Profile of Writer and Illustrator Madeira Desouza

Who I am is a complex product of genetics, life experiences, and choices. From the very first time I understood what my erections were for, I struggled to understand my sexual identity and how I fit into the life I saw around me. Let me share my experiences and lessons learned.

Admitting that you are gay may not be the easiest thing you’ve ever done. We’ve all heard that. But, it is completely true.

If you are gay, deep in your heart and soul, you will know. People around you will know you are gay. Your mother will know. Several of your high school classmates will know. Choosing to lie to yourself and others about who you really are sexually will only make you suffer.

Why I am presenting this profile of myself is simple: Who I am as one who creates and publishes imagery of masculine males is directly related to my self image and how I became honest with myself and the world about my homosexuality.

Discovering You

I have met men who told me that from a very early age they knew they were gay. Today I realize that they are, indeed, the fortunate ones. Knowing early can spare a man many years–perhaps even decades–of emotional pressure, turmoil, and self-punishment. But getting to the point in your life where you know yourself and your sexual identity can take much time, especially if there are factors in your life that combine to confuse you.

Let’s be honest here. Conservative persons and most, if not all, organized religions have attempted for decades to brainwash us into believing that we gay people make a choice to be gay. We’re further programmed to accept the utter falsehood that making such a choice to be gay means we are choosing to be sinners.

Think about this. How can any person make a deliberate and conscious choice about their sexual orientation? Do you think that it is possible for any person to make a deliberate and conscious choice about whether they are right-handed or left-handed? Do you think that it is possible for any person to make a deliberate and conscious choice about what foods taste better to them?

Use the brains that you developed over many years. You can be a person who thinks for himself. I do. I finally grew to understand that biology is just biology. There is no sin in biology. There is no choice in biology. If you are gay, most likely you were born that way. If you are straight, most likely you were born that way.

Where choice enters in to this process is very much limited to a man’s choice to act upon his sexual orientation. Even though you may be born gay, you can choose to deny it. You can choose to act as though you were born straight. You can marry a female. You can produce offspring with the woman that you married. Doing all this if you are gay takes a lot of your time and energy that could be channeled into other endeavors in your life. I call such a waste of a gay man’s life and energy battling biology.

Finding the Natural Flow of Life

It’s important to understand that this effort to battle biology is nothing less than deliberately going against an essential flow of nature. It takes work to go against any flow if you are constantly pushing in the opposite direction. Battling biology will cause an imbalance in your life that nobody can continue for a lifetime. Such an imbalance may topple a man emotionally or sexually or both.

Of course, when you choose to stop battling biology, a good many things immediately must be dealt with. If you are a member of a mainstream organized religion, you will really be cooked. If you were raised Roman Catholic like I was, you’re in for an especially bad ride. Guilt and shame can really ruin your entire personality and demeanor, not to mention that it causes you to not be any fun at all to hang out with–in or out of bed.

The Lies Told by Major Religions

Mainstream organized religions look upon being gay as being in a state of wrongful conduct deliberately by choice. Some leaders of organized religion here in the United States use their belief about the alleged choice to be gay as the basis for spreading criticism, negativity and hate. The most stunning example of this is found in Topeka, Kansas, where there is a fraudulent “church” that has set up an infamous and offensive website. They are a group literally from the fringe element that uses the Internet to spread an unashamed agenda of hateful falsehoods. This is an extreme example of the ironic lies told by organized religions, but you should be wary of trusting in the so-called truths sold by organized religion–especially when it comes to human sexual behaviors.

Would you trust the advice and recommendations about world travel that comes from a person who never traveled outside the United States? Would you trust statements about how to manage your money from someone who had declared bankruptcy? Would you believe someone who gave you medical advice who had no medical degree or experience working in a hospital?

Why, then, do you believe religious leaders who tell you that if you are male and you have sex with another male that you are choosing to be a sinner?

Here is the Antidote to Falsehoods

You can choose to buy into falsehoods sold to you everyday by organized religion if you so desire. But, know this: They want your obedience and compliance. They want your money. They want to tell you whom you can love. But, you really do not need to buy into falsehoods pushed by organized religion, however. You can set yourself free by using your brain: Think seriously through why anybody would use organized religion as a way to control you and your life. They may say that they care about your immortal soul. But, what they really care more about is exerting control over you.

