He was sixteen when the boys at school figured out he was gay. They found out through proximity and noticing certain patterns. For about eight months after that, he ate lunch alone. He got good at being on his own, so much so that twenty years later he’s arranged his life around the behavior.

At twenty-five, he lived in a lovely apartment, enjoyed a job he genuinely loved, and claimed his weekends to himself. He’d say he preferred being on his own and the freedom it provided.

He hadn’t made a close friend in ten years. He avoided going to gay social spaces almost entirely. When asked why, he gave several reasonable answers: the gay scene felt hierarchical, he met someone for coffee, and afterward the man didn’t reply to his follow-up message; he felt betrayed by someone whom he let in.

His answers were real, but they were keeping him from the possibility of changing how he felt.

What took him longer to see was that, at an early age, he’d learned what happened when he let people see the real him. He had learned to create distance between himself and others before they could confirm what he half-believed about them, and himself.

The solitude was his answer to avoiding situations that once ended in pain.

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Someone once told me that “friendship requires tolerance for uncertainty.” I remember thinking about this for quite some time. Then I got it.

Whenever we meet someone, let alone when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and let someone in, we open ourselves up to all the unkind experiences of the past. Asking this of someone who has experienced deception, bullying, teasing, lies, and ultimately pain is a lot.

For gay men, and queer men in particular, that early experience often includes learning that disclosure and safety come with risk, and over time, with each new bad experience being stored as “muscle memory”.

These men enter adulthood having already mastered how they present themselves to others, hyper-alert to threat, all to avoid the challenges they learned early on. Unless they examine these difficulties, their view of the world remains unchanged.

Research has made an important connection between happiness and social connection. They also show a strong correlation between chronic social isolation and worse health outcomes. These studies aren’t specific to one part of the world but rather across populations.

What the literature sometimes misses is how adapting to social isolation can lead to a preference for disconnection being disguised as a preference. A man who is disconnected and the man who prefers a quiet life often come across as the same person. Ask how they are, and they’ll likely give you the same answer.

Some people genuinely have low needs for social contact, are satisfied with a small circle, and feel fulfilled with limited socializing. That is real. The problem is when the person has adopted these traits under threat.

Gay men who fit into the latter explanation rarely put up their hand to unpack what may be going on because doing so would mean they would have to face their past, the source of their preference.

For some gay men, socializing is exhausting. Were you to see them at a gay social space, you’d think they were confident and enjoying themselves. Except for these men, leaving the space feels the same as when they first arrived.

They explain this as not having anything in common with most gay men they meet. The gay scene feels exhausting. Superficial conversations, arbitrary exchanges that lack the depth they seek. While this could be because they haven’t met the right community, it’s an observation shared by many gay men. So instead of exhausting themselves, they prefer to stay away. The result is fewer disappointments.

This is complicated because they’re not entirely wrong. Many gay social spaces can feel hierarchical in ways that mirror the conditional acceptance these men experienced growing up. Desirability in gay social spaces is often similar to desirability in gay dating spaces — particular age ranges, body types, levels of confidence, and how you look.

For men who have spent years protecting themselves from rejection, social circles can bring up old memories of them being judged or excluded. So although being a part of a gay community promises understanding and belonging, when it repeats the familiar patterns of status and exclusion, the disappointment hurts more.

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Betrayal is one of the most hurtful experiences that prompts some men to keep their distance. Many of these men describe themselves as having high standards and being selective. Understandably, trust isn’t handed over easily.

Everyone goes through an unspoken analysis, carefully calibrated against standards. The time this social curation takes is less painful than the risk of that deep, painful stab in the chest that makes them retract immediately, like a snail contracting into its shell when touched or threatened.

These patterns may seem strange from the outside, but they make complete sense when taking context and history into account. Whether it’s spending years alone at lunch, exhaustion from all things superficial, or betrayal that surfaces primal pain, social isolation has its roots firmly in a need to feel safe.

Gay community dynamics could, in theory, help men who have experienced negative social interactions in the past. Being recognized by others who share similar histories and survival skills can make some people feel less alone and more connected. There can even be a sense of belonging and mirrored identity that can repair previous exclusion.

However, many gay social spaces are another example of conditional belonging that men experienced in their adolescence. Desirability in gay community spaces is often similar to desirability in gay dating spaces. Men who don’t fit a particular age range, body configuration, or level of confidence relive the lack of belonging they learned to live with in the past.

