The Velvet Rage (3 page)

It must be noted that what is written here is in many ways applicable to lesbian women, too. While I do work with many lesbian women and find their journey to be similar, the ways in which it is explored are often very different. For example, lesbian women aren't known to frequent bathhouses, sex clubs, or driven to decorate their lives like gay men. They express their struggle with shame differently and in a uniquely female way. So it is out of respect for lesbian women that this book is written about gay men only. To be more inclusive of the lesbian experience would undoubtedly result in a book that does the lesbian experience an injustice. The stages of their lives are the same; however, the way in which they unfold is often very different.

Finally, a word about the differences between straight and gay men should be included. Often people will ask me, “Isn't the struggle with shame similar for straight men?” To this, I would
also answer yes, but not in the same way. Straight men struggle with their own authenticity and intimate relationships. And yes, they do struggle with shame that is created by a culture that has taught them to hold a masculine ideal that is unachievable, if not downright cruel. But as with lesbian women—and to a far greater degree—their struggles look very different. For example, straight men may fight shame by always having a cute, young, blonde bombshell of a woman on their arm (as some gay men do with a cute, young, blond bombshell of a man), but the constraints of living in a straight culture and mores cause their experience to be quite different than that of gay men. One should not conclude from these pages that straight men are even one fraction healthier than gay men. What is being said is that the trauma of growing up gay in a world that is run primarily by straight men is deeply wounding in a unique and profound way. Straight men have other issues and struggles that are no less wounding but are quite different from those of gay men.

I have written this book as a heart-to-heart talk with gay men that I invite you, the straight reader, to participate in. It seemed the most compassionate and useful voice given the difficulty of the material I present. After all, much of what I write about is the darker, more unseemly side of gay life to which our straight friends and family are not often exposed and, truth be told, which we'd rather that they didn't know about. So I have written it as a gay man who has experienced all of this and more, writing to an audience of gay men who know of what I speak. To adopt a more clinical, third person voice would, in many ways, bring an unnecessary coldness to an otherwise close and intimate exploration of our lives.

OSCAR WILDE
The Importance of Being Earnest

W
e are all born into this world helpless, love-starved creatures. For the first years of life, we are completely dependent upon others for everything we need, both physically and emotionally. As we grow to be children, the world still doesn't make complete sense to us; we still need someone to take care of us.

This craving for love and protection is more than just a passing urge or momentary appetite. It is an irrepressible drive and a constant longing that, when unfulfilled, will last a good long time, likely into adulthood.

For the early years of life, the only source that could satisfy your enormous cravings and needs was your parents. They provided you with everything you needed, but couldn't satisfy for yourself. Long before you reached the age of verbal thought, you knew that you needed your parents. You knew their touch and smell. You anticipated their caresses and recoiled at their scolding.

At that early age, abandonment by your parents was akin to death, and you avoided abandonment at all costs. In your own childish ways, you did everything within your power to retain the attention and love of your parents. Even when you screamed and threw tantrums, you were not risking their ire so much as desperately trying to keep your parents from ignoring you.

But perhaps starting at the ages of four to six, your parents realized that you were different. They didn't know exactly how or why, but you were definitely not quite like the other children they had known. It may have had little or no influence on their love for you, but they may have treated you in a different manner than your siblings or differently than your friends' parents treated them.

You, too, began to understand that you were different. Your understanding was only dim at first, but as those early years progressed into adolescence, you became increasingly aware that you weren't like other boys—maybe even not like your parents.

Along with the growing knowledge that we were different was an equally expanding fear that our “different-ness” would cause us to lose the love and affection of our parents. This terror of
being abandoned, alone, and unable to survive forced us to find a way—
any way—
to retain our parents' love. We couldn't change ourselves, but we could change the way we acted. We could hide our differences, ingratiate ourselves to our mothers, and distance ourselves from our fathers whom we somehow knew would destroy us if he discovered our true nature.

And we didn't hide our true selves just 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.

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.

We decided whatever it was—at the time we still may not have known what it was—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.

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.

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:

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 adult-hoods 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.

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.