Only 20 metres away! Can you feel the liberation yet? I sense only the banal assimilation of individuals into types: Sexual racism rules, of course. Guys with disabilities unsure which fetish they fit.
We lose at love, too. Apps enable our checklists like nothing before. Search by height, age, area, ethnicity, fetish, body type, body hair — all within a mile radius. We forget how stupid our criteria are. Apps are a lifeline for those in the closet, say some. But how much longer does this lifeline keep them there and choke them? The gay scene suffers, too. Bars have closed. Many have waned as the frisson of potential encounters collapses under the promise of an app shag on the way home. We used to speak first. In the silence, fear grows. Are we good enough?
Do our penises look long enough? Is the lighting on this selfie capturing pectoral definition?
Grindr leaves men feeling depressed and dead inside, research finds / Queerty
In the silence, emptiness echoes, too: We think we are hunters, but all are hunted, pursued by the tech that knows us too well. And so, no gay man will be put off using apps after this aggravated burglary, because fear is not important here. Loneliness is. Affirmation is.
USC doctor accused of forcing gay students to undergo “medically unnecessary rectal examinations”
Ours is an adulthood resting on the early pillars of isolation and alienation. A dating app is a false salvation, but for many, it is all the market has to offer. 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. 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.
How to Cope When You're Gay and Lonely
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. 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.
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- How to Cope When You're Gay and Lonely | GQ.
Feminine gay men are at higher risk of suicide, loneliness and mental illness. 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. 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.