Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Black Boys Secrets, Gay Men's Pain

Black Boys Secrets, Gay Men's Pain
By L. Michael Gipson

In 1989, a six foot, fourteen year old Roderick could be found greasing his thick, chocolate thighs with baby oil before popping a cherry Blow Pop into Vaseline glossed lips. Taking a cue from the girls on his block, Rod rocked form fitted wifebeaters and P.E. shorts that would ride high on his thighs, hitting just blow his heavy cheeks, before hitting his high-traffic neighborhood streets. Looking older than his years, Rod tried to strike a balance between presenting masculine enough to keep the corner boys from bashing him but Lolita enough to get the older men he desired to holler at him. Not for cash, but for sex and some grown male attention. Having been well taught on the joys of oral sex by a 13 year old cousin two years earlier, Rod found himself a magnet for lascivious older men. The problem is that these men weren't three to five years older than Rod, they're twenty-five, thirty, forty, even fifty year old men. At 32, Rod has since learned better, but as a teen he considered himself a willing co-partner in his many sexual seductions and encounters. Then, Rod believed because he could make these grown men moan and their toes curl that he had the power; that he was in control of these encounters. It would take being raped in a park by a 50 year old stranger that summer in 1989, when his partner ignored Rod's protests and continued penetrating Rod against his will, for Rod to realize that he'd never been in control at all.

"Until this man ignored my futile pleas for him stop, I thought men respected my wishes and my voice. I'd never been fucked before. The men before this dude would try to coerce me to do more, but they generally respected my boundaries. When he didn't stop I didn't know what to do. I felt confused, powerless and remember just crying the whole time," shares Rod, a health educator.

While Rod sought strangers, Khalil was accosted by family. Khalil was five years old when the sexual abuse with his uncle began. He was eight when it ended. He was twenty-five at his uncle's funeral when he was first told about his victimization from a fellow long-term survivor of his uncle's advances, his sister. Now a handsome, well-built 35 year old accountant, Khalil remembers bits and pieces of his childhood nightmare. He's scared to push too hard on those memories, scared to remember the horrible fullness of what he's lived.
"I'm a pretty well adjusted adult. I like who I turned out to be. If I open up those flood gates, I might become a basket case," says Khalil, "Part of me is afraid to open up that door and ruining my life."
Whether it's a Rod seeking sex with exploitive adults or a Khalil being molested by blood, the stories of black gay men surviving childhood or adolescent sexual abuse appear common. Now there may be more than stories demonstrating the disproportionate nature of childhood sexual abuse in black gay men's lives. In a paper to be published in the forthcoming journal of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, three independent qualitative studies on nearly a hundred Black men who have sex with men (MSM) found that prolonged and repeated sexual abuse was a common trend among the three samples of men. Moreover, they discovered another disturbing trend.
"We found that approximately 1 out of 3 Black MSM who participated in the three qualitative studies in Rochester, Lexington and Atlanta reported having experienced sexual abuse as a child," reports Dr. David Malebranche of ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Emory University. Malebranche along with Sheldon Fields, Ph.D. from the University of Rochester—School of Nursing, both black gay men, are among the paper's three researchers.
Thirty-two percent, almost a third of the Black gay men studied were sexually abused as children or adolescents. Another disturbing finding was that the men's abusers were often cousins, uncles and family friends. Both Khalil and Rod's childhoods reflect this trend of incest. While Rod's initial experience was a consensual act with a peer, it was still with his cousin by marriage. Similarly, Khalil was first molested by a blood related uncle. These men's experiences—whether a childhood sexual abuse or experience—are technically considered incestuous. These stories and findings raise concerns about the job the community is doing to protect the sexual welfare and development of black boys.

