Ignoring a beloved of 20 years in favor of a new flame of two weeks has created difficulties for so many poly relationships that community wisdom dictates overcompensating with the longer-term partner to avoid even the appearance of taking that person for granted. It can be hard to find one, especially factoring in insurance limitations, but it’s not impossible. Embracing this part of yourself would certainly make matters less fraught, but again, I advise you to seek a different therapist with more compassion. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s fairly common. You might just be someone who prefers masturbation over sex. Not always possible, I know, but something to strive for. I don’t think fantasizing during sex is bad or wrong, and it can be extremely useful for inducing orgasm, but ideally, you’d be having connected sex with your partner. (I’m a fan of it myself!) But it does seem to be presenting an issue in interpersonal intimacy. If your desires weren’t bothering you or interfering with your sex life, I’d tell you to stay on the dudes-doing-dudes beat. Lehmiller described the success rate of this, however, as “modest at best.” For a previous column, social psychologist Justin Lehmiller told me about a method sometimes employed to rid someone of unwanted sexual desires that involves that person masturbating to right before climax and then switching images or fantasies to a desired one as they orgasm. Since you’re so into gays, I’m sure you’re aware of conversion therapy’s low success rate and legacy of trauma. Ridding yourself of an unwanted desire is not particularly easy and, outside of the realm of the anti-social, probably not worth the effort. Maybe try a gay guy! That would be so you. I entirely reject the feedback you received from this therapist, and I urge you to find a new one. And if in fact you are patronizing the porn of gay male sex workers by, for example, subscribing to their OnlyFans accounts, then, in your small, one-person way, you are actually making their lives easier. Your fantasies are not making anyone’s life harder, except for yours because of the distress they are causing you. In your case, because you are not a gay man, you aren’t having gay male sex during which you could objectify the humanity out of a person. That is how a trait-based fetish can make someone’s life harder. I think the main thing to be cautious of when you have an intense sexual interest (that many would refer to as a “type”) is that you may focus on the traits that excite you (a big dick, blond hair, dark skin) to the extent that you ignore the person they are attached to. It has little practical possibility of becoming a reality, and you aren’t really pursuing what practical possibility it does have (i.e., in the MMF threesomes that are difficult to set up and underwhelming to you, at any rate).
In the realm of thoughts and fantasies, your interest in gay male sex is benign.
When they become problems is when they manifest as potential harm to others, like in the case of someone determined to act out their abusive fantasies. Desires and fantasies are, for many of us, largely out of our control and, in their raw, immaterial form, innocuous. There is nothing positive about shaming a client for her desires, no matter how they deviate from the generic script of pro-social conduct pushed by supposedly well-intentioned people. It is chilling that someone who behaved that way has ostensibly devoted her life to service. The scare quotes around “sex-positive” to describe that therapist are apt.