Gay men and their mothers

Close? Or destructive?

I have been reading a lot recently about the relationship between gay men and their mothers. There seems to be a lot of convincing evidence that this has both biological and dynamic elements: the women in a family with several homosexual men are often biologically dominant, super-fertile matriarchs. The down side of this is that the men's relationships are marked by an extraordinary closeness with their mothers. Everybody 'knows' this, but in reality I think this relationship is actually too close: the closeness in the picture on the right cannot be right for a grown man in my opinion. Gay men often report that their mothers are also their friend: it is so not right as an adult to consider your parent your friend. Yes I would also say this about women who are friends with their mother. The (very old and probably discredited) evidence seems to be that the relationship actually goes beyond this: mothers of gay men are too intrusive, too controlling, almost too intimate. They will relate to their sons in ways which are not appropriate: touching them too intimately, being too controlling, and positively smothering them.
This is exactly my experience with my own mother, and our relationship has actually deteriorated over the past couple of years to the point where we are estranged; an estrangement that was initiated by me. In retrospect I can see how she has been controlling, so that I have wound up spending my entire adult life holding her at arm's length. As she has got older and more cantankerous, the dodgy dynamic between us has been accentuated, which has had the unfortunate effect (for me) of embittering what I thought was previously a good relationship. The phrase 'I've bought a duffel coat just like yours' now takes on a completely new light. the situation has been worsened by the fact that she has a sister who in my opinion is a nasty piece of work, but who has been seen as the 'mad uncle' of the family, which has tended to detract from how f*cked we all are, and also by the fact that I am an only child. I know for a fact that she is going round telling people that I am not talking to her (G*ddess knows I've tried to), and she doesn't know why (which just indicates that she actually hasn't listened to a word I've said to her over the past couple of years and reinforces the faultline on which our relationship is built). Unfortunately she's shot herself in the foot, because for the first time in my life I've actually realised how much better my life can be without my mother in it.
Now you may say, and I would agree, that I shouldn't feel like this about my own mother. I don't want to feel like this, but despite attempts to formulate some kind of relationship with her that is workable, i have never managed to do so. So the result is that I now do not want to be in contact with my mother at all, because I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that our relationship can never be workable. This is absolutely one of those left-hand-path type of actions: it is not acceptable actively to want to exclude the woman who gave birth to you from your life, but I do. I ought to be helping her in her declining years, I ought to be standing by my mother, I have tried to do these things, but the main obstacle to this is my mother herself. I'm writing this secure in the knowledge that I will never have children to demonstrate my own poor parenting, but the kind of relationship a gay man's mother has with him too easily flips over into either smothering or pushing him away. I have responded to her clear message of 'piss off' by doing just that. By my socially unacceptable action, I have actually discovered how good life can be, but it means that I have actually grown up.