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 everything and show up for the major holidays.

On paper, he was present at everything I experienced. What we lacked was any shared history of having known each other, any intimacy at all. Our arrangement was quiet, and neither of us ever identified it as one.

When he got sick, the shape of the arrangement morphed without either of us discussing it. I saw him more. I was home more.

We were present in the same rooms more often.

The talking stayed just as sparse. And yet to everyone witnessing it, this proximity seemed to indicate closeness.

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I discuss this issue in sessions because the pattern happens with striking regularity among gay men who seem otherwise to have little to do with one another.

One client, leaving home at nineteen with vague excuses of a better job somewhere else, receives a phone call from his sister years later in his late forties. "Diagnosis," she says and then is silent, and he knows what the silence means. "I'll come this weekend," he responds.

And that's it. Logistics speaking for what neither person wants to say out loud.

Another, on a different continent for the better part of a decade, sends cash but never visits. Visiting had never been very welcome at home, and financial assistance has a less complicated status.

Another waits two hours in a hospital corridor before anyone comes to tell him he can go in, because his mother and his sister have quietly settled between themselves who counts as close enough to be let through first.

The underlying assumption in all of these cases, an assumption no one names and everyone acts on, is that if a man does not have a wife or children, he has nothing else he needs to be doing. His weekends are open and his work is flexible. His relationship, if he has one, will absorb the sudden absence without faltering.

None of these propositions has ever been stated as a request. They are treated as inherent truths about that man that simply had not been needed until now.

For gay men there is often a longer narrative running underneath that assumption. He was always the son at family dinners that barely appeared on the collective radar, the partner the family inquired about (or not) with an insincere, neutral tone. It was too convenient not to have him be an accessible figure in the family photo, a son who took up minimal space within the collective narrative.

Peripheral figures are always easy to relocate, and a son who has been on the fringes for thirty years often proves to be the most readily available individual to ferry someone to physical therapy.

In my experience, and I think the experience of a number of my peers, the financial impact of this arrangement, an arrangement often imposed on sons whose families may assume they have too much free time to accommodate familial duties, is never discussed, and it really should be.

An individual entering his fifties may suddenly have his financial life upended, having unexpected expenses such as medical travel to appointments, taking unpaid leave from work, and reassigning his freelance responsibilities to free up time for visits.

All of these actions go unquestioned because the family narrative has already decided what the son (the individual that his parents neither knew intimately nor was ever close with) does not have to do.

It’s not difficult to hand full-time caregiving of an infirm parent to a son his parents only ever saw on holidays.

There’s no need to be outright hostile about it. The assumption handles all the emotional heft of the situation. For me it accumulated as weekends that already belonged to me before I had said yes to anything.

Not all gay men have the luxury of never experiencing this. Some were cut off from their family in their early twenties and hear about their illness from a distant cousin.

When parental caregiving has been a shared responsibility, the labor gets divided more evenly, though the quietly assigned son typically ends up doing more than his more vocal sibling.

If that hits home at all, you also likely know the part that’s hardest to admit.

Attending to an ill parent you were never close to moves the distance elsewhere, leaving it intact. You are both in the room giving medication to the man lying in the bed, but you are still a stranger to him.

You can take him to all of his appointments and still not know his true feelings about you. He may express something at the most inopportune moment as you are trying to park the car, or more commonly, there is nothing he will say, which you learn later was never likely to happen.

What will never be said between son and parent is that the burden of this care was willingly granted, not requested, at the same point in the relationship that a deeper relationship never materialized.

It is bestowed upon you.

In the case of my father’s instruction, he gave it to me without any previous mention of it, on his way out the door for what seemed like the last time. He was right in telling me to look after my mother. I do so now, and will continue to do so.

However, I still think it’s poignant that while he was likely struggling with oxygen, his final words to me concerned the care of another person, and I doubt he was even aware of the irony.

Perhaps it’ll stay with you too.

Until next week,
Gino

Gino Cosme is a gay therapist writing for gay men who are done performing. New essays are always free. Paid subscriptions hold the archive open and keep the work independent.

Subscribe now

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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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 busyness that arrives suspiciously soon after the good news.

I, too, have felt this. A friend from my twenties, one of the only other gay men I knew at the time, had already reached the kind of settled domestic life it took me another decade to reach. I was glad for him. I also, for about a year, found it difficult to be in his flat without noticing every object that proved he had what I didn’t have yet. Neither of those things made the other untrue.

