It's just my imagination...

I have a friend who has been a school teacher for years and has now embarked on a new career into private counseling and therapy. After being brave enough to discuss with him my "situation", he has taken a keen interest in helping me and "practicing" on me. I told him that I would be willing to open up and share with him my thoughts and feelings about my attractions and desires and how they don't align necessarily with my day-to-day life and family situation. He was eager to try to help and grateful for my willingness to be used as an opportunity for him to "practice".

It's interesting that as I've shared with him my feelings, he has gravitated to trying to investigate my relationship with my father and the root feelings that may have come from that rapport, and whether that relationship was good or bad, etc. Frankly, I was quite put off by this approach. I am so far from this line of thinking that it isn't even funny. I am not interested whatsoever in finding the "cause" of my attractions, nor am I even faintly interested in searching for

someone to "blame". The blame game was played out years ago, and I came to the conclusion that there is absolutely no one to blame. I was never abused, I had a great relationship with my father (we weren't best buds, but we weren't enemies either) and he was not absent from my life - in fact, he was very much connected with my life all the way to the end of his.

I find it funny that my friend's approach slipped so quickly on this prescribed path. Maybe he didn't know what to say.

So, now he's talking to me about my "lack of experience" and how can I really profess to know that I am attracted to men sexually if I've never had sex with a man. My likes and attractions may be more "imaginary" than real, seeing that they are not part of any real experience.

I find this approach very distorted as well. I, indeed, know what I am attracted to when I see it and what pushes my buttons and makes me all twitterpated inside. I told him to turn the question around and to ask himself how he knows that he was heterosexual prior to any real sexual experience, and that it really is the same for all of us. Some things are fundamental and so deeply based within our persona that it exceeds any logical explanation based on experimentation - it just is what it is!

But it has been on my mind and has bothered me some... As much as I understand my attractions toward men, can I really know where I am without having sexual experience to confirm my attractions? Is it possible to be a non-practicing gay and still know for assurity without "experience"? And in my chosen path and circumstance, I am not about to "experience" such a reality any time soon... so am I just imagining that I'm gay?

What do you think? How would you respond to such a question? Do you feel experience is needed to know for certain about such things? I want to know what if feels like to be kissed intimately by another man that loves me for who I am. I know that I can't really know what that is like without experiencing it for myself and that until I do, I am left to my imagination. But does that change who I am or what makes me who I am and what I know?

Can one just "know"? Or is this all just a big game of pretend?