The Velvet Rage Page 2

  And we didn’t just hide our true selves from our parents. As best we could, we hid the truth from everyone, especially from other children. Children, probably more than any other people, are keenly aware of differences in one another, and often torment other children they perceive as different. Indeed, if you want to see some of the cruelest human behavior, just watch a kindergarten playground for a while. Children are merciless—especially when they sense that another child is different.

  Maybe you remember just how cruel children can be? Most gay men have early memories of this kind of rejection at the hands of their playmates. In fact, it is on the playground that we probably first began to consciously think about how we were different from other boys. We didn’t necessarily want to play the same games as the other boys. We were taunted or ignored by the more athletic, aggressive boys who always seemed to win the positive attention of their classmates and even the teachers. Maybe you also taunted and teased in a futile attempt to fit in.

  “I can’t remember when it started, but I can definitely remember always feeling like I didn’t fit in. I can remember sitting alone on the playground even when I was in kindergarten. I didn’t want to do all the stupid things the other boys were doing like sword fighting with sticks or playing cowboys and Indians. Even back then it all seemed so strange to me.”

  DALE FROM CHARLESTON, NC

  It was this early abuse suffered at the hands of our peers, coupled with the fear of rejection by our parents, that engrained in us one very strident lesson: There was something about us that was disgusting, aberrant, and essentially unlovable.

  Whatever it was—at the time we still may not have known what it was—we decided must be hidden completely from view. Although we are older now, we are still driven by those insatiable, infantile drives for love and acceptance. In order to survive, we learned to become something that we thought would be more acceptable to our parents, teachers, and playmates.

  “I hated school. I always made sure I arrived just before the morning bell and went straight home after school. I especially hated physical education. It never failed that when the teams were picked, I was always the last one. None of the boys wanted me on their team. They’d laugh and call me ‘sissy’ . . . ”

  TOM FROM PORTLAND, OR

  We made ourselves more acceptable to others in a variety of ways. Perhaps you learned that you could win approval by becoming more sensitive than the other boys. Maybe you learned that you could win approval by displaying a creativity that the other boys refused to show, or you learned to win approval by excelling at everything you did. You may have even tried to earn affection by withdrawing and becoming helpless, hoping to arouse the sympathies of others.

  The essence of all these experiences was the same. No matter how we expressed it, we needed love and we feared that there was something about us that made us unlovable. It was an experience that became an integral part of our psychology that has stayed with us most of our lives. We became utterly convinced that there was something about us that is essentially unlovable.

  THE FIRST MAN IN YOUR LIFE

  So where were our fathers when this was happening? Why didn’t they rise to our rescue and teach us that being a man starts by being honest about yourself? Why couldn’t they see our dilemma, the fear in our eyes, take us by the hand, and teach us how to calm the angst and love ourselves?

  In the book Silent Sons, Robert Ackerman gives us a clue to the emotional absence of our fathers:He is like no other man in the world. His influence is legendary. Without his so much as moving a finger, his look can give approval or stop you dead in your tracks. Without his saying a word, his silence says it all. He is a man who can seem capable of all feats in the world; a man who appears immortal and is supposed to live forever, or at least never grow old. He is a man of great emotions—if you could figure them out. A man of many contradictions and secrets. A man who wants to be close, but teaches independence. A man who stops hugging boys once they become 12. A man who has anger but won’t tolerate it in others. A man whose physical body eventually declines, but whose emotional influence continues to grow even after he is gone.1

  “I honestly don’t think I was one bit smarter than any of the other kids in my grade. I just figured out that if I studied hard and read everything I could, my teachers seemed to like me more. By the time I got to junior high, I discovered a small group of other good students to hang out with. For the first time, I remember feeling like I belonged somewhere.”

  RICK FROM SAN FRANCISCO, CA

  As a young gay man, the first man you loved was your father, and you craved from him love, affection, and tenderness. What most of us received from our fathers fell far short. Why? To start with, our fathers were raised, as we were, to be tough, stable, and emotionally detached. On top of that, many of them were veterans of wars that forced them at a young age to suppress their emotions and to commit unspeakable acts against humanity in the name of patriotism. In sum, many of our fathers grew up in a culture that offered them power in exchange for stoicism and buried emotion. As we grew older, we acted differently than the straight boys did. Those boys often pushed us aside, as different and strange, as did many of our fathers, too. Perhaps they were threatened by their own homoerotic fantasies, or maybe they just didn’t know how to handle us and so they retreated in confusion. Whatever the cause, most of us grew into our young adulthoods without having had a truly loving, honest, and safe relationship with a man. Not with our buddies, and certainly not with our fathers. The natural and organic expectation of a boy is that he will be nurtured and cared for by both a mother and a father. It was an agreement that was written into the genetic code of our souls—our fathers would love and lead us, and in exchange we would respect and honor them. For many of us, our fathers broke this agreement at a very tender time in our lives.

