I’ll admit it: I like a nice hetero romance. Even shitty ones. Even those anti-feminist tales where the heroine is rescued at the end by the strong hero who takes her in his arms, etc, etc. I like straight romances from either viewpoint (although, curiously, when told from the male viewpoint, they are rarely categorized as “romance”). I like a good sexy hetero sex scene. I like watching people fall in love, or fall in lust.

You know what I don’t like? Straight male coming-of-age tales. Or maybe I don’t mean coming-of-age, maybe I mean First Love. You know the ones I’m talking about: where a significant portion of the plot revolves around a beautiful girl and the young male protagonist’s attempts to get with her. Or date her. Or kiss her. Or whatever. I hate these stories and everything resembling them. Even when they’re done well. Even when they aren’t anti-feminist. Even when the main character isn’t an entitled jerk.

And I think I’ve finally realized why.

Imagine you are a young teenage Mormon boy who is beginning to understand that there is something different about him. All the guys around you are getting interested in girls, and I mean really interested—and you aren’t.

In your Sunday School and Aaronic Priesthood classes you are told over and over again that you have two priorities in life: going on a mission when you turn nineteen, and getting married to a woman in a Mormon temple for time and all eternity when you get back. This second priority is described as the single most important thing you will do in your life, and since you’ll be together with your partner literally forever, you are told that it is important to take your time and pray a lot and choose the right one. (Note: these lessons are nowhere near as intense as the ones the young women are getting, if anything I’ve heard on the subject is true.)

And yet… and yet… you read books and stories (even in Church-approved materials) about young men who get a sudden, overpowering crush on a girl, and think of nothing else but her, and pursue her for days, months, even years—and then they end up together. Married, sometimes. Sealed in the temple, even.

And then! Your stake president, or an apostle of the whole Church (i.e., a man with significant spiritual authority over you and your life) tells the story of how he first saw his “eternal sweetheart” across the room at a stake dance and told his buddy, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.” And then… they end up married. Forever.

But guess what you are also being told, a little less blatantly, though no less forcefully? Any attraction you have towards the people you actually are attracted to (i.e., other guys, because, remember, you’re gay) isn’t real. It’s transitory. It’s hedonistic. It’s a phase. It’s selfish. It won’t last. And this is when they aren’t telling you it is literally of the Devil and you are a sinner for having those feelings.

So whenever I read a story about a young (straight) male who is just discovering himself, and who fixates on some young woman who is just too perfect for words, and he pursues her for pages and pages and chapters and chapters, and either wins her or learns a Valuable Life Lesson at the end? I spend the whole time rolling my eyes and trying not to gag.

Here’s a fun fact: I was in therapy quite a bit as a college student, most of it in an attempt to rid myself of my “same-sex attraction” and allow my “natural, God-given feelings for the opposite sex to emerge.”

I’ll let you guess how well that worked out.

I’ve mercifully forgotten most of the details (although, don’t worry, they didn’t involve electroshock conditioning or aversion therapy—uh, that I recall….) but one detail has stuck with me: My second Mormon therapist (whom I hated and only saw once) listened to me describe my upbringing and teen years and said something like, “You haven’t had any formative sexual experiences, have you? I don’t mean sex, but a guy your age [I was almost nineteen by then] will usually have gone out on dates, held hands, kissed a few girls. But you haven’t done those things yet.”

He undoubtedly meant, “Of course you think you’re attracted to men! You haven’t allowed the tender blossom of your True Hetero Inclinations to flower under the subtle influence of making out with a girl in the back of your parents’ car!” (Conveniently ignoring the fact that there are any number of guys who didn’t touch a woman until they were legal adults and yet turned out 100% heterosexual. Weird how that works.)

But what I hear now when I recall that conversation is, “Of course you didn’t kiss your first boy until you were 23 years old. You were never allowed to even think about having the natural, formative sexual experiences everyone (every straight person, at least) around you was having. You were never provided with role models who shared your perspective and your sexual orientation, and the constant message you received was, ‘You don’t exist, you can’t exist, God wouldn’t allow you to exist—and if you do exist you’re damned to hell and also you are disgusting.’”

I don’t hate young straight males. (Anymore.) But I was forced to pretend to be one of them for about thirteen of my most formative years, and that tends to leave a bad taste in a person’s mouth. As well as, it turns out, leaving behind a lingering intolerance for the struggles and heartaching of their fictional counterparts.