Gay Men and Sexual Addiction

Carlos had heard the term “sex addiction” before and summarily dismissed it. It must have been created by people, probably by corporations, who wanted to deny individuals’ their sexual freedoms. Anyone who looked down on others’ sexual rights was anathema to him; he dismissed them outright. He’d already had enough of his family’s conservative religious attitudes and their beliefs about his sexual orientation—he had no more chosen to be gay than he had chosen to be Floridian. Their repeated rejection had all been incredibly painful for him, so when Carlos finally left home in order to pursue his own life, he promised himself never again to compromise his own values. He would be out and he would be proud.

Now here he was about to celebrate his 30th birthday, and something dramatic was occurring to him. He couldn’t invite all of the people he wanted to invite because they all knew very different sides of him, and he didn’t want those sides to collide. At work, he was a fierce young financial analyst. On the weekends, he was a racket ball warrior or a partying fiend. In the times between, he cruised men at the gym, in the park, in the alley behind his high-rise apartment in Miami and on hook-up apps on his smartphone. In fact, he was always thinking about his next sexual escapade, even when his head was buried in the numbers.

Carlos was engaging in anonymous sex with strangers usually several times per day. He slept very little and his work had begun to suffer. Yet he’d come to think of this as simply the gay male bachelor life, and even the life for some who were partnered. Carlos believed his movements were standard, but had begun to wrestle with difficult emotions. There was anticipation and “the high” that amplified each search for sex, and the crash of emotions and feelings of emptiness he experienced afterward. He would promise himself that the next experience would be the last time, and each time he would disappoint himself. He believed in safe sex and yet he had risked his health more times than he could remember. He would never take such risks with money; why did he take them with his health? While he’d chosen long ago never to compromise his values, it appeared that he very much had.

Sex Addiction Is Not about Sex

An unfortunate misunderstanding occurs when discussing the controversial subject of sexual addiction. People assume, not merely because of the label but also because of the behaviors themselves, that sex addiction is a problem of sex. It isn’t. Sex addiction is not really about sex; it is an expression of a problem with emotional intimacy. According to noted expert, Robert Weiss, a person experiencing sexual addiction is a person with an intimacy disorder. It is next to impossible for this person to feel comfortable being vulnerable, raw and emotionally honest in the context of close relationships—no matter the type (i.e., family, friend, lover).

In his book, Cruise Control: Understanding Sex Addiction in Gay Men, the factors sex addicts of all orientations find they have in common are:

• Intense emotional arousal when seeking a particular sexual behavior or romantic connection
• An inability to make healthy choices when in this emotionally aroused state
• They may experience a “distant intellectual awareness not to proceed” but go forward nonetheless
• When in pursuit of their sexual behavior or lost in fantasy regarding it, they discover they may spend long periods of time “feeling spaced out and distracted”
• Repeated promises to themselves made and broken
• Feelings of shame, emptiness or disappointment after continuing to break this promise to themselves

Stigma, Policing and Addiction Recovery

LGBTQ culture still faces a large degree of stigma on top of restrictive assumptions about the way it “should” and “should not” behave, sexually and otherwise. Given these constricting worldviews, bringing the concept of sexual addiction into the mix—even when it is intended only to be a healing agent—can feel negative and limiting. Is a diagnosis of sex addiction, when given to a gay male, an oppressive means of policing sexuality? Not necessarily.

The reality is that a subculture that has been sexually suppressed may be at risk for unhealthy sexual behaviors—they become a mask for the emotional intimacy the dominant culture does not want this subculture to feel toward one another. Healing does not always occur simply in freeing society of homophobic attitudes, but in opening peoples’ minds and hearts to the safety of closeness they may never have felt before. That is the end goal of recovery from sex addiction.