But still: Whatever else is going on here, clearly these men are getting some companionship out of these relationships. But there are sturdy incentives in place for them to not take that step of identifying, or identifying fully, as gay or bi. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Hero Images Inc. Most Viewed Stories. Best of The Cut. Of course they had alarming rates of suicide and depression. And then he looked at the data. This might be the case in the U. We struggle to assert ourselves. We replay our social failures on a loop. Since he looked into the data, Salway has started interviewing gay men who attempted suicide and survived.

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Being a member of a marginalized group requires extra effort. If you stand up to your boss, or fail to, are you playing into stereotypes of women in the workplace? For gay people, the effect is magnified by the fact that our minority status is hidden. John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people.

James, now a mostly-out year-old, tells me that in seventh grade, when he was a closeted year-old, a female classmate asked him what he thought about another girl. Immediately, he says, he panicked. Did they tell anyone else I said it that way? This is how I spent my adolescence, too: Once, at a water park, one of my middle-school friends caught me staring at him as we waited for a slide. But he never brought it up. All the bullying took place in my head. But if you experience years and years of small stressors—little things where you think, Was that because of my sexuality?

Or, as Elder puts it, being in the closet is like someone having someone punch you lightly on the arm, over and over. Growing up gay, it seems, is bad for you in many of the same ways as growing up in extreme poverty. A study found that gay people produce less cortisol, the hormone that regulates stress. In , researchers compared straight and gay teenagers on cardiovascular risk. Annesa Flentje, a stress researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, specializes in the effect of minority stress on gene expression.

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Even Salway, who has devoted his career to understanding minority stress, says that there are days when he feels uncomfortable walking around Vancouver with his partner. Because while the first round of damage happens before we come out of the closet, the second, and maybe more severe, comes afterward.

No one ever told Adam not to act effeminate. But he, like me, like most of us, learned it somehow. My parents thought it was cute, so they took a video and showed it to my grandparents.

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When they all watched the tape, I hid behind the couch because I was so ashamed. I must have been six or seven.

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By the time he got to high school, Adam had learned to manage his mannerisms so well that no one suspected him of being gay. I had to operate in the world as a lone agent. He came out at 16, then graduated, then moved to San Francisco and started working in HIV prevention. That ended up being a crutch. He worked long hours. 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.

Sometimes it would be two or three guys in a row. It went on like this for years.



Last Thanksgiving, he was back home to visit his parents and felt a compulsive need to have sex because he was so stressed out. Before this, the longest he had ever gone was three or four days. It was a way of not dealing with my own life. For decades, this is what psychologists thought, too: But over the last 10 years, what researchers have discovered is that the struggle to fit in only grows more intense. A study published in found that rates of anxiety and depression were higher in men who had recently come out than in men who were still closeted.

But it was really horrifying. But I just felt like a piece of meat. It got so bad that I used to go to the grocery store that was 40 minutes away instead of the one that was 10 minutes away just because I was so afraid to walk down the gay street. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too.

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But that meanness is almost pathological. All of us were deeply confused or lying to ourselves for a good chunk of our adolescence. 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.

I arrived to a date once and the guy immediately stood up, said I was shorter than I looked in my pictures and left. For other minority groups, living in a community with people like them is linked to lower rates of anxiety and depression. It helps to be close to people who instinctively understand you. But for us, the effect is the opposite. Several studies have found that living in gay neighborhoods predicts higher rates of risky sex and meth use and less time spent on other community activities like volunteering or playing sports.

A study suggested that gay men who were more linked to the gay community were less satisfied with their own romantic relationships. Rejection from other gay people, though, feels like losing your only way of making friends and finding love. 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. It has to be constantly enacted or defended or collected. We see this in studies: You can threaten masculinity among men and then look at the dumb things they do.

They show more aggressive posturing, they start taking financial risks, they want to punch things. This helps explain the pervasive stigma against feminine guys in the gay community. According to Dane Whicker, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Duke, most gay men report that they want to date someone masculine, and that they wished they acted more masculine themselves.

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.

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When he first came out, he was convinced that he was too skinny, too effeminate, that bottoms would think he was one of them. My boyfriend noticed recently that I still lower my voice an octave whenever I order drinks. So, his sophomore year, he started watching his male teachers for their default positions, deliberately standing with his feet wide, his arms at his sides. These masculinity norms exert a toll on everyone, even their perpetrators. Feminine gay men are at higher risk of suicide, loneliness and mental illness.



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Masculine gay men, for their part, are more anxious, have more risky sex and use drugs and tobacco with greater frequency. One study investigating why living in the gay community increases depression found that the effect only showed up in masculine gay guys. The second reason the gay community acts as a unique stressor on its members is not about why we reject each other, but how. In the last 10 years, traditional gay spaces—bars, nightclubs, bathhouses—have begun to disappear, and have been replaced by social media. At least 70 percent of gay men now use hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff to meet each other.

In , around 20 percent of gay couples met online. By , that was up to 70 percent. Meanwhile, the share of gay couples who met through friends dropped from 30 percent to 12 percent. And yes, those are problems.

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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 feels good in the moment, but nothing ever comes of it, and those messages stop coming after a few days. It is that they are almost perfectly designed to underline our negative beliefs about ourselves.