The Velvet Rage

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The window of Alan Downs’s therapy practice overlooks Santa Monica Boulevard and the heart of Los Angeles’s glossy gay ghetto, West Hollywood. The psychologist can stare out at the gay gym he uses and the “very gay” restaurant he dined at the evening before we talk. In the distance is the Hollywood sign. Downs is at the heart of LA’s gay community, yet the book that has made his name completely reassesses the modern gay experience, holding up an unsparing mirror to it.

Downs’s spry self-help manual is called The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World. It ........ addresses the myth of gay pride and, after three decades of post-Aids concentration on gay men’s physical health, turns inward to their mental wellbeing.

Its snappy title is slipping, sometimes ironically, into the gay lexicon. Man orders fifth pint at the bar: “It’s OK, it’s just my velvet rage.” Boyfriend finds partner trawling through the thousands of profiles on sex-on-demand website Gaydar: “But it’s my velvet rage.”

Downs coined the phrase to refer to a very specific anger he encountered in his gay patients – whether it was manifested in drug abuse, promiscuity or alcoholism – and whose roots, the book argues, are found in childhood shame and parental rejection. “Velvet rage is the deep and abiding anger that results from growing up in an environment when I learn that who I am as a gay person is unacceptable, perhaps even unlovable,” he explains. “This anger pushes me at times to overcompensate and try to earn love and acceptance by being more, better, beautiful, more sexy – in short, to become something I believe will make me more acceptable and loved.”

It is a controversial theory, but for a book whose only marketing campaign has been word of mouth, it is having a profound impact. The Velvet Rage was first published in 2005, but it has been a slow-burn success........

Downs’s argument is that feelings of worthlessness can be created in childhood quite unintentionally, and these lead gay adults to search for an unachievable perfection. “We have created a gay culture that is, in most senses, unlivable. The expectation is that you have the beautiful body, that you have lots of money, that you have a beautiful boyfriend with whom you have wonderful, toe-curling sex every night… none of us have that. To try to achieve that really makes us miserable. The next phase of gay history, I believe, is for us to come to terms with creating a culture that is livable and comfortable.”

Downs’s belief is shared by other mental-health professionals. Therapist David Smallwood, who is the former head of addiction treatment at the Priory, and a blunt-speaking recovering alcoholic, goes one step further. “Gay pride is an adaption,” he says, “a way of dealing with something we can’t deal with. We put on this TV picture and what we show is: ‘I’m proud to be gay.’ Underneath that, we might be dying inside.”

Downs identifies a litany of compulsions as adult manifestations of “velvet rage”. “If you give people in pain an anaesthetic they make use of it,” says Tim Franks, from the British gay charity Pace. “They may then become habitual users of that anaesthetic.”

Less problematic gay issues, but ones that struck a deep chord with me, include the unusually sophisticated knowledge of superficial cultures – pop music, fashion or film, for example – among many gay men. These can be seen as inauthentic compensations for the rejection we felt as children. Downs notes the high numbers of gay men working as stylists, hairdressers and fashion designers. “Because of our childhoods we’re good at these jobs. It is a specific gay talent because of invalidation. We are talented at stepping into something that’s a mess and cleaning it up and putting a fabulous facade on it." 

The Velvet Rage also deals with depression, self-harm and suicide, body dysmorphia and eating disorders – four times as likely in gay men as their straight counterparts. Conspicuous consumption and a culture of exhaustive gay acquisition – that absolute need to have the newest and shiniest and best of everything – is deconstructed. ........

“Clearly, because I was Pentecostal, I was going straight to hell for being gay,” says Downs. “Hence my own experience with shame. I often say the God of my childhood had anger-management problems.” Churches are particularly culpable, believes Tim Franks, for velvet rage. “Some gay men grow up in cultures where they will be told in no uncertain terms that God hates them. That’s a very significant message to grow up with.” Educational establishments don’t acquit themselves too well, either, he adds. “Homophobic bullying in schools in this country is still epidemic. It’s absolutely rife. Most British schools are not safe places to be gay.”

