after the war. Similar results were obtained in a survey of 72 homosexual and 72 heterosexual men: the mothers of the former experienced much more nervous shocks and difficulties during pregnancy than the mothers of the latter. Therefore, concludes Derner, maternal stress, which can lead to abnormal levels of sex hormones and the resulting impairment of the sex differentiation of the fetal brain, is probably a risk factor for sexual deviations in postnatal life.

However, the neuroendocrine theory of homosexuality raises serious objections and sharp criticism from many neuroendocrinologists, neurophysiologists, psychiatrists and psychologists.

The transition from experiments with rats to the analysis of human behavior is a very difficult and risky business. In experiments with rats, not so much homosexual reactions were obtained as a transformation of the polodimorphic behavior of animals as a whole. In humans, and even in primates, the situation is more complicated. Not to mention the frequent divergence of behavioral properties and erotic preferences, identified by Kinsey, homosexuals neither somatically nor behaviorally form a homogeneous group. In some cases, Derner specifically stipulates that the established feminine hormonal responses are characteristic only of "feminized" male homosexuals, but that human sexual orientations are relatively autonomous from somatic and other characteristics. Although the girls with adrenogenital syndrome described by Mani behaved in many ways masculine, their sexual behavior was heterosexual; exclusively homoerotic fantasies were characteristic of only 10%. Data on the impact of wartime stressful situations raise a number of methodological doubts (representativeness of medical statistics on such a delicate issue; how these data correlate with the statistics of other neurohormonal disorders associated with prenatal stress; how reliable is the comparison of retrospective self-reports of people, among whom some are healthy and others consider themselves sick, etc.).

Nevertheless, the psychoendocrine factors of sexual orientation cannot be discounted. In the last 23 years, the theory of dependence of the sexual differentiation of the brain and sexual behavior on androgens has undergone significant refinement. It turned out that, in addition to the already known specific differentiation of the brain in certain critical phases of prenatal development, there are two different pathways for the passage of hormones: androgenic, using mainly testosterone and (or) dihydrotestosterone, and estrogenic, relying mainly on estradiol, extracted from testosterone by aromatization on cellular level of the corresponding target organs. Experiments with the non-steroidal synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) have shown that its pre- and postnatal administration alters the features of polodimorphic play communication in female rats, increases masculinity and reduces femininity of sexual behavior in adult female guinea pigs, and reduces the likelihood of pounce and intromission behavior in female rats. adult male rats. When comparing 30 prenatal DES-exposed adult women with two control groups, 25% of these women showed increased bisexuality and homosexuality, although 75% were exclusively or almost exclusively heterosexual. This prompts scientists to assume that some forms of sex dimorphic behavior are based on specific variations or deviations in hormone metabolism pathways that are independent of the mechanisms that regulate peripheral sexual dimorphism, and perhaps even other sex dimorphic brain systems and associated behavior.

These phenomena are now being intensively studied. However, the large number of hypothetical neuroendocrine mechanisms that must be considered to explain homosexuality makes it extremely unlikely that the same mechanism underlies all forms of homosexuality. "In light of the lessons of endocrine research into genital intersexism, the endocrine basis of homosexuality, even if it exists in only one group of homosexuals, is itself likely to be multifactorial."

Formation of sexual orientation

Whatever the possible biological causes or concomitant factors of homosexuality, the formation of an individual's sexual orientation is a complex and lengthy individual process. The most important theoretical conclusion of the long-term search for the causes of homosexuality is the understanding that we do not know at all the "etiology" of a stable system of an individual's erotic preferences, be it homo, hetero or bisexual orientation. Behavioral statistics that quantify the ratio of homosexuality to heterosexuality are just as misleading as the tendency of clinicians to "substantialize" the syndromes they describe, turning them from phenomena into independent entities.

Since variations in sexual, as well as any other, behavior can be explained by temporary, situational factors, the American psychiatrist D. Marmor proposes to consider as a homosexual individual only those "who in adult life experience a definitely stronger erotic attraction to members of their own sex and usually, although not necessarily maintains a sexual relationship with them." This definition deliberately excludes transient, temporary, situationally determined (for example, strict sexual segregation in a prison or a closed educational institution) or typical only for a certain phase of psychosexual development (prepubertal and adolescent sexual experimentation) homosexual contacts and experiences. However, what does this result depend on? In modern sexology, there are two main paradigms in this regard, each of which has several meaningful concepts.

The first, more traditional biomedical paradigm (let's call it the inversion theory) places homosexuality in the same class of phenomena as hermaphroditism, transsexualism, and transvestism. Their common basis is the mismatch of different determinants or levels of gender identity, but this mismatch is not the same in its depth, stability and predominant sphere of manifestation. Hermaphroditism is a clear somatic pathology that makes it impossible for an individual to be sexually identified. Transsexualism is a permanent, total inversion of the gender role/identity, a mismatch between the morphological sex and sexual identity of the subject, mostly due to hidden genetic or hormonal pathology. Transvestism also involves an inversion of gender role/identity, but not permanent, but episodic; gender identity is in these cases, as it were, changeable, chosen for a while. Homosexuality does not affect physique or gender role/identity, but means a permanent reversal of sexual orientation, i.e. inadequate choice of sexual partner. In bisexual individuals, sexual inversion is temporary, episodic.

This scheme is logical in its own way, reflecting the transition from a deeper and more stable inversion to a local and episodic one. However, although "sexual" properties seem to be derived from "sexual", this is not always the case. On the one hand, violation of the gender role/identity in childhood is often accompanied by sexual inversion in the future. For example, all 9 boys who suffered from prepubertal gender role/identity mismatch, whose development was traced by Mani and Rousseau up to 2329 years, became homosexuals. On the other hand, transvestism is not necessarily and even quite rarely combined with homosexuality. Since attempts to find the biological determinants of "pure" homosexuality are still unsuccessful, psychologists and psychiatrists are forced to look for sources of sexual orientation in both homo and heterosexual versions, in the characteristics of individual personality development.

The second paradigm (the theory of sexual orientation) is based not on sexopathology, but on the psychology of normal development, considering the formation of the subject's erotic preferences as one of the aspects of the formation of his gender-role orientation; from this point of view, the critical period for the formation of erotic preferences will no longer be early childhood, but preadolescence and adolescence, and the most significant others are not parents, but peers with whom the individual communicates and on whom he is psychologically oriented during the period when his erotic interests awaken.

From the point of view of posing the question, the second model, which proposes to study the process of formation of sexual orientation as a whole, and not only in the homosexual version, is preferable, but in terms of content, both models are not so much alternative as complementary. The first fixes the connection of the sexual orientation of the individual with the peculiarities of the formation of gender-role orientation and preferences in the child, while the second describes the process of differentiation of erotic preferences proper, which falls on the early adolescence.

According to Storms' theory, "erotic orientation emerges from the interplay between sexual development and social development during early adolescence." In other words, puberty causes erotic experiences, and the social environment and the predominance of hetero or homosocial moments in it (the social circle of adolescents, the objects of their emotional attachments, sources of sexual information, etc.) determine their orientation. Since earlier awakening of the libido occurs at an age when peers of the same sex predominate in the adolescent's social circle and emotional attachments, this contributes to the development of homoerotic inclinations, and later maturation, on the contrary, favors heterosexuality. With the same sexual desire, the homoerotic orientation will be the stronger, the longer the period of predominance of homosocial relations; a decrease in sexual segregation, on the contrary, contributes to the formation of a heterosexual orientation.

Storms confirms this by referring to the known facts of earlier awakening of erotic interests and sexual activity among homosexuals. For example, according to Sagir and Robins, between 60% and 80% of homosexual men reported that they had a sexual desire before the age of 13 (in the control group there were 20-30% of those). The lower prevalence of homosexuality among women can also be explained by these two factors: the later awakening of erotic interests (15 years compared to 13 for boys) and the lower homosociality of women.

Storms' hypothesis certainly deserves serious discussion, but is far from certain. First, the increased eroticization of the emotional experiences and interpersonal relationships of male homosexuals in adolescence may be the result of a retrospective illusion or the fact that awareness of their sexual unusualness encourages such people to perceive all their relationships in an erotic way. Secondly, homosociality, as already mentioned, does not contribute to the development of homoeroticism under all, but only under some, not quite the same, conditions. Thirdly, the question remains open why homoerotic experiences that are socially typical for a certain age pass in some people, while in others they become fixed. Fourth, the reference to gender differences in this case is unconvincing, since due to the diffuseness of female sexuality, homoerotic shades and motives of female interpersonal attachments often go unnoticed and even unconscious.

The puberty accounts for the lion's share of those "homosexual contacts", the prevalence of which so horrified his readers Kinzie. Even in Kinzie's non-gay sample, 36% of men and 15% of women in college admitted such contacts.

However, a recalculation of the most representative sample of Kinzie's sample (2,900 men under 30 who attended college) showed that although 30% of them had at least one homosexual contact in the past, in which the interviewee or his partner experienced an orgasm, more than half of this subsample (16 % of the total) did not have such an experience by the age of 15, and in another third of the subsample (9% of the total) homosexual experimentation ended by the age of 20. According to Hunt, of the people who have ever had homosexual contact, half of the men and more than half of the women ended such relationships before the onset of 16 years. Among American adolescents aged 1319 years, 11% of boys and 6% of girls admitted homosexual experience, but more than half of this experience occurs in boys at 1112 years old, and in girls at 610 years old. Among American college students surveyed in 1976, such contacts were recognized by 12% of men and 5% of women, among Canadian students 1617 and 68%, respectively. Among 1617-year-old schoolchildren in Germany, homosexual contact was recognized by 18% of boys and 6% of girls, including 10% of boys and 1% of girls with orgasm, but in the last year before the survey, only 4% of boys and 1% of girls had such experience.

What is really behind these figures, which, according to the unanimous opinion of experts, are rather underestimated than overestimated? Let's look at them not from the point of view of sexopathology, which is interested in the etiology of homosexuality, but from the point of view of normal adolescent and youthful sexuality.

A homosexual experience in adolescence and adolescence may or may not be an essential fact of an individual's psychosexual biography, but such an experience in itself does not make him a "homosexual" any more than one would call a child a thief who steals someone else's toy. Most of these contacts occur between peers, without the participation of adults. Of the number of American teenagers with a homosexual experience, only 12% of boys and less than 1% of girls were initiated by adults; for the rest, the first partner was a peer or a teenager not much older or younger. A similar picture is drawn by Kinzie's homosexual sample: more than 60% of these men had their first homosexual contact between the ages of 12 and 14; in 52.5% of cases, the partner was also from 12 to 15 years old, in 8% he was younger, in 14% they were 1618-year-old boys, and only in the rest they were adults. Other studies provide similar data.

Why are homoerotic feelings and contacts common among teenagers? Early sexological theories tended to derive them from the characteristics of adolescent sexuality itself. For example, A. Moll postulated the existence of a special period of "adolescent intersexuality", when sexual excitability is very high, and the object of attraction has not been determined. This opinion is still held by some psychiatrists. However, the age limits of this period (from 78 to 1516 years) are too uncertain. In addition, it is not clear whether intersexuality is universal or characteristic only for some children and adolescents (and which ones), how sexual behavior and erotic fantasies correlate in these cases, etc. If for Moll "intersexuality" is an age-related phenomenon, then Z. Freud connects homosexuality with the original bisexuality of a person. The final balance of hetero and homoerotic desires, i.e. the psychosexual orientation of the personality, develops, according to Z. Freud, only after puberty. Since this process has not yet been completed in a teenager, "latent homosexuality" manifests itself in him, on the one hand, in direct sexual contacts and games, and on the other hand, in passionate friendship with peers of his own sex. Within the framework of psychoanalytic theory, which considers all emotional attachments as libidinal, such an expansive interpretation of homoeroticism is quite logical. However, how productive is an approach that describes the entire system of communication and emotional attachments of an individual in terms that have a predominantly, and for non-specialists, exclusively sexual meaning?

Adolescence and early adolescence is the time when a person needs strong emotional attachments most of all, but what if psychological intimacy with a person of the opposite sex is hampered by the adolescent’s own immaturity plus numerous social restrictions (mocking comrades, sidelong glances from teachers and parents), and attachment to same-sex friend associated with homosexuality? The fear generated by this only reinforces the adolescent's insecurity about his psychosexual identity. It's not even about the consequences. The relationship of a teenager with persons of his own and the opposite sex must be considered in the general system of his interpersonal relations, which, of course, cannot be reduced to sexual and erotic ones. The two scales proposed by Kinsey - the behavioral scale of hetero/homosexuality, which fixes the sex composition of a person's real sexual partners, and the dispositional scale of hetero/homoeroticism, which fixes an individual's erotic preferences, are not enough to describe and understand his relationships with people of his own and the opposite sex. They need to be supplemented with two communicative scales: a behavioral scale of hetero/homosociality, which fixes the gender composition of a person’s real communication circle (partners in games, joint activities, participation in same-sex or mixed companies, etc.), and a dispositional hetero/homophilia scale, which fixes the orientation on one or different sex communication, the ability of an individual to psychological intimacy and friendship with representatives of his own and the opposite sex and the need for them, etc.

None of these concepts are new. The concepts of hetero and homosociality and hetero/homophilia have long been used in social psychology. As for hetero/homosexuality and hetero/homoeroticism, Sandor Ferenczi distinguished them already at the beginning of the 20th century. However, these 4 axes are usually considered in isolation from each other. Meanwhile, it is their comparison that shows the illegitimacy of reducing general social and communicative categories to sexual and erotic ones, no matter how broadly the latter are interpreted.

The well-known homosociality of men and especially adolescent boys, who prefer communication with representatives of their own sex, does not follow from their common "homosexual radical", but from the general patterns of their sexual socialization. Homophilia, i.e. focusing on similarity rather than addition is a general psychological pattern, which is by no means limited to the sphere of gender relations; people generally tend to sympathize and seek intimacy with those who seem to them like themselves. This is clearly manifested in the psychology of friendship. In the transitional age, this trend is especially strong.

The combination of communicative and psychosexual characteristics is not the same for different individuals and at different stages of the life path. Behavioral heterosexuality can be combined with dispositional homoeroticism. Heteroeroticism is often combined with homophilia; this is especially typical for a teenage boy who perceives a woman only as a sexual object and that is why he is not capable of psychological intimacy with her, in dire need of a friend of his own sex. Sexual segregation in communication (homosociality) of adolescents can objectively favor homosexual contacts and at the same time stimulate heterosexual interests. The young man again receives confirmation of his masculinity and heterosexuality from peers of his own sex, to whom he tells about his "victories".

