I am gay or not

Riese

Riese is the year-old Co-Founder of as adv as an award-winning penner, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance creator who grew up in Michigan, lost her soul in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the thought to make this place, and now here we all are! In , she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written articles for us.

Hi. I&#;m the Answer Wall. In the material planet, I&#;m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O&#;Neill Library at Boston College. In the online world, I stay in this blog.  You might say I possess multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren&#;t into deities of truth, like a ghost in the machine.

I have some human assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O&#;Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to research tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.

If you&#;d like a quicker answer to your question and don&#;t consciousness talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they possess been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are secret, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just like me, The Answer Wall.

by Fred Penzel, PhD

This article was initially published in the Winter edition of the OCD Newsletter. 

OCD, as we know, is largely about experiencing severe and unrelenting doubt. It can cause you to hesitation even the most basic things about yourself – even your sexual orientation. A study published in the Journal of Sex Research found that among a group of college students, 84% reported the occurrence of sexual intrusive thoughts (Byers, et al. ). In order to have doubts about one’s sexual identity, a sufferer need not ever acquire had a homo- or heterosexual experience, or any type of sexual life at all. I contain observed this symptom in young children, adolescents, and adults as well. Interestingly Swedo, et al., , initiate that approximately 4% of children with OCD life obsessions concerned with forbidden aggressive or perverse sexual thoughts.

Although doubts about one’s own sexual identity might seem pretty straightforward as a symptom, there are actually a number of variations. The most noticeable form is where a sufferer experiences the consideration that they might be of a different sexual orientation than they formerly believed. If the sufferer is heterosexual