"My uncle taught me to abuse myself. I'm not sure of my sexual orientation to this day," confides 40-year-old Karel
Karl, I know from our "deep talks" that you have your childhood in a bit of a "fog", because you have probably displaced a lot of experiences. Can you give me an idea of the kind of family you grew up in?
I remember especially the tense atmosphere - and how all the adults pretended that there was no stuffiness in our home. My parents got on each other's nerves a lot - probably partly because they were crammed into a block of flats where nobody had any privacy or space of their own. Still, they kept up their dinners together and generally pretended that things weren't so bad between them. Partly because of me, I guess, and partly because of the widowed grandmother who lived with us. My mother didn't want to admit that she wasn't happy in the marriage because she would take it as a personal failure - and even as it was, my grandmother was letting her know that she was incapable of running a household. She created all kinds of pressures, emotionally blackmailed, manipulated. Dad preferred not to express himself and remained sullenly silent. I think each of them liked me - which was probably the only honest emotion they vented at home. They could never sort out their disagreements, they were always on edge - and as they all bottled up their dissatisfaction, they put all the more pressure on me to thrive, to do the family a good turn. I'm an only child, so I was constantly the focus of some adult's attention.
Did your parents have high standards for you?
In retrospect, I can't tell if the pressure came from them or from me - maybe both. My grandmother always praised me for cleaning up my school bag at home and immediately going to do my homework on my own - I was such a trouble-free and sensible child that I'm surprised no one suspected it. I guess I was also afraid to be angry, because I was punished exemplarily a few times for minor infractions - I don't know if my father wanted to show my mother and grandmother that he was in control of my upbringing, or if he was taking out his frustration on me... But I was afraid to make a mistake or to make myself known in any significant way. My father wanted me to play tennis - so I went to a sport I didn't enjoy for six years. Especially when my dad was happy. I didn't even think of pushing to join a music school. I was internally worried that the adults around me were unhappy, and I kept trying to make them feel better. Or at least look busy so no one would scold me.
Was that the reason you didn't confide in anyone about being sexually abused? You didn't want to "worry" your parents, afraid of their reaction?
It probably played a part, but I remember more of these bits and pieces from my childhood, there are a lot of white spaces in the story. The uncle who abused me was a bachelor - my mother's much older brother, a bit of a loner. He used to take me on trips, play me various bands on cassette tapes at home, and he liked to strum his own songs on the guitar, so we had a common hobby - music. He created a kind of conspiratorial atmosphere in the style of "I'll buy you fries with ketchup for lunch, but we won't tell Mummy". Sometimes he would take me to the pub as an escort, which my parents would definitely not approve of. He treated me like I was twelve, not five or six. I enjoyed spending time with him, I felt he understood me. I found him closer and more authentic than my mom, dad or grandmother. That's probably why I pushed all the groping right out - as if it hadn't even happened. It wasn't that I secretly cried into my pillow and made a conscious decision not to tell my parents what was happening to me.
The traumatic experiences didn't come back to you until thirty years later. You never thought you might be a survivor of sexual abuse before? There were no clues?
In retrospect, I can see that there were clues - at a very early age I started masturbating several times a day, I had vivid erotic fantasies, I would go to the library to secretly read sex education books. I was terribly attracted to the topic of human sexuality, but in a more serious and different way than my peers. I also wrote some music lyrics with very explicit themes - when I found them recently, I was shocked at the perversions I had written at the age of eight. I was so eager to grow up, to hold hands with someone in the park, to experience passionate kissing and foreplay like on TV. I fell in love with boys and girls - it was so easy to get emotionally attached to someone, especially older and more mature counterparts. But when I finally managed to get close to a classmate I liked, I felt nothing at all. We kissed on a bench in front of the house and I searched in vain for some pleasant emotion - no excitement or heartbeat appeared. All I could smell was spinach, which she probably had for lunch (laughs). It was as if I was watching the whole thing from the outside, as if it wasn't even happening to me.
Your girlfriend didn't recognize anything at the time?
No, she was as inexperienced as I was, and I didn't show anything. I could see she was enjoying the kisses and the touching, so I didn't want to spoil it. I was used to keeping my emotions to myself from my family - and I was probably ashamed to admit even to myself that I felt a huge disappointment and emptiness. I automatically figured that there must be something wrong with me if I wasn't feeling what I was supposed to feel when I "French-kissed" her, and pretended that I was experiencing the same excitement that she was. This was then repeated with another lady I lost my virginity to - she basically chased me away. She wasn't even my type, but I was pretty lonely and overlooked in high school, so I let myself get hit on.
Ironically, we continued dating for a few more years - I guess I subconsciously took it to mean that if I wasn't even turned on by a classmate I'd picked out on my own, it didn't really matter that I was barely attracted to my current girlfriend. I wanted to finally experience love like everyone else - even if my body and experience wasn't working the way I imagined. Sex felt mechanical, and my erections were failing at times, though my hormones were working and my libido was high too. But I had no one to confide in and lacked any comparison. So I just ignored my feelings and carried on.
I didn't want to lose my lady, we spent all our free time together, hanging on to each other like two outsiders. I guess the relationship made me rise a bit in my parents' eyes too - that I was already a serious acquaintance at seventeen and they could boast of an acquaintance.
That kind of sounds like you're repeating the "happy love" model of pretend love you saw at home... Was it different in your later relationship with your first partner?
Yes, I found my first boyfriend when I was twenty-two, and with him all intimacies and expressions of love felt much more natural. It wasn't that often that I completely disconnected from my body when kissing. Or looking at the ceiling in the middle of oral sex and feeling embarrassed that I wasn't actually enjoying it. I was relieved that I didn't have to pretend so much anymore and that I probably wasn't "abnormal" as I had feared. I was out as a gay man - even though my parents didn't like it twice - and I explained my tortuous sexual beginnings by saying that I just wasn't into girls. But it soon became clear that my orientation wasn't so clear-cut.
How do you identify today? Do you feel the need to pigeonhole yourself?
When someone asks, I say I'm sexually and emotionally "undefined" because I feel like that describes me better than "bisexual" or "pansexual". I have a similar feeling about that as I do about my whole personality - that it's still being formed, because I wasn't given that opportunity in childhood or early adulthood. I'm about to turn forty, and sometimes it feels like I'm just experiencing my first real love. That I'm only now beginning to understand who I am. More than abused, I feel "robbed" - my starting line is terribly shifted compared to my peers.
In the continuation of the interview - which you can look forward to again on Thursday - you will learn why Karel later reconsidered the label of "openly gay", how he perceives his period of sexual experimentation and which circumstances in his life "forced" him to make an appointment for psychotherapy.