Although different emotional attachments are interrelated and one of them may precede and prepare the birth of another, they are fundamentally irreducible to each other. Psychosexual experiences of adolescence can only be understood in terms of other aspects of personality formation.

For example, interest in the body and genitals of people of the same sex, which arises already in early childhood, is stimulated primarily by the need for self-knowledge, comparing oneself with others. In the puberty period, a teenager for the first time perceives his own body as an erotic object, secondary sexual characteristics become for him both a sign of adulthood and sex.

We read in the diary of a 14-year-old girl: "Once, staying overnight with a friend, I asked her if I could stroke her breasts as a sign of our friendship, and mine mine? But she did not agree. I always wanted to kiss her, it gave me great pleasure. When I see a statue of a naked woman, for example, Venus, then I always go into ecstasy." If you wish, you can see in this confession a manifestation of "latent homosexuality". However, bodily contact, touch have not only an erotic meaning, they are a universal language for conveying emotional warmth, support, etc. When evaluating potentially and even explicitly erotic contacts between adolescents, one must also keep in mind situational factors, in particular, the high homosociality of younger adolescents, for whom, especially at 10-12 years old, some segregation of the play activity of boys and girls is almost universally characteristic. Among the comrades of 1011-year-old boys examined by Kinsey, boys predominated in 72% of cases, girls in 4.7% of cases, and there were an equal number of both in 23% of cases. The greater actual accessibility of a peer of one's own, rather than the opposite, sex is enhanced by the similarity of interests and much less strict taboos on bodily contacts. Not surprisingly, homosexual games are more common among them than heterosexual ones. Less sex segregation is likely to give a different ratio. Genital play with peers, mutual or group masturbation, if adults are not involved in them, as a rule, are not considered something terrible or shameful in boyish companies. Since expressions of tenderness, hugs, kisses are not taboo at all in girls, their potential erotic overtones are mostly not noticed at all. Naturally, the awakening sensuality at first is often satisfied in this way. By the end of puberty, such games usually stop; their continuation into 1516 years already gives cause for concern.

Since erotic motivation is of secondary importance in the genital games of younger adolescents, psychologists, in order to avoid stigmatization, prefer not to call such contacts homosexual and not attach excessive importance to them. However, there is a definite relationship between pre-pubertal homosexual activity and future adult sexual behavior. Of the 2,835 German male students surveyed by Giese and Schmidt, 3.4% had had homosexual contacts during the year before the survey. These data were then compared with respondents' memories of their pre-pubertal (up to 12 years of age) homosexual activity; it turned out that the higher the pre-pubertal homosexual activity of the individual (the number of contacts and the number of partners), the more likely the adult's homosexual behavior. Of the students who did not have homosexual contacts in childhood, only 2% had them in the last year before the survey, and 19% of those who had many such contacts. In general, the childhood of homosexual men looks more "sexualized".

The simplest explanation for these correlations is a reference to conditioned reflex connections that can arise in an adolescent during genital play and become fixed as a homosexual orientation. In principle, this, of course, is not excluded. However, the conditioned reflex model of psychosexual development as a whole seems too simplistic, fixing attention rather on the external side of the event than on its meaning for the individual.

Meanwhile, the long-term consequences depend precisely on the subjective meaning.

Homosexual contacts with peers, if they have a playful form and are not combined with psychological intimacy, are mostly transient. It's not so much about the behavior as about the experiences of the subject. One patient of Harry Sullivan, an adult homosexual, told him that during his school years, only he and another boy did not participate in homoerotic peer games; Sullivan then accidentally met this school friend of the patient and learned that he, too, had become a homosexual. Non-participation in the games of comrades was probably their unconscious defensive reaction, but the passive role of the spectator only increased the psychological significance of what was happening.

G. Schmidt offers the following explanations for the correlations between the homosexual games of pre-pubertal boys and the behavior of adults:

1) the future homosexual orientation of an adult is already manifested in the behavior of the child; 2) a positively perceived sexual experience causes a desire to continue it and thereby forms a homosexual orientation; 3) homosexuals more often recall their prepubertal sexual contacts; they either have a better memory for such events, or have a lesser tendency to repress them from consciousness; 4) Homosexuals unconsciously rearrange their autobiography to make it more coherent.

Despite different assumptions, these interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Explanations 1 and 2 consider the differences described to be real, and explanations 3 and 4 see them as consequences of retrospective analysis; moreover, 1 and 2 are based on the premise that the present is a function of the past, while 3 and especially 4 consider the subjective past to be a function of the present. These hypotheses can only be tested with long-term longitudinal studies; the cross-sectional method and the analysis of retrospective self-reports are powerless here.

The etiology of homosexuality leads us to the problem of the genesis of sexual orientations as such. If the question is legitimate when, how and as a result of which an individual becomes aware of himself as a homosexual, what stages this process goes through, then this question is also legitimate in relation to heterosexuality.

Researchers distinguish 3 stages of homosexual identification: 1) from the first conscious erotic interest in a member of the same sex to the first suspicion of one's homosexuality; 2) from the first suspicion of one's homosexuality to the first homosexual contact and 3) from the first homosexual contact to the certainty of one's homosexuality, followed by the development of an appropriate lifestyle.

This process is not the same for men and women. Boys who awaken erotic feelings earlier and whose gender role allows and even requires distinct manifestations of sexuality begin to suspect their psychosexual unusualness earlier and begin sexual activity, usually in a homosexual version, earlier. In girls, psychosexual self-consciousness is formed later; the first infatuation, the object of which is usually a woman many years older, is experienced as a need for friendship, homosexual contact is often preceded by heterosexual relationships; this was the case for 55% of women and only 19% of men.

The duration of the process of homosexual identification varies depending on social conditions, including stereotypes existing in society, and individual characteristics. If the maximum of practical sexual experimentation falls on the prepubertal age and the initial period of puberty, then adolescence is psychologically most difficult, when the formation of sexual identity is completed. Analyzing his erotic experiences, a young man with homoerotic inclinations discovers his dissimilarity to others. This causes an acute internal conflict, a feeling of fear and loneliness, preventing the establishment of psychological intimacy with others and exacerbating the psychological difficulties inherent in this age. Many young men try to "defend themselves" from homosexuality with extensive, non-emotional heterosexual relationships, but this most often exacerbates the internal conflict. The mental state and well-being of young men with incomplete psychosexual identification is much worse than that of those who have completed this process in one way or another, and they are more in need of psychiatric help.

However, teenage homosexual experimentation is not always and not for everyone just situational. Apparently, it and its consequences are closely connected with childhood life experience and self-awareness of the individual. Discussing the regularities of the child's psychosexual development, I noted in boys, in accordance with the "Adam principle", a tendency to "defeminize". Contrary to the common stereotype of everyday consciousness, neither the physique nor the behavior of adult male homosexuals is by any means more feminine than other men. Comparison of homosexual and heterosexual men on psychological scales of masculinity, femininity and androgyny also does not support the psychoanalytic concept that homosexuals are characterized by identification with the opposite sex. However, when describing their childhood, homosexuals often see themselves as more feminine than other men. Why?

In 1974, Witham asked 206 homosexual men and 78 heterosexual men a series of questions relating to their childhood: 1) were they interested in dolls, embroidery, and other "girly" games and activities; 2) whether they liked to change into women's clothes; 3) whether they liked to play with girls more than with boys; 4) whether their peers teased "girl" and other female nicknames; 5) whether they preferred sexual play with boys over girls as children. The difference turned out to be huge, especially between the extreme groups of exclusively homosexual and exclusively heterosexual men.

Similar data have been found in Guatemala and Brazil, suggesting that inappropriate gender role preferences in childhood are a common prerequisite for adult homosexuality. Of course, retrospective self-reports on children's behavior are a fundamentally unreliable source, but similar results for children's games, the differentiation of which by sex is highly universal and stable, are cited by many other scientists. For example, Grellert et al., having asked 198 homosexual and 198 heterosexual men and the same two groups of homosexual and heterosexual women about how typical it was for them to participate in 58 different games and sports separately at 58 and 913 years old, found between these groups significant differences, with the majority of homosexuals found noticeable deviations from gender-role norms. The same symptomatology is noted by Green's longitudinal study, who for many years observed boys and girls with atypical sex-role behavior: 94% of these boys began to change into women's clothes before 6, and 74% before 4 years. 94% of feminine and only 2% of masculine boys prefer to be friends with girls. Feminine boys not only willingly play women's games (dolls, house), but also often choose female roles in them, which masculine boys never do. Although the causes of this feminization, as well as the sexological prognosis, may be different, the violation of sex-role standards of behavior in childhood is mostly supplemented by homosexuality at puberty.

However, why do adult homosexuals show no signs of feminization? Partly Harry answers this question. After interviewing more than 1,500 homosexual men, to what extent some traits that contradicted the image of masculinity (the nickname "sissy", a feeling of loneliness, a desire to be a girl, communicating more with girls, dressing in women's clothes, etc.) were characteristic of them in childhood, in adolescence and adulthood, Harry found that these signs diminish with age. For example, in childhood, 42% were considered "sissies", in their youth 33%, currently 8% of the respondents; the desire to be a girl (woman) decreased respectively from 22% in childhood to 15% in adolescence and finally to 5% in adults; play (communication) mainly with girls (women) in childhood was typical for 46%, in youth for 27%, and for adults for 9% of the respondents. Defeminization also occurs in the control, heterosexual group, but the initial level of "feminine" indicators in these men is much lower. For example, in a homogeneous student subsample among homosexuals, 47% were considered "sissies" in childhood, and among heterosexual men 11%, 34% and 5% wanted to be girls, respectively, 44% and 5% wore women's clothes. With age, this difference decreases or disappears, and in some ways even "turns over". For example, in childhood, the society of girls was preferred by 50% of future homosexual and only 12% of heterosexual male students; in youth, the corresponding figures were 47 and 25%, and among adults 23 and 41%, which is quite understandable due to the divergence of sexual orientations of both groups. On the one hand, macrosocial factors are at work here. A survey of 686 male homosexuals in San Francisco showed that psychologically and behaviorally feminized homosexuals more often come from a working environment than from an intelligent one, and many boys begin sexual activity earlier and in a homosexual variant. Harry explains this by the fact that in the culture of "blue collars" gender-role dichotomization is more pronounced, due to which any inconsistency with the stereotype of masculinity acquires greater social significance, is more clearly fixed by others, being fixed first in the adolescent's self-consciousness, and then in his sexual orientation. On the other hand, the microsocial, family environment matters. A comparison of 66 behaviorally and psychologically feminized 411-year-old boys with a control group of 56 ordinary masculine boys from demographically similar families showed that "feminine" boys in early childhood were more often considered beautiful, they were more sick; in the early years of life, mothers and fathers spent less time with them. At the same time, the expected difference depending on whether the parents wanted to have a son or a daughter during pregnancy was not found, as well as a difference in the distribution of marital roles or marital satisfaction (some theories of transsexualism attach importance to these factors).

These data are interesting not only from the point of view of sexopathology, but also in a broader sense. In accordance with the "Adam principle", the formation of male gender identity and gender-role behavior requires some additional effort, and there is strong pressure on boys in the direction of psychological and behavioral defeminization. Most of them cope with this task, but for those who find it more difficult and the process of defeminization is delayed, apparently, there are some doubts about their gender-role adequacy. Such boys feel more comfortable in women's society and at the same time experience an increased interest and attraction to the masculine principle, which acts as a kind of ideal, an unattainable model. At puberty, these interests and contacts are often eroticized and formed into a more or less stable dispositional system. At the same time, some are attracted to stronger, physically developed, masculine boys, communication with which, not necessarily sexual, introduces them to the desired masculinity, which they themselves seem to be denied. Others, on the contrary, gravitate towards younger, weaker and more tender boys, in communication with whom they can feel more confident and masculine than in the society of their peers.

This model, which takes into account the well-known idealization of masculinity in the homosexual environment, seems to me to overcome the one-sidedness of Storms' concept. It follows from it that the ratio of homo/heterosociality, homo/heterophilia and homo/heteroeroticism depends not only on the age and stage of the child's psychosexual development, but also on his individual characteristics. Not without reason, some authors associate the development of homosexual orientation with rigid sexual segregation and homosociality, while others, on the contrary, with heterosexual communication. In reality, both are likely to occur, but these factors, like the age of onset of erotic interests, the significance of which Storms emphasizes, should not be considered determinants of sexual orientation, but only factors contributing to its formation, and this is explained within the framework of the theory of normal psychosexual development, without reference to "hidden" biology.

However, if our sexual orientations are plastic and changeable, then can we talk about the existence of a single homosexual lifestyle or a special type of personality?

Sexual orientation and personality type

The relationship of sexual orientation with personality type is devoted to a huge special and completely boundless popular literature. At first glance, it seems quite clear that such an essential circumstance as the type of sexual orientation affects self-consciousness, self-image and social behavior. However, is it simply a question of some kind of stable correlation of traits or of causal dependence, and will such a correlation or causation be immanent, manifesting itself everywhere and everywhere, or does it depend on specific environmental conditions? In relation to heterosexuality, the very question of general personality traits is obviously absurd; one can say which mental traits favor one or another specific trait of sexual behavior, and nothing more. However, the same is true of homosexuality. We are accustomed to think differently only because this category is labeled, moreover, stigmatized. Even if homosexuality is as much a disease as diabetes or coronary insufficiency, it would hardly occur to anyone to write seriously about the "personality of a diabetic"; it is another matter to discuss the impact of diabetes and any other disease on the mental state of a person suffering from it. The concept of "homosexual personality" or "homosexual personality" does not cause an intuitive protest only because it was born in a psychiatric clinic and, like the concepts of "neurotic personality" or "schizophrenic personality", is associated with pronounced neurotic or psychotic manifestations. Although is it so clear? Today, psychiatrists are well aware that, apart from endogenous symptoms, the personality and social behavior of the patient depend, among other things, on how others relate to him. Without taking this factor into account, there can be neither prevention nor successful psychotherapy.

