Gay and bisexual men's age-discrepant childhood sexual experiences

Journal of Sex Research,  Nov, 2004  by Jessica L. Stanley,  Kim Bartholomew,  Doug Oram

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The response of guilt to sexual encounters as a child presented a challenge in coding the interviews. Several men spoke of feeling guilty about having a sexual experience with another male. Because guilt is a negative emotion, such feelings were coded as indicating a negative perception. However, in some cases the men's guilt appeared to result from family or community disapproval of homosexual relations rather than their own discomfort with the sexual acts with an older person. For example, one man stopped his sexual encounter because he thought that others believed homosexuality was wrong. He spoke of feeling guilty as a result of "someone else's self-imposed guilt" and of feeling confused about his sexual orientation. Another man stated that his "guilt came from enjoying it." Both of these men, as boys, wished that they could have talked to someone about their experience but did not feel comfortable revealing their same-sex attraction. Thus, the most damaging aspect of their sexual encounter may have been that they did not feel safe talking about their sexual orientation.

In conclusion, the standard convention of defining age-based childhood sexual abuse as uniformly negative, harmful, and coercive may not accurately represent gay and bisexual men's sexual experiences. Combining perception-based CSA experience with noncoercive, nonnegative, nonabusive experiences, as the age-based definition does, presents a misleading picture of childhood sexual abuse. An age-based CSA definition inflates prevalence rates of childhood sexual abuse and inaccurately suggests that the maladjustment associated with perception-based CSA experiences applies to all childhood age-discrepant sexual encounters. In contrast, these results suggest that gay men with histories of nonnegative, noncoercive childhood sexual experiences with older people are as well adjusted as those without histories of age-discrepant childhood sexual experiences. However, both definitions of CSA account for only a very small proportion of the variance in adult adjustment problems. Contrary to popular belief, negative outcomes do not inevitably follow from gay and bisexual men's childhood age-discrepant sexual encounters.