Sublimation = Starving At the Buffet Table

While I was a part of Courage, I often heard talk of sublimating or redirecting our sexual passions.

Since leaving Courage, I have been in conversation with a few of my friends from the Church who have suggested that if I was so suppression-focused, maybe I was going about carrying the "cross of homosexuality" in the wrong way. That maybe, if I was focused on fixing or suppressing my sexuality, I was doing it wrong.

The suggestion is that sublimation, not suppression, should be my goal for my sexual passions as a homosexual person - that basically I should try to funnel my sexual energy into other pathways such as caring for the poor, or developing strong friendships, or some form of religious expression. I've tried for so long to understand this idea of sublimation vs suppression, but in the end it feels like in this case sublimation is just a fancy word meant to hide the goal of suppression in nicer-sounding language.

In a way, I feel like a person who has been told to take the hunger she has that drives her to eat food, and to use that hunger to smell all the scents that the world has to offer - but hunger doesn't work like that, hunger is there to tell us that we need something and if we try to satisfy our hunger by smelling the rain in the trees or even by smelling good food, we are going to find ourselves frustrated. Yes, at first, all those smells will seem wonderful - but eventually those smells will become torturous as we realize that we are never getting closer to actually tasting or swallowing what we have smelled.

I'm not saying that we will die, necessarily, if we don't engage in sexual activity. But I am saying that we are not going to satisfy our desire for that deeper intimacy with one person by creating connections of service or friendship with more and more people. Instead we are going to increase our feelings of isolation and loneliness as we increase the numbers in the crowd around us, because in all this crowd of wonderful friends and acquaintances we have not gone to the depth of connection that we truly desire with a single one. It's like going to a buffet but never planning to eat.

More friends, more networking, more social and service-based connections are great - but just like the smell of fresh rain in the morning, these will not satisfy my desire for true intimacy. I am longing, like most of the single world, for that one person I can love completely and give everything. For that human person whom I can stand naked with in the garden of paradise, for that person without whom even paradise itself cannot be but lonely for my heart. Not even the closest friendship can fill that desire for a life partner.