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

by Alan Downs

most of us grew into our young adult-hoods without having had a truly loving, honest, and safe relationship with a man. Not with our buddies, and certainly not with our fathers.

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.

And it’s past time for us to realize that living the ideal gay life isn’t humane in the least.

Although we received validation for our actions, it was meaningless because we knew at the deepest level that we were play-acting.

when a gay man presents a false, inauthentic self to the world and is subsequently validated for that façade, he will feel hollow, and the validation won’t be satisfying.

it’s probably fair to say that most gay men have had similar feelings at some point early in their lives. It would be better not to be alive than to be gay.

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.

As you move from living in the closet to being out about your sexuality, the desire grows within you once again to silence the shame that once overwhelmed you. This time, rather than being subjugated by your feeling of shame, you begin to attack it vigorously, attempting to prove to yourself that you are worthwhile and loveable as a gay man.

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.

The harsh reality of stage two is that the gay man often pursues sources of inauthentic validation. Why? Because he hasn’t yet discovered the essential part of himself. Having lived with the belief that he was critically flawed, his true self was abandoned and he pursued other, more appealing personas.

You don’t need to be more spiritual, richer, friendlier, better looking, younger, or living on a beach. In this moment, all you need to be is you. Only in that space will you find lasting contentment.

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.

Foreclosure in stage three can happen in many different ways. Suddenly taking on a new spiritual path, abruptly changing careers or lovers, and moving to a very different kind of city are just a few of the more common ways. Any way in which you can imagine giving your life a sudden and radical “make over” is a way to foreclose from finding happiness and focus from within.

By showing yourself—your complete self—to the world around you, the world can respond with validation of what is real about you. It doesn’t always do so, but when it does, the validation satisfies that deep longing within.

That first relationship, for most gay men, ends in disaster. It is one of the most common stories gay men tell in therapy: the traumatic loss of innocence they experienced during their first gay relationship.

The question shifts from “What did I do to deserve this?” to “How can I prevent this from happening again?” Acceptance allows us to move on to prevention and regain a sense of control over our lives.

The gay man who suddenly abandons his partner almost always does so because of a secondary emotion of shame. When he feels angry in the relationship, it immediately goes into shame for feeling angry. When he senses the relationship failing, he is subsequently overcome with shame at the failure. He cannot talk with his partner about the problems because he feels so much shame about his role in creating the problems. No matter what is happening in the relationship, his final response is shame.

Passion is felt when you notice the joy that is felt frequently when you perform a particular task.

The gay man who has spent most of his time in life avoiding shame is also likely to not have discovered his passion in life. He has felt joy—and may be able to recall various joyous experiences, but he has been so preoccupied with avoiding shame that he hasn’t developed the skill of noticing joy and prolonging it when it occurs.

there is a difference in experiencing authentic joy and the temporary satisfaction that comes from validation. Joy emerges from inside you and is intrinsically generated. Validation is most often an external event that comes from other people.

the pursuit of joy is the primary objective, and validation comes only as a secondary benefit.

I often say that the journey from the head to the heart is taken with your feet—meaning that the only way to really integrate insights into your life is by behaving differently.

Many gay men that I work with see their bodies through the lens of future attainments. By this I mean that they tolerate their current body because they hold the belief that in a few months or years, it will be much improved. “I need to lose this layer of body fat so my abs will show.” “When summer comes, I will be in top shape for the beach.” They never actually accept their body as it is in the present moment.

people are sympathetic when they sense humanity in others and are put off when they see nothing but perfection. When you show only perfection, you create anxiety in others and play upon their own insecurities. The darker side of a person often wants to destroy the perfection that makes him or her look bad by comparison.

So many gay men that I work with struggle, as I did, with being Peter Pan.

What is common in my life with many other gay men is that the normal development into emotional manhood that should have happened during the second decade of life often doesn’t happen until much later, if it happens at all. Many of us live in a delayed adolescence that persists for decades until we learn the critical skills that allow us to traverse the passages between adolescence and manhood.

Contentment, it seems, is the one thing that remains just out of the reach of an adolescent.