The Velvet Rage (7 page)

Many supportive families have discovered the hazards of exposing a gay man's sexuality when he is in denial. Thinking that they are being helpful, even loving, they may attempt to confront him in the spirit of making him comfortable with sharing his sexuality, only to receive in return a barrage of anger and denial.

I remember seeing one couple in therapy after they had asked their eighteen-year-old son if he was gay. They had carefully explained to him that if he were gay, it was fine by them and that they only wanted him to be happy. The son angrily exploded at them saying, “You've never had a clue who I am,” hurriedly
packed a backpack, and left the house. By the time they saw me, he hadn't returned for over a week.

When we were denying that we were gay, we
acted as if
we were straight. “Acting as if” meant that we had to split our lives into two parts: One part was the acceptable, public self. The other part was the secretive, darker self. The darker self learned to meet men on the sly—at the mall, on business trips, in the park, on the internet, in the locker room, or at the highway rest stop. We had sex, often without exchanging real names (after all, we couldn't afford for some screaming queen to tell our secret all about town). We convinced ourselves that we weren't gay, just playing around with a guy until the right girl came along. However we justified it,
we definitely weren't gay
. We were bisexual, curious, and damned horny. What's so wrong with two guys taking care of business?

Some gay men in stage one don't act out their secret fantasy life. Instead of seeking “secret” sex, they harbor elaborate erotic fantasies about sex with men. These fantasies commonly grow so strong that the gay man becomes phobic of ever acting out the fantasy for fear of losing control. One client said it well: “I knew if I ever allowed myself to have sex with a man, the dam would break, and I'd never be able to go back to sex with my wife.”

The damaging effect of learning to live your life in two parts, whether in reality or fantasy, cannot be underestimated. It is an infectious skill that you learned, one that would eventually spread beyond the bedroom of your life. Life wasn't ever what it seemed on the surface. Nothing could be trusted for what it appeared to be. After all, you weren't what you appeared to be. In learning to hide part of yourself, you lost the ability to trust anything or anyone fully. Without knowing it, you traded humane innocence for dry cynicism.

Splitting, as this is known, is especially problematic. For many of us, long after we stop hiding the fact that we are gay, we continue to split off unacceptable parts of ourselves. We present a rosy picture of our relationship to coworkers, or we feign enjoyment at the dinner party thrown by a wealthy acquaintance just because it might increase our social status. Who we really are and what we truly feel is something very different from what we display for others in that moment.

While you may be thinking that this is just plain old dishonesty, it is in reality a much deeper psychological issue. It's about living dishonestly, faking an entire segment of our lives for the benefit of getting along in life. Even more troubling, when we are actively splitting we generally don't think of ourselves as being dishonest.

Ken is a case in point. Only after many years of therapy did he come clean about the extensive, second life he was living via the internet. At night, on weekends, and during breaks in the day, he would chat on the internet with the intention of arranging a sexual hook-up. Over a few years previous to his disclosure, he estimated that he had sex with probably more than a hundred different men. At the same time, Ken had been in a relationship with another man, Dave, who lived in another state. While they hadn't committed to monogamy yet, it was clear to Ken that his boyfriend was monogamous. In fact, Ken had artfully dodged the discussion of monogamy so as to avoid being cornered into a commitment he knew he would have to make to keep the relationship.

When disclosing his second life on the internet, Ken said, “I could never tell Dave about this. He would be so hurt. What would be the point if I stop it now?” Of course, the truth of the situation was that more than protecting Dave's feelings (which would surely have been very hurt), Ken was obviously mostly protecting
himself
from the shame of having lived a dual life.

Splitting is undoubtedly the most troublesome and persistent behavior learned during stage one, and it often lingers long after you've left stage one. When you split, you are able, if only temporarily, to avoid shame. If your boyfriend doesn't know about the affair, you aren't confronted with shame. If your coworkers don't know you're gay, you won't risk being treated like you're part of the “out group.” If your parents are never allowed to visit your one-bedroom apartment, they might not find out that your boyfriend is living with you.

While splitting often allows us to avoid shame, it also eventually undermines our relationships. We are never what we appear to be, and over time, others begin to sense this. Trust erodes from our relationships with lovers, friends, and family. We are marginalized and kept at a safe distance by others. In any case, they discover that they don't really know us at all. How can they trust someone they don't even know?

Splitting, as significant as it is, is just one of the ways in which we learn to avoid shame while in stage one. Let me tell you the story of Travis.

I met Travis after he entered an alcohol rehabilitation treatment center that often referred gay male patients to me. All of seventeen years old, he was already experiencing regular blackouts and painful withdrawal whenever he didn't drink. A quart of hard liquor a day had become his habit.

Travis always knew that he was different from the other boys. To start with, he was always smaller and developmentally behind the boys of his age. He loved to play the piano and had absolutely no
interest in sports. While he enjoyed the company of girls, at twelve years old he knew that he was mostly attracted to other boys.

Travis's father suspected that he was gay. He was a very controlling man who had spent nearly twenty years as a practicing alcoholic before he finally gave up drinking. After that, he seemed to become even more difficult and angry, especially toward Travis. At our first meeting, Travis had a broken arm and numerous bruises from the last beating his father had given him. But these were only the visible wounds; his father had also called him a “God damn faggot,” “cock sucker,” and “fairy,” standard insults that he flung at Travis when he became the least bit angry. Travis's response was to run away from home; he'd done so many times before, living on the streets for weeks at a time.