The day will arrive in the future when scientific findings disprove the long-held belief that the people choose their sexual orientation. Then, we can all begin to accept the reality (which some of us already accept) that biology, not willful choice, is what sets a person’s sexual orientation. In that future time, it will be very difficult for a religious person to be taken serious when they put down on gay people. It will, of course, always be possible for religious leaders or ordinary citizens to deride people for how they were born. Making fun of someone in a wheelchair is an example of that. But, can you think of anyone who respects the person who makes fun of someone for how they were born? No way.

In turn, people will one day not have a religious or spiritual basis for guilt and shame over their sexual orientation. And, I believe that ultimately the more progressive faith-oriented organizations will promote responsible sexual behaviors as the preferred way of life for all adults, rather than wasting time and energy passing judgment on a person’s sexual orientation. Some spiritual leaders and religious people today have already gotten a clue about this. It may be possible in the near future for medical science to alter a person’s genetics before they are born. If or when this becomes a reality, the next controversy will be altering an unborn baby’s genetics to make sure they are born heterosexual. Can’t you just imagine the bumper stickers to promote that kind of Nazi Germany style of human manipulation?

The Demands of Masculinity

As if dealing with your faith weren’t enough of a challenge when you stop battling biology, you will also need to face how your culture and your family environment defined being a man for you when you a kid. From the earliest days of my boyhood, I never had a solid definition of what a real man was. Unlike in my past, however, as an openly gay male, today I am sure that I do have a very clear definition of what being masculine means. However, the impressions I got while growing up were crystal clear: Real men were masculine and statuesque figures like you can see in depictions of ancient warriors. Except, of course, real men were also comfortable with guns. This may explain why I was confused and why it took me many years to admit that I am gay.

I struggled under the then-prevalent Roman Catholic perspective on masculine sexuality: Sex is solely for married people and is strictly for producing babies who will grow up to be what the Roman Catholic Church actually referred to as Soldiers for Christ. I was never clear as to why there was a military spin put on that, but I assumed that soldiers were expected to go out and fight somebody for some reason. The Roman Catholic Church also taught in those gloriously innocent days that even though you may be a soldier fighting on behalf of Christ or whatever, you body was not own. If you, as a male, dared to “touch yourself in an impure manner,” you were committing a terrible sin. In other words, when I was growing up, masturbation was considered something terrible by the Roman Catholic Church. Masturbation. Of all the problems in the world–hunger, poverty, birth defects, illiteracy–the Roman Catholic Church chose to be so upset about masturbation?!

The Worship of Testosterone

Adding to the warping influence of Roman Catholic dogma that I accepted during my youth, I grew up in a Portuguese-American household in the West in the 1950′s. In that culture there was no room for anything but macho and tough males, who were expected to produce babies. Of course, this was intended to happen after getting married, never before. The more tough you looked and acted, and the higher the number of offspring you generated, the more masculine you were perceived to be in that culture.

This worship of testosterone runs hot and freely in many other ethnic groups, but it is particularly evident in those of Mediterranean origin like mine. My dead grandfather was a noteworthy example of what feminists in the 1970s started uncharitably calling “testosterone poisoning.” He was remembered as a role model of a man’s man.

I never knew him since our lives barely overlapped. What I learned of him came from my mother, who was his daughter. He produced four offspring in his short lifetime, if you wish to evaluate his masculinity using the scale of testosterone worship of his era.

He was born and raised in “the old country” — the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal. The men from the islands were physically big men, who were also strong and powerful. He was like that. My mother told me he could win any fist fight with any man. He could drink any man under the table, she said.

In his early 40′s he achieved the pinnacle of his machismo. One night after getting drunk, he blasted a double-barrel shotgun at point-blank range into my grandmother’s face. Then he fired the shotgun into his own mouth.

I was 19 before my parents told me of this family tragedy. I was appalled, of course, yet I couldn’t help but wonder if my grandfather’s traits of machismo flowed in my blood. When I measured myself against him, it turns out I only got into two fist fights in my entire life (in elementary school). And, to date I have produced zero offspring.

