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My reaction to this
book was very mixed, I am not sure if that is partly due to it being
written the best part of 20 years ago, 20 years in which there has
been such progress for gay men.
Alan Downs is very
careful to make it clear that he is writing about the experience of
gay men, drawing on his lived experience, and while there is
significant overlap in experience across LGBT+ identities he did not
want to homogenise the diversity of experience. However despite the
care in that delineation I think he was probably only writing about a
fairly narrow sub-set of gay men, gay white men living in the cities
of west coast America…
There was also quite
a lot about it all being about your relationships with your parents,
the outdated tropes of a weak father and over affectionate mother are
not making you gay but are the source of gay men’s struggle with
self acceptance – too much Freud for my taste perhaps.
However there were
powerful insights nevertheless…
He writes that “One
cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and
wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that
covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not
planted by us, but by a world that didn’t understand us, wanted to
change us, and at times, was fiercely hostile to us. It’s not about
how good or bad we are, It’s about the struggle so many of us have
experienced growing up gay in a world that didn’t accept us, and
the ongoing struggle as adult gay men to create lives that are happy,
fulfilling, and ultimately free of shame.” (p22)
The growing trend
toward the curation of your life for social media is perhaps
something that queer people have been doing for a longer time – we
are desperate not to allow anyone the excuse of using us as an
example of myths of the lonely, miserable, mentally unstable
existence their homophobia predicted.
He goes on in a
similar vein that “While there is great relief from finally
revealing the secret of your true sexuality, another internal
tug-of-war begins to churn within you. You feel compelled to become
the best, most successful, beautiful, and creative man you can be.
You lurch forward into life, leaving achievement and creativity
strewn in your path. You must prove to the world that you are no
longer shameful.” (p70)
And is insightful
when he reflects that “The gay man who has spent most of his time
in life avoiding shame is also likely to not have discovered his
passion in life. He has felt joy – and may be able to recall
various joyous experiences, but he has been so preoccupied with
avoiding shame that he hasn’t developed the skill of noticing joy
and prolonging it when it occurs. The skill of creating and
prolonging joy has three parts: - Make yourself vulnerable to joy –
Notice when you feel joy – Repeat the behaviours that create joy”
(p160)
But some of this
seems tired when I look are the generations of queer people following
me, the post section 28, the post civil partnerships, the post
same-sex marriage generations seem more relaxed in their identities.
Sadly that is not true across the whole LGBT+ experience, especially
for our Trans siblings who are currently in dark days that feel very
similar to what gay men faced in the late 80s, my hope is that this
time will past – if we draw a graph of progress from partial
decriminalisation in 1967 to today, the late 80s was a blip, if we
draw a graph of progress from GRA in 2004 to somewhere around 2050 I
hope today’s challenges will look like a similar blip are a similar
point in the graph – and I will fight as hard as I can to ensure
that is the case.