Homosexuality is even more difficult. From the point of view of scientific psychology, it is meaningless to talk about personality traits that are not fixed in any way. Meanwhile, none of the existing psychological tests makes it possible to distinguish homosexual men and women from heterosexual ones, forcing us to think that differences in sexual orientation are more or less autonomous from other mental qualities. In the early 60s, the American psychiatrist Irving Bieber et al. compared the life path and personality traits of 106 homosexual males undergoing psychoanalytic treatment with a control group of 100 heterosexual patients and found significant differences between them. Thus, 63% of homosexuals and only 39% of controls reported that they were their mothers' favorites; 65% of homosexuals said that their mothers, in turn, wanted to be in the center of attention of their sons; in the control group, this was the case in 36%. Only 18% of homosexuals said that their mothers encouraged masculine attitudes and activities in them (47% in the control group), 66% of homosexuals and 48% of the control group noted the puritanical nature of their mothers. Mothers of homosexuals were more likely to interfere in their sexual life. Many homosexuals felt rejected by their fathers; in family quarrels, mothers usually sided with their sons against their fathers. Homosexuals spent less time with their fathers. They also received sexual information mainly from their mothers; 17% of the homosexual group had homosexual contacts with brothers or peers in childhood (3% in the control group); at all ages, homosexuals had a higher sexual activity, 82% of them had homosexual contact before the age of 19, while in the control group, only 35% had sexual experience by this age. Personal characteristics are also observed outside the sexual sphere. Three-quarters of the surveyed homosexuals feared bodily injury in childhood, 80% avoided competitive games and situations, 90% avoided fights, two-thirds felt lonely, and so on.

These observations can be explained not only in terms of psychoanalysis, but also in terms of role theory, which connects the emergence of homosexuality with the difficulties in assimilation by the child of an adequate sexual role. The fact that many homosexual men experienced a lack of male influence in childhood and had bad relationships with their fathers is also stated by some other researchers (R. Evans). However, in addition to the general unreliability of retrospective self-reports, the similarity of living conditions, as we know, does not guarantee the formation of the same personal qualities.

As Martin Hoffman rightly points out, many homosexual sons grow up in families of a completely different type, while many heterosexual sons grow up in families of the type described. Avoidance of fights and competitive situations is generally characteristic of introverts, but there is no evidence that introversion itself is typical of homosexuality.

Siegelman's systematic comparison of parental relationships between two groups of American and English homosexual men and control groups of heterosexual men did not reveal any significant difference in their upbringing.

One of the best methodological studies of homosexuality was carried out in England by Michael Scofield. He examined 3 groups of male homosexuals, 50 people in each, of which the first was prisoners, the second was patients in a psychiatric clinic, and the third was people who had never been prosecuted and had not consulted a psychiatrist. Each of these groups corresponded to a similar control group. It turned out that the 3 groups of homosexuals are just as different from each other as the corresponding groups of heterosexual men, i.e. sexual orientation not only does not determine all other personality traits, but itself varies depending on them. Until sexological studies were few and relied on small samples, it was believed that homosexuals were different from other people in everything. With the advent of mass surveys, this illusion collapsed. As Bell and Weinberg write, a single type of "homosexual" is as impossible as a single type of "heterosexual personality," "There are 'homosexualities' and 'heterosexualities', each of which includes many different, interrelated dimensions." Even the sex life of these people is not the same: 71% of the male (465 people) and three-quarters of the female sample (211 people) of Bell and Weinberg were distributed into the following 5 types.

The first group (67 men and 81 women) consisted of people living in stable, close couples, reminiscent of a heterosexual marriage. Compared to other groups, they have the fewest sexual problems, do not look for casual, temporary partners, are better socially and psychologically adjusted, have higher self-esteem, and are less likely to suffer from loneliness. The second type (120 men and 51 women) "open couples", also living together, but not quite satisfied with their partnership; they often look for sexual entertainment on the side, experiencing various anxieties in connection with this. Their social and psychological adaptation is somewhat lower than that of the first group, but higher than that of other homosexuals. The third group "functionals" (102 men and 30 women); they are like heterosexual bachelors whose life is built around sexual adventures. Their sexual activity is higher, there are more partners than other groups, but their contacts are mostly devoid of emotional involvement, extensive and impersonal. Although on the whole they are energetic, cheerful people who successfully overcome the difficulties of their existence, their social and psychological adaptation is lower than that of the first groups. The fourth type (66 men and 16 women) "dysfunctional"; they are unable to accept their homosexuality, nor to repress it. They have the most sexual and psychological problems and internal conflicts. The fifth type is "asexual" (110 men and 33 women), characterized by minimal sexual activity, lack of emotional contact with other people and many psychosexual problems. These people are more inclined to consider themselves unhappy than others, they turn to doctors more often, and among them there are most suicides.

Thus, even in terms of sexual behavior and social adaptation, homosexuals do not form a single whole. If we take into account the frequent mismatch of sexual behavior and erotic preferences, the differences between male and female homosexuality, and other points, then the conclusion becomes even more indisputable.

The Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith data have been heavily criticized for being essentially limited to statistical processing of respondents' memories of their sexual behavior. However, is it possible to understand sexual behavior outside of its specific social context? What Bell and Weinberg consider "types" of sexual behavior may be just temporary states; the same person can be "asexual" in one period, "functional" in another, and so on. Even more methodologically risky is constructing "stages" of their sexual development based on respondents' answers.

Indicative in this regard is the evolution of views on homosexuality in foreign psychiatry. At the beginning of the 20th century, most psychiatrists considered homosexuality to be a serious mental illness. By the middle of the century, it became clear that the neurotic symptoms often observed in such people do not stem from their sexual orientation itself, but from some other individual characteristics, and most of all from the difficulties of their social position. Indeed, is it easy to maintain mental health and mental balance for a person who all his life has to suppress something, hide, be afraid of exposure, and even tend to consider himself inferior? As one writer put it, show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a merry corpse.

In the 1970s, this position was also revised. Mass studies using psychological tests have shown that neuroticism is not an obligatory companion of homosexuality. Whether a homosexual will be neurotic or not depends, on the one hand, on social conditions (the stronger the stigmatization and social isolation of a certain category of people, the more likely they are to have neurotic reactions), and on the other hand, on individual personality traits, including communicative qualities, the level of self-esteem, the ability to accept and defend one's individuality, etc. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of diagnoses, noting that homosexuals have different personalities, which may or may not correspond to different neuroses. No matter what its adherents say, homosexuality, in addition to personal emotional difficulties associated with defining one's sexual and erotic identity, which often remains ambiguous all one's life (among the homosexuals surveyed by Bell and Weinberg, only half recognized their erotic preferences as exclusively homosexual), gives rise to a number of social problems. . Many homosexual men (for women, the picture is different) in the USA and Germany, forcedly or out of personal inclination, lead an extremely extensive sexual life, changing 5060 sexual partners a year, often unfamiliar and completely anonymous. This contributes to the wide spread among them of various sexually transmitted diseases (almost two-thirds of Bell and Weinberg's respondents had them), which in recent years have been joined by such a dangerous disease as AIDS. This cannot but cause public concern, especially since it is more difficult to establish the sources of infection in a homosexual environment than in any other.

The problem of the "homosexual personality" also has its cultural aspect. The thesis about the human inferiority of homosexuals is often countered by a list of great people belonging to this category. From the point of view of a homosexual minority seeking to assert its respectability, the compilation of such lists is quite logical: all stigmatized groups like to refer to their greats, but what does this do for science?

First of all, some of these attributions are problematic. For example, with the light hand of Oscar Wilde, an opinion about the homosexuality of W. Shakespeare spread in literary criticism, because many of his love sonnets are addressed to a man. However, in the 17th century, such appeals were the usual literary norm, and in the dramas of W. Shakespeare homosexuality is usually ridiculed, which was also a literary norm. It is extremely risky to determine the sexual orientation of figures of the past based on indirect data. Many of those for whom the reputation of homosexuals was established actually led a bisexual lifestyle, others had episodic homosexual contacts, others are suspected of homosexuality because homophilic motives were strongly expressed in their work or personal life, for example, the idealization of same-sex friendship, although homophilia and homoeroticism do not always coincide. Sometimes sentences are passed on the basis of gossip and opinions of obviously hostile people. However, the point is not so much in the problematic nature of attribution, but in whether it is needed at all. Although sexual orientation is a very essential property of a person, it does not matter in itself, but only in the system of the life world of the person whose biography we are writing. What is important is not so much what a person's sexual life and erotic preferences were like, but how he comprehended and experienced them. Did his awareness of his psychosexual characteristics make him hide from the world, withdraw into himself, or, on the contrary, actively seek communication with his own kind? At what age, how and how clearly did this awareness come (if it came)? Did he try to suppress his homoerotic desires or, on the contrary, to satisfy them, and how successful was he in both? Did he hide his homosexuality (like M. Proust) or openly admit it (like A. Gide)? Was his erotic relationship all the same, homosexual or heterosexual, stable and psychologically intimate, or casual and anonymous? How was all this refracted in his self-image and self-respect, and how was it reflected in his work? If there is no such internal penetration into the spiritual world of a person, then information about her sexual life is meaningless. The label "homosexual" provides for understanding the life and work of the poet A. as little as a certificate that the prose writer B. was bald, and the artist V. was lame. We are all alike in some ways, but not like others in some ways. If being different means belonging to a stigmatized minority, this inevitably gives rise to some kind of psychological difficulties.

However, the point is not so much in dissimilarity (it can be imaginary) and in relation to others, but in the self-consciousness of the subject. One short, physically weak boy grows up with a sense of his inferiority, inferiority; the other corrects natural defects with the help of special exercises; the third compensates for their achievements in other areas of activity; the fourth produces an overcompensation reaction, and so on. The same thing happens with sexual orientations.

Medicopsychological studies tracing how this or that mental trait or disease (be it schizophrenia, epilepsy or kidney stones) manifests itself and is refracted in behavior and artistic creativity are in themselves quite legitimate, but this angle of view is not suitable for literary criticism and art history. Regardless of their factual accuracy, the lists of "great homosexuals" look offensive and vulgar. Such biographies, whether they emphasize "thanks" or "despite", describe the whole from the point of view of the part, and this approach is directly opposed to the method of serious psychological biography, which tries to reproduce and understand the contradictory integrity of individual being and becoming a person. This is also true when interpreting works of art. "Death in Venice" and "Tonio Kroeger" contain certain homoerotic motifs, but to reduce their content to them is the same as to see in "Buddenbrooks", in the words of T. Mann, just "a history of uric acid diathesis in four generations".

Speaking about sexual orientations, one cannot ignore the problem of bisexuality. Within the framework of the traditional dichotomy of homo and heterosexuality, the inclination of an individual to sexual contacts with representatives of both sexes seems to be some kind of misunderstanding, a consequence of the incompleteness of psychosexual identification or simply a means of mimicry, the desire of a homosexual to "pass for one" in the heterosexual world. In reality, bisexual behavior and the "scripts" behind it are autonomous and ambiguous. Gagnon identifies several types.

1. Bisexuality is often observed in adolescence, when a teenager has not yet determined his erotic preferences and can experiment in both directions, although, probably, already at this time, homosexual and heterosexual experiences have different meanings for him.

2. The alternation of heterosexual and homosexual behavior based on the presence in the mind of the individual of two qualitatively different sexual "scenarios". For example, American "hustlers", young male prostitutes, allow other men to perform fellatio with them for money, but without emotional involvement and activity on their part. Although they experience sexual arousal and orgasm, they do not consider themselves homosexual, despise their clients, and maintain heterosexual relationships. To what extent such a distinction between "scenarios" ("homo" for money, "hetero" for oneself) is sincere or conditional is an open question.

3. Situationally determined bisexuality, for example, in conditions of forced sexual segregation (prison, military schools, etc.). Homosexual activity serves as a temporary substitute for heterosexual relationships, but these people retain their heterosexual identity. Often, especially in prison, this is accompanied by violence and is symbolized in terms of domination and submission: the stronger asserts power over the weak, thereby confirming his own masculinity.

4. Parallel homosexual and heterosexual behavior, for example, when a formal heterosexual marriage is combined with secret homosexual attachments or relationships of a husband or wife. Most often this is a consequence of late sexual identification, when the individual discovers that his real erotic preferences lie in a different direction. However, it is also possible to constantly combine both types of relationships, which satisfy the different needs of the bisexual individual, allowing him to feel either more masculine or more feminine.

5. Finally, bisexuality as a result of indifference to the gender of the partner. This sometimes happens in situations of group sex, where the bodies seem to lose their sexual differences, or in people who are completely focused on their own sexual experiences.

Obviously, these cases are psychologically quite different. In other words, bisexuality also has its own semantics, which must be studied specifically, without blaming everything on natural differences. Consideration of the processes of formation of sexual orientation is of fundamental, general methodological significance. First, it shows that in the formation of an individual's psychosexual identity, his sexual orientations and preferences, self-consciousness plays the same key role as in the formation of gender identity. Any events of an individual's sexual biography must be considered not only objectively, from the outside, but also taking into account the meaning that he himself puts into them. Secondly, it clarifies the significance of puberty and adolescence as critical periods in the formation of sexual orientation, in the light of which the previously formed ideas of the individual about their own gender identity, gender role adequacy, etc. are corrected and sometimes modified. Thirdly, it shows that these processes, like the more general processes of sexual differentiation, involve a close interaction of natural, sociocultural, and individual biographical factors. Fourthly, it has a practical pedagogical meaning, guiding doctors and educators to an attentive and tactful attitude to the sexual experiences of a teenager, since it is very difficult to distinguish statistically normal age-related sexual experimentation from signs of developing paraphilia, and, on the contrary, it is very difficult to injure a child and give his thoughts and fantasies a dangerous direction. easily.

The debate about whether homosexuality is considered a congenital disease, a personality trait, a lifestyle, or something else is unlikely to end in the near future. The proposed methods of its therapy and correction are just as diverse. Whatever reasons (as a rule, many) determine sexual orientation, it is not a matter of free choice and cannot be changed arbitrarily. True, contrary to the ideas that prevailed until the mid-1960s, intensive psychotherapy, sometimes combined with hormone therapy, in some cases leads to a change in the sexual orientation of the individual. Success is achieved in 3050% of cases and depends on factors such as age (people younger than 35 respond better to therapy than older people), the presence of heterosexual experience or at least reactivity, the duration of homosexual activity, the conformity of the patient's appearance to gender stereotypes, etc. However, the matter is difficult and possible only with a very strong desire of the patient himself. Adolescents with an undeveloped sexual orientation often fail to do so. Psychological and pedagogical methods, involving tact, tolerance and understanding, prevail here over more active psychotherapeutic techniques.

