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GAY SEXUAL EDUCATION
#1
Acquisition of basic concepts: male, female, couple and family
 
This chapter is dedicated to sex education, with particular regard to the sexual education of gay boys. All education, and therefore also sexual education, aims to convey systems of values and to distinguish between right and wrong, moral and immoral, normal and not normal, basically, the sexual education can be taken as a guide  to distinguish what is to be accepted from what is to be rejected. Here I will use the categories of normal and non-normal.
 
Before sexual education in the strict sense, there is a phase of acquisition of concepts that will be taken as fundamental postulates, as obvious and indisputable structures of society, and in this sense will be considered normal. This phase begins very early; the contents transmitted include the difference between boy and girl, the behaviors assumed as typical of the boy and of the girl, the idea of the family, like father, mother and children, and also the idea of couple. And it is precisely through the acquisition of the concept of heterosexual couple as a normal thing that the discrimination of homosexuality begins.
 
The couples that appear in the comics of Walt Disney are always heterosexual: Donald Duck and Daisy, Mickey Mouse and Minnie, Horace and Clarabelle, etc. etc. and couples are presented by insisting on different attitudes of the male and female. Daisy is flirtatious and vain, Donald Duck is confusing and clumsy. Minnie is attentive to beauty and self-care, Mickey Mouse is concerned with investigating and solving police cases, but inevitably Donald Duck is in love with Daisy and Mickey Mouse with Minnie. The child, well before being able to understand what falling in love means, assumes that it is normal and obvious that a couple is formed of a boy and a girl. These messages, subliminal and pounding at the same time, constitute a substantial educational push not to heterosexuality in itself but to consider heterosexuality normal before knowing what it is about.
 
School books and heterosexual culture
 
The transmission of messages that underline the normality of heterosexuality continues to adulthood through many ways. Whoever has a school book in his hands that speaks of literature will notice that the point of view of the book, while having all the appearance of objectivity, is in all cases the typical hetero point of view. It is enough to say that the stories of love that we are talking about are, except for very rare exceptions, heterosexual stories and in the very rare cases in which stories with homosexual background are mentioned, which in the ancient world were not very rare and therefore cannot be omitted at 100%, the way to deal with the topic is substantially different from that used to describe heterosexual stories. Examples of couples of famous lovers, such as Paolo and Francesca, Abelard and Eloisa, Lancelot and Guinevere, and down to Renzo and Lucia and up to the contemporaries, are always made up of heterosexual couples. 
 
Sexual education through films and television
 
Even on television there are basically only stories of heterosexual love or passion. The appearance of television series centered on homosexuality, like the famous Queer as folk, is something that is spoken about a lot, almost an event, because it is absolutely exceptional, and we must keep in mind that in these series, homosexuality is presented as a social phenomenon perfectly structured in itself and substantially separate from the ordinary hetero world, the normality of gay reality is not at all emphasized, just the stereotype is stressed, that is gay reality is presented not in its complexity and its ordinariness but through a particular gay reality very ritualized, that one represented by the mass media, which is objectively only a little section of gay reality but risks to be mistaken for the real gay world.
 
Basically, given the general invisibility of the most relevant part of the gay world, i.e. of undeclared gays, the images of homosexuality that can be found in the cinema, on television or in comics (where they start timidly to appear), are only those of the gay visible world, with its collective rituals and its stereotypes, they are images that are very far from the real life of the vast majority of gays and, moreover, for show needs they are presented with particular tones and with a particular underlining.
 
Gays almost never appear on TV as ordinary people who one can meet in everyday life. Except for very few exceptions,  the idea of gay presence in society as a normal component of society itself still has no place in cinema and literature. The images used by advertising are often full of sexual allusions, even very explicit and they are almost always allusions to heterosexual sexuality. The very rare images that allude to gay couples or to contents referring to homosexuality are often the cause of scandal and are remembered above all for their exceptional nature and for the controversies they have provoked.
 
Sexual education and sport
 
Also sport helps to underline the idea of heterosexuality as normality and therefore of homosexuality as deviance. Discussions on the presence or absence of gay players in the national team or in other teams are very indicative of this trend. Coaches and players are quick to point out that there are no gays in their teams, which is like saying that there are no pathological cases and that everything is normal.
 
