The Velvet Rage (10 page)

As I have observed my own life as a gay man and the lives of many of my gay clients, there is a curious and consistent theme that emerges. Regardless of how successful or wealthy we may or may not be, we are almost always over-the-top outrageous in what we do. We are the chefs at the best, most highly reviewed restaurants. We are the vice presidents of important investment houses. We are the top hairstylists to whom movie stars fly for hundreds of miles just to have us fix their hair. We rarely do
things that are quiet, reserved, and commonplace. Those jobs we leave by and large to straight people to slog through.

There is a definite
outrageous
quality to our lives. Years ago, when I first took notice of this, I began asking myself “Why?” What is it about loving another man that leads us to be outrageous? The two, in my mind, seemed completely unrelated, and yet they seemed to be very common partners in real life. Gay and outrageous. Yes, that more or less described many of the gay men I knew.

Not until I began the deeper work of uncovering shame in my own life and the lives of my gay clients did I understand this connection. Let me start to explain this by asking a question: If you hold the fundamental assumption of shame that you are critically and mortally flawed, how would you cope with this? One way, as we have seen in stage one, is to avoid confronting the shame. Another way, the way of so many of us, is to compensate for shame by striving for validation from others, even if it is not earned authentically. As long as others are actively acknowledging our superior and creative accomplishments, we can at least temporarily convince ourselves that we aren't so bad after all. If everyone else thinks we're great, are we not great?

Stage two of the gay man's life is the stage of compensating for shame. Once we leave stage one and are no longer shamed by our sexuality, we continue to hold the deeper belief that there is something fundamentally flawed about ourselves. Any person, straight or gay, who grows up in an environment that is essentially
invalidating of some core part of themselves such as sexuality struggles with this deeper shame. The shame over being gay is past us. Now we are driven by the deeper shame of believing that we are flawed.

While we grow ever more comfortable with our sexuality, in both public and private, we have yet to deal with the core shame that continues to hound us. We grew up believing that we were unacceptable and somehow tragically twisted. We no longer hold that being gay is twisted, but we cling to the core belief that we are inferior.

In stage two, it is this core of toxic shame that takes center stage. To silence the distress of this toxic shame, we go about the task of seeking validation from others. However we can and with whatever abilities we are blessed with, we set about to mine the world for approval, praise, and recognition. The more validation we discover, the less distress we feel.

What's different about our craving for validation in stage two is that in stage one, validation is all about trying to hide our sexuality. In stage two, it is about trying to still the small but persistent voice of shame within us. We need validation to assure us that as gay men, we are worthwhile and ultimately deserving of love.

The acquisition of validation is so rewarding that we become validation junkies. The more we get, the more we crave it, the better we feel, and the harder it becomes for us to tolerate invalidation. Our houses become showplaces that elicit kudos from all who enter. Our bodies become chiseled in muscle, pleasing our bedroom guests. We work to become wealthy so that we can take regular and exotic excursions around the world that bring us excitement and worldly sophistication that is recognized and adored by other wealthy, worldly travelers. We write books, create
the world's most recognized art, and collect everything from stamps to the finest pedigree bulldogs. Explore the finest of anything in this world and you will always find gay men clustered about the helm.

And, of course, we include sex in our search for validation. Many gay men collect encounters with beautiful, sexy men like a museum might hoard all the David Hockney or Edward Hopper paintings it can possibly afford.

The validation we achieve through sexual encounters is immediate and stimulating, even if it is essentially inauthentic. We play a role, one that we have mastered over years of being onstage, that seduces our beautiful conquest-to-be. When he gives up his resistance and succumbs to our siren call, we feel the rush of immediate validation. If no one else does, at least this one man sees something of value in us. This blissful moment rarely lingers, but in that moment, it satisfies.

Hidden in our search for validation is both a truth and a lie. The truth is that validation is good and necessary for our psychological well-being. The lie is that we have not yet truly discovered or accepted ourselves; hence, the validation is of something less than authentic. It is the validation of a façade that we masterfully erect.

In fact, in our rush to achieve validation, we run roughshod over the subtleties that lie within us, and choose instead to grab the nearest and brightest flag that will draw the attention and, hopefully, validation of the world around us. In stage two, we learn to achieve validation in any way that we can, and not necessarily in the ways that will make us content with life.

During stage two, more so than any other stage, a low tolerance for invalidation rises to the surface. This is an inability to tolerate any perceived invalidation that might come our way.
Sometimes it is painful invalidation, like a lover who leaves you for another man or a friend who stabs you in the back with critical words spoken to others. Sometimes it is a slight invalidation, perhaps just a frown from a stranger or an innocent joke about your taste in clothing. Whatever the source and however intense the perceived invalidation, in stage two, the gay man can handle very little of it.

A friend of mine who happens to be a medical doctor relayed to me a good example of this inability to tolerate invalidation that he experienced in a relationship with a friend. He had scheduled a lunch with a gay friend, John. The two of them had met when they were in high school and had remained close for almost twenty years. In the past few years, they didn't see each other as often as they'd like given my friend's busy schedule of seeing patients and making hospital rounds. Right before the time of their lunch, my friend received an urgent page from the hospital about a patient who was dying from a mistake one of the nurses had made in administering medication. My friend raced to the hospital, and as soon as he could, called John to apologize and to see if they could reschedule the lunch. John was cool on the phone and agreed to meet at some future date. After that, my friend didn't hear from John for weeks, even though he left several messages on his answering machine. When they finally did speak some months after the lunch incident, John was irate with my friend and accused him of never caring enough and having been a terrible friend. He angrily declared that the friendship was now over.

