Gay men loneliness
For five years of my life, I lived openly and unapologetically as a gay man. Twelve years old and gay as all hell, I was not a standard middle-school student you would find in , even in my hometown of Long Beach in Southern California. And when the planet didn’t end that December, I consideration, “Shit, now I really gotta figure this out.”
After downloading Grindr at thirteen, I was exposed early to hyper-sexualization, fat-phobia, transphobia, and every phobia or insult you could find under the sun. Even with all of these faceless torsos and all of the budding assure of promiscuity and connection, I felt empty; I was lonely. Loneliness, typically internalized from collective, was something I felt almost leap from within me to fill every corner of my burnt orange bedroom. Where was this coming from? Why did I sense so alone?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines loneliness as “the quality of entity unfrequented and remote; isolat[ed].”[1] This definition is too basic for my standards because loneliness, at least as it stands in the gay community, can be found almost everywhere; at t
Gay loneliness and familial trauma take center stage in 'All of Us Strangers'
Haigh, 50, calls “All of Us Strangers” his most personal film to hang out. The auteur said he was keen to express the particular challenges faced by gay men appreciate him who were born during the s. Members of this “middle generation,” he noted, were largely spared the waves of AIDS-crisis deaths. And yet they had to reach to grips with their sexuality under the shadow of that epidemic and during a corresponding period of virulent homophobia.
In Adam, Haigh sought to personify how these twin traumas could be as responsible for maintaining a same-sex attracted man’s emotional paralysis as a car crash killing his parents at the dawn of his adolescence.
During his own coming of age, Haight said, he was left to wonder, “‘How on earth act I ever get to live? How do I ever get to hold a relationship?’”
As Harry melts Adam’s defenses, he asks the older man whether he’d fancy having intercourse. Adam says he would — and then reveals that for a drawn-out time, he had avoided penetrative sex entirely, “for obvious reasons.” Belong
Gay Loneliness Is Real—but “Bitchy, Toxic” Culture Isn’t the Full Story
If you are gay or know many gays, chances are you saw “Together Alone,” Michael Hobbes’ longform essay on what he calls an “epidemic of gay loneliness,” show up in your feeds late last week. After seeing the article shared approvingly by many friends, I skimmed and dutifully posted it myself. It’s unsettling, full of resonant descriptions of isolation, drug addiction, and self-hatred among gay men; and it’s ambitious in its attempt to name, outline the contours of, and prescribe solutions for what it argues is a cultural and social crisis among gay men hovering between youth and middle age. But later, as I read the article more closely, I began to feel uneasy.
Something in Hobbes’ portrait—more specifically, in the words of the group of gay men he chose to interview—reminded me of a courteous of conversation that I encountered when I’ve worked in offices with big gay populations. The conversation happened frequently enough that I began to be able to predict how it might unfold. An older gay male colleague, typi
March 02,
The Epidemic of
Gay LonelinessBy Michael Hobbes
I
I used to fetch so excited when the meth was all gone.
This is my friend Jeremy.
When you have it, he says, you have to keep using it. When it&#x;s gone, it&#x;s like, &#x;Oh great, I can go back to my life now.&#x; I would stay up all weekend and go to these sex parties and then feel like shit until Wednesday. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day.
Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. He won&#x;t tell me the accurate circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.
Jeremy is not the confidant I was expecting to include this conversation with. Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea he used anything heavier than martinis. He is trim, intelligent, gluten-free, the gentle of guy who wears a work shirt no matter what day of the week it is. The first time we met, three years ago, he asked me if I knew a good place to perform CrossFit. Today, when I seek him how the hospital&#x;s been so far,