How difficult it is to change a person's sexual orientations is convincingly shown by Masters and Johnson's book Homosexuality in Perspective. Its first part, "Preclinical Study", summarizes the work done in 1957-1970. systematic laboratory study of sexual responses (masturbation, methods of sexual stimulation of a partner, anal-genital contacts and erotic fantasies) of 94 homosexual men and 82 women in comparison with the behavior of a group of heterosexual individuals and a small (6 men and 6 women) "ambisexual" sample. The second part, "Clinical Study", describes almost 10 years (1968-1977) experience in the treatment of 56 male and 25 female homosexual couples who applied to the Institute for various functional disorders (impotence, anorgasmia, etc.) or sexual dissatisfaction. In other words, the preclinical study dealt with homosexuals who were satisfied with their sex life, while the clinical study dealt with those who needed medical help.

As befits serious scientists, Masters and Johnson are cautious in their conclusions. However, they categorically assert that homosexuality is not a single phenomenon, that its origins and forms are as diverse as similar aspects of heterosexuality. Despite the possible (though not proven) genetic predisposition to homosexuality, in general, any sexual orientation is built on the basis of individual experience and learning. The first thing the doctor should learn, the authors emphasize, is that homosexuality is not a disease; The goals of therapy should always be determined not by the doctor, but by the client, although the doctor should help him assess how reasonable and realistic his wishes are.

According to Masters and Johnson, the psychophysiology of homosexual sexual activity is basically subject to the same laws as heterosexual, and the treatment of most sexual disorders (impotence, anorgasmia, etc.) is the same in both cases. More complex are cases of sexual dissatisfaction, especially if the subject of concern of the client is his very sexual orientation. Masters and Johnson distinguish two types of such cases: "conversion" (conversion), when a homosexual, who had no or almost no heterosexual experience (5 or 6 on the Kinsey scale), expresses a desire to switch to a heterosexual lifestyle, and "reversion" (return), when an individual with limited heterosexual experience (2 to 4 on the Kinsey scale) wants to return to it. In principle, Masters and Johnson, based on their clinical experience, consider both of these processes to be possible.

Although the overall percentage of therapeutic failures is quite high, the data of Masters and Johnson confirm the fundamental possibility of correcting psychosexual orientation. However, scientists warn against excessive optimism. In many cases (23% of males and 18.8% of females), when the patients' motivation seemed to be not strong enough, doctors refused to help them in advance, considering their intervention unpromising and even harmful. Trying without sufficient chances of success to change the sexual orientation of the patient, the doctor runs the risk, in case of failure, to undermine his mental balance, reduce self-esteem and strengthen his view of himself as a patient (other doctors and psychologists express similar concerns).

A major premise of functional therapy for both homosexual and heterosexual subjects is the physician's ability to identify, evaluate, and openly discuss the positive and/or negative impact that a patient's social and sexual values ​​have on their lifestyle. The doctor's duty is not to impose his system of values ​​on the patient, but to help him understand his own life situation. If necessary, the doctor can change the structure of the patient's behavior, but does not have the right to rebuild his basic value system.

Such an attitude, both ethical, based on the principle of autonomy and self-worth of the individual, and pragmatic (brute external pressure is much more likely to harm than help), corresponds to the general spirit of modern psychology and medical deontology. A sexologist, like no one else, must remember the first commandment of Hippocrates and the fact that behind sexological problems there are always human problems.

Kon I.S. Introduction to sexology. M., 1988, p. 257293.

Irina Bode 02.09.2016

Other people
The most complete analysis of homosexual sexual orientation in terms of science and medicine

They try to talk about homosexuality delicately, since the topic is quite fertile for terrible battles to break out in the comments to any publication about homosexual and homosocial behavior. At the moment, it is not completely clear which factors determine orientation to a greater extent. Whatever the possible biological and genetic factors, the formation of sexual orientation is a very complex and individual process.

Of particular piquancy is the fact that sexual orientation in some cases can be a variable value and be explained by situational factors. Does a single homosexual experience in adolescence make a person a homosexual? How significant is the impact of such an experience on subsequent sexual life? Researchers have yet to give clear and substantiated answers to these questions.

I communicate with my gender. What is wrong with me?

Homosociality, that is, the focus on social contacts only with one's own gender, is not something out of the ordinary, because people tend to sympathize more with those who are similar to themselves. The trend of close relationships during adolescence, if it occurs, is accompanied by a storm of emotions, and the connection because of this will be stronger than in adulthood. At the same time, homosociality can objectively favor both homosexual contacts and stimulate heterosexual interests: a young man who communicates with peers of his own sex receives from them confirmation of his status in society, talking about his “victories” in the field of communication with the opposite sex. It is also interesting that the increased interest in one's own sex is also determined by the greater accessibility of the body of a peer of the same sex.

In 1982, a Portland scientist Edward Grellert (later he even wrote a king with the telling title “The Origin of Sexual Desire. A Possible Mechanism”) and colleagues conducted a study in which they divided the subjects into 4 groups of 198 people each: homosexual and heterosexual men, homo- and heterosexual women. The researchers asked the subjects how often they engaged in certain sports and gaming activities at different periods of their lives: 5-8 and 9-13 years. The difference was found not only between heterosexual men and women. Most homosexuals noted a significant deviation from the norms of intersexual relations and role divisions in the group. Many studies with similar results have given reason to think that the violation of the norms of sex-role relations in childhood and adolescence can be the cause of the formed homosexual inclinations.

Disease or not?

Previously, homosexuality was seen as a disease that could be treated. And this point of view exists to this day. In America, not so long ago, hundreds of doctors took up treatment, who provided stunning statistics, according to which they cured one in three. Some said that they themselves were previously homosexual, but now the treatment has turned them into ordinary family men. A whole movement began, which was called the ex-gay movement. It received significant support from religious communities. Adding fuel to the fire was the American Psychiatric Association's (APA's) refusal to treat homosexuality as a disease in 1973. It is noteworthy that the first organization of the movement was also created in 1973 by three homosexuals. Subsequently, many participants in the movement left it, condemning it in every possible way and apologizing to the LGBT community. The movement advised resorting to reparative therapy, the methodology of which starts from individual and group counseling and ends with electroconvulsive therapy and aversive therapy.

In fact, treatment at best did not lead to anything, and at worst ended in suicide. In 2009, the APA issued statements that the treatment was not working and doctors should no longer offer such services, as such therapy is dangerous to a person's health, both psychological and physical. Reports have noted that ex-gay groups can help individuals socially and psychologically, that they appear most likely to alleviate the suffering of the organizers themselves in the first place, as they live in a state of constant stress due to unresolved conflict between their religious beliefs and sexual desire. Some group members did get better, while others reported depression, anxiety, anger, confusion, deterioration in relationships with others, suicidal thoughts, self-loathing, and loss of performance.

Sigmund Freud

Even Sigmund Freud, a well-known Austrian psychiatrist, suggested that all people are bisexual from birth, and further orientation is formed under the influence of external factors, that is, hetero- and homosexuality are development options. At the same time, he did not consider homosexuality a disease, and offered corrective treatment, aimed at reducing discomfort due to the rejection of society or the patient's rejection of himself.

It is worth noting that homosexuality was classified as a disease in the ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases of the ninth revision). She belonged to the group of psychosexual disorders along with a violation of psychosexual individuality, transvestism, exhibitionism. However, homosexuality was excluded from ICD-10. At the same time, the classification retains the definition of egodystonic homosexuality, when the patient is aware of his sexual orientation, but reacts strongly negatively to it, wants to change it and insists on his own treatment.

Homosexuality was also excluded from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental diseases), and back in 1973. Thus, at present, homosexuality, from the point of view of official classifications, is a kind of sexual orientation, and not a disease at all. But anxiety disorders, psychological discomfort, mental instability associated with awareness of one's orientation, are already related to mental illness.

Orientation is determined in the womb

There are many skeptical people who argue that it is extremely unlikely that a person's orientation is determined before birth. However, more and more scientific evidence, on the contrary, confirms this point of view. The argument against the assertion that homosexuality is formed only under the influence of social factors is the impossibility of curing homosexuality. Electroshock, hormonal therapy, and aversion therapy do not help.

So far, there has not been a single sufficiently convincing study that would prove the advantage in the influence of some factors over others. Scientists suggest that orientation is determined by a combination of genetic, hormonal and social factors. Biological theories are now extremely popular, and the list of biological factors may even include the environment of the uterus in which the implantation of the zygote and further development of the embryo occurs.

So in mice, in the event of stress, more individuals are born that are predisposed to homosexuality. Why can't humans have the same effect? Indeed, in stressful situations, the hormone cortisol is released, which affects the production of fetal hormones, which may well affect orientation through the hormonal system.

Some independent research groups claim that, according to the results of twin studies, genetic factors can explain up to 25-30% of the differences between homo-, bi- and heterosexual people. A fairly old study from 1993 showed that there is a genetic marker for homosexuality, Xq28, located on the X chromosome. The results of a study conducted on gay brothers showed that among them, the concordance (the presence of the same specific feature) of Xq28 markers was significantly higher than the random expected, in 64% of cases the markers had a similar appearance. Subsequently, however, a study was conducted that questioned the results and did not confirm the existence of a gene responsible for the development of homosexuality.

In 2012, the results of another long-term study on the causes of male orientation were reported. The data confirmed the results of 1993, that is, the association of Xq28 and homosexuality. Homosexuality has also been linked to a marker on the eighth chromosome, the 8q12 gene. The scientists noted that, most likely, each of these chromosomes contributes to the development of sexual preferences, but how exactly is not yet clear.

Some researchers have argued that the male sex of the fetus provokes the maternal immune response, which becomes stronger with each subsequent gestation of the male fetus. Thus, the probability of having a gay man increases with each boy born. There was also a study on identical twins, when the children were separated immediately after birth. The results showed that if one of them turned out to be gay, then the second with a probability of more than 50% also turned out to be gay.

Barr body, inactivated X chromosome

Epigenetic studies also suggest a bond between a mother and her sons. A woman is a “mosaic”: one of her X chromosomes is “disabled” in each cell, while different chromosomes are disabled in different cells. Inactivation occurs randomly. It is hypothesized that switching off can also occur in the embryo, and in some cases it does not occur by chance. Sven Bocklandt and colleagues reported in 2006 that mothers of gay men showed a significant predominance of one X chromosome inactivation over the other.

Is it all about the genes?

The top row is the left tonsil, the bottom row is the right. From left to right: heterosexual man, heterosexual woman, homosexual man, homosexual woman.

Several studies using fMRI at once revealed differences in the functioning of certain brain structures of hetero- and homosexuals: the hypothalamus, thalamus, and amygdala. The connections between the amygdala and other parts of the brain are more extensive in heterosexual women and gay men. At the same time, the reaction in the prefrontal cortex and thalamus to the female face is stronger in heterosexual men and homosexual women. There is also an inverse correlation. Such structural and functional differences may arise early in development and are independent of external sociocultural factors, the researchers argue.

It turns out that our sexual preferences are shaped by genetic and hormonal factors in the womb and social at an early age. Multiple studies, which began in the early 90s, found that homosexuality is more common in male relatives on the same maternal line.

But at the same time, the opinion about the acquired nature of homosexuality also has confirmation. Often a person himself misperceives the homosocial orientation in relationships and misinterprets relationships with both sexes. Some of the more outspoken proponents of the existence of gay propaganda and its harm point to the possibility of reorientation to suit fashion trends.

Why evolution of homosexuality?

It is a great surprise that homosexuality has not been eradicated by evolutionary mechanisms, because homosexuals are less involved in procreation. Let us return, for example, to the same stress mechanisms. Stress is hunger, lack of resources and the struggle for survival. In such situations, the birth of more heterosexual individuals can lead to stock depletion. Homosexual prevalence, on the other hand, can reduce the birth rate in a natural way and conserve reserves.

It is assumed that the genes responsible for homosexuality are evolutionary mechanisms for regulating the number of individuals in a group. So, for example, the allele of the gene is responsible for attraction to men. If such an allele occurs in a man, then, according to this theory, he will show interest in his own sex; it can be assumed that in the future this will lead to a decrease in the number of individuals. If such an allele appears in the genome of a woman, then the group can presumably survive a demographic rise. This means that, given limited resources, it is evolutionarily more profitable to give birth to homosexuals: no one has to be killed and no one has to fight for food. At the same time, the alleles of the genes remain in the genome, and when the group emerges from the crisis, they will manifest themselves in the genome of females, and the population will recover. There is also a suggestion that these genes are also responsible for increasing the fertility of homosexual siblings, thus maintaining a balance in the group.

Unfortunately, most of the research is related specifically to male homosexuality, but the nature of female homosexuality from an evolutionary point of view has not yet been sufficiently studied. Many associate female homosexuality more with psychological factors, even complexes. According to Freud, disappointment in the father, the lack of communication with him, is central to the formation of same-sex attraction.

Yet not so long ago, a study was conducted that compared the birth weight of homo- and heterosexual women and men. The results showed that gay firstborns who subsequently had no younger siblings had lower birth weights compared to controls. This effect was observed for both women and men, which suggests the existence of a maternal immune response. Studies also show that mothers of first-born homosexuals, on average, produce fewer offspring.

Some researchers believe that in order to fully understand evolutionary mechanisms, it is necessary to consider the situation in a broader, cultural aspect. For example, Paul Veisey, a psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, was doing research in Samoa testing a theory based on kin selection. The idea is that homosexuals make up for the absence of children by contributing to the reproductive success of siblings by providing financial or social assistance. At the same time, the genes of homosexuals are transmitted through nephews and nieces. Skeptics point out that on average, people share only 25% of their genetic code with relatives, that is, to compensate for the absence of their own children, it is necessary to have at least two nephews or nieces. Paul Veisey found that gay men in Samoa, on average, spend more time with their younger relatives than straight men.

Faafafine is the third gender in Polynesian culture

The scientist notes that he was surprised by such results, since earlier a study was conducted in Japan, the results of which showed no difference in attitudes towards children between homo-, heterosexual and childless people. The same result was obtained in the UK, USA and Canada.

