A small number of people struggle with persistent fears that they’re gay. But they’re not closeted — instead, they have a form of OCD.
Time‘s Jeffrey Kluger tells the story of Bethany, who struggled with the condition:
Fifth grade was the year Bethany started to notice boys — and to wonder if she was noticing them quite enough. The girls she knew were already swooning over Kirk Cameron, Michael J. Fox and other teen heartthrobs of the day. She was swooning too, she guessed, but in the same way her friends were? And what about when it came time to kiss a real boy in her own world? Would she want to?
Kluger explains that while questions like this sometimes do lead people to discover that they’re gay, Bethany felt “instinctively” that she was straight. He writes, “Her anxiety grew from an increasingly common form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in which people who may have no moral or cultural qualms about homosexuality suddenly begin despairing of the possibility of ever knowing with blood-test certainty just what their sexuality is.” Bethany’s instinct that she was attracted to men didn’t stop her from worrying about her sexuality for 20 years, until she finally found a website that described her symptoms, and entered cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Bethany’s story and other accounts of homosexuality OCD (HOCD) are potentially controversial for lots of reasons. For one thing, some people do experience prolonged denial over their sexuality, often because they get the message from their families and from the culture at large that being gay is unacceptable. Also, so-called “reparative” therapy that claims to “cure” homosexuality is immoral and harmful — and until all too recently, homosexuality itself was erroneously classed as a mental disorder by the DSM. Understandably, this might make a lot of people leery of therapy that talks someone out of the idea of being gay.
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