  “I never spoke with my father about my being gay. Years ago I told my mother and, of course, I knew she’d tell my dad. I know that he knew, but we never talked about it. I just couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in his face. Now that he’s gone, I grieve for him—and for us—when I think about it, because we never were able to be friends. Friends? Hell, we weren’t even able to talk.”

  TOM FROM SEATTLE, WA

  Of all the invalidation we will receive in our lives, this is by far the most damaging. The first man that we love—arguably the man we will love the most in our life—is incapable of validating us at a time when we need it most. It is emotional betrayal of the worst sort. The wound created by this betrayal will go on to affect us throughout most of our lives.

  Our mother, too, likely sensed that we were different. She moved in to protect us from what she rightly sensed would be a slow and subtle betrayal by our fathers. She nurtured. She favored us. She over-validated us to compensate for the betrayal she saw us suffer.

  The end result of these strained family dynamics was that the only authentic validation we may have experienced as a young man came from our mothers. And this validation was usually directed at the things that our mothers valued—the feminine ideals. Hence, the feminine qualities (not to be confused with effeminate qualities) of our true self were validated the most.

  Psychologically speaking, this made us comfortable, even drawn to the feminine, and resulted in a better developed tender side. We cultivated creative, compassionate, and nurturing talents. In addition, we became comfortable in the company of women. While this wasn’t true for all of us—some of us had fathers who were emotionally present regardless of our sexuality—it was true for many of us, to a greater or lesser extent.

  So as mere children, years before we would have sex for the first time with a man, we had suffered rejection by our peers, emotional neglect from our fathers, and overcompensating protection from our mothers. We survived by learning to conform to the expectations of others at a time in our development when we should have been learning to follow our own internal promptings. We became puppets of a sort—allowing those around us to pull the strings that made us act in acceptable ways, all the while knowing that we couldn’t trust ourselves.

  What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in the church? Mother’s little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved. How could we love ourselves when everything around us told us that we were unlovable? Instead, we chased the affection, approval, and attention doled out by others.

  Not surprisingly, the long-term effect was an inability to validate ourselves. The ability to derive internal satisfaction and contentment didn’t emerge from our adolescence as it should have. Instead, we sputtered along looking to others for the confidence and well-being that we needed to protect ourselves from being overcome with shame. 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.

  So the little boy with the big secret becomes the man who is driven to avoid shame by hiding his dark truth. Famished for authentic validation and without a reliable sense of self-direction, he develops a sophisticated radar for those things and people who will make him feel good about himself.

  This little boy grows up to be a man who is supremely knowledgeable of culture and fashion. A man of Adonis-sized proportions and many lovers. A man of great success and wealth. A fabulous and outrageous host. An arbiter of good taste and elegant design. A pop-culture aficionado.

  To a great extent, these are the gay men we have known. This is you and me—a little boy with a terrible secret who hides his curse behind a curtain made of crimson velvet. It may surprise many to learn that his secret is not his sexual appetite for men. No, it is something darker, stinging, and filled with rage.

  His secret he cannot reveal, not even to himself, for fear that it will consume him completely. Deep inside, far from the light of awareness the secret lives. Go down beneath the layers of public façade, personal myth, and fantasy. Peel away the well-crafted layers, for only then can you see the secret clearly for what it is: his own self-hatred.

  Chapter 2

  UGLY TRUTHS & HIGH FASHION DREAMS

  “I guess my worst fear is that I will become a bitter, lonely old queen hanging on to a bar stool in some dark joint where nobody goes. I mean it isn’t getting old that worries me—it’s being old and alone that terrifies me. I look around and I don’t see one of my friends in a happy relationship. We’re all pretty much in the same boat. We date. We fall in love. We fall out of love or get dumped. We are single again. After awhile, we’ve all sort of given up on finding Mr. Right. It’s more about are you Mr. In-My-Bed-Right-Now and, whatever you do, please don’t stay for breakfast. If you do, we’ll eventually end up hating each other.”

  JOHN FROM SAN FRANCISCO, CA

  In modern history, there’s never been an easier time to be gay. Sure, we’ve got a few crazed, right-winged enemies, but it’s only a matter of time before their homophobic finger-wagging is considered a mistake in the service of social evolution—like the McCarthy-era speeches and racially motivated lynchings. There is a real sense that social attitudes and values toward gay men are shifting for the better. Times are definitely changing.

  Yet, in my work as a psychologist, my clients who are gay men sometimes talk about being despondent, depressed, even suicidal. They tell me about the constant struggle to find fulfillment and lasting love. Some recount stories about lots of sex, with lots of different men at exotic parties in the finest locations around the globe. Others confess feeling over-the-hill at thirty-five, as if life were over because the twenty-somethings no longer want them. Still others are caught up in their own world of money, art, fashion, and palatial homes.