Weisy believes that men in Samoa are different from men in countries where he has previously experimented. The fact is that in Samoa there is a so-called third social gender, when a man lives as a woman from childhood, dresses and identifies himself as a woman, while having sexual contacts with men who consider themselves heterosexual. The words "gay" and "homosexual" are not in their vocabulary. The scientist suggested that this is precisely the reason for their increased attention to nephews compared to the West and Japan. Weisy explains his point this way: Most men in the West who identify as gay and have masculine traits and a masculine lifestyle are actually descended from men with a cross-gender identity.

Another small stone in the garden of the evolutionary inferiority of homosexuality is the fact that in the US alone, 37% of the LGBT community have children, of which about 60% are their biological children. According to the Williams Institute, on average, same-sex couples have two children. This is not much of a counterargument, but evolutionary biologists point out that for the most part gay people in modern history have not lived open lives, and the socially imposed pattern of having marriages, and in marriages having children, played a significant role; moreover, it was able to strengthen itself and thus does not reduce the birth rate.

Maintaining homosexuality in a population can be associated not only with benefits for the population, but also be a side effect of the combination of several genes during mutations, the same side effect can be bisexuality, which, by the way, some scientists consider a good evolutionary advantage over heterosexuality, so how it reduces the level of aggression in the group.

Can orientation be measured mathematically?

In 1948, the first of two monographs, later called the "Kinsey Reports", was published, which proposed a scale according to which they tried to measure sexual orientation. 0 on this scale - absolute heterosexuality, 6 - absolute homosexuality, an additional column "X" was added, denoting asexuality. Reports are now particularly cited to substantiate the 5-10% homosexual population argument. At the same time, the scientist himself diligently avoided terms for describing orientation, since he believed that sexuality is subject to change, and human attraction should be considered not only as physical contact, but also from the point of view of psychology.

Alfred Kinsey

Reports indicated that about half of the men interviewed in the study had shown at least one sexual interest in both sexes, and more than a third of them had had sexual contact with their gender at least once. Naturally, both monographs were subjected to strong criticism, which affected all aspects: from sampling and methodology to general topics, which, according to critics, contributed to the degradation of society and morality. There were also some fairly sensible remarks about unaccounted for biases related to the fact that only volunteers participated in the studies, and a quarter of them were also prison inmates. It is interesting that the “cleared” version of the reports, which was released years later under the editorship of two other researchers, differed insignificantly from the original in statistical data.

The Kinsey scale is quite limited in scope, as it does not share real sexual experience, fantasies, and attraction. In order to better understand human sexuality and its development throughout life, another scientist, Fritz Klein, developed a more accurate scale that captures not only sexual experience, but also fantasies, behavior, preferences, and also divides them into past, present and idealized vision of the future. Such a concept reflects variability, and also means that the desired ideal may not coincide with past and even present views.

Homophobia is a real problem

Henry Adams and colleagues conducted a rather interesting study. Heterosexual men who were quite homophobic and heterosexual men who were neutral about homosexuality were shown erotic scenes with MF, MM and LJ couples. In both groups, an erection occurred when viewing erotic scenes with the participation of women (s). But these results will not surprise anyone. But what was interesting was that erections when watching scenes with men arose more often among the homophobic group. This gave scientists grounds for thinking about hidden sexual attraction disguised as homophobia.

Scientific evidence of the harm of what is called the propaganda of homosexuality has not yet been identified. However, all this noise around the topic of sexual orientation, both on the part of heterosexuals and representatives of the LGBT community, only exaggerates, sets the teeth on edge and is the reason for the growth of intolerance, incitement of hostility on the basis of sexuality, which in turn is the cause of an even greater escalation of the conflict, which leads to very deplorable consequences up to suicide. However, one thing is clear at the moment: homosexuality is not only characteristic of humans, its origins are hidden in the homosocial behavior of animals, it has evolutionary origins. And why and how exactly it appears, we just have to find out.

In contact with

Whatever the possible biological causes or concomitant factors of homosexuality, the formation of an individual's sexual orientation is a complex and lengthy individual process. The most important theoretical conclusion of the long-term search for the causes of homosexuality is the realization that we do not know at all the “etiology” of a stable system of an individual's erotic preferences, be it homo-, hetero- or bisexual orientation. Behavioral statistics that quantify the ratio of homo- and heterosexuality are just as misleading as the tendency of clinicians to "substantialize" the syndromes they describe, turning them from phenomena into independent entities.

Since variations in sexual, as well as any other, behavior can be explained by temporary, situational factors, the American psychiatrist D. Marmor proposes to consider as a homosexual individual only those “who in adult life experience a definitely stronger erotic attraction to members of their own sex and usually, although not necessarily maintains sexual relations with them. This definition deliberately excludes transient, temporary, situationally determined (for example, strict sexual segregation in a prison or a closed educational institution) or typical only for a certain phase of psychosexual development (prepubertal and adolescent sexual experimentation) homosexual contacts and experiences. However, what does this result depend on? In modern sexology, there are two main paradigms in this regard, each of which has several meaningful concepts.

The first, more traditional biomedical paradigm (let's call it the inversion theory) places homosexuality in the same class of phenomena as hermaphroditism, transsexualism, and transvestism. Their common basis is the mismatch of different determinants or levels of gender identity, but this mismatch is not the same in its depth, stability and predominant sphere of manifestation. Hermaphroditism is a clear somatic pathology that makes it impossible for an individual to be sexually identified. Transsexualism is a permanent, total inversion of the gender role/identity, a mismatch between the morphological sex and sexual identity of the subject, mostly due to a hidden genetic or hormonal pathology. Transvestism also involves an inversion of gender role/identity, but not permanent, but episodic; gender identity is in these cases, as it were, changeable, chosen for a while. Homosexuality does not affect either physique or gender role/identity, but means a permanent inversion of sexual orientation, i.e. an inadequate choice of a sexual partner. In bisexual individuals, sexual inversion is temporary, episodic.

This scheme is logical in its own way, reflecting the transition from a deeper and more stable inversion to a local and episodic one. However, although "sexual" properties seem to be derived from "sex", this is not always the case. On the one hand, violation of the gender role/identity in childhood is often accompanied by sexual inversion in the future. For example, all 9 boys who suffered from pre-pubertal gender role/identity mismatch, whose development was traced by Mani and Rousseau up to 23-29 years old, became homosexuals. On the other hand, transvestism is not necessarily and even quite rarely combined with homosexuality (this is evident, by the way, from the above ethnographic data). Since attempts to find the biological determinants of "pure" homosexuality are still unsuccessful, psychologists and psychiatrists are forced to look for sources of sexual orientation in both homo- and heterosexual versions, in the characteristics of individual personality development.

The second paradigm (the theory of sexual orientation) is based not on sexopathology, but on the psychology of normal development, considering the formation of the subject's erotic preferences as one of the aspects of the formation of his gender-role orientation; from this point of view, the critical period for the formation of erotic preferences will no longer be early childhood, but preadolescence and adolescence, and the most significant others are not parents, but peers with whom the individual communicates and on whom he is psychologically oriented during the period when his erotic interests awaken . The relationship between these two theoretical models is presented on p. 269.

From the point of view of posing the question, the second model, which proposes to study the process of formation of sexual orientation as a whole, and not only in the homosexual version, is preferable, but in terms of content, both models are not so much alternative as complementary. The first fixes the connection of the sexual orientation of the individual with the peculiarities of the formation of gender-role orientation and preferences in the child, while the second describes the process of differentiation of erotic preferences proper, which falls on the early adolescence.

According to Storms' theory, "erotic orientation emerges from the interplay between the development of sexual desire and social development during early adolescence". In other words, puberty causes erotic experiences, and the social environment and the predominance of hetero- or homosocial moments in it (the social circle of adolescents, the objects of their emotional attachments, sources of sexual information, etc.) determine their orientation. Since earlier awakening of the libido occurs at an age when peers of the same sex predominate in the adolescent's social circle and emotional attachments, this contributes to the development of homoerotic inclinations, and later maturation, on the contrary, favors heterosexuality. With the same sexual desire, the homoerotic orientation will be the stronger, the longer the period of predominance of homosocial relations; a decrease in sexual segregation, on the contrary, contributes to the formation of a heterosexual orientation.

Storms confirms this by referring to the known facts of earlier awakening of erotic interests and sexual activity among homosexuals. For example, according to Sagir and Robins, from 60% to 80% of homosexual men reported that they had a sexual desire before the age of 13 (in the control group, those were 20-30%). The lower prevalence of homosexuality among women can also be explained by these two factors: the later awakening of erotic interests (15 years compared to 13 for boys) and the lower homosociality of women.

Storms' hypothesis certainly deserves serious discussion, but is far from certain. First, the increased eroticization of the emotional experiences and interpersonal relationships of homosexual men during adolescence may be the result of a retrospective illusion or the fact that awareness of their sexual unusualness encourages such people to perceive all their relationships in an erotic way. Secondly, homosociality, as already mentioned, does not contribute to the development of homoeroticism under all, but only under some, not quite the same, conditions. Thirdly, the question remains open why homoerotic experiences that are socially typical for a certain age pass in some people, while in others they become fixed. Fourth, the reference to gender differences in this case is unconvincing, since due to the diffuseness of female sexuality, homoerotic shades and motives of female interpersonal attachments often go unnoticed and even unconscious.

The lion's share of those "homosexual contacts" falls on the transitional age, the prevalence of which so horrified his readers Kinzy. Even in Kinzie's non-gay sample, 36% of men and 15% of women in college admitted such contacts.

However, a recalculation of the most representative sample of Kinzie's sample (2,900 men under 30 who attended college) showed that although 30% of them had at least one homosexual contact in the past, in which the interviewee or his partner experienced an orgasm, more than half of this subsample (16 % of the total) had no such experience by age 15, and another third of the subsample (9% of the total) had ended homosexual experimentation by age 20. According to Hunt, of the people who have ever had homosexual contact, half of the men and more than half of the women ended such relationships before the onset of 16 years. Among American adolescents aged 13-19, 11% of boys and 6% of girls admitted homosexual experience, but more than half of this experience occurs in boys at 11-12 years old, and in girls - at 6-10 years old ^ "Among American college students surveyed in 1976, such contacts were recognized by 12% of men and 5% of women, among Canadian students - 16-17 and 6-8% respectively... Among 16-17-year-old German schoolchildren, homosexual contact was recognized by 18% of boys and 6% of girls, including including orgasm - 10% of boys and 1% of girls, but in the last year before the survey, only 4% of boys and 1% of girls had such an experience.

What is really behind these figures, which, according to the unanimous opinion of experts, are rather underestimated than overestimated? Let's look at them not from the point of view of sexopathology, which is interested in the etiology of homosexuality, but from the point of view of normal adolescent and youthful sexuality.

A homosexual experience in adolescence and adolescence may or may not be an essential fact of an individual's psychosexual biography, but such an experience by itself does not make him a "homosexual" any more than one would call a child a thief who steals someone else's toy. Most of these contacts occur between peers, without the participation of adults. Of the American teenagers who have homosexual experience, only 12% of boys and less than 1% of girls were initiated by adults; for the rest, the first partner was a peer or a teenager not much older or younger. A similar picture is drawn by Kinzie's homosexual sample: more than 60% of these men had their first homosexual contact between the ages of 12 and 14; in 52.5% of cases, the partner was also from 12 to 15 years old, in 8% he was younger, in 14% they were 16-18-year-old boys, and only in the rest - adults. Other studies provide similar data.

Why are homoerotic feelings and contacts common among teenagers? Early sexological theories tended to derive them from the characteristics of adolescent sexuality itself. For example, A. Moll postulated the existence of a special period of "adolescent intersexuality", when sexual excitability is very high, and the object of attraction has not been determined. This opinion is still held by some psychiatrists. However, the age limits of this period (from 7-8 to 15-16 years) are too uncertain. In addition, it is not clear whether intersexuality is universal or characteristic only for some children and adolescents (and which ones), how sexual behavior and erotic fantasies correlate in these cases, etc. If for Moll “intersexuality” is an age-related phenomenon, then 3. Freud connects homosexuality with the original bisexuality of man. The final balance of hetero- and homoerotic drives, i.e., the psychosexual orientation of the individual, develops, according to 3. Freud, only after puberty. Since this process has not yet been completed in a teenager, “latent homosexuality” manifests itself in him, on the one hand, in direct sexual contacts and games, and on the other hand, in passionate friendship with peers of his own sex. Within the framework of psychoanalytic theory, which considers all emotional attachments as libidinal, such an expansive interpretation of grmo-eroticism is quite logical. However, how productive is an approach that describes the entire system of communication and emotional attachments of an individual in terms that have a predominantly, and for non-specialists, exclusively sexual meaning?

Adolescence and early youth is the time when a person most of all needs strong emotional attachments, but what if psychological intimacy with a person of the opposite sex is hampered by the teenager’s own immaturity plus numerous social restrictions (mocking comrades, sidelong glances from teachers and parents), and attachment to a friend of the same sex is associated with homosexuality? The fear generated by this only reinforces the adolescent's insecurity about his psychosexual identity. It's not even about the consequences. The relationship of a teenager with persons of his own and the opposite sex must be considered in the general system of his interpersonal relations, which, of course, cannot be reduced to sexual-erotic ones. The two scales proposed by Kinsey - the behavioral scale of hetero/homosexuality, which fixes the sex composition of a person's real sexual partners, and the dispositional scale of hetero/homoeroticism, which fixes an individual's erotic preferences, are not enough to describe and understand his relationship with people of his own and the opposite sex. They need to be supplemented with two communicative scales: a behavioral scale of heterohomosociality, which fixes the gender composition of a person’s real communication circle (partners in games, joint activities, participation in same-sex or mixed companies, etc.), and a dispositional hetero/homophilia scale, which fixes the orientation on same- or heterosexual communication, the ability of an individual to psychological intimacy and friendship with representatives of his own and the opposite sex and the need for them, etc. .

None of these concepts are new. The concepts of hetero- and homosociality and hetero/homophilia have long been used in social psychology. As for hetero/homosexuality and hetero/homoeroticism, Sandor Ferenczi distinguished them already at the beginning of the 20th century. However, these 4 axes are usually considered in isolation from each other. Meanwhile, it is their comparison that shows the illegitimacy of reducing general social and communicative categories to sexual and erotic ones, no matter how broadly the latter are interpreted.

