We all have one or two relatives that's gay. I have women in my family that are lesbians.  The lesbians in my family are also members of both OES & BGL. I haven't spoken to them in years, not because they're gay, but because of other reasons. I'm 100% with the conventional relationship & if it doesn't work out I will deal with the consequences. The consequences don't always have to be painful or full of drama. It's hard for me to understand the gay community because I'm not gay or bisexual & in this generation you have to say never been gay or bisexual because people are flipping all the time from gay to straight. I have never been confused about my sexuality. I'm single & been single for a while & I can't see how being single can make you confused about your sexuality. 

I get spiritual, emotional & physical support from my own personal relationship with God. I'm not heavy into religion, I just feel if you believe in God than you are never alone. I don't look for emotional support from another man.

 

Here's the article:

The findings raise fascinating questions over the long-held belief that sexual preferences may be partly genetic and are fixed early in life.

They also suggest that female sexuality may be more 'fluid' than men's, accounting for the fact that some women sustain long and often fulfilling marriages before developing lesbian or bisexual tendencies in early middle age  -  often leaving behind them a devastated husband and utterly bewildered children.

 

While the phenomenon of married women falling in love with other women is nothing new, in the past it was generally only bohemian, upper class women who dared to be overt about their lesbian tendencies  -  women like the married writer Virginia Woolf, who was 40 when she began a long love affair with Vita Sackville-West, who was also middle-aged and married.

 

But the new research suggests that this could be changing. And while some have previously concealed their sexuality to keep their families together, many women have no prior inclination to change their sexual preference until their mid-life revelations.

The consequences can be traumatic.

Twice-married: Beverli Rhodes shared her first lesbian kiss at 30

 

Twice-married: Beverli Rhodes shared her first lesbian kiss at 30

Beverli Rhodes insists she had 'never entertained the thought of being in a gay relationship' when she was growing up.

 

She married George, a company director seven years her senior, and quickly had three babies.

 

When the marriage broke up after seven years, she says: 'I simply thought that we were too young when we'd married and had grown apart.

 

‘Sex wasn't fantastic but I just put it down to the fact that like many mothers of young children, I was usually shattered.'

 

Indeed, she quickly met and married Daniel, who managed a chain of restaurants, and soon became pregnant with her youngest daughter.

Within two years, at the age of 27, Beverli was a divorcee for the second time, and attributed the break-up to the stresses caused by her burgeoning career as a City business analyst and the fact she earned far more than her husband.

 

It was a further three years before she realised, aged 30, that she was developing feelings for other women.

 

Beverli's life-changing moment happened after she broke her wrist in a car accident and her friend's lesbian daughter drove her home from hospital

 

The couple realised their mutual attraction and ended up kissing.

As Beverli recalls: 'The thrill of it took my breath away.'

 

Their subsequent year-long affair was the prelude to a series of other liaisons over seven years, during which Beverli  -  anxious not to jeopardise her happy relationship with her children  -  kept her sexuality secret. 

 

As the new research reveals, mothers understandably agonise about the reaction of their children if their sexuality begins to waver.

 

Christian Moran, who conducted the studies at the Southern Connecticut State University, found that many women initially go through what is effectively psychological trauma as they try to reconcile their loyalties to their families with their attraction to other women.

 

Beverli was certainly fearful of how her own children would react. 'They were in their teens when I told them and I thought they'd be more surprised than they actually were,' she says.

 

Even so, she concedes it wasn't easy for them. 'The younger ones were teased at school when news leaked out,' she reveals. While for many women 'coming out' is a liberating and ultimately fulfilling experience, for others there can be irrevocable damage to their family relationships. Take the experience of Lynn Volante. When she fell in love with another woman and walked out on her husband, the impact on her family life was calamitous.

 

Her elder son Ben, then 13, felt so shamed by his mother's mid-life change of sexuality that he withdrew into silence. In fact it was six years before he was able to admit to anyone that his mum was gay.

 

'I was 19  -  and I'd been dating my then girlfriend for three years  -  before I finally felt able to tell her that mum had not just left us, but had gone off to live with another woman,' he says.

 

'It opened the floodgates. I don't think I stopped crying for three days.'

Lynn, a credit control manager in a bank, was 36 and had been married to Colin for 16 years when she jettisoned everything to live with Emma, a younger colleague. Lynn and Emma's relationship had begun platonically. 'Then one evening Emma said: "I've fallen in love with you",' Lynn recalls. 'I was speechless with shock.

 

‘But within a few days I realised I had feelings for her and I started to fall passionately in love.' Bound up in the tumult of her own emotions, Lynn left Colin to raise their two adolescent boys alone so she could pursue her affair with Emma. Small wonder Colin says now: 'I can only describe her actions then as incredibly selfish, because she put herself and her feelings first.

 

'Overnight I was left on my own with two impressionable young boys, who were totally bewildered and terribly upset, having to explain where their mother was.' 


Lynn, now 53 and living in Rugby, Warwickshire, is full of regret for what happened. Ironically, her relationship with Emma lasted just 18 months and she has failed to find lasting love since. 'I know I hurt Colin and my sons terribly, and while they are supportive now, I will never know if they truly forgive me,' she says.

'But I never set out to hurt anyone. I was just being honest and true to my feelings.' The question is: at what cost? Mum of two Lynn Cassidy, 48, is another who struggled with mixed emotions when she realised she was gay. After her husband Mark left her for another woman she eschewed relationships, preferring to concentrate on raising her children. Then, when she was 36, she decided to retrain as a counsellor and, without warning, developed a 'huge crush' on her openly gay female tutor.


'My feelings seemed to come out of nowhere,' she recalls.