This can create difficulty for men who could most benefit from being a part of a gay community. The ones who have the deepest scars and view the world with caution. Men who could benefit from being welcomed by others who might also benefit from the contact.

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Some gay spaces are welcoming and do make men feel understood. But finding a way in can still be hard for men with painful histories. Telling them to “join the community” can leave them feeling they’ve failed at one more thing, without recognizing why it’s difficult.

What tends to work is less about social isolation and more about gradual reintegration into social spaces. It’s a slow, steady introduction into places that feel like an extension of their personalities and interests.

Working from a coffee shop instead of from home. Going to the bookshop to find their next read instead of Amazon and a Kindle enabling hibernation. Having lunch out — alone or with a partner or friend — instead of ordering Uber Eats all the time. Joining the gym instead of exercising in the living room being coached by Apple Fitness+.

These small behavioral changes, while courageous and sometimes difficult, build social capital by association. For some, that may be the extent of being part of a social economy; for others, it enables the odd smile, the greeting of familiar faces, and perhaps the start of one of many conversations.

The man who ate lunch alone at sixteen was me, and I learned exactly what I needed to learn to survive that period.

Thirty years later, I still take time to invite someone in fully, and I consciously make decisions that produce the outcomes I once rejected but needed: healthy, safe relationships that are mutually rewarding and life-expanding.

I can’t tell someone who prefers isolation whether connection to others is worth it. For some men, the life they’ve built, preferring to be alone, works for them, and it’s a legitimate choice. For others, myself included, the safety of isolation starts to feel like a different kind of cost.

The challenge isn’t deciding whether you need people or a more active social life. It’s in recognizing whether the life you live is one you’ve chosen, or if it’s one chosen for you decades ago by a sixteen-year-old doing the best he could with what he knew.

If this landed, I’d like to know which part. Reply to this email and tell me.

Until next time,
Gino x

Gino Cosme is a gay therapist with over a decade of clinical work with gay men. Unfiltered Clarity is about naming the patterns gay men live and rarely name.

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All examples in this piece are composites drawn from patterns observed across therapeutic work with gay men. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality. No single story represents an individual person.

This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of any condition.

Content note: This article discusses domestic abuse, coercive control, and violence

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The morning before his husband was moving into an assisted living facility, Daniel spent an hour or two laminating three photos: One was of their wedding. The other was the front of a house that they bought together. The third was the trip to South Africa they did the year before the diagnosis.

He wasn’t doing this because he wanted to decorate the room. After all, this is a man who regularly suggested how I should embrace more of a minimalistic style in my office.

Rather, what he wanted was for these three photos to be something that people saw when they entered his husband’s room: something that would immediately say to anyone who walked in that a husband lived here.

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Often, chemistry is the holy grail when it comes to dating. There appears to be an expectation that within the first, second, or third date, a magical spark will erupt, indicating that this is the person. Yet I often see that the absence of the spark is usually a way out of dating someone who, on paper, seems promising.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a version of “He’s good on paper, but there were no sparks.”

What follows are examples of how this plays out amongst gay men.

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He was in a wheelchair on his way to Portugal with my mother. He could barely breathe. The cancer had caught up with emphysema, one failing system on top of another.

I pushed him through the terminal doors.

And the last real words he said to me, just before they went through security, were "Look after your mom."

I've thought about those words for eighteen years now. He was the one leaving in a wheelchair. Even then it seemed likely he would not be coming home the way he was traveling out.

And his last message to me was still to do something for someone else.

Between his diagnosis and his death he never once asked me to do anything for him, or even asked me what it had been like to be his son.

We barely knew each other before his diagnosis. I would call the house and ask for my mother; he would answer, get through maybe two sentences with me, and hand the phone over. For years this was the entire arc of the relationship.

He would pay for …

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The text came in at eleven at night. His best friend of nine years had got engaged to a man he had met four months earlier. There was a photo attached. He looked at the photo for longer than a photo needs to be looked at and set the phone face down on the counter.

He told me about it the following week in his therapy session. What my client wanted me to explain was why the best news his closest friend had ever given him had made him feel worse instead of better.

The word for what he felt is envy, and it is an ugly word to put anywhere near someone you love. Most men are willing to say they envy a colleague or a stranger on an app. Almost none of them are willing to say they envy their best friend.

Envying an acquaintance costs you an uncomfortable hour. Envying the person who has known you longest threatens the story you tell about that friendship, so the feeling doesn’t get said out loud. It shows up some other way instead: a call that doesn’t get returned as quickly as it used to, a bu…

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He left close to midnight. The text came at seven the next morning. Warm, casual tone, nothing wrong with it. Kevin told me about it five days later in a session. The text wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.