No generalization about black gay men can be made with these studies small sample sizes, but the results are a cause for consideration and an open discussion about how to better protect black boys. Culturally it seems the issue of protecting black boys' sexual development is often met with silence. There's also an unspoken, illogical assumptions about boys' ability to physically defend themselves against unwanted adult male abuse and advances and that those gay boys who seek out sex with men are prepared to handle the consequences of their desires and actions. In turn, boys are responding to these messages and lack of visible information on male-to-male sexual abuse with silence about their own experiences. Like Khalil, many men in the study never or had rarely shared their assaults with anyone before being interviewed, much less sought out counseling.
"My first thought after it happened was to not tell anyone about the rape. I thought who would believe a fat, 14 year old boy had gotten raped by a man? In 1989, there were no after school specials on male rape to warn me. I only told my mom about the rape two months later because I wanted an HIV test. Even then, I didn't tell her the real details of how I got in the position to be raped or my teen years with men until I was grown," says Rod.
In the US there is no legal understanding of consensual sex between a minor and an adult male. Still, it happens and stories like Rod's, where intergenerational sex was sought after and perpetrated by youth, raises a different set of questions about what—beyond the law—qualifies as abuse between men and boys? What, if any, damage is wrought for these boys from these experiences as they get older? Is subsequent adolescent sex with men conscious desire or does the abuse evolve into a pattern continued with other men?
Khalil's childhood sexual experiences with men didn't stop at age eight. There are others Khalil remembers and feels conflicted about. Like the two-year relationship he had as a 15 year old with a 30 year old man. The relationship was primarily a sexual one, and at the time Khalil thought of the relationship as consensual. Khalil's second relationship with an adult male occurred when he was sixteen. This time it was with his church's pastor, a man of nearly sixty years. Khalil says that this relationship wasn't consensual, but coercive and manipulative and that to escape it, he ultimately had to leave his church and avoid the subsequent calls to his home. Even today, when Khalil describes the two sexual relationships you can hear that he treats them differently; one less traumatic than the other, though both morally and legally inexcusable by Khalil's own admission.
"If the men label these relationships as abusive then they'll need to deal with it or process it differently. Still, I think there are a small number of men out there who have these kinds of sexual experiences that are not abusive. The men do not consider it abusive often do not manifest the same negative patterns of behavior noted in victims of sexual abuse," explains Dr. Fields.
Can a teenage boy consent to sex with an adult male? Does he have the mental and developmental capacity? Beyond the slower maturity of boys than girls and its implications for sexual readiness, physically we know that the human brain is still developing its final and perhaps most important function up to age 25, judgment. So, can one separate adolescent sexual experience from childhood sexual abuse? Well, in academia the separation is under debate. Regardless of the outcome, one thing that seems certain is that in the instances of gay boys, particularly effeminate gay boys, there may need to be a greater sense of urgency to address the matter of coercive sex or sexual abuse by adult men to avoid identity and self-acceptance issues later in life.
"Preliminary research findings suggest that young boys who are targeted as victims of sexual abuse by men are targeted because they may appear to be more effeminate and/or may be believed to be gay by their abusers," says Dr. Sana Loue, a research professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
If Dr. Loue is right, a common societal misperception embraced by some black gay men proves unfounded. The erroneous belief that male homosexuality is caused by childhood sexual abuse committed by men. Rod and many of the study's men blamed their same sex desire for men on their childhood sexual abuse, when ironically the reverse may have proven true. These men were targeted as boys because they were or appeared to already be gay. Even if the boys weren't particularly effeminate or viewed by their predators as gay, their attackers may have targeted them merely because the youth was both accessible and vulnerable, making the child's sexual orientation at the time incidental and not the later cause for a homosexual orientation.
"The claim that males become homosexuals because they have been sexually abused by men is not logically coherent. One could argue, then, that the reverse should also be true: that females and males become heterosexuals because they were sexually abused as children by individuals of the opposite sex," quips Dr. Loue.
It may be necessary to impress this more logical and ultimately therapeutic argument with the black gay teens at youth centers like the Beyond Identities Community Center (BICC) in Cleveland given the prevalence of sexual abuse cited by these boys. In my work with gay youth at BICC, I found as many as 8 out of 10 teen boys in my group sessions reporting sex with an illegally older male. Many BICC boys blame their sexual orientation on their abuse and early sexual experiences. Like Rod and Khalil, most of my BICC boys knew their relationships were not appropriate and occasionally felt ill at ease about their sexual histories with adults.
Unfortunately, I can recall almost as many instances of youth who fancied themselves as their elder's exploiters because they initiated the sexual advance and reaped the economic benefits of trading sex for their basic survival needs or to meet their hedonistic desires for bling-bling. These boys viewed those relationships as consensual. Refrains such as 'I'm mature for my age', 'Age ain't nothin' but a number' and my favorite 'These boys ain't got nothin' I want, I need a man to take care of me' were common. The price of such attitudes may be found in young black men's exploding HIV rates in city after city, since sex with an older man is a predictor of HIV infection for youth.
Beyond HIV, researchers say black gay boys could be setting themselves up for future poor self-worth, confusion and guilt about sexual orientation, a negative view of themselves and others as black gay men, a willingness to equate sex with love, high numbers of multiple sexual partners and risk taking behaviors. When I think of the adult black gay men who define their value primarily in their sexual currency, men's lack of self-esteem beyond the physical and material, the unwillingness to view their sexuality as natural, the lack of motivation to build a self-sustaining community and men's struggle to sustain loving, intimate relationships, I can't help but reflect on that one third. I can't help but wonder about the origins of these men' lessons and what these experiences taught.
Many of my abused BICC boys can't imagine a happy, healthy future for themselves as black gay men. Many don't see themselves being gay after thirty. They can envision transformations, perhaps church assisted, into a heterosexual life with a wife, house and kids. How this miracle of magnificent self-denial will occur is a remote question for them. This miracle's still more tangible for them than being a healthy, happy black gay man lacking the appeal and procurement privileges of youth. They say being gay is for the young. In them, I sense a fear of becoming those older men looking for boys to control and exploit. Predators they intimately know, older black gay men worth modeling they know more sparingly.
When I ask questions about their fears, they tell me different. I ask if they see themselves as men wanting to be in relationships with teenage boys. Uniformly they answer "no". When asked if they'd later approve of their teenage sons having sexual relationships with men, again "no". When asked why they don't think that they are worth just as much as their unborn, hypothetical children or the children they won't molest as adults, I receive blank stares from sad eyes. After a brief moment passes, the boys clumsily attempt to explain their individual exception to their own moral order. I laugh hearing in their initial answers—despite their protestations—an innate and simple moral understanding: little black boys, even those that are man-size, should be off limits by grown men.
"A good man would bare the burden of responsibility by gently rejecting a misguided youth's advances. A better man would hug that hungry boy and offer him the mentorship, affection and resources he is seeking from men. Instead of offering a potential lifetime of questions, confusion and embittered regret," says Rod, demonstrating in his words and actions that the abuse cycle's inevitability isn't inevitable at all That the strongest men, men like Rod and Khalil who have broken their silence to help their fellow brothers, meet the harsh challenges of life with courage, resiliency and keen survivor skills.
"Everything that has happened to me has only made me stronger, says Khalil, offering us a little hope about our wounded boys and their futures.
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