By putting the more celebrated, creative aspects of gay culture in the spotlight, and suggesting that beneath them lurk serious psychological issues, the book has caused a stir, and Downs himself has drawn criticism. “It’s a minority of readers, but it’s a sizable minority,” he says. “Probably somewhere around 15% of readers will get quite angry. The question I get a lot is, ‘If I want to have as much sex as I want then what is the problem with that? Why pathologise that?’ I am not, in fact, pathologising that, but people have interpreted it as such. My response to that is if that’s working for you, if that’s bringing you lasting fulfilment and creating a life that you feel really is the life that you want to live, then go for it.”

Is this all about rebranding self-loathing for a new era? “Only if you buy the argument that the cause of our problems is being gay,” says Downs, “and not the invalidation we went through as children. I do fear that as the book becomes more popular those who would like to misinterpret it or to take some small piece of it and take it out of context could do so. But what I’m saying is that it’s invalidation – not being gay – that creates the problems.”

Everyone WHO I speak to about Velvet Rage insists it is important to remember, amid the hype around the book, that, as Franks puts it: “Many gay men are able to grow up and have happy, successful adult lives with meaningful relationships, friendships and sex. I don’t want us to get into this idea that we’re all broken.”

You imagine that if the book brings greater awareness of gay mental-health issues, that can only be a good thing. Franks began his work at Pace with a systematic review of National Institute for Mental Health research.  “What they found was that lesbian and gay people were up to two-and-a-half times more likely to become alcohol or drug dependent, over two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer from anxiety or depression disorders. Gay men particularly were up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual counterparts. The report concludes by saying that ‘lesbian, gay and bisexual people are at significantly higher risk of mental disorder, suicide ideation, substance abuse and deliberate self-harm than heterosexual people.’ This is a very, very serious issue.”

The report further says: “It is likely that the social hostility, stigma and discriminations most LGB people experience is at least likely to be part of the reason for the higher rates of psychological morbidity observed. Prejudice against homosexuality is unlike other intolerance in that it can reach into families. Rejection by parents of their own children because of their sexual orientation is likely to have a severe emotional impact.”

The government welfare cuts are not good news here. “By default rather than by design we are going to be massacred,” says Franks. “We’re in deep trouble. Less than a third of mental-health services in this country monitor sexual orientation. Our needs are invisible. When mental-health charities are planning what to provide for we are not on the radar. Nobody is looking.”

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If gay men are going to have to self-diagnose and treat their own mental-health issues, lending a well-thumbed copy of The Velvet Rage might present the first Elastoplast to the problem. “When you read it, it all seems so very obvious,” says therapist David Smallwood, “but no one had written it down before. I don’t want it to seem like I’m a single-issue fanatic. All I’m saying is that when I see someone that is troubled in this way I will bet my next 20 years’ salary on where it started. I start dealing with gay men that have issues around sex or drugs or alcohol and within five minutes I know that we are into their childhood. So I think that every gay man to some extent will have been affected by velvet rage.”

Downs has assumed an almost messianic place in the lives of those who have absorbed his thinking. He has broken the implicit language of half a century’s gay culture and flipped it on its head. The central axis of an individual’s gay narrative, one that used to concentrate on the coming-out story either as a teenager or later, has been shifted back into childhood. The result is that gayness appears to be a psychological as much as sexual condition. Historically, gay culture has been underpinned by the word “pride”. Now Downs has identified a clear relationship with shame.

“I do think that a lot of the issues in The Velvet Rage have pushed gay men and gay culture to create thoroughly wonderful things,” says Downs, “but the question that each of us must ask is: ‘Is this the life that I want for myself?’ When you read the biographies of most people who have been incredibly successful in the creative world, they haven’t always achieved a personal life that is satisfying and fulfilling. That is my concern as a psychologist.”

Downs is currently writing his follow-up book. It will be called Peter Pan Becomes a Man. “The subtitle is The Eternal Boy Grows Up. The new book really delves into our emotional adolescence and how we seem to be stuck in a cycle and how it stops us leading deeply attached and healthy relationships.”..........................

-----"Pride and prejudice for gay men", The Guardian, 20 February 2011

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