Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives

by Walt Odets

In that assertion, the gay man is accepting the heterosexual perspective on who he is: the gender of his sexual partner defines him as gay and is his only distinguishing difference. From a psychological perspective, this is simply not the whole truth, and the claim often does a serious disservice to gay lives.

People who are taught not to value themselves do not exercise self-care, and high-risk behavior is one way we play out the self-devaluation and shame that stigma creates. Sustained societal stigma—which is internalized as self-stigma—almost invariably results in elevated shame, anxiety, and depression, and behaviors that express such feelings.

This is the “characteristic self” that I earlier mentioned. When a person’s accumulated developmental experience is relatively good—never perfect, but good enough—our characteristic self provides us, in Erikson’s words, “a sense of being ‘all right,’ of being oneself, and of becoming what other people trust one will become.”6 When our characteristic selves shift later in life, it is because new life experience has engaged earlier resolutions that left us with some vulnerability. If our characteristic selves are not changing in response to new experience, it is because we have stopped learning and growing. We have stopped living.

But why have gay agendas pushed for marriage, rather than the decoupling of marriage from rights and privileges for all citizens? And even with the lonely adolescent experience in mind, why emotionally would LGBT people want to participate in a heterosexual convention with such a problematic history, a convention that has also served as the standard against which gay lives have been stigmatized? These questions are important because, among all the rights and privileges gay communities have pursued over the last half century, legal marriage is the one aimed squarely at deconstructing and reconstructing gay relationships—and thus at the core of what it means to be gay and live a gay life.

Young men must know that, even as they live in increasingly conventionalized communities, they will not be marginalized by their own communities for leading “unconventional” gay lives. In the pursuit of acceptance through conformity, stigmatized communities too easily marginalize their own nonconformers, and the persistent celebration of marriage as the crowning achievement of gay people in America is a step in that direction.

Gay men have usually grown up as outsiders, and outsiders often hope to present themselves as “just like” insiders and receive the benefits and approval that insiders grant other insiders. But psychologically, the question remains: Are men who fall in love with other men and get married just like heterosexual men in conventional marriages? Both gay lives and gay relationships have a long, necessarily independent history of improvisation and invention, largely born of a gay sensibility. Without traditional social models to draw on, gay men have had to discover ways to be themselves in a manner that straight men with a ready-made life plan never have.

Relationships between

gay men—human, good, and valuable relationships—are not only expressions of traditional romantic love, they are also often fraternal, paternal, nonmonogamous or polyamorous, and communal, and they are often thoughtfully and honestly so. Society—and some gay men—critically judge such unconventional inventions and use them as evidence that gay relationships do not work—even as the same inventions are nonexplicitly or deceitfully implemented in many heterosexual unions.

Fidelity—the real fidelity that makes relationships important and humanly decent—is simply about being truthful.

When a relationship does not provide something one partner needs, is otherwise in difficulty, or clearly no longer works, fidelity is respectfully saying this and empathetically talking it through.

But in working with gay men in therapy for a third of a century, I am most struck by one great tragedy: in childhood, most have been handed a rule book of limitations to live by, rather than a songbook of possibilities.

Think of how Matthias started out, and what he did with his life—he liberated himself. Half the time, the gay liberation movement is really the “Please like us, we were born this way” movement. Liberation is about insisting on our own lives, not seeking their permissions for a diversity that harms no one. If society is going to hang the acceptance of gay people on our conforming, I’m out of the conversation, but not without insisting on my rights. I’m like Matthias and Robb and you. I like being gay. I want to be gay, and I’m going to be gay. Our lives and how they got this way are no one else’s business.

In shame, many of us still bargain with the horse, and our biggest bargaining chip lies in trying to live lives that inauthentically mimic the lives society would have us live.