Married with SSA
We go all close up and personal in this webinar.
Alan Gingery shares his story with us. Alan was also featured on the A Way Beyond the Rainbow podcast.
As a child and a teenager, Alan had difficulty connecting to men. This started with his dad who was not emotionally available and wasn’t able to affirm him in his masculinity. Alan’s dad held a stereotypical understanding of masculinity: athletic, independent, never showing weaknesses and never expressing his emotions.
Alan was sensitive and artistic and definitely not athletic. He felt his acceptance was conditional upon meeting his father’s expectations. His dad shamed him for being effeminate and not masculine.
His brother was typically angry and often violent. Because his brother was not safe, Alan chose to connect to his sister and his mother.
Alan found it difficult to connect to other boys growing up and around puberty experienced a lot of shame from bullies about his lack of stereotypical masculinity. This made it really hard for him to identify with men and his own masculinity. Largely due to his unmet need to connect to masculinity and males, Alan began to feel same-sex attraction as a teenager.
Date: Saturday 9th September
Time: 4pm (BST)
Alan was born in the 1950’s in Kansas in Central USA. In the early 60’s his mom and dad, brother and sister moved to Colorado where he went to elementary school, middle school and high school. He attended university in Oklahoma and finished with a degree in English and education. Later he attended a seminary in Colorado and got a Masters of Divinity degree. He also holds a Celta Certificate from Cambridge University which qualifies him to teach English as a second language (ESL) to adults.
Alan married his high-school sweetheart after finishing university and they have been married 44 years. He and his wife adopted 2 children from India, and now his daughter and son-in-law have blessed the family with a granddaughter. He has worked as a public-school teacher, in a contracting business with his father, overseas as an ESL teacher in Ukraine and now lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina teaching ESL.