Probing Adolescent Homosexuality: Sex Orientation, Gender Identity, Expression and its Related Issue

Abstract

Adolescent is said to be the crucial stage in one’s development where everyone is confronted by the issue of finding his/her identity and when the role played by this identity is non-conforming to the sex assigned to him/her at birth. One may unsure of his/her sexual orientation yet is certain of his/her feelings towards his/her opposite or same sex which lead to depression, confusion and anxiety. Thus, this study was conducted to determine the socio-demographic profile, sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression of homosexual adolescents and its related issues that the respondents personally experience based on actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity and expression. Combinations of quantitative and qualitative research using Interpretative Phenomenological Approach were employed in this study. Information was generated by the researchers using adopted survey questions treated with Cronbach alpha for reliability and focus group discussion. The findings revealed that among 30 homosexual adolescent represented this study, the most frequent to engage were males with 23% of distribution of age by gender and majority were Mandaya with the religion of Roman Catholic. Respondents perceived themselves as exclusively homosexual but wanting to shift their future marital paradigm to exclusively heterosexual. Rejection hindered them from expressing their sexual orientation and gender identity. Generally they experienced discrimination at public places, school, home and church. Social media print and magazines were the means of the respondents to express their sexual orientation and to find their homosexual society. Homosexual adolescents were interested to seek help for counseling specifically on personality testing, crises management and trainings on how to handle relationships with same sex, relationship with parents as homosexual and relationship towards the community.