The Epidemic Of Gay Loneliness 5

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8.  Why Are Gay Men So Mean To Each Other..?  Two Reasons

First Reason

The researchers I spoke to explained that gay guys inflict this kind of damage on each other for two main reasons. The first, and the one I heard most frequently, is that gay men are shitty to each other because, basically, we’re men. 

“The challenges of masculinity get magnified in a community of men,” Pachankis says. “Masculinity is precarious. 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.......... most gay men report that they want to date someone masculine, and that they wished they acted more masculine themselves. Maybe that’s because, historically, masculine men have been more able to blend into straight society. 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. Researchers say this kind of training, deliberately trying to appear more masculine and taking on a different sex role, is just one of the ways gay men pressure each other to attain “sexual capital,” the equivalent of going to the gym or plucking our eyebrows.

“The only reason I started working out was so I would seem like a feasible top,” Martin says. When he first came out, he was convinced that he was too skinny, too effeminate, that bottoms would think he was one of them. “So I started faking all this hyper-masculine behavior. My boyfriend noticed recently that I still lower my voice an octave whenever I order drinks. That’s a remnant of my first few years out of the closet, when I thought I had to speak in this Christian Bale Batman voice to get dates.” 

Grant, a 21-year-old who grew up on Long Island and now lives in Hell’s Kitchen, says he used to be self-conscious about the way he stood—hands on hips, one leg slightly cocked like a Rockette. 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. 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.


Second Reason

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. .............

.........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..... 

The worst thing about the apps, though, and why they’re relevant to the health disparity between gay and straight men, is not just that we use them a lot. It is that they are almost perfectly designed to underline our negative beliefs about ourselves. In interviews ........ conducted with gay men in 2015, he found that 90 percent said they wanted a partner who was tall, young, white, muscular and masculine. For the vast majority of us who barely meet one of those criteria, much less all five, the hookup apps merely provide an efficient way to feel ugly.........

It’s worse for gay men of color. Vincent, who runs counseling sessions with black and Latino men through the San Francisco Department of Public Health, says the apps give racial minorities two forms of feedback: Rejected (“Sorry, I’m not into black guys”) and fetishized (“Hi, I’m really into black guys.”) Paihan, a Taiwanese immigrant in Seattle, shows me his Grindr inbox. It is, like mine, mostly hellos he has sent out to no reply. One of the few messages he received just says, “Asiiiaaaan.”  

None of this is new, of course. Walt Odets, a psychologist who’s been writing about social isolation since the 1980s, says that gay men used to be troubled by the bathhouses in the same way they are troubled by Grindr now. The difference he sees in his younger patients is that “if someone rejected you at a bathhouse, you could still have a conversation afterwards. Maybe you end up with a friend out of it, or at least something that becomes a positive social experience. On the apps, you just get ignored if someone doesn’t perceive you as a sexual or romantic conquest.” The gay men I interviewed talked about the dating apps the same way straight people talk about Comcast: It sucks, but what are you gonna do? “You have to use the apps in smaller cities,” says Michael Moore, a psychologist at Yale. “They serve the purpose of a gay bar. But the downside is that they put all this prejudice out there.”

What the apps reinforce, or perhaps simply accelerate, is the adult version of what Pachankis calls the Best Little Boy in the World Hypothesis. As kids, growing up in the closet makes us more likely to concentrate our self-worth into whatever the outside world wants us to be—good at sports, good at school, whatever. As adults, the social norms in our own community pressure us to concentrate our self-worth even further—into our looks, our masculinity, our sexual performance. But then, even if we manage to compete there, even if we attain whatever masc-dom-top ideal we’re looking for, all we’ve really done is condition ourselves to be devastated when we inevitably lose it. 

-----"Together Alone" The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness", by Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post, 2 March 2017