A reader wrote to me once about envying his best friend for a different reason entirely. His friend had been rejected by his own family and still ended up living independently, with nothing handed to him. The reader had never said so, because voicing it felt too close to resenting someone for surviving something terrible. What he actually envied was the self-knowledge the ordeal had forced. He had never been tested that way, and some part of him wondered if that meant he knew himself less.

I have heard versions of that confession for years, in session and, increasingly, in my inbox. The pattern repeats even when the specifics don’t.

This is a pattern I see often. It isn’t a law every gay friendship obeys. Plenty of close friendships between gay men have none of it, and the same friendships that do are frequently where men do their best repair, the place they go to say the envious thing out loud and be forgiven for it immediately.

How much of this a man experiences also depends on where he grew up, what money was or wasn’t around him, his race, his age, and how many other gay men his actual life has ever contained.

A man who found a queer social world at nineteen in a large city tends to react differently in his friendships than a man who met his first gay friend at thirty-five in a town with one bar that closed years ago.

The friend who drives across a city at midnight because you called crying exists in plenty of these histories too, sometimes inside the very friendship that also holds the envy. Both can be part of the same friendship at once.

Where the comparing came from

Most of us grew up as the only one we knew, or close to it. The first real gay friendships arrive in adulthood, and they tend to arrive in rooms that were already organized around desirability before you walked in: the bar, the app, the party, the group holiday where everyone had already evaluated everyone else before the second drink.

For a long stretch of gay life, the people available as friends and the people available to date have been the same small set of men. Some friends were former dates. Some are future ones. Everyone in the room learned how they were ranked whether they asked to or not.

A boy who spends his adolescence being compared, for softness, for how convincingly he passed, grows into a man who still compares himself to other men even once the original danger is gone. Scarcity installed the comparing, years before he ever called someone a friend, and it continues quietly in relationships where love is actually present, because nothing has told him the situation has changed.

That is where the critique belongs. The scarcity that caused this is the problem, along with the years of ranking that kept reinforcing it long after most of these men left the situations where they needed it to survive. Blaming a man for still reacting to his best friend’s good news mistakes the symptom for the cause. He learned to treat every room as a place where he was being ranked because for a long time, in the rooms available to him, he was.

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What the envy is actually comparing

The friend's engagement was a comparison, made involuntarily, against a version of his own life he hadn't yet reached. Envy toward a stranger usually raises a vague question: why not me. Envy toward your closest friend raises a much more specific one, because you know exactly what he did and didn’t have that you don’t, and the comparison already includes specific detail. He knows the friend’s history. He knows what the friend struggled with and what came easily. There’s no vagueness to reduce how much it hurts.

This is also why men stop themselves from saying it so quickly. Naming it out loud, to the friend himself, risks something the man doesn’t want to risk: being seen as someone who couldn’t be simply happy for the person he loves most. So the feeling gets managed privately instead, usually by seeing him a little less. A text answered a day later than it would have been the month before. A dinner that gets rescheduled twice. None of it registers to either man as what it is. It still has an effect, even though neither man names it.

I asked him, in that first session, whether he thought his friend had ever felt anything like this toward him. He hadn’t considered it. When he did, he remembered a stretch two years earlier, right after he’d been promoted, when his friend had gone unusually quiet for about a month. Both of them, it turned out, had experienced the same thing at different times, in the same friendship, and neither had said a word.

What makes it easier

I don’t think the answer here is to name every moment of envy to the person who caused it. That would turn a friendship into something that constantly has to be checked, which is its own kind of exhausting, and not every private feeling needs to become a shared one to be handled honestly.

What seems to matter more is whether a man can feel the envy without letting it decide his behavior. Notice it, let it be uncomfortable, send the text back the same day anyway.

The friendships that handle this best are usually the ones old enough, and honest enough elsewhere, that the men involved already know they are allowed to be imperfect toward each other. My own friend and I never discussed that year directly. What changed it was time, and enough other evidence, dinners kept, calls returned, that the comparing eventually had nothing left to point to.

If you’ve felt this and never said so, you are dealing with something that scarcity created in you before you had any say in the matter, inside a friendship that is probably one of the more honest things in your life regardless.

If someone came to mind while you were reading this, that’s worth paying attention to. It’s information about what has quietly been happening in that friendship.

Until next week,
Gino x

Gino Cosme is a gay therapist writing for gay men who are done performing. New essays are always free. Paid subscriptions hold the archive open and keep the work independent.

Subscribe now

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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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.

Unfiltered Clarity is a weekly essay for gay men
who want the pattern named, not softened.

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Attention happens in the moment. It’s instantaneous. Value is different. It’s a claim about the future. It says I want more of this, next week, and the week after that.

