And there was Christian, the second guy I ever kissed, who killed himself at 32, two weeks after his boyfriend broke up with him. While one half of my social circle has disappeared into relationships, kids and suburbs, the other has struggled through isolation and anxiety, hard drugs and risky sex. None of this fits the narrative I have been told, the one I have told myself. Like me, Jeremy did not grow up bullied by his peers or rejected by his family. He was raised in a West Coast suburb by a lesbian mom. I barely knew at that point. This is a picture of me and my family when I was 9.

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My parents still claim that they had no idea I was gay. Jeremy and I are In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history. As recently as my own adolescence, gay marriage was a distant aspiration, something newspapers still put in scare quotes. Public support for gay marriage has climbed from 27 percent in to 61 percent in Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives.

And just like the last epidemic we lived through, the trauma appears to be concentrated among men. In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon.

All of these unbearable statistics lead to the same conclusion: It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men. The good news, though, is that epidemiologists and social scientists are closer than ever to understanding all the reasons why. Travis Salway, a researcher with the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, has spent the last five years trying to figure out why gay men keep killing themselves. Salway grew up in Celina, Ohio, a rusting factory town of maybe 10, people, the kind of place, he says, where marriage competed with college for the year-olds.

He got bullied for being gay before he even knew he was. He had a girlfriend through most of high school, and tried to avoid boys—both romantically and platonically—until he could get out of there.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

By the late s, he was a social worker and epidemiologist and, like me, was struck by the growing distance between his straight and gay friends. He started to wonder if the story he had always heard about gay men and mental health was incomplete. Gay men were being kicked out of their own families, their love lives were illegal. 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. 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.

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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.

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

I was a year-old college freshman in Kentucky when I met Chris. He was 22, a senior and a talented musician who could sing and play brass, keyboards and woodwinds. I'd never had a boyfriend before, and I felt incredibly flattered when this popular, good-looking guy asked me out. I was also pleased that we had a similar religious upbringing. I grew up going to a Methodist church, and I've always had a strong Christian faith.

Chris's father was a Southern Baptist minister who preached fire and brimstone, and Chris was taught that being gay was the ultimate sin—an absolute sentence to hell. Two unusual things happened on our first date. Then, after he kissed me good-night, he shocked me again, saying, "No matter what you hear, I'm not gay. But in the world we lived in, people often claimed a guy was gay if he wasn't a jock or really macho, so I didn't want to judge someone because of who his friends were and what he did.

I decided to take Chris at his word. Besides, he'd taken a girl—me—out on a date, so how could he be gay? We immediately started seeing each other exclusively. I thought it was a storybook romance for nine months—until Chris abruptly said, "I can't do this anymore. A few weeks later, over the holidays, we met to talk. We obviously still had feelings for each other, and without explaining why he'd split up with me, Chris declared, "If we're going to be together, let's make it official: Will you marry me?

It was a dream come true. Of course, I could have asked more questions, but I convinced myself that Chris had gotten cold feet because we had become serious so quickly. I also had a stubborn streak, which I practiced as a child and maintained throughout our marriage. I was determined to make our relationship work.

I wanted to show Chris that I would stick with him through everything. I didn't believe in premarital sex, but once we were engaged I went on the Pill and told Chris I thought we should make love. He refused, explaining that he respected me too much and that sex had ruined his previous relationships. Frustrated, I kept reminding myself that, as he said, "We will have the rest of our life together.

This pronouncement made me feel more secure, but I shouldn't have ignored my nagging intuition that something was seriously wrong. I was a year-old virgin on our wedding day and a disappointed bride when Chris couldn't get an erection that night.

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I retreated to my side of the bed and cried myself to sleep, wondering, Is this what our life together will be like? The next morning, we decided to start our marriage on the right foot—by going to church. We had sex that afternoon. It wasn't as passionate as I'd hoped, but I convinced myself yet again it would all be fine.

Gay, middle-aged, and lonely as hell | Savage Love | Chicago Reader

Chris had won a prestigious position in a military band, and we moved to the Washington, D. After Chris's boot camp, we settled in as newlyweds, but we never achieved the "happy couple" life I had envisioned. We rarely spent time alone together because Chris preferred to have dinner parties, go to parties or play cards with friends.