The Complete Guide to Gay Life for New Explorers

There are over 200 questions and Answers in the Book and here are a few of them: What is the normal age to realise you are gay? The most common age to realise that you are gay is 12. This makes life particularly confusing as you are starting to realise that you are attracted to people of the same gender, but all of your thinking or conditioning up to now may have been that boys are attracted to girls and girls are attracted to boys. It can be confusing, frightening, exciting, shameful, unsettling and lonely as you may not feel comfortable to tell anyone. You may also go through a period where you think it’s a phase and that it will pass and so you just kind of ignore it. At this stage of life you are probably also changing schools into a senior cycle and this comes with its own pressures. You want to fit in to the new school environment. You want to avoid bullies. You may need to move classes a lot and generally you will be in a bigger school where there is more activity and less consistency than your other school. At 12 you are also bursting to become a teenager as this has certain rights and privileges attached to it. It is a coming of age time and a time of trying to shake off the childhood habits and develop some early adult habits. This causes untold conflicts in the head of a teenager as they want to be treated as a mini-adult, but also want to be able to be childish if the mood takes them. All these changes prove very difficult for gay kids and they need time to adjust to the changes going on in their bodies as they break into puberty and deal with their new surroundings, new sexual desires, new school, new ideas of adulthood and new friends. Parents need to ensure that they will be there to support them no matter what. How long does it take people to accept that I am gay? Acceptance can take from a second to a lifetime. Some people will already know you are gay before you tell them and they will have already accepted it. Others may have long held beliefs about gay people that need to be adjusted in their own minds first, and this can take some time. As being gay was not your choosing, you have nothing to apologise for. You may need to give some people longer to accept that you are gay and most will eventually come around. That said, if some people refuse to accept you as a full and worthwhile human being, then you might be better off not having such people in your life. When it comes to grandparents, they may be too old and from a generation that may not be able to comprehend what being gay is – and you may decide that telling them in not worth the worry that it will bring to bear on them. On the other hand – I have often been surprised at who shows tolerance and who is closed-minded – you might be surprised too who you find support from and who turned out to be very different from what you thought. Are parents responsible for someone being gay? Study after study has shown that gay people are in every facet of society, and the parenting style and presence or absence of one or both parents does not determine the sexuality of their children. Sometimes, when parents discover that their child is gay, they will question whether it was something they did or didn’t do that made their child gay. Perhaps a mother felt she was too protective, or overbearing, or a father may feel that he did not provide the right role-modelling or didn’t encourage more “gender appropriate” activities for his children. These issues simply do not matter. People are either gay or not and no level of parenting influence will determine the sexuality of a child. What is homophobia? Homophobia is the word used to describe someone’s discrimination towards gay people. These prejudices are sometimes born out of religious/cultural beliefs and always out of lack of understanding. These people do not accept that homosexuality is part of normal life and they usually think that being Gay is somehow “wrong”. They tend to discriminate against gay people, spread rumours and falsehoods about gay activities, block changes to laws to recognise gay people as equal and think that gay people are somehow un-natural. Usually these people do not know or accept family or friends/colleagues who are gay and have a narrow view of life. Ironically, a lot of people who claim to be homophobic, are themselves battling with their own sexuality. They think that by proclaiming they are against homosexuals, others will not suspect that they are gay. There have been huge swings in positive support for gay people but perhaps there will always be a certain section of society that will always be homophobic. Is being gay all about sex? No. Being gay is only one aspect of your personality, but it does reach into almost every aspect of your life. While being gay is a core element of yourself, the fact is that you will also be labelled by your physical appearance, by your profession, social standing, place of birth, colour, race, and so on! Your sexuality is an important part of life, but there are so many facets to this life and so much to do, see, experience and deal with and most of them have nothing to do with sex. Live your life to the full, don’t become defined by your sexuality. Embrace it and enjoy being gay without it controlling everything you do. There are 200+ other questions and answers in the book.