Religion and sexual education
 
The attitudes of total closure of the Catholic Church with respect to homosexuality are well known. The Church doesn’t limit itself to reaffirming the centrality of the heterosexual couple but states a prejudicial sentence and without appeal against  homosexuality. The official documents of the Church, beyond impromptu interviews with apparently conciliatory tones, are and remain among the manifestations of the more radical intolerance towards homosexuality.
 
It could be objected that the television series, the comics, the attitudes of the Church or those of the sports world are not true forms of sexual education, it remains the fact that all or almost all the messages to which the boys, who are growing, are exposed, are messages endowed with a communicative power far superior to that of any form of classical sexual education, and contain repeated and concordant underlining of the normality of heterosexuality and therefore of the non-normality of homosexuality.
 
Parents and sexual education

The condemnation of homosexuality is implicit but it is and is understood as very clear. It should be added that, in all this, the attitudes and expectations of the family have enormous weight. Parents hardly worry about the possibility that the boy can be gay and behave with him by taking absolutely for granted that they are dealing with a heterosexual boy and therefore they always believe they are legitimized to project their expectations into the boy and to direct him in the direction that, in good faith, they judge the most appropriate for the boy himself.
 
Sexual education: taboo and scandal
 
Sexuality, all sexuality, is still affected by a category of religious origin, that is, the idea of taboo, of the forbidden, and therefore of the transgressive. Of sexuality one can also speak but always in general terms, by categories, never explicitly and with reference to oneself. Sexuality, in other words, is not considered a normal topic of conversation, it is something that should be omitted, at least for good education. The idea of the taboo implies that of the scandal, the idea that one can create a scandal is very significant, because scandal means publicity and also money, so newspapers, magazines and gossip blogs put the sexuality of a person on the streets when that sexuality turns out to be not normal, especially when it comes to conjugal betrayals or homosexuality.
 
Building one’s own concept of sexuality
 
Naturally, the boys, with the maturity, gradually build their own idea of sexuality and, if they are gay, specifically of homosexuality, which progressively detaches itself from the concepts learned in a subliminal way in childhood and early adolescence. In other words, with the passing of the years boys open their eyes and realize that the reality of sexuality, in general, is very different from ideal models, that the model of marriage as a natural love union of a man and a woman if it's considered for what it really is, shows all its fragility, so much so that in Italy the majority of marriages don’t hold up over time and that, as regards homosexuality, in particular, reality is totally different from how it is represented.
 
Repressive sexual education
 
The weight of the internet in this path towards awareness is often decisive. It is much easier to talk seriously and without sexual taboos with a 35/40-year-old man than with an 18/20 year-old boy who is still deeply conditioned by behavioral patterns and interpretation patterns of external origin. There are still many young people in their twenties who don’t have a realistic idea of how others experience sexuality. I would add that there are twenty-year-old guys who are literally terrified by the idea that something of their sexuality can be leaked to their parents.
 
In some circles, even today, gay guys suffer real forms of violent repression that unfortunately leads them to make choices that over time will prove devastating for their emotional life and for their personal balance. I happen to talk to guys over 20 who have never before had any chance to talk seriously about their sexuality. Talking with these guys allows us to understand the depth of their discomfort and the need for them to be reassured in order to be able to look at the future with concrete hope.
 
To get out of certain environments and earn a true autonomy it takes a huge effort and guys are often completely abandoned to themselves and discouraged in their every attempt to emancipate themselves and to build a better perspective. Very often families or are totally incapable of realizing the difficulties of their sons or are inclined to consider as a priority the traditional way of life to maintain a reputation at least apparent in front of the people. In some circles, even today, a 20-year-old boy he cannot afford not to have a girlfriend if he doesn’t want to be substantially marginalized. The state of suffering caused by these situations is really heavy. Here not only is there no sexual education to freedom and responsibility but there is a real form of educational violence that doesn’t propose but imposes coercive behavior patterns through very heavy forms of masked blackmailing. This imposition attitude is opposed to that of complete indifference which is instead characteristic of environments that are considered more open and free.
 
Risks of obscurantism and prohibition
 
It should be emphasized that, for the boys, talking seriously about sexuality and clarifying their doubts in this matter is fundamental and the absence of any form of comparison ends up inducing them to seek answers away from the daily dimension, in environments that seem the most suitable to acquire concrete knowledge on the subject of sexuality and in particular of homosexuality. I speak primarily of the pornography, which presents models, apparently gratifying and simple, endowed with a force of persuasion well beyond that of words.
 
