Closeted gays
Kingdom in the Closet: Saudi Arabia's Remarkably Vibrant Lgbtq+ Community
Yasser, a 26-year-old artist, was taking me on an impromptu tour of his hometown of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a sweltering September afternoon. The air conditioner of his dusty Honda battled the heat, prayer beads dangled from the rearview mirror, and the inhale of the cigarette he’d just smoked wafted toward me as he stopped to show me a barbershop that his friends frequent. Officially, men in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to wear their hair long or to present jewelry—such vanities are usually deemed to violate an Islamic instruction that the sexes must not be too similar in appearance. But Yasser wears a silver necklace, a silver bracelet, and a sparkly red stud in his left ear, and his hair is shaggy. Yasser is homosexual, or so we would describe him in the West, and the barbershop we visited caters to gay men. Business is brisk.
Departing the barbershop, we drove onto Tahlia Street, a broad avenue framed by palm trees, then went past a succession of sleek malls and slowed in front of a glass-and-steel shopping center. Men congregated outside and in nearby cafés. Whereas
I’m a closeted gay man.
When I first typed that sentence, it felt nice. The more I looked at it on my screen, the less fine it felt. I desire the courage to delete the word “closeted” and to not confine my declaration to written words that will never be attributed to me by name.
I’m a closeted queer man, but of a different sort. I’m attracted to other men – always have been – but I believe in a traditional view of marriage. And I’ve been an evangelical pastor for more than thirty years. Who knows, I might be your pastor.
Gays started using phrases like “coming out of the closet” in the 1960’s, the same decade when I was figuring out that I had this massive problem that I did not want, did not understand, and that I had no one with whom to talk it over. I didn’t realize the closet metaphor – I was ten, eleven, twelve in my period of self-discovery – but I knew I needed to put my attraction to other boys and the tingle they caused inside of me away, out of sight, out of anyone else's grasp , behind other stuff.
My family’s sexual ethics contradicted godly wisdom in every way, but even in our house, I knew that boys being attracted to boys would be condemned and met with my father’s lea
The ‘Global Closet’ is Huge—Vast Majority of World’s Womxn loving womxn, Gay, Bisexual Population Obscure Orientation, YSPH Study Finds
The vast majority of the world’s sexual minority population — an estimated 83 percent of those who identify as lesbian, queer or bisexual — retain their orientation hidden from all or most of the people in their lives, according to a new study by the Yale School of Universal Health that could own major implications for global public health.
Concealing one’s sexual orientation can lead to significant mental and physical health issues, increased healthcare costs and a dampening of the public noticeability necessary for advancing equivalent rights, said John Pachankis, Ph.D., associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health. He co-authored the study with Richard Bränström, an associate professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and analyze affiliate at Yale.
Published in the journal PLOS ONE, the study is believed to be the first attempt to quantify the size of the “global closet” in instruction to gauge its widespread health impact.
“Given rapidly increasing acceptance of sexual minorities in some countries, it might be easy to assume that most sexual minorities are
How times have changed for LGBTQ … or hold they?
There is no doubt that we hold seen an increase in acceptance of LGBTQ over the past two decades. I never thought in my lifetime that I would ever be standard for being an out gay man nor be able to legally join my husband of 28 years.
Of course, we still see people who are LGBTQ attacked by the culture at huge for, of course, organism LGBTQ. Hate crimes are on the rise nationally and according to the Human Rights Campaign, “Hate crimes based on sexual orientation represent 16.7% of hate crimes, the third-largest category after race and religion.”
Source: I-Stock by Getty Credit: Tat'yana Mazitova
While acceptance of us LGBTQ folks have risen, I’ve been surprised at how people who are perceived to be closeted gays are being attacked for creature closeted!
I’ve been thinking about this ever since I filmed a video on TikTok, and expressed an unpopular view about how straight men can still enjoy sex with men.
I was surprised by all the comments I’m still getting from people who saw the video and assumed that I was either a closeted gay or bisexual dude. In reality, as a sex therapist and educator, I was sharing one of the ma
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