My friend was truly devastated over the incident. He felt bad about having had to cancel the lunch, but at the same time he knew that he had no other choice. No matter how much he tried to explain this to John, it didn't seem to matter. John had perceived
the incident as deeply invalidating and was clearly very angry about it.

Perhaps in reading this example you may feel that John was unusually childish and rash in his response. And he was. But take a moment and consider that if you have known other gay men in stage two, then you have had similar experiences. You may even be able to recall times when you reacted just as John did. I'm certainly not proud of it, but I must admit that I can.

When a gay man experiences a low tolerance for invalidation, he is highly distressed by whatever perceived invalidation he experiences, and it is only logical that he would take action to relieve that distress. That action, or shall I call it a reaction, usually involves either removing himself from the invalidating situation, silencing the source of invalidation, or both.

In practical terms, this means that we either avoid the person who is invalidating us or we strike out at them verbally, physically, or passively. In the case of John, he verbally attacked my friend and then avoided potential future invalidation by terminating the friendship.

There are many ways a gay man in stage two might react to invalidation. If he is in a position of power, he may fire the employee on the spot who invalidates his decision-making abilities. Or he may walk off the job when the boss points out a problem
in his work. He may verbally shred a neighbor who objects to the addition he is planning for his house.

These, of course, are very active and obvious ways the gay man in stage two may react to invalidation. As mentioned earlier, however, there are also more passive means. He may not be able to afford to walk off the job when a coworker criticizes his work, but for months afterward he simply refuses to be helpful in any way or sabotages the coworker's project by acting as if he never received the memo asking him for assistance. He may emotionally shut down with his lover after a perceived invalidation and refuse to share anything other than the mundane details of life for some time following the incident.

Without a doubt, sex is a major source of invalidation within relationships between gay men. When one partner refuses the other partner's bid for sex, it can start a chain of sexual withholding that has destroyed more than few gay male relationships. The rejected partner perceives a deep and intolerable invalidation by being turned down, and he reacts by withdrawing sexually. The other partner, invalidated by this, equally withdraws and the sexual aspect of the relationship goes stale.

Therapists who work with gay male couples often report seeing this cycle of “mutual invalidation” in their clients' relationships. I remember working with a gay couple a few years ago who had reached the brink of disaster. Both men came to therapy on the verge of leaving, so much so that at the time I was surprised that they even bothered to seek help. The more I probed in the first session, the more it became clear that these two had been through years of active invalidation of one another.

When the couple returned after that very tedious and painful first session, I learned of even more pain that plagued these two men. At some point, one of them had an affair with a close friend
of theirs. The other one found out about the affair and started blatantly soliciting men in one of the local gay bars for sex, right in front of his partner. And things got worse. He started bringing men to the house and having sex with them at times when he knew his partner could easily come home. For a short time, the other partner moved in with the friend with whom he was having the affair. This torturous game had gone on for years, back and forth, and it had destroyed virtually every ounce of good feeling between them.

While no gay man is proud of it, it is true that gay men in stage two can become absolute geniuses at invalidating each other. Because we have such a low tolerance for invalidation and experience it so painfully, we also are hypersensitive to it in our environment. In other words, we're always on the lookout for invalidation. As a result, we come to know it in all its forms and nuance. So when the time comes that we need to strike back at a perceived invalidation, what might we deliver? A good smack of the same in return.

The stereotype of the bitchy, bitter queen comes from the image of the gay man who is stuck in stage two. He knows to expect invalidation, and he is armed with fistfuls of it in return. “Don't mess with me, sister, cause I'll bite back and bite back hard.”

Depression can emerge in the gay man in stage two as it can in stage one, but for different reasons. In stage two, the gay man experiences a hunger for validation and a hypersensitivity to invalidation. In fact, he may become so sensitized to invalidation that he begins to see it everywhere he turns in life. His vision narrows, as if by intention he were eliminating from sight all traces of validation. What he does allow himself to see is a life full of invalidation.

A colleague of mine recently treated a twenty-eight-year-old gay man who worked at a high-tech company in California. The
man had come to therapy on the verge of suicide. As the therapist worked with him, the source of his hopeless depression began to emerge: he was a failure. Because he hadn't chosen to work for a firm where his stock options would now be worth millions of dollars, his current paycheck of $250,000 per year gravely reminded him that he was a failure.

“Wow!” you might say. “That's screwed up.” And it is—on a very grand scale. But the dynamic underlying this incredible misperception of reality is common among gay men experiencing depression in stage two. Everything starts to sour and go bad—even the good things in life. It's as if everything has become infected with invalidation. And the experience is deeply distressing and hopeless.

While not all gay men in the throes of stage two experience this depression, a sizable number do. The toxic core of shame has the gay man utterly convinced that he is critically flawed, and this shame colors and dims his experience of life, causing him to filter out the good and grasp only the bad, difficult, and distressing.