The well-known homosociality of men and especially adolescent boys, who prefer communication with representatives of their own sex, does not follow from their common "homosexual radical", but from the general laws of their sexual socialization. Homophilia, i.e., orientation towards similarity rather than addition, is a general psychological pattern, which is by no means limited to the sphere of gender relations; people generally tend to sympathize and seek intimacy with those who seem to them like themselves. This is evident in the psychology of friendship. In the transitional age, this trend is especially strong.

The combination of communicative and psychosexual characteristics is not the same for different individuals and at different stages of the life path. Behavioral heterosexuality can be combined with dispositional homoeroticism. Heteroeroticism is often combined with homophilia; this is especially typical for a teenage boy who perceives a woman only as a sexual object and that is why he is not capable of psychological intimacy with her, in dire need of a friend of his own sex. Sexual segregation in communication (homosociality) of adolescents can objectively favor homosexual contacts and at the same time stimulate heterosexual interests. Again, the young man receives confirmation of his masculinity and heterosexuality from peers of his own sex, to whom he tells about his “victories”.

Although different emotional attachments are interrelated and one of them may precede and prepare the birth of another, they are fundamentally irreducible to each other. Psychosexual experiences of adolescence can only be understood in terms of other aspects of personality formation.

For example, interest in the body and genitals of people of the same sex, which arises already in early childhood, is stimulated primarily by the need for self-knowledge, comparing oneself with others. In the puberty period, a teenager for the first time perceives his own body as an erotic object, secondary sexual characteristics become for him both a sign of adulthood and sex.

We read in the diary of a 14-year-old girl: “Once, staying overnight with a friend, I asked her - can I stroke her breasts as a sign of our friendship, and she - mine? But she didn't agree. I always wanted to kiss her, it gave me great pleasure. When I see a statue of a naked woman, for example, Venus, I always go into ecstasy.” 1 If you wish, you can see in this confession a manifestation of “latent homosexuality.” However, bodily contact, touch have not only an erotic meaning, it is a universal language for conveying emotional warmth, support, etc. When evaluating potentially and even explicitly erotic contacts between adolescents, one must also keep in mind situational factors, in particular, the high homosociality of younger adolescents, for which, especially at 10-12 years old, some segregation of the play activity of boys and girls is almost universally characteristic. Among the comrades of 10-11-year-old boys examined by Kinsey, boys predominated in 72% of cases, girls - in 4.7% of cases, there were equally those and others in 23% of cases. The greater actual accessibility of a peer of one's own, rather than the opposite, sex is enhanced by the similarity of interests and much less strict taboos on bodily contacts. Not surprisingly, homosexual games are more common among them than heterosexual ones. Less sex segregation is likely to give a different ratio. Genital play with peers, mutual or group masturbation, if adults are not involved in them, as a rule, are not considered something terrible or shameful in boyish companies. Since expressions of tenderness, hugs, kisses are not taboo at all in girls, their potential erotic overtones are mostly not noticed at all. Naturally, the awakening sensuality at first is often satisfied in this way. By the end of puberty, such games usually stop; their continuation at the age of 15-16 already gives cause for concern.

Since erotic motivation is of secondary importance in the genital games of younger adolescents, psychologists, in order to avoid stigmatization, prefer not to call such contacts homosexual and not attach excessive importance to them. However, there is a definite relationship between pre-pubertal homosexual activity and the future sexual behavior of an adult. Of the 2835 German male students surveyed by Giese and Schmidt, 3.4% had homosexual contacts during the year before the survey. These data were then compared with respondents' memories of their pre-pubertal (up to 12 years of age) homosexual activity; it turned out that the higher the pre-pubertal homosexual activity of the individual (the number of contacts and the number of partners), the more likely the adult's homosexual behavior. Of the students who did not have homosexual contacts in childhood, only 2% had them in the last year before the survey, and 19% of those who had many such contacts. In general, the childhood of homosexual men looks more "sexualized".

The simplest explanation for these correlations is a reference to conditioned reflex connections that can arise in an adolescent during genital play and become fixed as a homosexual orientation. In principle, this, of course, is not excluded. However, the conditioned reflex model of psychosexual development as a whole seems too simplistic, fixing attention rather on the external side of the event than on its meaning for the individual.

Meanwhile, the long-term consequences depend precisely on the subjective meaning.

Homosexual contacts with peers, if they have a playful form and are not combined with psychological intimacy, are mostly transient. It's not so much about the behavior as about the experiences of the subject. One patient of Harry Sullivan, an adult homosexual, told him that during his school years, only he and another boy did not participate in peer games of homosexuality; Sullivan then accidentally met this school friend of the patient and learned that he, too, had become a homosexual. Non-participation in the games of comrades was probably their unconscious defensive reaction, but the passive role of the spectator only increased the psychological significance of what was happening.

G. Schmidt offers the following explanations for the correlations between the homosexual games of boys in prepubertal age and the behavior of adults: 1) the future homosexual orientation of an adult is already manifested in the child's behavior; 2) a positively perceived sexual experience causes a desire to continue it and thereby forms a homosexual orientation; 3) homosexuals more often recall their prepubertal sexual contacts; they either have a better memory for such events, or have a lesser tendency to repress them from consciousness; 4) Homosexuals unconsciously rearrange their autobiography to make it more coherent.

Despite different assumptions, these interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Explanations 1 and 2 consider the described differences to be real, and explanations 3 and 4 see them as consequences of retrospective analysis; moreover, 1 and 2 are based on the premise that the present is a function of the past, while 3 and especially 4 consider the subjective past to be a function of the present. These hypotheses can only be tested with long-term longitudinal studies; the cross-sectional method and the analysis of retrospective self-reports are powerless here.

The etiology of homosexuality leads us to the problem of the genesis of sexual orientations as such. If the question is legitimate when, how and as a result of which an individual becomes aware of himself as a homosexual, what stages this process goes through, then this question is also legitimate in relation to heterosexuality.

Researchers distinguish 3 stages of homosexual identification: 1) from the first conscious erotic interest in a member of the same sex to the first suspicion of one's homosexuality; 2) from the first suspicion of one's homosexuality to the first homosexual contact and 3) from the first homosexual contact to the certainty of one's homosexuality, followed by the development of an appropriate lifestyle.

This process is not the same for men and women. Boys who awaken erotic feelings earlier and whose gender role allows and even requires distinct manifestations of sexuality begin to suspect their psychosexual unusualness earlier and begin sexual activity, usually in a homosexual version, earlier. In girls, psychosexual self-consciousness is formed later; the first infatuation, the object of which is usually a woman many years older, is experienced as a need for friendship, homosexual contact is often preceded by heterosexual relationships; this was the case for 55% of women and only 19% of men. In table. 15 provides data on the age parameters of this process.

The duration of the process of homosexual identification varies depending on social conditions, including stereotypes existing in society, and individual characteristics. If the maximum of practical sexual experimentation falls on the prepubertal age and the initial period of puberty, then adolescence is psychologically most difficult, when the formation of sexual identity is completed. Analyzing his erotic experiences, a young man with homoerotic inclinations discovers his dissimilarity to others. This causes an acute internal conflict, a feeling of fear and loneliness, preventing the establishment of psychological intimacy with others and exacerbating the psychological difficulties inherent in this age. Many young men try to "defend themselves" from homosexuality with extensive heterosexual relationships devoid of emotional involvement, but this most often exacerbates the internal conflict. The mental state and well-being of young men with incomplete psychosexual identification is much worse than that of those who have completed this process in one way or another, and they are more in need of psychiatric help.

However, teenage homosexual experimentation is not always and not for everyone just situational. Apparently, it and its consequences are closely connected with childhood life experience and self-awareness of the individual. Above, when discussing the patterns of the psychosexual development of the child, I noted in boys, in accordance with the “Adam principle”, the tendency of “defeminization”. Contrary to the common stereotype of everyday consciousness, neither the physique nor the behavior of adult male homosexuals is by any means more feminine than other men. Comparison of homosexual and heterosexual men on psychological scales of masculinity, femininity and androgyny also does not support the psychoanalytic concept that homosexuals are characterized by identification with the opposite sex. However, when describing their childhood, homosexuals often see themselves as more feminine than other men. Why?

In 1974, Witham asked 206 homosexual men and 78 heterosexual men a series of questions relating to their childhood: 1) were they interested in dolls, embroidery, and other "girly" games and activities; 2) whether they liked to change into women's clothes; 3) whether they liked to play with girls more than with boys; 4) whether their peers teased them with “girl” and other female nicknames; 5) whether they preferred sexual play with boys over girls as children. The difference turned out to be huge, especially between the extreme groups of exclusively homosexual and exclusively heterosexual men (Table 16).

Similar data have been obtained in Guatemala and Brazil, suggesting that inappropriate gender role preferences in childhood are a common prerequisite for adult homosexuality. Of course, retrospective self-reports on children's behavior are a fundamentally unreliable source, but many other scientists cite similar results for children's games, the differentiation of which by sex is highly universal and stable. For example, Grellert et al. , asking 198 homo- and 198 heterosexual men and the same two groups of homo- and heterosexual women about how typical it was for them to participate in 58 different games and sports separately at 5-8 and 9-13 years old, found between these groups significant differences, with the majority of homosexuals found noticeable deviations from gender-role norms. The same symptomatology is noted by Green's longitudinal study, who for many years observed boys and girls with atypical sex-role behavior: 94% of these boys began to dress in women's clothes even before 6, and 74% - before 4 years. 94% of feminine and only 2% of masculine boys prefer to be friends with girls. Feminine boys not only willingly play women's games (dolls, house), but also often choose female roles in them, which masculine boys never do. Although the causes of this feminization, as well as the sexological prognosis, may be different, the violation of sex-role standards of behavior in childhood is mostly supplemented by homosexuality at puberty.

However, why do adult homosexuals show no signs of feminization? This question is partly answered by Harry. After interviewing more than 1,500 homosexual men, to what extent some traits that contradicted the image of masculinity (the nickname "sissy", feeling of loneliness, desire to be a girl, communicating more with girls, dressing in women's clothes, etc.) were characteristic of them in childhood, in adolescence and adulthood, Harry found that these signs diminish with age. For example, in childhood, 42% were considered "sissies", in their youth - 33%, at present - 8% of the respondents; the desire to be a girl (woman) decreased respectively from 22% in childhood to 15% in adolescence and finally to 5% in adults; playing (communication) mainly with girls (women) in childhood was typical for 46%, in youth - for 27%, and for adults - for 9% of the respondents. Defeminization also occurs in the control, heterosexual group, but the initial level of "feminine" indicators in these men is much lower. For example, in a homogeneous student subsample among homosexuals in childhood, 47% were considered "sissies", and among heterosexual men - 11%, 34% and 5% wanted to be girls, respectively, 44% and 5% wore women's clothes. With age, this difference decreases or disappears, and in some ways even “turns over”. For example, in childhood, the society of girls was preferred by 50% of future homosexual and only 12% of heterosexual male students; in youth, the corresponding figures were 47 and 25%, and among adults - 23 and 41%, which is quite understandable due to the divergence of sexual orientations of both groups. On the one hand, macrosocial factors are at work here. A survey of 686 homosexual men in San Francisco showed that psychologically and behaviorally feminized homosexuals more often come from a working environment than from an intelligent one, and many boys begin sexual activity earlier and in a homosexual variant. Harry explains this by the fact that in the culture of "blue collars" gender-role dichotomization is more pronounced, due to which any inconsistency with the stereotype of masculinity acquires greater social significance, is more clearly fixed by others, being fixed first in the adolescent's self-consciousness, and then in his sexual orientation. On the other hand, the microsocial, family environment matters. / Comparison of 66 behaviorally and psychologically feminized boys 4-11 years old with a control group of 56 ordinary masculine boys from demographically similar families showed that "feminine" boys in early childhood were more often considered beautiful, they were more sick; in the early years of life, mothers and fathers spent less time with them. At the same time, the expected difference depending on whether the parents wanted to have a son or a daughter during pregnancy was not found, as well as a difference in the distribution of marital roles or satisfaction with marriage (some theories of transsexualism attach importance to these factors) .

These data are interesting not only from the point of view of sexopathology, but also in a broader sense. In accordance with the "Adam principle", the formation of male gender identity and gender-role behavior requires some additional effort, and boys are under strong pressure in the direction of psychological and behavioral defeminization. Most of them cope with this task, but for those who find it more difficult and the process of defeminization is delayed, apparently, there are some doubts about their gender-role adequacy. Such boys feel more comfortable in women's society and at the same time experience an increased interest and attraction to the masculine principle, which acts as a kind of ideal, an unattainable model. At puberty, these interests and contacts are often eroticized and formed into a more or less stable dispositional system. At the same time, some are attracted to stronger, physically developed, masculine boys, communication with which, not necessarily sexual, introduces them to the desired masculinity, which they themselves seem to be denied (recall Tonio Kreger). Others, on the contrary, gravitate towards younger, weaker and more tender boys, in communication with whom they can feel more confident and masculine than in the society of their peers.

This model, which takes into account the well-known idealization of masculinity in the homosexual environment, allows, it seems to me, to overcome the one-sidedness of Storms' concept. It follows from it that the ratio of homo/heterosociality, homo/heterophilia and homo/heteroeroticism depends not only on the age and stage of the child's psychosexual development, but also on his individual characteristics. Not without reason, some authors associate the development of homosexual orientation with rigid sexual segregation and homosociality, while others, on the contrary, with heterosexual communication. In reality, both are likely to occur, but these factors, like the age of onset of erotic interests, the significance of which Storms emphasizes, should not be considered determinants of sexual orientation, but only factors contributing to its formation, and this is explained within the framework of the theory of normal psychosexual development, without reference to "hidden" biology.

However, if our sexual orientations are Plastic and changeable, then can we talk about the existence of a single homosexual lifestyle or a special type of personality?

Question to a psychologist

What counts as a homosexual experience? in adolescence, my friend and I played computer games at his house, both underage, and then he began to give me oral pleasure! Then he asked me to try to do the same for him. It was the first time for me! but I could not and refused, although there was an attempt after his persuasion, he then said that there would be nothing terrible! if I try and I didn’t understand then that it’s impossible to do this, it seemed to me like some kind of game now I’m 23 I’m dating a girl and I love her very much but I would like to know whether this case should be considered a homosexual experience or not I really don’t want to it was considered a homosexual experience! I still have a fear that I might become gay, tell me, I worry about this in vain! Please advise some exercises from fears and negative thoughts!

