Gay in love
In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon. All of these unbearable statistics lead to the same conclusion: It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men.
The good news, though, is that epidemiologists and social scientists are closer than ever to understanding all the reasons why. Travis Salway, a researcher with the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, has spent the last five years trying to figure out why gay men keep killing themselves. Salway grew up in Celina, Ohio, a rusting factory town of maybe 10, people, the kind of place, he says, where marriage competed with college for the year-olds.
He got bullied for being gay before he even knew he was. He had a girlfriend through most of high school, and tried to avoid boys—both romantically and platonically—until he could get out of there. By the late s, he was a social worker and epidemiologist and, like me, was struck by the growing distance between his straight and gay friends.
He started to wonder if the story he had always heard about gay men and mental health was incomplete.
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Gay men were being kicked out of their own families, their love lives were illegal. Of course they had alarming rates of suicide and depression. And then he looked at the data. This might be the case in the U. We struggle to assert ourselves. We replay our social failures on a loop. Since he looked into the data, Salway has started interviewing gay men who attempted suicide and survived. Being a member of a marginalized group requires extra effort. If you stand up to your boss, or fail to, are you playing into stereotypes of women in the workplace? For gay people, the effect is magnified by the fact that our minority status is hidden.
John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people. James, now a mostly-out year-old, tells me that in seventh grade, when he was a closeted year-old, a female classmate asked him what he thought about another girl. Immediately, he says, he panicked. Did they tell anyone else I said it that way? This is how I spent my adolescence, too: Once, at a water park, one of my middle-school friends caught me staring at him as we waited for a slide.
But he never brought it up. All the bullying took place in my head. But if you experience years and years of small stressors—little things where you think, Was that because of my sexuality? Or, as Elder puts it, being in the closet is like someone having someone punch you lightly on the arm, over and over. Growing up gay, it seems, is bad for you in many of the same ways as growing up in extreme poverty. A study found that gay people produce less cortisol, the hormone that regulates stress. In , researchers compared straight and gay teenagers on cardiovascular risk.
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Annesa Flentje, a stress researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, specializes in the effect of minority stress on gene expression. Even Salway, who has devoted his career to understanding minority stress, says that there are days when he feels uncomfortable walking around Vancouver with his partner. Because while the first round of damage happens before we come out of the closet, the second, and maybe more severe, comes afterward.
No one ever told Adam not to act effeminate. But he, like me, like most of us, learned it somehow. My parents thought it was cute, so they took a video and showed it to my grandparents. When they all watched the tape, I hid behind the couch because I was so ashamed. I must have been six or seven. By the time he got to high school, Adam had learned to manage his mannerisms so well that no one suspected him of being gay.
I had to operate in the world as a lone agent. He came out at 16, then graduated, then moved to San Francisco and started working in HIV prevention. That ended up being a crutch. He worked long hours. He would come home exhausted, smoke a little weed, pour a glass of red wine, then start scanning the hookup apps for someone to invite over.
Sometimes it would be two or three guys in a row. It went on like this for years. Last Thanksgiving, he was back home to visit his parents and felt a compulsive need to have sex because he was so stressed out. Before this, the longest he had ever gone was three or four days. It was a way of not dealing with my own life.
For decades, this is what psychologists thought, too: But over the last 10 years, what researchers have discovered is that the struggle to fit in only grows more intense. A study published in found that rates of anxiety and depression were higher in men who had recently come out than in men who were still closeted.
But it was really horrifying. But I just felt like a piece of meat. It got so bad that I used to go to the grocery store that was 40 minutes away instead of the one that was 10 minutes away just because I was so afraid to walk down the gay street. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. But that meanness is almost pathological. All of us were deeply confused or lying to ourselves for a good chunk of our adolescence. So we show other people what the world shows us, which is nastiness. Every gay man I know carries around a mental portfolio of all the shitty things other gay men have said and done to him.
I arrived to a date once and the guy immediately stood up, said I was shorter than I looked in my pictures and left.
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In this situation, he NEVER does humble himself and in the long haul, he rejects the said female out of jealousy. He becomes jealous and is spiteful since he feels that a man should always be superior over women. Their personalities collide and the gay boy is the first to part ways. He leaves with hate in his heart while the woman still loves him. He returns to his philandering ways just before he met the love of his life. As much as he engages sexually with other men, it continuously is unpleasant. He also dumb-downs his male sex partners and female friends.
In due time, he may come to his senses, but chances are he will never do so. He has built so much hate in his heart for the woman his heart fell in love with for him. CBS Interactive. The Guardian. Guardian News and Media.
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