How to Cope When You're Gay and Lonely | GQ

Contents:

• HOW TO COPE WHEN YOU'RE GAY AND LONELY
• GAY, MIDDLE-AGED, AND LONELY AS HELL
• A GAY MAN AT MIDLIFE PONRS BEG LONELY AND ‘INVISIBLE’
• WHERE ARE ALL THE LONELY GAY MEN?
• MY FAY REJECTED ME FOR BEG GAY, SO CHRISTMAS IS A LONELY TIME

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. 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’ll ver:The History of Queer And Gay LonelsWhy Queer People Are Often LonelyThe Reali Of Beg ClosetedHow Comg Out Can Benef Your WellbegPosive Ways To Cope Wh Lonels As A Queer PersonEdor’s Note: This article is part of our ongog seri The Roots Of Lonels Project, the first-of-s-kd rource that prehensively explor the phenomenon of lonels and over 100 typ that we might experience over the urse of our History Of Queer And Gay LonelsWhat Do It Mean To Be Queer? Usually, beg queer is an umbrella term that refers to anyone who isn’t heterosexual and/or who isn’t cisgenr (those who intify wh the genr they were assigned at birth) term has historilly been ed as a slur, but has been reclaimed by many people recent years, particularly by Millenials and Gen the term enpass the whole of the LGBTQ+ muny, ‘queer’ isn’t necsarily synonymo wh ‘gay. ’People who are bisexual, transgenr, lbian, gay, etc., may refer to themselv simply as queer to scribe their sexualy and/or genr inty.

GAY, MIDDLE-AGED, AND LONELY AS HELL

Studi about queer lonels generally are centered around gay men and their experienc wh lonels, but there is anecdotal evince that also suggts that people om all parts of the LGBTQ+ muny are likely to experience lonels related to beg Shane, a public speaker, LGBTQ+ activist, and licensed social worker New York and Oh, has spent years workg wh people wh the queer tells me:“Some queer people have been ostracized by their fai, further g isolatn. There are fewer pictns of same-sex relatnships between women, but they do still pictns of queer dividuals clu poems om Sappho, a woman who equently wrote about her love for other women, and the Warren Cup, an ancient silver cup that picts men timate relatnships wh other recent history, however, beg queer has often meant beg the AIDS crisis, which spanned om the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, thoands of people, pecially gay men, died — by 1995, over 320, 000 people died om AIDS the Uned Stat people, cludg policians and medil profsnals, didn’t want to teract wh people wh AIDS, leavg queer women to step to support those affected by a whole, the entire queer muny was ignored and, a queer man who grew up the midst of the AIDS crisis, had mixed feelgs when he realized that he wasn’t straight. He tells me:“For a good portn of my childhood, my mom’s favore brother, my uncle Dennis, a gay man, lived wh as he was dyg of AIDS.

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

”Prr to the AIDS crisis, beg queer was often treated as a mental Amerin Psychiatric Associatn only removed the term ‘homosexualy’ om s Diagnostic and Statistil Manual (DSM) 1973, and the WHO (World Health Organizatn) only recently reclassified the terms ‘transgenr/genr ngence’ om the mental health tegory to the sexual health tegory s updated ICD (the Internatnal Classifitn of Diseas). ”For Jonathan Mendoza, a young man who grew up a relig fay, the ia of g out ma him tells me:“When I first really began to give [beg gay] thought, I would get so sred; sometim, I’d get very lighthead, almost as if I was on the verge of a panic attack. Michael Hobb wr about the way fear of rejectn and beg closeted n affect queer people his article “Together Alone: The Epimic of Gay Lonels.

Likewise, a lack of acceptance ral nservative muni n ntribute to my muny was more suburban than ral, there was fely a lack of openly LGBTQ+ people — most queer people me out after graduatg high schools my area tried to form clubs such as the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA), there was phback om many people the Michael Johnson is a registered nurse (RN) and has a PhD is also an assistant profsor at the Universy of Wisns-Milwkee and wr for the Lavenr Health LGBTQ Rource Center, a se that provis a multu of rourc that perta to the well-beg of queer are var typ of isolatn that queer people experience, he explas, cludg social and gnive isolatn, and both typ of isolatn n occur when a queer person don’t have accs to a tsted muny. ”If you live an area where you aren’t able to nnect wh many queer people, readg books and listeng to podsts that are created by queer people n help you to feel a sense of n also nnect wh people, many of whom are willg to talk wh others about their experienc beg queer, by searchg mon hashtags, such as #queer, #gay, or #lgbt on Instagram, Tumblr, and I listened to lbian women, bisexual women, and women who simply didn’t intify as straight, I saw myself their stori. 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.

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. “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.

WHERE ARE ALL THE LONELY GAY MEN?

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. 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.

MY FAY REJECTED ME FOR BEG GAY, SO CHRISTMAS IS A LONELY TIME

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. “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. 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 .

“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. And I kept nyg was a problem bee I had always told myself, ‘I’ve e out, I moved to San Francis, I’m done, I did what I had to do as a gay person. For s, this is what psychologists thought, too: that the key stag inty formatn for gay men all led up to g out, that once we were fally fortable wh ourselv, we uld beg buildg a life wh a muny of people who’d gone through the same thg.