Gay, middle-aged, and lonely as hell - Chigo Rear

Contents:

• HOW TO COPE WHEN YOU'RE GAY AND LONELY
• GAY, MIDDLE-AGED, AND LONELY AS HELL
• IS LONELS THE GAY MAN’S CURSE, OR A PRODUCT OF 21ST CENTURY LIFE?
• SAVAGE LOVE: I AM A LONELY, AGG GAY MAN; WHAT SHOULD I DO?
• A GAY MAN AT MIDLIFE PONRS BEG LONELY AND ‘INVISIBLE’
• GAY PEOPLE 'AT RISK OF A LONELIER OLD AGE'

HOW TO COPE WHEN YOU'RE GAY AND LONELY

Part of realizg you're gay, or bi, or trans, or non-bary, or anythg other than cisgenr and heterosexual is acceptg you’re different—and somewhat separated—om the majory. Here he shar his journey to overe the sense of isolatn he felt growg up gay a small U.

At the time, there were no real gay role mols except for Graham Norton and Jack om Dawson's Creek—and I certaly didn't intify wh him bee I wasn't a football player. I felt like I was pletely on my rried on until I was 16, when I started gog out to gay bars my hometown.

For the first time I've been able to form a good group of gay iends and create my own support work. I'd go on gay chatrooms but that was jt a facels nversatn wh someone who uld have been anyone. I thk if I'd had iends who were gay when I was growg up, my life would have been so different.

GAY, MIDDLE-AGED, AND LONELY AS HELL

I now know there were other kids at my school who were gay, but they didn't e out till much later.

For years I’ve noticed the divergence between my straight iends and my gay iends. In our lifetime, the gay muny has ma more progrs on legal and social acceptance than any other mographic group history. As recently as my own adolcence, gay marriage was a distant aspiratn, somethg newspapers still put sre quot.

Public support for gay marriage has climbed om 27 percent 1996 to 61 percent 2016. ” Gay characters the days are so monplace they’re even allowed to have flaws.

IS LONELS THE GAY MAN’S CURSE, OR A PRODUCT OF 21ST CENTURY LIFE?

Still, even as we celebrate the sle and speed of this change, the rat of prsn, lonels and substance abe the gay muny rema stuck the same place they’ve been for s. Gay people are now, pendg on the study, between 2 and 10 tim more likely than straight people to take their own liv. In a survey of gay men who recently arrived New York Cy, three-quarters suffered om anxiety or prsn, abed dgs or alhol or were havg risky sex—or some batn of the three.

Dpe all the talk of our “chosen fai, ” gay men have fewer close iends than straight people or gay women.

I’m a perpetually sgle gay guy who was raised a bright blue cy by PFLAG parents. “Marriage equaly and the chang legal stat were an improvement for some gay men, ” says Christopher Stults, a rearcher at New York Universy who studi the differenc mental health between gay and straight men. In the Netherlands, where gay marriage has been legal sce 2001, gay men rema three tim more likely to suffer om a mood disorr than straight men, and 10 tim more likely to engage “suicidal self-harm.

SAVAGE LOVE: I AM A LONELY, AGG GAY MAN; WHAT SHOULD I DO?

TTravis Salway, a rearcher wh the BC Centre for Disease Control Vanuver, has spent the last five years tryg to figure out why gay men keep killg themselv. “The fg feature of gay men ed to be the lonels of the closet, ” he says.

“But now you’ve got lns of gay men who have e out of the closet and they still feel the same isolatn. By the late 2000s, he was a social worker and epimlogist and, like me, was stck by the growg distance between his straight and gay iends.

He started to wonr if the story he had always heard about gay men and mental health was plete. When the dispary first me to light the ’50s and ’60s, doctors thought was a symptom of homosexualy self, jt one of many maniftatns of what was, at the time, known as “sexual versn. ” As the gay rights movement gaed steam, though, homosexualy disappeared om the DSM and the explanatn shifted to trma.

A GAY MAN AT MIDLIFE PONRS BEG LONELY AND ‘INVISIBLE’

Gay men were beg kicked out of their own fai, their love liv were illegal. “That was the ia I had, too, ” Salway says, “that gay suici was a product of a bygone era, or was ncentrated among adolcents who didn’t see any other way out.

The problem wasn’t jt suici, wasn’t jt afflictg teenagers and wasn’t jt happeng areas staed by homophobia. He found that gay men everywhere, at every age, have higher rat of rdvascular disease, ncer, ntence, erectile dysfunctn, ⁠ allergi and asthma—you name , we got . In Canada, Salway eventually disvered, more gay men were dyg om suici than om AIDS, and had been for years.

GAY PEOPLE 'AT RISK OF A LONELIER OLD AGE'

“We see gay men who have never been sexually or physilly asslted wh siar post-trmatic strs symptoms to people who have been bat suatns or who have been raped, ” says Alex Kroghlian, a psychiatrist at the Fenway Instute’s Center for Populatn Rearch LGBT Health. Sce he looked to the data, Salway has started terviewg gay men who attempted suici and survived. “When you ask them why they tried to kill themselv, ” he says, “most of them don’t mentn anythg at all about beg gay.