Out of the Shadows: The Psychology of Gay Men's Lives

by Walt Odets

Gay men engage in psychotherapy at about three times the rate of heterosexual men, and for good reason. The complexity of growing up gay in a heterosexist society; distorting developmental influences, including the early and late HIV epidemics; and ongoing marginalization in adult life all often conspire to make therapy a useful endeavor. The more difficult journey gay men travel also provides benefits, for it nurtures a capacity for emotional introspection that is personally valuable and productive in therapy.

Many years ago, Will came to see me for therapy to help him come out as gay. He was a retired dentist, and he wasn’t nineteen, or twenty-nine, or even forty-nine. “Why now?” was my obvious first question, and his answer was succinct: “I was waiting for my wife to die,” and she had.

While driving to a neighborhood café on Telegraph Avenue, he suddenly said, “It’s Friday.” I looked over at him, and he was pointing to a newsstand at the curb and asked me to pull over. Leaping from the car, he collected a pile of newspapers from one of the boxes, returned to his seat, slammed the door shut, and looked triumphant. He had a stack of twenty or so copies of The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ illustrated magazine. “Don’t tell me you read that? And an entire stack of them?” “No, I’m going to take it to recycling in the morning. Everyone has a responsibility to keep garbage off the streets.”

For unexplored emotional pain, denial can be a very destructive defense: it is often indiscriminate and global and risks deadening all of our feelings, including those that allow us to live fully, to sometimes live happily, to love, and to love intimately. Denial may steady a life, but it can also crush it.

There is no better indicator of internalized stigma than gay people’s current focus on the idea that they were “born gay” and thus have no culpability for being gay. Few assert that they are gay simply because they want to be.

I very much doubt that being gay has a neat causal explanation in either nature or nurture. Gay people should give thought to why the why feels important. As far as we know, being gay is simply one expression of natural human diversity, for which explanations and justifications are owed to no one.

Merriam-Webster, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Dictionary.com all now provide the single word homosexual as the first definition of gay. For the Oxford English Dictionary, the second definition is the “informal or derisive” use of the term to describe something as “foolish, stupid or unimpressive: ‘he thinks the obsession with celebrity is totally gay.’”

While still in graduate school, Felix once said to me during a therapy session, “I know this is going to set psychoanalysis back a hundred years, but until I got fucked, I didn’t know what it meant to be a real person. It was the first time I felt I was whole. It was an experience I wouldn’t give back for anything.” It is not clear whether the physical act of sex instinctually informs the emotion, or the conscious and unconscious emotion interpret the act and give it its meaning. I believe it works both ways, simultaneously. Human sex is magic.

In the societal model, observed biological sex, gender self-identity, internal sensibility, and expressed sensibility must all be aligned. As children and young adults, we easily internalize this model, and any discontinuity between the four components becomes a painful internal struggle that is worsened by societal stigma and rejection. Although society has created the conflict by imposing a simplistic, inhuman model, it is left to LGBTQ people to deal with the problem: it is LGBTQ people who are left feeling deviant and “misaligned.” We have the choice of either rejecting the social construction in a pursuit of wholeness and authenticity, or bringing ourselves into alignment.

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.

But again, it must be asserted that the problems that arise in being gay are not the results of being gay, they are the results of how being gay is treated by the larger society. It is not we, but they, who are accountable.

We are never completely free of shame acquired in childhood, adolescence, and early adult life, and the mere assertion of “gay pride” does not undo it; it hides it. The ability to consciously recognize shame when it attempts to play itself out can transform our lives. In recognizing shame, we can decide to interrupt its inclinations and play things out differently. In doing that, we sometimes get better results, and our shame and self-doubt slowly diminish.

Sex is not conducted out of good sense or reason, and it never will be. By its very nature it is irrational, and both the importance and the irrationality of sex are beyond negotiation. Societal stigma, self-stigma, and shame are often about sex because these issues are rooted in feelings that many human beings find self-revealing and frightening. The only way out of this perceived conflict is to use our rational minds to come to some acceptance of human life as it is. Our choice is simple: we can be ourselves, or we can be ourselves pretending to be something else.

Survivor guilt is not, as many mistakenly understand it, simply guilt about remaining alive when others have perished. It is guilt about doing better than others, about good fortune in the face of others’ misfortune, about succeeding when others cannot. It feels harmful and disloyal to those who have not done as well.

Generativity can be realized at almost any age, and I sometimes find myself offering an obvious, often-ignored observation to men who are attempting to grieve disappointing lives: we can only start from where we are, never from where we wish we were. This is sometimes a difficult reality to accept, particularly for those who cannot release their self-blame for what has derailed them.

Many in today’s gay communities hold the hopeful idea that the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage—and a concurrent shift of social perceptions in a handful of small American enclaves—will end developmental trauma for young gay people. This is simply not true, and to know that, one need only look at the torturous history of African-Americans following Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, 150 years ago. For gay lives, the granting of legal rights and authentic acceptance are two different issues in a society steeped in phobic aversion to real diversity. Current legal protections are only the opening scene of act two in a three-act play that will almost certainly stretch into the wee hours of yet another morning.

Psychic numbing is a common reaction to trauma, particularly to extended trauma such as the two epidemics. Numbing helps one endure the traumatic experience by allowing dissociation from frightening, painful feelings and, thus, from the significance of the enveloping event. During the event, numbing is thus often helpful, particularly if it is not so profound that it interferes with one’s ability to pragmatically respond in useful ways. When sustained long after the event, numbing is problematic: disconnection from feelings fragments one’s internal life and obstructs interpersonal connections.

Numbing depletes vitality, and like the overuse of repression, it can leave behind an internal life almost completely incapable of feeling. Herman comments on why constrictive, “negative” symptoms can be difficult to detect: “They lack drama: their significance lies in what is missing.” To the person’s detriment, such symptoms are often interpreted as long-standing character, and are never explored.

‘You’re feeling broken, in pieces. By talking, you’re finding ways to put the pieces back together,

For the heterosexual who wonders which man in the gay couple is “the wife,” the useful answer is probably “You are ignorant of the emotional complexity and potential richness of human life. We are trying to dig out from under your mess and find and be ourselves.”

For both gay and straight boys, Internet pornography now offers an easily available correspondence degree with a major in sex, from a third-rate faculty with a poorly conceived curriculum. When gay men meet after graduation, they quite naturally share what they learned in school.

Gay men crafting their lives and relationships must try to reconstruct one important principle that society and its conventional relationships have persistently distorted. This is the principle of fidelity as honesty and truth. Fidelity is not about the appearance or reality of monogamy, or guarantees of lifelong love that no one can honestly make. 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.

If gay people are to live their lives, it will not be by mimicking a society that only accepts relationships that follow its rules—rules that it does not actually honor. That society has insisted that its love is somehow better or more real than that of gay people, which is an obvious untruth. That society—fearful that in others’ freedom it will see its own limitations, deceptions, or envy—has demonstrated prohibitions and hatred for unconventional forms of bonding and love that have persisted for millennia against all odds.

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.