Sad to be gay.

There are many factors that affect us when we are children, which determine how we turn out as adults. Some of those factors can include how we are brought up by our parents, where we live, how we live, wealth and so on. Another important factor that also affects us as adults is how well our development is promoted as children. A lack in different developmental stages can affect a child for the remainder of their life.

In this assignment, I will give a detailed description of David’s story from the video I watched and reflect on it. I will discuss the events of his life, using different theory relevant to events during his infancy, childhood and early adulthood. A life-cycle perspective will be more relevant for the purposes of this assignment as development is seen to be continuous and changes should not be seen in isolation. A number of different theories have been put forward to explain development and in order to begin to examine the impact of life events on David’s development, theories such as: attachment, psychosocial, and ecology have been considered. I acknowledge that in drawing patterns from observations to explain phenomena, different persons may explain the same events with a range of theories.

Born in 1965, David grew up in care as he was abandoned at birth by his white mother because during those times inter-racial relationships were unacceptable. His father, a black man, remained involved in his life till he was nine, then he went back to his native home in Nigeria. David was sexually abused at the age of eight by older boys and by his father. At the age of eleven, he had his first consensual sexual relationship with a boy. At twenty-six years he met his birth mother and at thirty-five he managed to forgive his father. At the time of making the video, he is forty and has realised that he is not happy with his gay life-style as he says that he wants a nuclear family; wife and children of his own, something he has always dreamt of having to compensate his lack of it as a child.

In the video David expresses emotions of sadness and pain as he tries to deal with his past. David is sure that he was not born gay but became gay because of the environment and he would like to change that. David takes Jean, a friend to the children’s home where he was first abused. He even expresses how much he idolised and trusted his father, “ I over idolised my father and every weekend I sat at those steps waiting for him to take me”, somebody he looked up to ended abusing him. He sought male affection and could get this from the boys in the house since the Social workers were all women.

Until 1967, being gay was an imprisonable offence in the UK. During the 1970s, there were assumptions that homosexuality was a mental illness that could be treated by using a version therapy similar to the Pavlov experiment- classical conditioning, with rewards and punishments. A man was given an electric shock after seeing pictures of men he found attractive and nothing for pictures of women, thereby associating women fantasies with “relief from tension” and pictures of men with “pain and anxiety”. David speaks to Jeremy to find out if the version therapy helped him “go straight”. Jeremy says that it caused him to remain celibate for years because the shocks he used to give himself made him scared of having any contact with people so he kept away from people, this had a negative impact on him.

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 David is in search of something that can help him “go straight”, he looks at the internet and finds x-gay courses most of them being religious with slogans such as “Jesus will set you free” and the costs start from £700per week. He enrolls with Love In Action based in Memphis; it is one of the 120 Ex-gay ministries in America. Even though he makes it clear that he is not religious at all and might find this difficult he keeps an open mind. In order to change, David has to deal with the past and this proves a ...

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