The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World

by Alan Downs Ph. D.

It is in this experience of differentness, being the one who doesn’t fit in, that shame takes root in our lives. So it follows that even as homophobia begins to wane in our world, gay men will still need to do the work of acknowledging all the ways in which we have accepted our unlov-ableness and actively do the work required to obliterate such heinous beliefs from our lives.

While understanding the origins of shame-based wounds is important, this alone is not sufficient to bring needed change into our lives. Change comes by choice and practice, not from insight about our past.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The consequence of this is that his true self remains undeveloped and hidden deep within him. Who he is, what he really likes, his true passion, and more are all colored and buried beneath the façade he has developed to avoid shame. While this helps him to cope with the distress and subsequent avoidance of shame, it is a recipe for trouble in life. At first, the trouble is seemingly minor, but as he grows older he becomes increasingly aware that he doesn’t really know what he wants out of life and what might make him ultimately fulfilled and content. As the years go by, his awareness of this deficit grows, causing various maladies including deepening depression, conflictual and faltering relationships, substance abuse, and sleepless anxiety.

This begins the first of three stages in a gay man’s life, and it is the stage that is characterized by being overwhelmed by shame.

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?

To be gay in an uncompromisingly straight world is to struggle to find love and, once found, to hold on to it. We are men in a world where men are emotionally disabled by our masculine cultural ideals. And we are men who threaten those ideals by loving another man at a time in life when we are neither equipped for the ravishes of love or the torment of shame.

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.

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.

What is distinctly noticeable about this stage two depression is that the old sources of validation no longer seem to soothe the gay man’s distress. He works hard, but the feeling of validation is harder to come by. The beautifully furnished apartment no longer thrills him. His success at work feels as if it were a grating noise to his ears. The parade of sexual conquests with beautiful men becomes tedious and boring, like a hamster on a treadmill who runs incessantly but will never go anywhere. Very little, if anything, is experienced as validating.

The end of stage two is inevitably the dark night of the soul for the gay man. It is a time when he may untie every anchor to his small vessel. Relationships are often ended. Career choices are frequently questioned. Friendships are dismissed. The meaning of life is rejected, revised, destroyed, and reinvented. And while the extent to which a gay man displays this angst upon his face and life may vary, the internal process is always tough and grim. Some retreat into a period of mostly silent contemplation. Others become activated, expressing their struggle to all who will hear. Each slight variation of personality has its own way of expressing the process, but the result is the same: elimination of shame and the birth of authenticity.

The vicious cycle is an inability to learn from one’s mistakes in life as a result of avoiding shame. Mistakes are one of the primary causes of justifiable shame. Therefore, when a gay man in stage one or two makes a mistake, he is slow to admit it and stubbornly refuses to revisit the mistake in order to learn how he might do things better. He may employ defensive behaviors such as blaming the mistake on others, denial, and being slow or refusing to acknowledge the mistake.

Mistakes trigger shame; therefore, they must be avoided. Since no one is perfect, mistakes are unavoidable, so the second-best thing he can do is avoid the memory of the mistakes, or try to “cook the books” and construe the mistake as something other than an error. The tragedy contained in this vicious cycle is that mistakes help a person change their behavior. When mistakes are swept under the carpet of life, then no change takes place and the same dysfunctional behaviors keep happening.

Every relationship requires repair from time to time—one or both people must own the injury they have caused within the relationship and show an intention to do differently in the future. Nobody wants to be around a jerk who never acknowledges when he has screwed up.

Repairing a relationship means taking meaningful steps to accept responsibility without diverting to blame for another issue.

The distraction the sex provides helps them to break the ongoing flow of whatever distressing emotion they are currently feeling. When it’s over with, the distress may return, but often it is somewhat reduced.

sex with men becomes a necessary method for changing your mood or alleviating distress. It begins to play a central role in your psychological equilibrium, and you can’t effectively function without it. Whenever things get rough at work or home, you head for the nearest place to hook up with men.

This is what is known as a process addiction—using a behavior to regulate your mood. At first, any process addiction is a choice to engage in a behavior that helps to radically shift your mood. Over time, you become dependent on the behavior, and it starts to feel like it’s out of control. Regardless of the consequences of repeating this behavior, you keep doing it to feel better. Again and again, you go do it, until you either find another way to regulate your mood or your life becomes consumed with the addiction.

Loneliness as an emotion has some unique properties, and the foremost is that the more a gay man tries to avoid confronting his loneliness, the more control the emotion has over his life. The fear of being lonely increases, and the anticipated distress heightens dramatically.

Some gay men who have a particularly difficult time with self-validation rely on sex to feel good about themselves. This kind of gay man needs to see others excited by his presence and adoring his body in order to feel worthwhile and acceptable. If other gay men fail to notice him or be attracted to him, he begins to question his own value. On the surface, this may sound a bit juvenile, but in reality it is something that many, if not most, gay men struggle with to some degree. We rely heavily upon the adoring reactions of others to our presence for our own self-esteem.