Our nervous systems often read both as the same thing. Being wanted for a night and being wanted for a life can produce a similar chemical hit, so the mind fills in the gap and files the first one under the second.

This confusion doesn’t disappear once you’re in a relationship. In some ways, it becomes easier to miss.

This is especially true for gay men who are in a relationship that should feel safe, yet somehow it doesn’t. Letting someone in and telling them who you are isn’t easy. Letting yourself experience the slow kind of intimacy, the kind where another man gets to know you over months of dinners and small arguments, feels too vulnerable to even contemplate.

Feeling wanted by another man, even if it is brief or anonymous, is usually the first proof some of us got that we existed to anyone. It arrived with little or no conversation attached. In a bathroom. A message on an app. You could experience the whole thing in silence. Nothing about you had to survive beyond the moment.

I had a client, a composite of a few men I’ve worked with over the years, who grew up in a house where no one commented on him at all.

When I asked him to name something good his parents had said to him, he couldn’t. What he could describe was the first time a man on a train held his eye contact a second too long. He was sixteen. Nothing happened. He told me that he felt more visible in that one moment than he ever did living at home for eighteen years.

Experiences like these are examples of how easy it can be to mistake desire for love. For this client, desire was the first thing that made him feel seen.

We develop this habit early. Unknowingly. Sexual attention becomes the thing that makes us feel wanted. After a while, we start to treat this attention as the only real measure of our worth.

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At twenty-four, mistaking attention for genuine interest costs you a rough morning and checking your phone too many times. Things start to change and affect you differently later on, when you’re more settled, in a relationship, still using sexual attention to measure your value.

I recall working with a couple for a stretch. Together for six years, one of them kept track of how often his partner initiated sex.

When the sex slowed down for a few months, ordinary reasons, a stressful job, a dying dog, he became convinced the relationship was ending.

His partner was still calling him at lunch. Still remembered his mother’s chemo schedule better than he did. None of that registered as proof of how much his partner loved him.

Here was a man, who was six years into a committed relationship and still measuring his value in the same way he’d used at nineteen with strangers.

I’ve worked with men who can remember how they felt when a stranger reacted positively to their body six months prior but struggle to remember what their partner said the previous week. They continue to measure closeness as when they were in their twenties, when sexual attention felt like connection.

Being valued feels different. It develops over time. It’s when a friend remembers you don’t like a restaurant and books somewhere else without telling you. When a partner sees you stressed, unshaven, tired, but still books that weekend getaway you go to each year.

Value develops when those moments like these keep showing up without the “rush.” Like when a promise is kept, a Tuesday is just an ordinary Tuesday, and having a conversation where nothing felt like you needed to perform.

You experience value not when someone wants you tonight. Most people can want another person tonight, given the right room and, perhaps, enough to drink. The question worth asking is who keeps choosing you once there’s nothing left to perform.

Have the sex. Enjoy being wanted while you experience it. Just remember to keep the two separate in your head.

One arrives in a moment. Wanted. The other takes time to prove itself, when the excitement is gone and you’re just another person in the room. Value.

Kevin stopped waiting on a morning text to tell him his worth. He started paying attention to who was still there three months later, asking nothing of him except that he keep showing up as himself.

It takes longer to trust that kind of proof. This kind of proof doesn’t disappear by lunchtime.

I’d love to know what you think. Do you remember when you realized you’d been measuring value with attention?

Until next week,
Gino x

Unfiltered Clarity is a weekly essay for gay men
who want the pattern named, not softened.

Subscribe now

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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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 template has a visibility problem. And that problem lands on the men who don’t match it.

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The version of you they decided to sell

There’s a version of gayness that gets promoted. We all know what it looks like. A man who is young and lean, often living in urban that tend to have good weather.

He shares fitness advice, or he models the latest trends in fashion, with a discount link in the description in case we want to purchase the items. Affiliate links are the hit these days. He likes to share opinions about serums and in between he shares images of his holidays at beach clubs. His seemingly never-ending feed is arranged like a gallery wall, perfectly calibrated for maximum absorption.

This man exists. Culture has selected him as the product.

I say “product” because that’s how advertising works. You take the widest possible market, narrow the representation to one aspirational type, and sell that type to everyone else as the benchmark.

The man on the Explore page is a Coca-Cola ad. He’s on Grindr’s grid. He’s on the cover of the magazine. He’s in the Pride campaign sponsored by a bank. He’s the face of the dating app billboard. He’s the default image search result for “gay man,” something worth sitting with for a minute.