As we worked together, Travis was able to identify the intense shame he felt for being different. Although he hated those hateful words that his father flung at him, deep inside he had come to believe they were true. Underneath it all, he felt worthless.

For Travis, alcohol was a way to avoid the intense shame he had internalized from his father. In fact, most of his binges had occurred after he had fights with his father. Despite his deep anger toward him, there was a part of Travis that still revered his father and believed that he was right.

After being able to maintain sobriety for several months while in the treatment program, Travis began reporting intense feelings of shame, hopelessness, and a desire to isolate himself from the other boys in the treatment center. The other residents were all straight, and he was certain that they looked down on him.

The only way Travis could handle his shame was to drink. Of course, the treatment center had taken away his one effective avoidance strategy, and he was left helpless to fight his demons without his usual weaponry.

Substance abuse is a common avoidance strategy that many gay men learn at this early stage of the struggle to cope with the trauma of being gay in a straight man's world, and consequently, it is an epidemic among gay men. All the research confirms it, and if you've spent any time in a large city's gay neighborhood, you've seen it, too. Everything from alcohol to cocaine to ecstasy to heroin. It's all there, and regularly being lapped up by party boys and muscle daddies alike. Try to imagine a gay nightclub where at least half the people weren't stoned, drunk, or tripping on ecstasy—it's hard to do.

Clearly, substance abuse is one of the ways some of us learned to avoid shame. In fact, for some of us, it is the
only
way we learned to avoid shame. If we could get high enough for long enough, we could forget the shame that dogs us throughout the day. Only then could we let go and really have a good time.

I work with many gay men who have come to believe that they can't have sex unless they are high or intoxicated. The only way they can let go is to medicate themselves out of the shame. Shame is insidious and ubiquitous, and the need to avoid it is equally ever-present, especially when we are bare-naked and vulnerable with another man.

Substance abuse isn't just a circuit-party-going queen's issue, either. I've rarely been to a dinner party hosted by gay men where alcohol wasn't flowing generously. A cocktail or two before dinner, bottles of wine with dinner, and aperitifs afterwards are not unusual. Recently, I attended a dinner party where two separate guests each arrived with a large bottle of liquor for their own cocktails. Apparently, the host was known for not keeping a very well-stocked bar.

Still another way gay men avoid shame is in anonymous sex. It's quick, easy, no ties, no names. After all, if you don't know his
name, you have a great excuse never to call or talk to him again. When a man gets to know you intimately, he becomes uniquely equipped to point out your flaws and shortcomings. By limiting yourself to brief sexual encounters with a man you know only superficially at best, you get all the goodies and none of the other stuff. It's just quick, clean, honest fun—or so we tell ourselves. How honest can a brief encounter truly be?

All of us know a gay man, maybe even ourselves, who intentionally has only brief relationships with other men. Just as soon as the relationship starts to feel committed, we find a reason to break it off or to drive the other person out of our life. All it takes is an inkling of shame, and we're on the run.

These brief relationships may whet our sexual appetite, but they do little to gain us authentic, self-generated validation. Hence, they also do little to dampen our rage. The consequence of all this is that the more short-lived relationships and sexual encounters we have, the more cynical we become about relationships. After all, none of our relationships has come close to satisfying the ravenous yearning for authentic validation. We can become critical and easily angered in even brief relationships as our rage grows and destroys our bond with those whom we also desire.

During stage one, we may also experience a great deal of compounded shame. Imagine this: You have a fight with your boyfriend, storm out of the house, and go down to the local gay bar, where you proceed to get smashed and do something to embarrass yourself. Maybe you dance on the bar in your underwear or perhaps you simply become obnoxious and loud. Whatever the behavior, you did something radical to try and silence the intense shame that the argument with your boyfriend ignited.

This is the nightmare of compounded shame, and we've all been there in one way or another. Compounded shame occurs
when something triggers our shame, and we immediately go into avoidance mode, like storming out of the house and getting smashed at the bar. While we're pouring our heart and soul into avoidance, we suddenly discover that we're doing things that might be justifiably shameful, like singing naked on the piano bar.

Sometimes a powerful emotion like shame is followed by what is known as a secondary emotion. When shame is both the primary and the secondary emotion, this is called compounded shame. Other emotions, too, can be secondary to shame, such as anger or fear. For example, you become enraged with the person who “outed” you at the office, or you become overcome with the fear that your boyfriend will dump you. Shame often is the cue for other troubling emotions, creating a scenario where you go from feeling bad to much worse.

When I was in my very early twenties, I married a wonderfully talented woman named Karen. She was beautiful but had even more talent as a soprano. I mistakenly took our wonderful friendship as a sign of romance and decided that what I needed to do was to marry Karen. In time, I convinced myself that would be the solution to all my shame about being gay. In fact, it was going to cure me, and I wouldn't be gay anymore!

Of course, marrying didn't cure me of anything. Within two years, Karen and I were divorced. After the divorce, I struggled with dark feelings of shame, but this time it wasn't just about being gay. It was about being gay and having badly hurt a wonderful woman. For several years, I drowned in my compounded
shame. The more shame I acknowledged, the more frantically I tried to avoid the shame. I used every possible escape hatch I knew to avoid the horrible feelings of guilt and shame. Early in my career I even abandoned my love of clinical work to climb the career ladder in human resources at Hewlett Packard, just to prove that I wasn't a scoundrel or some screaming queen. Maybe my sexuality wasn't conventional, but everything else about me was just fine.