The Velvet Rage (4 page)

So as mere children, years before we would have sex for the first time with a man, we had suffered rejection by our peers, emotional neglect from our fathers, and overcompensating protection from our mothers. We survived by learning to conform to the expectations of others at a time in our development when we should have been learning to follow our own internal promptings. We became puppets of a sort—allowing those around us to pull the strings that made us act in acceptable ways, all the while knowing that we couldn't trust ourselves.

What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in the church? Mother's little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved. How could we love ourselves when everything around us told us that we were unlovable? Instead, we chased the affection, approval, and attention doled out by others.

Not surprisingly, the long-term effect was an inability to validate ourselves. The ability to derive internal satisfaction and contentment didn't emerge from our adolescence as it should have. Instead, we sputtered along looking to others for the confidence and well-being that we needed to protect ourselves from being overcome with shame. What normally becomes an internal, self-sustaining process of self-validation in the healthy, young adult remained infantile within us, and we instead became sophisticated in the ways of coercing acceptance from the world around us.

So the little boy with the big secret becomes the man who is driven to avoid shame by hiding his dark truth. Famished for authentic validation and without a reliable sense of self-direction, he develops a sophisticated radar for those things and people who will make him feel good about himself.

This little boy grows up to be a man who is supremely knowledgeable of culture and fashion. A man of Adonis-sized proportions and many lovers. A man of great success and wealth. A fabulous and outrageous host. An arbiter of good taste and elegant design. A pop-culture aficionado.

To a great extent, these are the gay men we have known. This is you and me—a little boy with a terrible secret who hides his curse behind a curtain made of crimson velvet. It may surprise
many to learn that his secret is not his sexual appetite for men. No, it is something darker, stinging, and filled with rage.

His secret he cannot reveal, not even to himself, for fear that it will consume him completely. Deep inside, far from the light of awareness, the secret lives. Go down beneath the layers of public façade, personal myth, and fantasy. Peel away the well-crafted layers, for only then can you see the secret clearly for what it is: his own self-hatred.

I
n modern history, there's never been an easier time to be gay. Sure, we've got a few crazed, right-wing enemies, but it's only a matter of time before their homophobic finger-wagging is considered a mistake in the service of social evolution—like the McCarthy-era speeches and racially motivated lynchings. There
is a real sense that social attitudes and values toward gay men are shifting for the better. Times are definitely changing.

Yet in my work as a psychologist, my clients who are gay men sometimes talk about being despondent, depressed, even suicidal. They tell me about the constant struggle to find fulfillment and lasting love. Some recount stories about lots of sex, with lots of different men at exotic parties in the finest locations around the globe. Others confess feeling over-the-hill at thirty-five, as if life were over because the twenty-somethings no longer want them. Still others are caught up in their own world of money, art, fashion, and palatial homes.

Virtually all of the gay men I work with agree on one thing: no matter how accepting society becomes, it is still very hard to be a gay man
and
a truly happy person. We may have gained so much, but something critical is still missing.

If you're “out,” you no longer harbor that “dirty little secret” about yourself, but you likely do continue to hide your true self behind the beauty you manufacture. And nobody knows how to create style more than gay men. We decorate the world. We decorate our lives. We decorate our bodies. And we do it all in an effort to hide our real selves from the world. Gay men are the worldwide experts on style, fashion, etiquette, bodybuilding, art, and design. In every one of these fields gay men predominate. If this weren't so, there would be few tuning in to the hit television show
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
.

We specialize in makeovers of all types and sizes. We're experts in making things and people
look good
. We are professionals in remodeling ugly truths into high-fashion dreams.

Ever stop to wonder why this is so? Is there really a gay creativity gene that we all inherited? When you think about it, is it actually plausible that our sexual orientation genetics would somehow
also give us a talent for hair, makeup, and rearranging the living room?

I don't think so. There seems to be something more to it. Something about the experience of being gay causes us to develop our “fashion” skills. Something about growing up gay forced us to learn how to hide ugly realities behind a finely crafted façade.

Why is this so? We hid because we learned that hiding is a means to survival. The naked truth about who we are wasn't acceptable, so we learned to hide behind a beautiful image. We learned to split ourselves in parts, hiding what wasn't acceptable and flaunting what was. We learned to wave beautiful, colorful scarves to distract attention from our gayness—like the matador waving a red scarf before the bull to distract the beast from goring his body. We became experts in crafting outrageous scarves.

The truth is that we grew up disabled. Not disabled by our homosexuality, but emotionally disabled by an environment that taught us we were unacceptable, not “real” men and therefore, shameful. As young boys, we too readily internalized those strong feelings of shame into a core belief:
I am unacceptably flawed.
It crippled our sense of self and prevented us from following the normal, healthy stages of adolescent development. We were consumed with the task of hiding the fundamental truth of ourselves from the world around us and pretending to be something we weren't. At the time, it seemed the only way to survive.

One cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not planted by us, but by a world that didn't understand us, wanted to change us, and at times, was fiercely hostile to us.

It's not about how good or bad we are. It's about the struggle so many of us have experienced growing up gay in a world that didn't accept us, and the ongoing struggle as adult gay men to create lives that are happy, fulfilling, and ultimately free of shame.

This life we created for ourselves—the one that we thought gay men were supposed to be enjoying—can be empty and unfulfilling. But we're stuck in a role—a way of life—that is rooted in our shame and holds us back from creating the life we really want. Somewhere along the way, we picked up the idea that a happy gay man was one who had lots of sex and at least one handsome man on his arm at all times. Wherever this “ideal” of gay men is featured, such as in entertainment or advertising, they are depicted as handsome, muscular men who seem to have it all—sensitivity, stylish good looks, and a body that would drive Cleopatra
and
Marc Anthony wild with desire.

Virtually all of gay culture is defined by sex and the pursuit of desire and beauty. Whether it's a gay bar or a gay news magazine, the hard-driving, heart-pounding message of sex is omnipresent. And it's not just sex—it's toe-curling, mind-blowing, hard-body, all-night-long sex.

Is this enough? I am a man. I need to be loved. I need to love myself. I need to feel strong
and
to cry. I need to feel alive
and
to grieve my losses. I need to know that there is someone in this world who truly loves me. I need to love someone. I need a safe,
stable, and committed home. Truth is, I need all these things much more than I need great sex.

Even though we never talk about such things at the cocktail parties and catered affairs we attend, we crave it with a desire that we can barely conceal. Behind the façade, we are honestly and without reservation human. And it's past time for us to realize that living the ideal gay life isn't humane in the least.

Remember when you first knew you were gay and imagined how your life would be? You probably imagined meeting a handsome fellow, falling madly in love, and living your lives together with a few dogs or, if you were really progressive, even children. You imagined your family would eventually accept your lover as a part of the family and you'd live happily together for a lifetime.

Okay, maybe that was just my fantasy. But I'll bet anything that yours was equally rosy. Then, somewhere along the way, your dream died. A lover betrayed you. You couldn't be faithful to one man. Boyfriend after boyfriend proved to be untrustworthy. The men you desired and loved disappointed you.

What did you do? You went to the gym, to the bathhouse, to the bars, to the sex club, or maybe even tried to lose yourself in climbing the corporate ladder. You tried to convince yourself that you weren't unhappy, just bored. Or maybe you just weren't getting enough sex. Or maybe this time, after test-driving dozens of models, you'd find the right man for you. Who knows, maybe
Quentin Crisp's “tall, dark man” was just around the corner—or maybe just in the next bed?

But as dear Mr. Crisp reports, the tall, dark man never comes. What to do? Bury the sadness deep within yourself and keep moving lest you find yourself suffocating in your own self-pity.

Why are my intimate relationships short-lived? Why am I so driven to have the perfect body, the most beautiful house, the most fabulous career, the youngest and prettiest boyfriend, etc.? Why do I fight this nagging depression that tells me my life is bereft of greater meaning?

What all of these questions point to is an emotional wound. It is a wound that almost all gay men experience, and if they choose to move their lives forward, must also heal. If you're asking these questions, as have I and most of the gay men I encounter, you're struggling with this wound inside yourself, too.

The wound is the trauma caused by exposure to overwhelming shame at an age when you weren't equipped to cope with it. An emotional wound caused by toxic shame is a very serious and persistent disability that has the potential to literally destroy your life. It is much more than just a poor self-image. It is the internalized and deeply held belief that you are somehow unacceptable, unlovable, shameful, and in short, flawed.

What makes the wound of shame so destructive? To experience such shame, particularly during our childhood and adolescent years, prevents us from developing a strong sense of self.

A sense of self is the development of a strong identity that is validated by your environment. The nerdy teenager develops an identity that includes “science genius” because among other things, he joined the science or math club and discovered other teenagers who validated his talent. Same thing for the jocks and head-bangers—they developed a sense of self from the validation
they received by hanging out with others who share and value similar interests and abilities.

Straight boys developed their sense of their sexual self by taking girls out on dates. Everyone, including their parents, validated them for this behavior. Hence, they came to accept it as part of themselves. Gay men, on the other hand, rarely had this experience. In large part, we played the part and took girls to the prom so that we'd fit in, all the while knowing it was a farce. Although we received validation for our actions, it was meaningless because we knew at the deepest level that we were play-acting. Consequently, we developed a pseudo-self, which wasn't a natural growth of our abilities, desires, and intelligence. It was a self that would earn us validation by others, but our true selves remained hidden from everyone.

Our core belief that one is unacceptably flawed prevented our organic self from developing as it does in an emotionally healthy boy. Instead, it became frozen in time, undeveloped, and somewhat juvenile in form. How we coped was by presenting to the world a self that was explicitly designed to help us get by.