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

Contents:

• HOW TO COPE WHEN YOU'RE GAY AND LONELY
• SAVAGE LOVE: I AM A LONELY, AGG GAY MAN; WHAT SHOULD I DO?
• GAY, MIDDLE-AGED, AND LONELY AS HELL
• A GAY MAN AT MIDLIFE PONRS BEG LONELY AND ‘INVISIBLE’
• SO GAY = OLD AND LONELY?

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. 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.

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

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.

“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. 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. 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.

GAY, MIDDLE-AGED, AND LONELY AS HELL

“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.

“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. “When you ask them why they tried to kill themselv, ” he says, “most of them don’t mentn anythg at all about beg gay. “The trma for gay men is the prolonged nature of , ” says William Elr, a sexual trma rearcher and psychologist.

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

By the time he got to high school, Adam had learned to manage his mannerisms so well that no one spected him of beg gay. 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.

SO GAY = OLD AND LONELY?

“It’s like you emerge om the closet expectg to be this butterfly and the gay muny jt slaps the ialism out of you, ” Adam says.

“I me out when I was 17, and I didn’t see a place for myself the gay scene, ” says Pl, a software veloper. It got so bad that I ed to go to the grocery store that was 40 mut away stead of the one that was 10 mut away jt bee I was so aaid to walk down the gay street.

Every gay man I know rri around a mental portfol of all the shty thgs other gay men have said and done to him. Several studi have found that livg gay neighborhoods predicts higher rat of risky sex and meth e and ls time spent on other muny activi like volunteerg or playg sports.