Through my teenage yeas, I had low self-esteem and perceived of myself as never being “masculine enough”. After I came out, I learned that gay men of Portuguese extraction are highly valued for their masculine endowments. Well, after all, I am a descendant of the island men, and if you were following closely what I wrote, you will remember the part about the physically big men from the Azores.

Homosexuality is Wasted on the Young

All around us today online it is impossible to miss the clear message that homosexuality is considered for young people. Don’t buy into that, however. If you know where to look (like the website you’re now visiting), you can find material for mature gay males.

I did not spend my youth in homosexuality, however. As other baby boomer men like me have done, I just could not or would not accept that I was a gay man. So, I got married to a woman when I was 29 as a way to prove to myself and to the world that I was straight. During our 12 years of marriage I never had sex with any other person. I got out of the marriage following my wife’s problems with alcohol and prescription drugs to ease her chronic depression, which distracted me completely. I never got the opportunity to learn within my marriage that I was not a straight man like I had been deceiving myself, my wife, and everyone I knew in those days.

For five years following my divorce, I was frustrated with how unsuccessful I was at making rewarding emotional and sexual connections with women. I kept insisting on believing that I was a straight man. This was literally a full-time lie that I chose to live with. Yet, my fantasies were always about having sex with men. I could not break free from the self-deception. It owned me, plain and simple.

The World Wide Web emerged at that same time as an instantaneous resource for information and recreation. I began to surf online and found myself enjoying numerous websites tailored specifically to gay men. Yet, I kept telling myself that I was straight. I chose to believe that my Internet activities–such as downloading pictures of men having sex with other men–was nothing more significant than something I did with my computer at night in the privacy of my own home. What a liar I was! I did not realize the extent of my lies to myself.

When my mother died suddenly at age 66, the shock jolted me into an in-your-face and non-theoretical understanding of how mortal we all are. Immediately after her passing, a 65 year-old male colleague of mine needed emergency heart surgery–a quadruple bypass. I was the very last person he spoke with after surgery. He did not survive but a few hours.

I was confronted with the clear and unmistakable reality that life can end without warning. This shifted my priorities almost overnight. When you learn so suddenly by the loss of loved ones how life is powerfully precious and temporary, your life gets rearranged, whether you want it to be rearranged or not. Such a significant emotional experience teaches you very quickly that there is no longer any room for lies in your life.

If you have been denying that you were born gay, eventually your religion, your culture, your upbringing, your environment, and your family become less important when compared to accepting yourself totally and honestly. As I did, you may wake up and realize deeply that battling biology means you are not really alive at all and maybe you never were. And so you make the choice to stop lying and start living for the very first time. You can learn the simple truth that a real man is someone who gives to the world more than he has received regardless of which gender is sexually attractive to him.

Expressing Your Sexual Idenity

Some people choose to believe that gay men recruit other men “to become gay” by using the tools available on the Internet. Think about that for a moment. What a completely silly and illogical belief that is! Either you are born gay or you are born straight. Sexual orientation is hard-wired into a person’s essential being. Sexual orientation is fixed forever and what turns you on sexually is not subject to willful choice. No organized religion, website or medical professional can turn a gay person straight. Anyone who believes that changing one’s sexual orientation is possible is delusional.

My recommendation is to express yourself. That is why I am a man who creates controversial imagery for gay adult men to view. Not everyone can produce visual works, but wherever your own individual creative talents may be, I urge you to bring them into the forefront of your life.

I cannot adequately express how relieved I felt when–thanks to the Internet–I realized that other men out there had thoughts and fantasies like I was having. I learned that there are other men out there who enjoy visual images of masculine men like I do. For over 40 years, I had allowed myself to be convinced that somehow I was a freak–the only man in the whole world who had the sexual orientation that I have.

And so, I am pleased I can share with you what I have experienced. I hope that I might reach at least one other man out there whose battle with himself can come to an end. There really is no time for lies we may choose to tell ourselves. It is better to stop battling biology and live in truth.

Read my interview with a man who concealed being gay for far too long. I also have opinions as a gay man about what it means for gay men when they think of being masculine.