Rejection from other gay people, though, feels like losing your only way of making friends and finding love. Being pushed away from your own people hurts more because you need them more. The researchers I spoke to explained that gay guys inflict this kind of damage on each other for two main reasons. It has to be constantly enacted or defended or collected. We see this in studies: You can threaten masculinity among men and then look at the dumb things they do. They show more aggressive posturing, they start taking financial risks, they want to punch things.
This helps explain the pervasive stigma against feminine guys in the gay community.
According to Dane Whicker, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Duke, most gay men report that they want to date someone masculine, and that they wished they acted more masculine themselves. Feminine gay men are still stereotyped as bottoms, the receptive partner in anal sex. A two-year longitudinal study found that the longer gay men were out of the closet, the more likely they were to become versatile or tops.
When he first came out, he was convinced that he was too skinny, too effeminate, that bottoms would think he was one of them. My boyfriend noticed recently that I still lower my voice an octave whenever I order drinks. So, his sophomore year, he started watching his male teachers for their default positions, deliberately standing with his feet wide, his arms at his sides. These masculinity norms exert a toll on everyone, even their perpetrators.
Feminine gay men are at higher risk of suicide, loneliness and mental illness. Masculine gay men, for their part, are more anxious, have more risky sex and use drugs and tobacco with greater frequency. One study investigating why living in the gay community increases depression found that the effect only showed up in masculine gay guys. The second reason the gay community acts as a unique stressor on its members is not about why we reject each other, but how.
In the last 10 years, traditional gay spaces—bars, nightclubs, bathhouses—have begun to disappear, and have been replaced by social media.
At least 70 percent of gay men now use hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff to meet each other. In , around 20 percent of gay couples met online. By , that was up to 70 percent. Meanwhile, the share of gay couples who met through friends dropped from 30 percent to 12 percent. And yes, those are problems. But the real effect of the apps is quieter, less remarked-upon and, in a way, more profound: For many of us, they have become the primary way we interact with other gay people.
It feels good in the moment, but nothing ever comes of it, and those messages stop coming after a few days. It is that they are almost perfectly designed to underline our negative beliefs about ourselves. In interviews that Elder, the post-traumatic stress researcher, conducted with gay men in , he found that 90 percent said they wanted a partner who was tall, young, white, muscular and masculine.
For the vast majority of us who barely meet one of those criteria, much less all five, the hookup apps merely provide an efficient way to feel ugly. John, the former consultant, is 27, 6-foot-1 and has a six-pack you can see through his wool sweater. Vincent, who runs counseling sessions with black and Latino men through the San Francisco Department of Public Health, says the apps give racial minorities two forms of feedback: It is, like mine, mostly hellos he has sent out to no reply. None of this is new, of course. Maybe you end up with a friend out of it, or at least something that becomes a positive social experience.
It sucks, but what are you gonna do? But the downside is that they put all this prejudice out there. What the apps reinforce, or perhaps simply accelerate, is the adult version of what Pachankis calls the Best Little Boy in the World Hypothesis.
- gay young guys?
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As kids, growing up in the closet makes us more likely to concentrate our self-worth into whatever the outside world wants us to be—good at sports, good at school, whatever. As adults, the social norms in our own community pressure us to concentrate our self-worth even further—into our looks, our masculinity, our sexual performance. Then we wake up at 40, exhausted, and we wonder, Is that all there is? And then the depression comes. He has published four books on gay culture and has interviewed men dying of HIV, recovering from party drugs and struggling to plan their own weddings.
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He sat Halkitis and his husband down on the couch and announced he was gay. James grew up in Queens, a beloved member of a big, affectionate, liberal family. He went to a public school with openly gay kids. Over the years, James had convinced himself that he would never come out. So I thought those were my two options: James remembers the exact moment he decided to go into the closet. He must have been 10 or 11, dragged on a vacation to Long Island by his parents. I realize, the second he says it, that he is describing the same revelation I had at his age, the same grief.
Mine was in Halkitis says his was in So what are we supposed to do about it?
10 Reasons Why Gay Dating Is Really Hard | HuffPost
When we think of marriage laws or hate crime prohibitions, we tend to think of them as protections of our rights. One of the most striking studies I found described the spike in anxiety and depression among gay men in and , the years when 14 states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Gay men in those states showed a 37 percent increase in mood disorders, a 42 percent increase in alcoholism and a percent increase in generalized anxiety disorder.
The laws were symbolic. They increased though less dramatically among gay people across the entire country. The campaign to make us suffer worked. Now square that with the fact that our country recently elected a bright orange Demogorgon whose administration is publicly, eagerly attempting to reverse every single gain the gay community has made in the last 20 years.
Tic Tacs and musclar bodies
Any discussion of gay mental health has to start with what happens in schools. Only around 30 percent of school districts in the country have anti-bullying policies that specifically mention LGBTQ kids, and thousands of other districts have policies that prevent teachers from speaking about homosexuality in a positive way. These restrictions make it so much harder for kids to cope with their minority stress.
For the last four years, Nicholas Heck, a researcher at Marquette University, has been running support groups for gay kids in high schools. Guys with disabilities unsure which fetish they fit. We lose at love, too. Apps enable our checklists like nothing before. Search by height, age, area, ethnicity, fetish, body type, body hair — all within a mile radius. We forget how stupid our criteria are. Apps are a lifeline for those in the closet, say some. But how much longer does this lifeline keep them there and choke them? The gay scene suffers, too.
Bars have closed. Many have waned as the frisson of potential encounters collapses under the promise of an app shag on the way home. We used to speak first. In the silence, fear grows. Are we good enough? Do our penises look long enough?
Yes, dating apps can be bad for gay men – but not in the way you might think
Is the lighting on this selfie capturing pectoral definition? In the silence, emptiness echoes, too: We think we are hunters, but all are hunted, pursued by the tech that knows us too well. In a recent speech to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, a political action committee that advocates for LGBT political candidates, Buttigieg talked about growing up with the notion that to be gay was to exist in a socially defined opposition to these moral qualities:.
He spoke movingly of having wished he could have been something other than what he was. I believe Buttigieg when he says he wished he could be straight. I came out in high school, in my junior year, and was always pretty comfortable with my sexuality and felt blessedly supported by my family, but adolescence is awful and adolescent difference is worse; I recognize the sleepless longing to be, for once, just like everyone else.
I am, however, a little suspicious of the neat schema of his biographical tale. Gay or married. Gay or in politics. Gay or a soldier. Former Massachussetts Rep. Barney Frank came out in In , the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled for gay marriage in Baehr v. To many young LGBTQ people — the poor, people of color, trans people or people who were otherwise gender non-conforming — these battles were distant and often immaterial. The health disparities between white and African-American communities in the AIDS epidemic only continues to grow, for example. But to a smart, well-read, Harvard-bound, well-to-do, son-of-two-professors with at least some passing familiarity with current events, these advances and political developments would have been immediately salient.
They certainly were for me. By the year , I could imagine that it would be legal in my lifetime. By the year , I was having heated dorm-room arguments with other gay people over the desirability of gay marriage. It would, I said, ever the obnoxious contrarian, result in a normalization of queer radicalism; it would turn us into just another boring, bourgeois constituency of the vacuous center of American politics.