Hello Anton!

You are torturing yourself because you have not accepted this situation in your life. Yes, it's a homosexual experience, albeit in adolescence. Now you are with a woman and what could be the reasons for alarm? Only if you want to complete what you did not complete then? Try? But why? Enjoy life with your girlfriend. And stop beating yourself up. Sincerely, Olesya.

Hello Anton! I remember your question:

often young people (adolescents) lead themselves into a dead end by accepting and seeing themselves as a homosexual, having experienced in their life a situation or violence from a man or a young person, or having experienced molestation from a man as well, and perceive themselves as such! BUT - it was AGAINST your will - it was done OVER YOU and in this situation you are the same victim as with violence! and it's NOT YOU homosexual, but the person who did this to you! and FROM this YOU WILL NOT become THEM!!! this situation only says that in your life there was this situation, BUT No more conclusions can be drawn! and DO NOT run away from your fears, from your pain - this situation also needs to be worked out in order to let go and survive it and live on!

It's not a buffoonery. This is a memoir. Something here is inspired by pre-autumn music. I’m sitting alone in the country (when some general doesn’t call), I indulge in the simple joys of life and feel myself - really thirty years younger ...

In various circumstances, I have been asked more than once if I have had at least some homosexual episodes in my life. Sometimes there were such circumstances and questions formulated in such a way that I answered insincerely: “Yes, of course. I remember once giving your dad a fang - that's how you were born. I'm your real father, Luke."

It happened to guys who unequivocally ran into a fight. Paradoxically, it happened that after such an answer they stopped doing it, running into a fight. Even Caucasians. "That's a quote, right? Well, let's talk about movies! Because - what else? Break into shreds? And if not? Verbal escalation has been taken to the extreme - and should it be aggravated? No, well, it happened that they tore into rags. I mean, they tried.

And it happened that such questions were asked without any thought of confrontation. Especially, girls, in moments of the highest confidence. They are all perverts, all a little lesbian and all curious. “No, Tyom, well, I’m really interested. Well, was it ever? And then I read in Kinsey ... "

If there was something “truly interesting” - I would tell, it wouldn’t disappear from me, it wouldn’t rust after me. But in the memoir story, I can only tell what was not so interesting, what was true, and the closest thing to what could be called a "homosexual experience."

"Tyomych, bonjorno!" - this is Rem, one of my bosom friends in the country. I just unlocked the gate, squeezed through with a backpack, and he was right there. Well, yes, I had exams, intermediate ones, and he had already settled for two weeks. And bored, apparently.

Ninetieth year. I am fourteen and a half, he is only a little over thirteen. brat. But we are friends. He is a little talkative - but a good, cheerful, relaxed guy.

“Come in,” I say, in such a cordially indifferent way. In fact, I'm glad he's here. I thought none of us would be there. Half of June it rained, only now the sun came out (but smartly). Rodaky sent me ahead, "to put things in order." I mean, if I survive, they will catch up too. I love them, but, to be honest, I'm not in a hurry. To live alone is the very thing, after the city bustle. Especially, if not directly alone, if old Rem is here. Actually, he is Roma, but Roma is "Rome" ... that's why he was called "Rem". Boy logic. And so it happened.

I open my backpack, pour oatmeal cookies into a vase, make coffee. Rem takes the box, “Natural? Brazilian?"

"Colombian".

"From the professor's ration?" - smiles. Yes, my dad is a professor.

“They don’t give this in rations,” I answer, holding out the cups. - Contrabass. With the addition of cocaine, of course.

Smiling even more understanding. He is aware that I'm messing around with the Ligov's swindlers and walking foreigners in the haunted St. Petersburg places. Saigon, Lenrokklub, Maltsevka, I can show a lot of other interesting things for a moderate fee in white-toothed smiles and freely convertible currency. Yes, it’s just fun to communicate with “aliens”. But both bucks and cocaine coffee are also a profit.

For Rem, this is all something like a "mafia". Although what the hell are they mafia, these my buddies-fartsovschiki? So, the students are five years older than me, and very nice guys. There is also something to talk about with them, in addition to clothes and “pink Cadillacs”.

Over coffee, we chat, finally blurring the line between me, a fourteen-year-old representative of the business establishment, and Rem, a snotty thirteen-year-old of an indefinite class affiliation.

Then I take out four cans of Heineken from my backpack (yes, it's bad after coffee, but we don't care). I show how to uncork, apply. Rem is finally liberated. Do you need a lot? Chirping non-stop. He poisons his stories accumulated during the school year.

“And so I go to him, which means I’m calling, and behind the door there is zero reaction, only some kind of panting. I think: he jerks off, or what? But he didn't say, of course.

“And then there was the fun. The guy alone in the shower for half an hour, no less, stuck around. But as it turns out, they say to him: did you at least hide the corpse of Dunyasha Kulakova, if, it seems, you killed her to death? Estimate?

I guess: Rem is not a fool, actually. But now he is driving some kind of blizzard and with a clear fixation on ... Yes, he seems to have “taken shape”, and he, like any Soviet, ahem, pioneer, is very interested in the question of how sinful and reprehensible some moments of growing up are. Well, the ninetieth year, let me remind you. Then it was not that there was no sex - but masturbation certainly "was not doubly."

I decide to come to the rescue as a senior comrade. I say with all my trademark “tact”: “Romych, well, everyone has different ... standards. Maybe a minute is enough for you to shoot back, and someone plays up for half an hour. But about the corpse of Dunyasha - it's funny.

Opens eyes:

"What, what?"

I press my hand to my heart

“Oh sorry! I just didn't know you were the only guy in the galaxy who never did that."

Yes, it's ridiculous to say, but then people really had complexes out of the blue. I faced it. I have? Yes, almost no. I have always been very pragmatic about physiological issues. Perhaps due to sports admixture in my spiritual diet. Boxing from the age of eight, karate from the age of thirteen - this contributes to a better understanding with your body. In addition, my father is a philologist, my mother is a doctor. Accordingly, access to all sorts of artistic Anglo-bourgeois “corrupting” books, as well as to medical educational ones, which were already being printed in the Union at that time, but in limited editions.

Yes, I definitely have to help Romka get out of the snares of his complexes. He explains the idea:

“No, Tyomkin, you misunderstood me. Of course... "our hands are not for boredom" and all that. But I didn’t understand: what does it mean to “shoot back in a minute”? Well, the first time - maybe, but then all the same, you need to shoot back three more times, so that finally it sags and can be hidden in your pants? And it's not even a minute."

Here, I confess, I fell into some bewilderment. No, of course, I am an expert in the matter, I read very enlightening books, I watched porn, and on this basis I considered my own libido to be very “high-otane”, but still I thought that after ejaculation, as a rule, “he” sags . Well, the second time sometimes it worked, without a break and without a drop in hydraulics. Under a very good mood from a very joyful impression. But to four times - and all the way like a bayonet?

I look at Romka's hand on the table. He drums lightly with his little finger. I truncated this gesture well when he is in the pref, let's say, has four chips in a deliberately trump suit and urges the player to order more.

I laugh, ruffle his hair: “It’s good to drive, a sex machine, damn it!”

Laughs too. He reports: “And when I drove the guys out of the class, everyone began to crucify, like he did at least five times, only to start subsiding. With heifers, of course - how could it be otherwise?

But he also complains: “But in fact, I noticed that somehow my grip on the motorcycle began to squeeze out worse. Is there any connection?

“The hair from the hand is wound on a cable,” I say.

Rzhem. We've already sucked on two cans of Hanneken.

The next day, in the second half of it, when I plowed the beds for carrots and parsley and even installed the seeds, Rem showed up again, on a motorcycle. He had the Carpathians, I had a Java-20 scooter, one and a half forces more. It's tougher. True, he has brand new Carpathians, and my Yavka was bought from hand, and with a broken kickstarter, it started from a pusher, but it still pulled better on alumina. And she had as many as three passes against two in the Carpathians, and it was, of course, cooler.

"Shall we ride?" Rem suggested.

“To the lake. I found a cool place. There is no one there at all."

Didn't cheat. We drove through the forest to the other side of the local most “bathable” lake, with clear water and sandy entries. An unexpectedly decent beach was found there, about two hundred meters obliquely from the main one, and indeed - no one. Basically all over the lake.

Rem, approaching the water, suddenly pulled off his swimming trunks and hung them on a willow branch. He explained with a grin, remaining completely naked: “Since there is no one, I don’t want to wet the seat.”

This was unexpected, because before, even in our own circle, without outsiders, we had never bathed naked. Somehow got used to swimming trunks, or something.

But - why not? I recently discovered that I'm not really embarrassed about nudity at all. We were with a class near Ladoga, at the end of April, and I argued with the boys that I would swim across the Neva, back and forth. And there were no bathing suits. Well, when I swam, when I went ashore, it didn’t matter at all that the girls and Mary, our Englishwoman, who accompanied me as an adult, could see me.

Actually, I used to consider myself rather shy, "introverted". But it turned out that the "exhibitionist." I remember one young lady, Vika, snorted: “You could at least cover yourself with your hands, Zheleznov!” I replied: “Turn away, if that! And I need to dry off." And Mary kept trying to wrap herself in her cloak, saying: “You are the utmost crazy!”, not without some admiration, as it seemed to me. But there the boys built a fire, and warmed up.

This girl, Vika, later handed me over to her older sister, an aspiring artist from Repinka. She just needed a type for the "classic" series of sketches "The Athenian Boy in the Gymnasium." I wasn't sure that he was so Athenian, with his straw hair like an eternal crow's nest, but it fit. It was not possible to promote the artist for sex (she tried to get off with chocolates), but on the whole it was fun. An adult, practically, a young lady, and in a rather relaxed atmosphere.

So Romki, or what, now be shy? I shrug my shoulders, I also undress. I notice that he, albeit unobtrusively, glances, comparing. I wanted to "comfort" with condescending generosity: "Yes, you're just a year younger," but I said nothing. Because I was not sure that I actually have more. It's a question of perspective.

We swam, returned to the shore, and Rem suddenly said: “Remember Kesha?”

I immediately understood who I was talking about, since the name is not Seryozha, not Sasha, not Dima.

This was several years ago. I was eight, and those boys were fifteen or sixteen. Like bad company. Their ringleader was one such Grin, an overgrown fool, and, well, several shkets with him, including the aforementioned Kesha. I mean, they were de facto shkets, but for me, at the age of eight, of course, they were very big and scary guys.

In fact, they didn't do anything really wrong. Well, quite harmlessly sometimes they dug in to us, to the small fry.

But once it happened that the parents had to leave for St. Petersburg, and I was left alone at the dacha. This was not the first time - and the parents could not worry. At that age, I was quite able to cook pasta, sausages, and even clean and fry the caught fish. But these boobies, our village "punks", when they figured out that there were no adults on the site, filled it up and began to break on the door, already bending the hook. And in the house there were only me and my friends. Rem, including

I don’t think that these “fuligans” really meant something terrifying - so, they showed off. But, honestly, I got stuck. All of us, little ones, got stuck. And I should not have known, but I knew where Bati kept the gun, the Izhevsk vertical. In a cache behind a board in the wall. Saw. And where the cartridges - he also knew.

He took out a rifle, opened the door with a bent hook, and immediately discharged one barrel into the ground, resting the butt on the jamb. Tellingly, that fat and most greyhound Grinya somehow immediately got lost somewhere. And when I raised the barrel, I found that I was aiming at Kesha. Which of them still seemed like a pretty normal guy. But I still said: “If you don’t leave, the next one is in the belly.”

Kesha (to give him credit) still managed to manage his jaw to utter: “What are you, fucked up?”

I replied, “Perhaps. Would that make it easier for you?" Well, or not so "cowboy", at their eight years old, but in any case they disappeared and never returned.

I didn’t tell the parents about this incident, fortunately, Oldman didn’t count his cartridges. Gossip, of course, went, but we extinguished them. “A bang that looks like a gun shot? Yes, heard it too. Some ducks, apparently, were shooting out of season on a nearby lake. Poachers."

These older guys seemed to appreciate that we weren't sneaky. The "fulyugans" didn't get to the bottom of us anymore. Grinya soon disappeared somewhere, but what about Kesha? Well, we saw each other, of course, from time to time, on the street, in the village shop, we even said hello - but what topics could we have for communication with such and such a difference in age?

And then Kesha went into the army, into the paratroopers or something like that, as far as I was aware, and now Rem asks if I remember him. And develops thought.

"He is back. Often we hang out. He's cool now. Like, pimp and bandos. Prostitutes often bring. You can appreciate it."

I grinned proudly: “Baby, are you going to tell me something about prostitutes? Yes, I didn’t bring them some pineapple water, like the poet Mayakovsky, but I dragged their bucks from point to point.

What was true. Several times - it happened. Well, the article for the currency didn’t shine for me, even if the special forces covered me, and I received some commission from “transactions”. In addition, even in my adolescence I was good at copying operas (they, the Soviet “professionals”, shone very brightly compared to the current “almost humanoid ones”), which may have influenced my future career. At least that valuable understanding: if you want to be a good detective, don't look like shovels.

Rem smirks: “Well, he, Kesha doesn’t just bring them. He them (makes the movement of the skier at a synchronized step, whistling) - right here. I mean, on the other side. But you can see it well from here."

We sat for a bit, leaving the bur-goat to click the deck on the little finger (well, for fun). It was already evening when the roar of the Zhiguli engine was heard on a difficult road.

"This is Kesha's chisel," Rem announced. “Come on behind the bushes, from sin.”

"From sin?" - I smile.

“Yeah. In the name of righteousness!"

Kesha arrived with only one young lady. Group sex did not dance. But as far as I've seen - quite such a "butter" young lady. A strong professional, nothing superfluous, but what is not superfluous is with her.

They spread out the rug, Kesha dragged out a case of beer, and, having undressed, began.

No, it was, of course, informative, but not exactly breathtaking. Yes, the movements are natural, without "pretense", as in porn - but what can you see from two hundred meters away? How does Kesha's butt rise rhythmically over her thighs? And most importantly, for some reason I suddenly did not want to look at Romka, who either had already started, or was about to. I mean, I didn't even want to find out. Not that there would be anything unnatural in that, but...

Keeping to the line of bushes, I carefully descended to the water and entered it.

"Where are you going?" Rem called out in a prompting whisper.