What he wanted to talk about in his therapy session with me was how flat he felt the next day. The sex was good, he was clear on that. And still his baseline returned, except this time it landed harder.

For an hour the attention had made him feel that he mattered. And it did make him feel that way, but only for a short period because being wanted and being valued are not the same thing.

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He showed me his Instagram Explore page during a session. Every square was the same man. Different faces, same man. Mid-twenties. Chiselled jawline and well-lit shirtless torso. Caption on one of the images was about “living my truth.” The photo most likely went through four editing apps.

“This is what the algorithm thinks gay looks like,” he said.

He’s forty-six and lives outside Manchester. He runs an accountancy firm and loves going to the cinema on Wednesdays because it’s cheaper. He’s been with the same man for nine years in what is a stable relationship. But the algorithm shows him zero images of people who resemble his actual life.

I asked what he felt, looking at that grid. He paused for longer than I expected.

“Tired,” he said. “I’ve felt tired of it for years.”

That tiredness is worth paying attention to. It’s the exhaustion of being visible to a community that seems to have already decided what its members should look like. A community that draws its visibility from a narrow tem…

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Most evenings my husband and I sit and talk about something we watched, where we’d go on our next vacation, or how China is eating the electric car industry.

We don’t go to rooftop parties overlooking the city skyline. We aren’t members of a glamorous underground world that straight people think exists. Our wardrobes don’t contain neon leather. We’re indecisive on what to watch. We’re just two men who share a life that looks, from the outside, unremarkable.

So, when people say that being gay is a choice, and that it’s a lifestyle I have chosen, I want to push back. Hard.

Labels reduce the lives of gay men to stereotypes. They erase quiet routines and everyday life. Saying we choose to be gay implies that we’re performers and that our lives are a spectacle.

The truth is it’s the same as any other person on earth: full of errands, arguments, laughter, and silence; groceries, mortgage, school runs, and quiet mornings.

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A man in Melbourne emailed me the other day. He had read my essay on hypervigilance and wanted to tell me that he had spent eleven years married to someone who still didn’t know that he cried in the shower. He said he doesn’t make noise when he does it. The sound of the water covers everything.

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Three months in, I caught myself saying “partner” on a work call with a client I had known for over a year. He had said “my wife” earlier in the conversation. I had said “husband” to him many times before. This time I said “partner.” I noticed it only after I hung up.

The client made nothing of it. No one had asked. There was no incident I could point to. At some point, without deciding to, I had started making myself smaller.

I started asking other gay men whether they had noticed anything similar. The answers came back faster than I expected.

One stopped wearing a particular ring at work. Another moved a framed photo off his desk before meeting with a US-based team on Zoom. Someone said that for the past six months he’d been removing apps from his phone before international travel. A man in his fifties told me he had begun checking the news the way he used to check his bank balance in his twenties. Compulsively. Looking for bad numbers he was already expecting.

A few of them said this w…

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Three minutes, maybe four. The dog was fine. The brother had got a promotion. He said the right things back, hung up, and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.

He didn’t know why he was crying.

He told me about it the next week. A man in his late thirties, who is sometimes partnered, describing a call that on paper contained nothing. No cruelty or abandonment. A pleasant exchange.

Underneath the pleasantness, something that had been sitting in his sternum for thirty years, finally surfacing because for once he was tired enough not to push it down.

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Four of us at brunch on a Sunday in Lisbon. The shakshuka is good. Someone mentions a man a couple of us went on dates with separately, years apart. The first observation lands. Then the next one. The voice doing it has a particular quality. Witty. Precise. The kind of read that makes everyone at the table sit up because the language is so good.

By the third minute, the man being talked about has been comprehensively dismantled. His outfit at a wedding. His career trajectory. The thing he does with his mouth when he’s nervous. The way he writes captions on Instagram. The dinner at his apartment that everyone privately thought was sad.

We laugh. We laugh a lot. The performance is excellent. The man is not here to defend himself, and even if he were, the rules of the exchange are clear. You appreciate it. You add to it if you can. The technique gets filed away for next time.

Walking home, I notice I feel slightly worse than I did before brunch. The discomfort is about the conversation, and…

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He had a pretty good week.

