Gay 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 typical middle-school student you would spot in 2012, even in my hometown of Lengthy Beach in Southern California. And when the society didn’t end that December, I thought, “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 promise of promiscuity and connection, I felt empty; I was lonely. Loneliness, typically internalized from community, 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 feel so alone?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines loneliness as “the quality of being unfrequented and remote; isolat[ed].”[1] This definition is too basic for my standards because loneliness, at least as it stands in the gay society, can be found almost everywhere; at the gay-bar, at the club, in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies classroom, or in a bed, s

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 caring 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, typically white and trim and successful, would place off on a lament about the impossible meanness and pet

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 communicate the particular challenges faced by gay men love him who were born during the 1970s. Members of this “middle generation,” he noted, were largely spared the waves of AIDS-crisis deaths. And yet they had to arrive 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 male lover 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 undertake I ever get to live? How do I ever get to contain 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 extended time, he had avoided penetrative sex entirely, “for obvious reasons.” Belonging to the more sexually carefree younger gay generation that has only known HIV as a treatable

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