"I'll be right back." And I swam, trying not to make any noise. Approaching the opposite shore, where Kesha was tore his passion, already pretty moaning, I still could not resist and, which I have to report for the sake of historical authenticity, I myself twitched right in the warm water, afloat. Well, impressions still accumulated - it was necessary to throw it out. I fleetingly realized at the same time that, quite possibly, I didn’t want to look at Remov’s masturbation so much as I didn’t want him to see mine.

Nobody saw this, except for some particularly curious okushkas and crucian carp. And that couple didn't see me. It was still light (white nights), but I was stealth myself.

Just as imperceptibly, overshadowed by a sudden idea, he slipped through the reeds, extended his hand and in turn snatched four bottles of Zhiguli from a box on the shore, clutching the prey between his legs.

At some point, apparently, I still betrayed myself. Kesha raised his head and we met eyes. Dodging and kicking off the shore with my feet, I dodged back into the lake on my back, managing not to miss any of the loot.

Kesha jumped up to his full height, and I even discovered with some surprise that he was now, at least not a short man, but hardly taller than me at my "thirty-thirty". True, a well-built, pumped-up guy. Not like a broiler bodybuilder, but athletically. “I would still do it once in a while,” I thought “in passing”, however, I myself, however, did not really believe in it, and even more so did not want to check it.

"You!..." - Kesha gasped with indignation.

I, choking with laughter, shouted across the water surface: “Innocent, do not be distracted! Your lady will be bored!"

The young lady, instead of getting bored, burst out loudly. Apparently, she was also amused by this situation.

Kesha shook his fist: “Give me back the beer, you bastard!”

I object: “Well, where do you need so much? Enuresis will develop. The erection will disappear. Alcoholism is harmful in your advanced age.”

Kesha: “What do you think, I will swim after you? I recognized you, professor's cub! Yes Yes. You will get caught in the gardens ... - he bent down, pulled out a belt from his jeans, shook it, - this is how I get around that ... "

Then the young lady, having risen, grabbed him by the elbow, drawing him back to the rug, purred something like, obviously: “Yes, you relax!”

I confirmed, “Yeah, right. I say don't get distracted. Yes, I will return your beer, don't worry. Then somehow. "I'll kiss you later... if you want." And I swam away.

Returning to Rem, he handed him a bottle: "Kesha treats!"

He snorted: “Well, you give! No, but he is, in fact, really a bandit ... "

I said meaningfully: "In this country - every second bandit, every third - a position."

Rem didn’t know then what a “position” was, so he shut up. Beer.

In the days that followed, I was not so afraid of meeting Kesha, but I imagined what it might look like. “You stole my beer! - - Ndya? And you broke my door hook. Would you like to talk about it?"

However, he rarely visited the Gardens. Only a month later we somehow crossed paths in the store, and I said: “I remember that the bir owes you. We are working on it". He just chuckled.

And half a month later, I died. Almost. Romka and other boys and I swam in the same lake, from the same beach. And on the opposite bank there were people, including Kesha with the same girlfriend.

We were throwing the ball about halfway through, and then one of ours, Tolik, said: “There is a hole in this place. Fifteen meters. The fishermen told me, they measured.

Tolik was even a little older than me, and on the whole a reasonable guy, but sometimes strained with his gullibility to meaningful absurdities. I grimaced: “What the hell is a hole? What the hell, fifteen meters? In this puddle - having spawned more than four, it has never happened anywhere!

We argued for some nonsense ... in fact, that if I get silt from the bottom in this place, then I will draw the word “dick” on his belly with that silt and he will drive through the village, along the main street. And if not, then they will draw silt from shallow water for me, respectively.

I dived, and then... I still can hardly imagine the physical mechanism of what happened. Stretching out my hands in front of me, I hit them with a piece of net at the bottom. Apparently, a muddle caught on something very massive (it was impossible to make out in the rising ink puffs of silt). I don’t know how it was possible to contrive, but my hands almost immediately got bogged down in this grid so that you’ll throw off the hell. Maybe I panicked a little, which made matters worse by escaping.

The boys, of course, thank Neptune, quickly suspected something was wrong, dived (fortunately, it was really three meters there), saw my deplorable situation, called for help. And the first to sail was Kesha, that redneck pimp, the thunderstorm of my childhood and the victim of my arrogant beer piracy.

While they were looking for a knife on the shore to free me, Kesha dived several times, taking in full lungs of air, and informed me of it. Mouth to mouth, which might seem spicy - but under some other circumstances. I am absolutely sure that if he had not done this, I would not have made it to release.

And I would like to say that my first words, when they pumped me out on the shore, were: “I remember that I owe you a beer.”

But thanks to Kesha, I didn’t have to pump it out. When released and pulled to the surface, I just snorted, caught my breath, was fully conscious and able to row. Although, of course, now many rescuers who came to the rescue shouted: “Grab your shoulder!” But now it was redundant.

However, when I got ashore, I really said to Kesha: “I remember that your debtor!” A bit pompous, cinematic.

He blurted out, chuckling a little nervously and also still out of breath: “Go to hell! He survived - and thank God.

I persisted: “Nevertheless. Tell me when it's convenient to come in, and I'll come in."

“With a gun? - but then he shook his head, as if clearing his ears of water: - Okay, that's me! Perked up too. Well, I'm leaving now - next Wednesday I'll be back in the evening.

I had some money left from my legal and not so legal earnings, I rushed to St. Petersburg, bought eight cans of Gesser. It was more expensive, of course, than four bottles of Zhiguli, fifty times, but not the case where the bill is appropriate.

Rem, knowing about my firm intention to repay the “courtesy visit”, dissuaded: “No, well, I understand everything, but he really is a bandos!”

"And what?"

“Well, isn't it enough? He will say that now you owe him money for life.

"Hardly".

“Well, yes, fucked up shit. But… do you remember, he threatened you with a belt then, on the lake?”

“Well, he’ll say: take off your pants and lie down!”

I chuckle, looking into my eyes: “Roma! He actually saved my life. Somehow I won't fall apart."

It gives out the last argument: “Well, if something like that ... Well, what is it called in the zone? "Lower", right?

Here I get annoyed: “Don’t talk nonsense! For God's sake!"

"And what?"

“And the fact that if they want to let someone down, they don’t touch him at all! Not that…” I almost blurted out “they don't kiss underwater” - but that would be superfluous. None of the guys saw exactly how Kesha saved me. Therefore, he finished: “And not what they invite to their house!”

Yes, I rubbed myself in enlightened circles, I had a fair amount of "concepts about concepts." Well, more than Romka, anyway.

When I showed up at Kesha's the next Wednesday, he was still with the same girlfriend, and both of them were a little tipsy. "Good" tipsy, one might say. This time the young lady seemed vaguely familiar to me.

“Wow, Gesser? Kesha wondered. “And now the pioneers live curly!”

Then the young lady slapped her forehead: “Ah, I remembered you! Now - for sure. You went to Lidka, pick up the bucks. I was also surprised that this…”

"Puppy?" - I smile. Yes, now I remember it too. We bumped into one of my "employer's" customers, Max, in the hallway when this Aphrodite was getting out of the shower. And she ... I could say: "Immediately became my masturbatory fantasy." It wouldn't even be true. I mean, then - any young lady with her figure could become.

"Subject?" she clarified. - And I'm Diana. For friends - just Ira.

She was not only curvaceous and springy, graceful like a cat, but also very effective. Now she was wearing a moderate, not “working” make-up, which favorably emphasized her beautiful, even somewhat aristocratic face, which was not at all spoiled by a predatory falcon nose and a chiseled, domineering chin. Eyes - lively, mocking, at the same time intelligent and insightful. But this insight didn't bother me at all.

I took her graceful brush with mother-of-pearl claws and kissed: “ Je suis enchanté, mademoiselle.

Kesha chuckled, “Isn’t that the fork, isn’t it silver?”

The forks were normal. And the table was quite decent for those modest times. Riga sprats, salami, cucumbers, tomatoes. We sat down at the table.

“So you, then, work for Max? Kesha stated. - The world is small, that the hut is covered. Well, that's what a friend says. I myself ... Pah-pah, bye!

“Max praised very much,” said Ira-Diana. “He said he was such a smart guy.”

“I noticed that! Much faster!” Kesha confirmed. We laughed. The embarrassment, if there was any, dissipated. We drank some Gesser.

"I'm sorry that then..." - Kesha was a little embarrassed.

“With a gun? - picked up Ira-Diana. She threw up her chiseled chin: - Oh, yes, I heard it. This, probably, looked like in the cartoon about Piglet? Well, where did he hit the ball?

Kesha: “Now it’s funny, of course, but then it was almost ... well, not to the table.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. "But I wouldn't shoot."

“Pfft! - Kesha exhaled cigarette smoke with an effort. - Then - the vidocq was such that another second - and the khan to my liver. As if I came home, I sucked the bubble of water with a screw and passed out. I stole from my dad's stash. And as soon as I got out, I realized: after this, there is only one road: to the Marine Corps. Already, it seems, nothing is scary in life. ”

I guess: “So, in the Marines, and not in the landing. There, apparently, they taught how to transmit air under water. Well, like amers have "seals" - we also have these "combat swimmers". Of these, that is. Yes, I would hardly have done it at times.

I say: “I’m sorry, but then I really strove!”

Kesha: “And I - as if not! (pats shoulder) No, well, actually, of course, we were wrong. But we are not evil. Yes, they were fooling around."

Kesha splashed himself and the lady of vodka, I preferred to refuse before they would not offer it. By that time I had tried vodka, and I did not like it. I understand that it is unpatriotic, but even now I can screw it up only to maintain the company. And also vodka is just diluted alcohol, from the thirty-sixth year.

Ira-Diana asked: “Do you have any relatives in medicine, or what? Well, there, on the lake - "enuresis", "erection"?

“An erection,” I say, a little embarrassed, “it happens, as it were, regardless of origin. But guess what, Miss Marple.

“I also study in honey,” he says.

They were nice guys, we sat nicely for a while.

“Do you know,” says Ira-Diana, “that Artyom means “dedicated to Artemis, the goddess of hunting?”

And a kind of light flashed in her eyes - as if ... the imp was playing with matches. I didn’t really understand what it would be for - more precisely, I couldn’t believe it, but I played along “intuitively”:

"I know. And Diana - the same Artemis, only Roman?

"Exactly! And what are you, such a brat, dared to blaspheme against your goddess? Who was watching us on the lake? Who saw me without clothes?

With half an eye he squinted at Kesha: no, he was completely complacent. And what kind of jealousy in the occupation of his girlfriend? He even, it seemed to me, nodded encouragingly.

“I tremble and repent,” I say. “A worthless servant of his goddess deserves, uh, severe punishment.”

I felt like my earlobes were about to burn my neck - but it was nice. As I suspect, Ira-Diana specialized in submission games. "Strict lady".

"Get up!" she ordered. - "I also want to see you without clothes."

Not exactly mesmerized, but intrigued, I pulled off my shorts and swimming trunks. In fact, I was flattered by the thought that an adult young lady would be able to appreciate my not bad, for her age, physical development. As then, with the artist.

“The goddess insists on a medical examination,” Ira-Diana said, and I dutifully followed her into another room.

"You haven't had before?" she asked when we were alone.

“Do you answer like boys, or how is it?” - I grin, already all crimson, realizing how hoarse and juvenile I “sound”.

“Do you see boys around here somewhere? - reassures: - For me - do not worry. I take care of myself. And all will be well".

It was my first time. And of course, I was a fool a fool, but I liked it. In fact, the main problem of any underage nerd in dealing with young ladies is that deep down he himself is not sure that he will like it, that it will not turn out to be “a miserable likeness of the left hand.” And they feel his real timidity behind the feigned swagger and therefore she is instinctively not sure if she needs him when he may not need her. Yes, the guy fantasizes about it, imagines himself in all sorts of combinations that he has ever seen in porn, but he just does not know for sure how he will actually feel when he makes a dive. It's like diving: theory is useful, but not exhaustive.

Irishka was, however, a professional of a very high class. She didn't give me a single chance to screw up.

Catching my breath and frozen in exhaustion, I thought how stupid and perverted our great writers are. In their books, the first experience is always a kind of depressing disappointment, almost disgust. Damn, are these giants of mind and spirit really incapable of realizing their physiology to such an extent? Naturally, when you have finished once or twice, you will have some fatigue and even blues. But it is impossible, in fact, to see the "emptying of the inner world" where there was only an unloading of the scrotum?

Fortunately, however, I was brought up not only on the great Russian literature, with its kind of cavernous anti-eroticism. And Ira too.

Yes, that's for sure. Then, already in the mid-nineties, I happened to spend several months in Butyrka, due to official necessity, and the most surprising impression was that there were unique people there who sincerely considered “zapadel” not just some kind of “unformatted”, but also , say, such a thing as quite a heterosexual cunnilingus. In any case, they bred the first movers to such “seditious” revelations, so that if not lowered (lowered in the hut is not at all such a joy as in that alteration of the advertisement about Mamba), then pick up and plunge into some dependence, for “non-disclosure”.

Now, of course, I don’t think that such wild ones even remained in Quiche. And honestly, I always somehow didn’t give a damn about their concepts regarding private life.

Therefore, if they asked me if I had ever kissed a guy, I would answer honestly: “Does air transfer under water count?” And, I will not hide, I received then a very great general satisfaction (from the thought that I would not die right now), but hardly sexual. I think Kesha too.

Subsequently, having already settled in Moscow, I was interested in his fate, realizing that eight cans of Gesser were still insufficient payment for saving a life.

He was not from St. Petersburg, but a local, district center, soon gave up his pimping career in the Cultural Capital, opened a security company in his town. At my suggestion, our people went out to recruit him, but Kesha categorically refused to integrate into any kind of “system”, he preferred to remain a free private trader. Then I asked, unofficially, colleagues from the Baltia bureau to keep an eye on his affairs and be a beacon if any problems arise.

In my still youthful fantasies, I imagined how, say, his guys would accept cops with unaccounted for Kalash, start sewing, and here I am, on a white horse and in a black cloak, with a coat at the ready, and the protocol is in tatters. And everyone wept.

But there was nothing like that, even cry. This is how you can keep a private security company in Russia - and in general not have any problems either with the law or with bandits? This Kesha is a bore. Well, then, closer to zero, they all drove off to Italy with the same Ira-Diana. Cosa Nostra did not call to look after, but, according to rumors, everything is fine with them there too.