'At first I worried about being gay. I couldn't imagine how the children would ever cope with such a revelation. So I pushed my feelings to one side. ‘But then I decided I had to find my true self so I joined an organisation for people who are confused about their sexuality, to discuss it.' It was there that she met Susan, who had also been married, and the couple fell in love. Now Lynn, 48, a counsellor, and Susan, 51, an accountant, live together in Blackpool, Lancashire.

Lynn adds: 'Sadly, although my son has always been fine, my daughter found it hard to accept I was a lesbian. ‘She felt it was a betrayal and that my life as a happily married mum to her dad had been a lie.

'She wouldn't even speak to me. It was awful as we'd always been so close. Suddenly we were arguing and overnight our relationship became fraught. ‘She said I was no longer the mum she knew  -  and that was what upset her most. For a long time I think she thought my attraction to other women was a pre-menopausal phase. 'She thought it had been provoked by my marriage breakdown; that I'd been turned off men and had become a lesbian because I couldn't find a man.

 

So why are women like these changing their sexual orientation after relatively long and conventional marriages, and sometimes with painful consequences?

 

There are, according to Dr Ceri Parsons of Staffordshire University, a multitude of causes, both psychological and social.

 

'Women today are finding it easier to be in same-sex relationships for many reasons: society is taking a more liberal position.

 

‘Generally people are more aware of lesbianism  -  so while it appears that there is an upsurge in lesbian relationships when actually it might simply be the case that they are just more visible,' she suggests.

More provocatively, Parsons also agrees with the conclusions of the recent study, that women's sexual identity is capable of change and flux.

'Historically psychologists have tried to pigeonhole people as homosexual or heterosexual but these categories are highly inadequate,' she says.

She believes female sexuality can be far more fluid than that.

'I've heard women say: "At this point I was heterosexual and now I identify myself as a lesbian." ‘Sexual preferences aren't always set in stone.'

Some psychologists suggest that women are drawn to one another because of an emotional empathy; a shared capacity to talk about their feelings. ‘Women tend to have more close friendships with other women than men do with other men,' says Professor Marilyn Davidson, a psychologist at Manchester Business School.

 

'They may feel they get more emotional and physical support from a relationship with another woman than they have had from their husbands; or it may be simply that they have chosen to have a relationship with another woman because they've fallen in love.' The social stigma attached to lesbianism is also evaporating, claims Davidson. 'It is more socially acceptable among middle-class women.

 

‘Women such as TV presenter Mary Portas, who left her husband to live with a woman, are acting as important role models, so other women are saying: "Its okay for me to follow my feelings," whereas in the past they may have suppressed or hidden them.'

 

All of which may remain hard to accept for many heterosexual women  -  especially among the older generation.

 

Indeed, when Ruth Slater, a former policewoman who had been married for 19 years and has two children, revealed to her family in her 40s that she was gay it was not her ex-husband or children who struggled to accept her changing sexuality, but her mother.

 

'My mum, who was in her mid 60s when I said I was gay, was extremely shocked at first. To her lesbianism was totally alien and she simply couldn't comprehend how I'd been married for so long and then become gay,' Ruth, 49, explains.

 

'We never fell out over it but I felt bad she was so upset.'

Ultimately, no research in the world can prove conclusively why some women have lesbian encounters in later life while millions of others go through a lifetime without the slightest attraction to another woman.

But for those who do discover latent tendencies in middle age, the turmoil it can cause to their families is often every bit as hard for them to confront as their own hidden desires.

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Its a sad sad day for our children.

Young black boys aint got a chance.

And is anything too hard for the Lord?  Nope.

Thats the Good News!

I have a question, why report all the flith that is going on in this world when we know what the Word of God tells us about these things.  The time we spend reporting the negatives, we can be lifting up the name of Jesus and glorifying His name.  Negative reports are time wasted.

God is good and His goodness and mercy endures forever.  Our lives should be lived so that the Spirit of God through us will convict them to know they are living wrong.  And even if you don't say a word, the Spirit of God will pull on their hearts.  No one will leave this earth without the gospel being preached to them so everyone is without an excuse.

Just my opinion. 

I disagree, I don't think it's time wasted & ignoring it is turning a blind eye to the reality of the world we live in. Most folks don't live a sheltered lifestyle were they can tune out what's going on in the world today. Most folks think they can through positivity, but when they're affected by something than it becomes important in their life. Besides, Romans 1 says even the desire of a man for a man or a woman for a woman is sin. The act of sex between two people of the same gender is also sin.

I'm not here to judge anyone's sexual preference, I'm just bringing light to an already heated topic in the world.   

 

I agree with you statement to a degree.  What I'm saying for a person to dedicate so much time to writing a statement so long about the evil men/women do, it time taken away from God ministering to your heart. God don't minister to our hearts about evil but good. Good and evil can't linger in the same place.  Most people may not be seeking God to walk after His Spirit to be a yield vessel to tune out what's happening around them but he shows us their souls to pray for them.  God don't like the evil men do but He loves the soul.  Even with us.  He looked past all the craziness we've done and loved us anyway.  It's SIN.  This is why we must walk as He walked.  Hate the sin and love the person.  Sin is sin, regardless of what they are doing. 

I don't believe being Gay is a psychological, I do believe that is spiritual in nature and has a lot to do with social behaviors and the image others portray about homosexuality. many people and children have became susceptible to this issue, as if it were a drug or alcoholism (once addicted it is very hard to get clean).  As seen with some stories here a lot of people have the same story after a traumatic experience (breakups, rape, abuse, and molestation) many choose to be in same sex relationships. Harboring bitterness, anger, resentment, opens our spirit to evil, and possible possession. I believe these acts are demonic and anti-life. There is a line that should be drawn but it seem that basic values that use to be prominent, is no longer viable in the lives of many.

May there deliverance become many and soon In Jesus Name 

Great point Sister Scott...

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