The person who accepts the gay label in adulthood has typically spent much of his childhood emotionally disconnected from people, particularly his male peers and his father. He also was likely to assume a false, rigid "good little boy" role within the family.

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The pre-homosexual boy is detached, not only from father and other boys, but from maleness and his own male body, including the first symbol of masculinity, his own penis…Homosexual behavior is the search for the lost masculine self. [...] By the early teenage years, unconscious drives to fill this emotional vacuum – to want to connect with his maleness – are felt as homoerotic desires. The next stage will be entry into the gay world.