Loneliness gay

Pick one recurring space, show up weekly, and take small social risks. Since he looked into the data, Salway has started interviewing gay men who attempted suicide and survived.

“When you ask them why they tried to kill themselves,” he says, “most of them don’t mention anything at all about being gay.” Instead, he says, they tell him they’re having relationship problems, career problems, money problems.

He would come home exhausted, smoke a little weed, pour a glass of red wine, then start scanning the hookup apps for someone to invite over. One of his kids, for example, was under pressure from his parents to major in art rather than finance. But the real effect of the apps is quieter, less remarked-upon and, in a way, more profound: For many of us, they have become the primary way we interact with other gay people.

“It’s so much easier to meet someone for a hookup on Grindr than it is to go to a bar by yourself,” Adam says.

That sense of not quite fitting in with peers, family, or cultural expectations can shape how you relate to others for years.

You may have learned to mask parts of yourself to avoid rejection, struggled to trust that people will fully accept you, or felt disconnected even in close relationships. Then we wake up at 40, exhausted, and we wonder, Is that all there is?

What’s less understood is that laws literally affect our health.

One of the most striking studies I found described the spike in anxiety and depression among gay men in 2004 and 2005, the years when 14 states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Even relatively small stressors in this period have an outsized effect—not because they’re directly traumatic, but because we start to expect them.

It feels like I’m scratching an itch, but it’s scabies. All of us were deeply confused or lying to ourselves for a good chunk of our adolescence. It’s easy to ignore, roll your eyes and put a middle finger up to straight people who don’t like you because, whatever, you don’t need their approval anyway.

At first, it’s annoying. We struggle to assert ourselves. And even he says most of his messages don’t get replies, that he spends probably 10 hours talking to people on the app for every one hour he spends meeting for coffee or a hookup.

It’s worse for gay men of color. By 2010, that was up to 70 percent.

Or maybe it’s internalized homophobia: Feminine gay men are still stereotyped as bottoms, the receptive partner in anal sex.

A two-year longitudinal study found that the longer gay men were out of the closet, the more likely they were to become versatile or tops. That doesn’t have to happen very many times before you start expecting it, before your heart starts beating a little faster when you see a car approaching.

But minority stress doesn’t fully explain why gay men have such a wide array of health problems.

He won’t tell me the exact circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.

Jeremy is not the friend I was expecting to have this conversation with. “As soon as I closed the door on the last guy, I’d think, That didn’t hit the spot, then I’d find another one.”

It went on like this for years.

So we show other people what the world shows us, which is nastiness.”

Every gay man I know carries around a mental portfolio of all the shitty things other gay men have said and done to him. Receiving the message that you do not belong, at an early age, penetrates deeply to our core. I think we tend to underestimate the trauma of being profoundly different and having to hide it.

But I just felt like a piece of meat. Being pushed away from your own people hurts more because you need them more.

The researchers I spoke to explained that gay guys inflict this kind of damage on each other for two main reasons. I managed to deflect—something like “Sorry, you’re not my type”—then I spent weeks afterward worried about what he was thinking about me.

But the feeling of distance from other people didn’t go away.