Birthday dinner Thursday, gallery thing Friday, a housewarming on Saturday that he arrived at on time, which apparently required some effort. He said the right things at each of them. Made people laugh when the table needed loosening.

At the housewarming he found himself spending twenty minutes explaining to someone why their new neighborhood was up-and-coming. He’d done the research.

That was the kind of guy he was.

Sunday morning he was standing in his kitchen and the room felt off. Sort of used up. The wallpaper looked different than it had on Thursday. The kettle sat cold. He didn’t have anywhere to be.

“I know I’m lucky,” he said later. “I genuinely don’t take it for granted.” Then a pause that was longer than it needed to be. “I just don’t know who I’m doing all of it for.”

I’ve heard that sentence, or something near it, more times than I can tell you.

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He knew what he was doing.

The man who dates people came forward. He watched it take over the evening. Smooth enough that anyone watching would assume this was just who he was.

There was a warmth in his voice when he asked questions (mostly real, but also produced). He usually tracks what the other person is thinking. That night, he stayed with what was actually being said.

He wanted to make it stop.

It didn’t.

That’s the frustration I want to address. Or rather a specific shame that emerges, making the problem more difficult.

I can best describe it like this: you understand the pattern, and you still do it. And at some level, that feels like failure.

That self-imposed accusation is based on a flawed model.

But let’s look at a healthier one.

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He’s asleep. You’re not.

Your body hasn’t moved. You’re lying still, breathing at the right pace for someone who should be unconscious by now. But you have been awake for the better part of an hour, running a forensic audit of the evening.

The thing he said at dinner and whether it contained a shift you should have caught. The split-second pause before he laughed at your joke… was that hesitation or just breath?

You’re replaying his face when you said you loved him, looking for microexpressions your conscious mind might have missed. Whether the way he touched your shoulder goodnight was the usual pressure or a degree less committed.

You are three anxiety cycles ahead of where you actually are, constructing threat scenarios from neutral data, lying next to someone who by every available measure is fine.

Some might label it as insomnia, but what’s truly transpiring is surveillance.

And the most destabilizing part: you’re doing it because he matters.

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He wasn’t angry, exactly. But something in his voice arrived fast and flat, the way a door closes before you’ve finished walking through it.

“I can’t help what I’m attracted to.”

I hadn’t suggested he could.

We’d been talking for twenty minutes about why he kept ending up alone. About the dates that went nowhere. About the particular, quiet exhaustion of someone who is actively dating and still managing to stay effectively isolated.

And then he mentioned, almost in passing, that he only ever pursued men who were white.

I asked about that. One question. Gently, the way you’d note that someone always orders the same thing.

What came back was a wall.

The biology argument arrived first, then the autonomy argument, then the “I just know what I like” argument, each one handed over before I’d had a chance to respond to the last.

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The Zoom call had gone forty minutes over. My colleague, warm and genuinely curious, asked how I was feeling about the move to Lisbon.

I heard myself answer before I’d decided to.

“Yeah, really good about it. Excited. It’ll be great.”

I was mid-sentence when I caught it.

The performance had already loaded, already started playing.

The words were true in the way that true-ish things are true; somewhere in the general vicinity of my actual experience.

But there was a layer underneath I hadn’t checked before speaking. Something about exhaustion. The specific grief of leaving a city I hadn’t expected to love. The feeling, which I hadn’t named to myself, of not being entirely sure what I was moving toward.

None of that made it out. My mouth got there first.

I finished the sentence. We moved on.

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They were at a dinner party. Eight people around a table, good wine, the kind of evening that earns the description “lovely” in the morning. His boyfriend reached across and touched the back of his hand. Casual. Warm. The gesture lasted maybe three seconds.

He told me about it two weeks later.

“I missed it,” he said. “He reached for me and I was somewhere else before I could feel it. Running some kind of check. Is this okay, does this look okay, who’s watching, is he doing this because he means it or because it’s what you do in front of people.”

He paused.

“By the time I came back, he’d already taken his hand away.”

He had never been to a conversion therapy program. He was raised in a household where his sexuality was spoken about exactly once and then never again.

His parents…

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Why do I post gay content on Substack?

Because I’m gay. That’s it.

I’m a gay man who writes, so I write about being a gay man. I don’t have a better answer than that. I didn’t choose a niche, draft a content strategy, or decide gay men were an underserved demographic worth targeting.

I am one. So I write from inside that, the way a parent writes about parenthood, or the way a person who survived something writes about surviving it.

That’s the answer. It took about four seconds.

So why does the question keep forming?

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