Obscurantist or prohibitionist attitudes regarding sexuality have effects that are exactly opposite to those envisaged. If the parents, the school, the Church and the sports environment consider sexuality to be a taboo, the boys will go in search of spaces where they can obtain information in a clear way and can even live their first experiences, through the internet, first of all through pornography and then through erotic chats and dating sites. The huge number of people who use these sites is largely due to the absence of any form of sexual education at the family or school level, as well as, obviously, to the repression of sexual spontaneity.
 
Pornography on the net
 
In the past years pornography on the Internet was presented with criteria of strong aggression and in very stereotypical forms, access to the sites was generally paid and the presence of dialers to charge the user very high telephone charges was a deterrent that helped to keep the vast majority of kids out of those environments. Today things have changed, the free porn sites, which are financed exclusively by theme advertising, are many and recently the blogs created by individual users to collect photos from the web and to republish them, are widely spreading. this is the phenomenon of re-blogging, which has a particular meaning when it comes to erotic sites (these sites are not are about explicit pornography but show content vaguely related to sexuality, such as nude photos or short movies taken by a candid camera, with some sexual implication). The re-blogging has led to the creation of sites that have nothing to do with the old heavy pornography, that was present on the Internet years ago, these sites are managed with good taste, sometimes they have no commercial purposes and it is not surprising that they have a public in progressive increase. Even these blogs with an erotic theme, however, inevitably present behavior patterns.
 
Pornography and today also the re-blogging of erotic content constitute for many gay guys the sexual model of reference, somehow a true sex education. It should be kept in mind that the boys' approach to pornography starts very early and that the first contact usually takes place between 13 and 14 years, so at an extremely receptive age compared to content related to sexuality.
 
The use of pornography is closely connected with masturbation and is, above all for straight boys, a topic of discussion with peers. For them, talking about these things with their friends is still possible and not risky, for gay boys it is easy to realize from the speeches of other boys that the sexuality of those boys is another and it is easy to deduce the wrong conclusion that there is something wrong with gay sexuality.
 
For a straight boy the messages coming from pornography are filtered through the speeches made with friends and have a less important value than for a gay boy, who on those topics generally doesn’t have the possibility of interpersonal comparison. I would add that the first sexual relationships of heterosexual boys are generally considerably more anticipated than the first sexual relationships of gay boys and present themselves as a sort of license to adulthood, for gay boys instead, masturbation on the basis of pornography replaces sexuality lived with other guys for very long periods and ends up consolidating the models offered by pornography.
 
Sexual education delegated to Church and pornography
 
In social contexts, such as the Italian one, in which moralism dominates and in which sex is the most widespread and rooted educational taboo, there is no serious form of sexual education given through institutional and lay channels, that is, not affected by prejudices of religious origin, which means that the sexual education of boys is almost totally delegated to the Church and to pornography.
 
Although the conditioning weight of the education given by the Church is still significant in many cases, the element that really dominates the sexual education of boys in today's Italy is certainly pornography via the Internet. Given that in fact a very delicate educational task is up to the pornography, let us ask ourselves if it is really able to perform such a task by showing the true gay sexuality as it is actually experienced, or if pornography shows something substantially different from reality, in particular, let us ask ourselves if and how gay pornography influences the true sexuality of gays, beyond the fact that it represents such a sexuality more or less correctly.
 
Hetero-gay and gay-gay models of male-male relationship
 
Let’s start from the definition of heterosexual male (hetero) as a male person who falls in love both on an emotional and sexual level with women or girls, and of homosexual male (or gay) as a person, always male, who falls in love both on the emotional and sexual level with men or guys.
 
According to the common notion, an emotional or sexual relationship "male homosexual" or, briefly, "homosexual" is a relationship "between two male persons", but it is clear that, in fact, the situations that can occur are two and are clearly different from each other. If the relationship is created between two gays we will talk about gay-gay relationship, if it on the contrary it is created between a heterosexual and a gay we will talk about a hetero-gay relationship. It should not be surprising that hetero-gay relationships exist, because a heterosexual, who "falls in love" affectionately and sexually only with women or girls, can nevertheless, for various reasons, build also sexual relationships, generally without a true affective component, with gay guys, the phenomenon, indeed, is and overall has been quite common, as we will see in the section on gay sexuality. Historically, hetero-gay and gay-gay relationships were born in very different eras and have been structured according to very different models.
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