The authenticity that is sought in stage three is fundamentally inconsistent with the use of sex as an emotion regulation method. In stage three, the gay man must learn other ways than just sex to control his emotions, improve his mood, and to find joy in life.

Not until the gay man develops another way to manage his emotions can he leave his addictions behind. When he learns how to authentically connect with his world and achieve the contentment that he craves, he can relinquish those old behaviors and break free from their suffocation. Here lies the boundary between stages two and three. The gay man begins to leave behind the inauthenticity of his past, and moves into a place of becoming himself—a true self that is shown to all the world for the flawed beauty therein. But first, he must pass through another ring of fire: the crisis of meaning.

The journey into authenticity and acceptance is the beginning of stage three in the gay man’s life. It is the final stage in life, no matter at what age it is entered.

Deconstructing the effects of a life built on the avoidance of and overcompensation for shame is the central process of stage three. Now that shame is no longer the driving force in his life,

What always fascinates me is that once a gay man enters into stage three, his visibility in the gay community often diminishes. He is no longer a regular at the gay clubs, nor is he an active player in high gay society. He may, in fact, no longer feel the need to visit the gay ghetto. You may see him on occasion at the gym or at a political fund-raiser, but he is not a regular on the gay scene. This is unfortunate for young men, for they are unable to see the healthy progression from shame to freedom. Many younger gay men just assume that once you get older, you hide out in your house or move away out of embarrassment from having aged. It isn’t conceivable to them that many of the gay men who “disappear” do so because they have outgrown the need for the avoidance of shame and acquisition of validation that is at the core of so much of mainstream gay culture.

He embarks on a journey away from a familiar life and seeks a better life for himself. He isn’t certain what that better life is, nor is he at all certain that he will ever find it. It is a quest without a defined endpoint.

The great danger inherent in stage three is that the gay man will foreclose on ambiguity. Rather than allow this lack of clarity to resolve itself naturally, like the settling white flakes in a child’s snow globe when it has been put down, he attempts to create artificial clarity and too quickly defines an endpoint to his journey. Or he turns back into the ways of earlier stages, being unwilling to tolerate the ambiguity of the present.

Resolution, on the other hand, comes slowly and is measured. It is a gradual, organic change that seems to flow naturally in life. It needs no sudden jolt or miraculous event. It is a beautiful fractal that emerges out of the chaotic background, slowly revealing itself in the foreground of life.

The underlying psychological conflict that is resolved in stage three is the complete acceptance of the self and elimination of toxic shame. Resolution is the manifestation of a gay man who is no longer holding the core belief that he is flawed and unacceptable, and consequently spending most of his energy managing, silencing, and avoiding shame.

Experiences that involve extreme and significant emotional responses are likely imprinted in our neurological pathways in significantly different ways. These pathways show great resiliency and maintain their potency regardless of age, thus allowing a person to remember emotionally significant events from even early childhood for most, if not all, of one’s life.

The second important fact about relationship trauma is that emotional memories dramatically affect the way in which we process similar stimuli after the trauma.

The acceptance of betrayal is about accepting the following: 1. All men, and gay men in particular, have shortcomings. 2. Betrayal is a product of the betrayer’s woundedness and not the fault of the betrayed. The underlying dynamic of this acceptance is the realization that betrayal has a predictable and knowable cause: emotional woundedness. If we wish to have a relationship that is free of betrayal, then we must either find a partner who is not wounded or find a partner who is willingly and actively working on his own emotional wounds. Of course, the former is difficult if not impossible to find. The latter becomes the requirement of all gay men who wish to heal their relationship trauma.

The skill of creating and prolonging joy has three parts: • Make yourself vulnerable to joy. • Notice when you feel joy. • Repeat the behaviors that create joy.

Integrity really cuts to the core of the struggle of the gay man, meaning integrate all parts of oneself, or more formally, the state of being undivided. For the gay man, it means the absence of hiding parts of yourself, no longer splitting, and allowing all parts of yourself to be known.

Being clear and straightforward about who we are, what we want from others, and our intentions is the cornerstone of integrity.

The learning and practice of passion, love, and integrity is what creates meaningful contentment in our lives. Once we have shed the shackles of shame, and seek to create a life worth living, these three become the ultimate goals of our lives.

meaningful life change comes from mindful practice.

The traumatic effect of growing up in a world where we must hide the truth of our strongest feelings causes our development to stall. We aren’t able to have a normal adolescence where we experiment with who we are and receive the critical reflection of those around us that helps us to create a secure identity. Instead, we must hide, presenting to the world a fabricated version of ourselves until the day that we are free to express our sexuality and step out of the closet of shame. For so many of us, the experience of truly coming out comes too late, and the impact on our identity formation is profound. We are left floundering, with undeveloped internal guides that, should they have been allowed to develop, would have guided us toward discovering our passion and a stronger sense of ourselves.

What makes a measurable difference in my life is when I practice—meaning “do”—certain things that are likely to improve my life and increase my contentment. Likewise, when I don’t do these things (I like to call them “skills”), my inner peace and joy are diminished.

The secret to life isn’t an idea—it’s a behavior. You must do, not just think about, what is likely to bring you joy and peace.