Locker rooms are a part of American culture most boys take for granted -- eventually. "Sure, it's embarrassing," says one straight friend. "It's also a comparison kind of thing."

But for 19-year-old Jess Bowling -- a gay Atlantan who came out to his family and friends earlier this year -- his first trips to the locker room after P.E. class had another dimension. He remembers being "fixated" on the naked bodies he saw," he tells WebMD.

It's not uncommon for such commonplace situations -- like sleepovers and showering at school -- to create a confusing mix of arousal and frustration in gay boys, says Sidney Phillips, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn. And because those feelings sometimes create shame, many gay boys grow up repressing them, he says.

Phillips is currently writing a paper describing this scenario. His objective: to help parents and teachers understand what the normal course of development is for gay boys -- who can spend their adults lives trying to unload the emotional baggage picked up in those early years, he says.

"Locker rooms, sleepovers with friends, even common child-rearing practices create constant stimulation -- overstimulation" for a gay boy, Phillips tells WebMD. "It's a wholly different experience for the homosexually inclined boy to take a shower with his father or sleep with his brother than it is for a heterosexual boy."

Further complicating the picture, he says, is a quite different version of the Oedipal drama -- with mother as main rival and father as primary love object. In the gay boy's family life, that struggle may actually cause the stereotypically absent or withdrawn father.

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"It's not that absent or withdrawn fathers create homosexual sons, but rather the opposite ... the boy's attraction precipitates the father's withdrawal," Phillips says, an action that could well lead his gay son to seek out childhood love affairs -- even with heterosexual boys.

Such relationships, he says, "are clearly an effort by the homosexual boy to heal and repair the effects of paternal withdrawal and revulsion." And they predictably end the same way -- with the heterosexual boy eventually turning his attentions to a heterosexual girl.

"For the gay boy, the pain would be unbearable because it has to be kept secret," says Phillips. To compensate, these boys often develop the delusion that their straight friend was really gay, like them, but afraid to admit it.

"Even though it ultimately was not an erotic triumph, since the heterosexual boy always gets his girl, the gay boy possibly for the first time basks in the warmth of another male's love," says Phillips. "There is the hope that some day, some how, someone will love him completely."

But if this longing goes unrequited -- if the gay boy experiences only the overstimulation of everyday life, the shame it evokes, and the need to hide his feelings -- it becomes the classic description of the homosexual closet, he says.

"Broadly speaking, the coping mechanism takes one of two directions as they enter puberty -- either they become sexually compulsive or sexually inhibited," he says. If inhibition is the coping mechanism, "boys head into adolescence avoiding that which stimulates them -- being around other boys. They may become socially isolated, or decide that maybe they are asexual."

The tendency to compulsive sex may express itself in several avenues, including cruising for anonymous sex (with all its potential health risks) and compulsive masturbation, says Phillips. As a result, some find themselves as adults unable to establish stable, happy relationships.

For Bowling, adolescence meant a relationship with another boy that started when they were both 12 and lasted several years. And that sort of stable, mutually fulfilling relationship can prevent problems like compulsion and inhibition, says Phillips. "An accepting, mutual relationship like that would be in line with how many heterosexual adolescents begin to deal with their own sexuality," he tells WebMD

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"Adolescence is a time for sorting out who one is and will become," he says. "Experimentation is the norm. Adolescent boys and girls will try out various sexual identities as part of figuring out who they are and what they like. Boys who turn out to be gay will date girls. Boys who turn out to be straight will get involved with other boys. They will do this regardless of restrictions parents think they are putting into place."

Phillips' observations are "one of the really important contributions being made today ... a different way of understanding homosexuality than we had in the past," says Ralph Roughton, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

"Only in the past decade have psychoanalysts come to realize that homosexuality is simply a normal developmental pathway for some people -- that it isn't caused by early childhood experiences," says Roughton. "Homosexuality is normal sexuality for some people.

"In the ordinary heterosexist world, we simply hadn't thought how it would be for someone who was stimulated by the same sex rather than the opposite sex," he adds. "What is the experience of a very shy, frightened adolescent boy who is attracted to the other guys in the locker room? What would that mean to him? What does he do internally with those feelings, because he couldn't either ignore them or acknowledge them?"

Compare Bowling's experience with someone just 10 years older than he and you'll likely get a different scenario, says Roughton.

"It's almost a different world even from just a decade ago because there's so much in the popular media that presents a much more positive picture of being gay -- there aren't such feelings of shame and the need to hide it all," he says.

The society in which the child is reared is another factor in how adolescent gays cope with overstimulation, Roughton tells WebMD.

"Growing up in Midtown Atlanta is very, very different from growing up on a farm in South Georgia, for example," he says. "Even if the popular media might present a more accepting picture, your immediate surroundings might say it's all wrong, it's sinful."

Bowling admits that he kept his sexuality hidden during his adolescence, that he bounced between homosexual and heterosexual relationships as he got older, that he had his share of unrequited love interests -- until a therapist help him sort it all out.

"Coming out," he tells WebMD, "was a source of empowerment for me. It helped me see that a source of frustration came from not being completely honest with myself and with other people.

"I told my dad first -- now I have a stronger relationship with him. There are some areas he's a little uncomfortable with, but he's tolerated it and accepted it. My mom said she had suspected from the time I was very young. She held my hand. It truly was a Hallmark moment -- it ended her frustration, everything was in the open."

"This is a pattern of development that parents and teachers should be aware of," says Roughton. "We're not saying what causes someone to be gay. We're talking about how that experience gets shaped and how young kids must deal with feelings of sex and sexuality. We're not saying we should have a different gym class for gay guys ... but we want to create a climate where people can talk about what their feelings."