  Virtually all of the gay men I work with agree on one thing: No matter how accepting society becomes, it is still very hard to be a gay man and a truly happy person. We may have gained so much, but something critical is still missing.

  If you’re “out,” you no longer harbor that “dirty little secret” about yourself, but you likely do continue to hide your true self behind the beauty you manufacture. And nobody knows how to create style more than gay men. We decorate the world. We decorate our lives. We decorate our bodies. And we do it all in an effort to hide our real selves from the world. Gay men are the worldwide experts on style, fashion, etiquette, bodybuilding, art, and design. In every one of these fields gay men predominate. If this weren’t so, there would be few tuning into the hit television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

  We specialize in makeovers of all types and sizes. We’re experts in making things and people look good. We are professionals in remodeling ugly truths into high-fashion dreams.

  Ever stop to wonder why this is so? Is there really a gay creativity gene that we all inherited? When you think about it, is it actually plausible that our sexual orientation genetics would somehow also give us a talent for hair, makeup, and rearranging the living room?

  I don’t think so. There seems to be something more to it. Something about the experience of being gay causes us to develop our “fashion” skills. Something about growing up gay forced us to learn how to hide ugly realities behind a finely crafted façade.

  Why is this so? We hid because we learned that hiding is a means to survival. The naked truth about who we are wasn’t acceptable, so we learned to hide behind a beautiful image. We learned to split ourselves in parts, hiding what wasn’t acceptable and flaunting what was. We learned to wave beautiful, colorful scarves to distract attention from our gayness—like the matador waving a red scarf before the bull to distract the beast from goring his body. We became experts in crafting outrageous scarves.

  The truth is that we grew up disabled. Not disabled by our homosexuality, but emotionally disabled by an environment that taught us we were unacceptable, not “real” men and therefore, shameful. As young boys, we too readily internalized those strong feelings of shame into a core belief: I am unacceptably flawed. It crippled our sense of self and prevented us from following the normal, healthy stages of adolescent development. We were consumed with the task of hiding the fundamental truth of ourselves from the world around us and pretending to be something we weren’t. At the time, it seemed the only way to survive.

  One cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not planted by us, but by a world that didn’t understand us, wanted to change us, and at times, was fiercely hostile to us.

  It’s not about how good or bad we are. It’s about the struggle so many of us have experienced growing up gay in a world that didn’t accept us, and the ongoing struggle as adult gay men to create lives that are happy, fulfilling, and ultimately free of shame.

  This life we created for ourselves—the one that we thought gay men were supposed to be enjoying can be empty and unfulfilling. But we’re stuck in a role—a way of life—that is rooted in our shame and holds us back from creating the life we really want. Somewhere along the way, we picked up the idea that a happy gay man was one who had lots of sex and at least one handsome man on his arm at all times. Wherever this “ideal” of gay men is featured, such as in entertainment or advertising, they are depicted as handsome, muscular men who seem to have it all—sensitivity, stylish good looks, and a body that would drive Cleopatra and Marc Anthony wild with desire.

  “The nurse asked me at the clinic how many sexual partners I’d had in the past year. It took me by surprise—do I tell the truth or lie? I told him about half a dozen, which is an out-and-out lie. I have no idea. The truth is, I really don’t want to think about it. I’m sure it’s somewhere in the dozens, if not more... ”

  KIRBY FROM DALLAS, TX

  Virtually all of gay culture is defined by sex and the pursuit of desire and beauty. Whether it’s a gay bar or a gay news magazine, the hard driving, heart-pounding message of sex is omnipresent. And it’s not just sex—it’s toe curling, mind blowing, hard body, all-night-long sex.

  Is this enough? I am a man. I need to be loved. I need to love myself. I need to feel strong and to cry. I need to feel alive and to grieve my losses. I need to know that there is someone in this world who truly loves me. I need to love someone. I need a safe, stable and committed home. Truth is, I need all these things much more than I need great sex.

  Even though we never talk about such things at the cocktail parties and catered affairs we attend, we crave it with a desire that we can barely conceal. Behind the façade, we are honestly and without reservation human. And it’s past time for us to realize that living the ideal gay life isn’t humane in the least.

  Remember when you first knew you were gay and imagined how your life would be? You probably imagined meeting a handsome fellow, falling madly in love, and living your lives together with a few dogs or, if you were really progressive, even children. You imagined your family would eventually accept your lover as a part of the family and you’d live happily together for a lifetime.

  “I never imagined that I would be single again at forty. This isn’t at all how I thought my life would turn out. I wasn’t like the others. . . I thought I’d find a good, stable lover and we’d be together forever. Now I’m not sure whether to crawl under a rock, get a facelift, or take up bowling. I mean, how do you meet a nice guy?