January 20, 2009: "A Life Incongruent With Who You Are"

A psychologist wrote to the Chicago Tribune's "Dear Amy" advising her to be careful about dismissing suspicions that a prospective bridegroom was homosexual. He said that there were two cases in his family where women married men who turned out to be gay, and both marriages ended badly. In one case, the man knew he was gay but lived in self-denial; the other "found out" his sexual preference much later. Both men were married for years and had several children before they destroyed their families.

The psychologist believed it was wrong for these men to marry women in the first place, and maybe he was right. But then he concluded, "Being gay is really OK. However, trying to live a life that is incongruent with who you are does not work."

Really? It doesn't work? Sure it does. Or it can. Every decent man who has ever lived has struggled to live a life incongruent with who he was.

For example, most men - over 90 percent, I think - are inherently blay. (Don't look up "blay" in the dictionary: I've had to coin the term because I don't know a name for this condition.) A blay man is one who is not naturally attracted to one particular woman through the course of her life as she ages, changes, and loses the bloom of her youth. Instead, he is naturally and irreversibly attracted to multiple women who are roughly in the 18-30 year age range. Now, a blay man might manage to remain faithful to one woman through a 60-year marriage - but that is only because he chooses to live in denial. He puts up a false front, so to speak, and deliberately lives a life "incongruent with who he is." In his heart, he's flamingly blay whether he admits it or not.

A key feature of blayness is that it is simply "there" as one's built-in sexual orientation. No one chooses it. I know I didn't choose to be blay. Most men of my generation discovered we were blay when, around age 11, it became apparent that Farrah Fawcett Majors and Cheryl Tiegs were so much more appealing to us than the girls of our own age and acquaintance. Popular Islam acknowledges the existence of blay tendencies when it pictures heavenly bliss as the possession of a harem of 72 willing virgins. (Wow! 72. I don't think I'm that blay.)

There are men who, having the resources, live a life completely congruent with their blayness. Hugh Hefner is one example. He has never seen the point of denying himself. His attitude is one that we see reflected in many people who indulge their natural tendencies and can proudly say that they "are who they are." Bernie Madoff, for example, has lived a life that is very congruent with his greedy acquisitiveness. Father John Goeghan lived a life congruent with his rapacious pedophilia. Jeffrey Dahmer lived a life congruent with his natural tendency toward cannibalism.

These all are or were bad men. It is just nonsense to praise them for living lives of "authentic existence" in accordance with their true inner natures. All moral suasion, and all human decency, depend crucially on the conviction that it is possible, and, in many cases, desirable and necessary, to live one's life in utter denial of one's natural tendencies. In fact, that is the kind of denial that virtually all married men must practice - whether they are gay or blay or anything else.

If you are now living a life congruent with who you are, repent.