Platforms optimise for engagement, which rewards aspiration and scarcity. Brands follow the numbers. And every time we like, save, scroll through, or follow the template, we train the machine to show us more of it. The algorithm learned this hierarchy from us and then sold it back at scale.

When the rejection comes from the inside

The men I see have often already survived the straight world’s version of exclusion. As boys, most learned early to read a room for signs of danger and to adjust their behaviour accordingly. They experienced family dinners where they were tolerated rather than welcomed. By the time these men reach adulthood, these adaptations are so unconscious they mistake what’s going on for years.

There’s a second version of this that often hits harder than any family rejection could deliver. When you finally find a community you were promised would accept you, only to find out that the community has its own hierarchy. Its own velvet rope.

The men in these communities all share a history of scanning rooms, looking for cues. So when they seem to reward one version of being gay while barely noticing another, it feels like a familiar experience with the same questions.

Do I belong here? Is there something wrong with me?

Those questions arrived long before the algorithm did.

The shame is pre-loaded. The template just activates it.

Gay men build themselves from scratch. We build ourselves, arrive at community, only to find that the community has already decided what its promotional materials look like.

It feels like you’re standing in a room that was meant to feel like home, only to find out that the room holds a particular dress code no one told you about.

This is how the template works

The template, backed by an algorithm, works through repetition. You see the same body on Grindr, Instagram, billboards, and Pride floats. Subliminally you absorb all of it. Your brain, trained over years of comparison, starts judging you against the template.

Quietly that voice in your head starts to say things like “You’re too old” or “Your interest in documentaries and long walks is boring,” measuring you against the circuit parties and protein shakes.

Dating apps are a concentrated, real-time version of the room. A forty-eight-year-old man once told me he’d tracked his messages over six months. His opening line was identical and the responses always correlated with the different photos he’d use. The one where he looked younger and leaner got replies. The one where he looked like himself got silence.

He knew this for a while. What brought him to therapy was the discovery that he’d started hating the photo that looked like him.

The gap between the ad and the room

The men who sit across from me in sessions are in their forties and fifties. Some carry extra weight. Some come from small towns, where the nearest gay bar closed in 2014. Their interests include gardening, true crime podcasts, Formula 1, and cooking badly. They are living full lives.

And many of them feel like they’re doing gay wrong.

This is what happens when you feel the wound of belonging to a group that welcomes you in theory but promotes a version of membership that bears zero resemblance to you.

They were promised a community that was meant to bring relief from constantly needing to measure yourself against the unacceptable. The difference is that the people who do the measuring look like you, only polished to get the most Likes.

Yes, pockets of resistance exist. Bear culture, faith-based LGBTQ+ groups, older gay men’s groups, gaymer communities. They don’t make the Explore page. The men I work with rarely find them before they find the template.

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The thing you’ve been experiencing

If I had to name the thing underneath all of this, it’s a question gay men have been asking for years without saying it out loud.

What’s wrong with me?

And they’ve been solving the wrong equation. Because the answer is that the question belongs somewhere else entirely.

A community that draws its visibility from a narrow template has a visibility problem. The man who doesn’t match the template has absorbed a version of being gay that’s measured by a spreadsheet and a “content strategy.”

The truth is he was always gay enough.

The feed and the grid made him think otherwise. His brain, trained since childhood to look for places where he fits, kept agreeing with the algorithm.

What helps is learning to notice when — and name — the comparison voice starts to speak, recognising it’s old adaptation wearing new clothes.

That’s the actual work.

To the gay men who never fit the version of gay that got advertised

Too quiet. Too old. Too fat. Wrong accent. Wrong country. Wrong interests. Not gym-enough. Not scene-enough.

You were always gay enough.

The community has a visibility problem. It’s the platforms’ product that profit from the narrowing and the brands that fund it. And each of us who feed the loop without thinking about what it costs the men it leaves out.

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

Until next week,
Gino x

Gino Cosme is a gay psychotherapist with over a decade of clinical work with gay men. Unfiltered Clarity is a weekly essay on the patterns gay men live and rarely name.

Subscribe now

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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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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The Word Doing the Work

Somewhere there is a version of me being described that I don’t recognize. A permanent festival. A soundtrack of electronic music running in the background of every social gathering. I used to ignore it. Now it lands differently, like when a stranger describes your house but gets the address wrong.

The word doing the damage is lifestyle. It belongs to the same family as CrossFit and keeping chickens in the garden. Things you choose to have and do. Things you could, in theory, unchoose. A vocabulary built to please other people. Where identity is filed under preference.

I was eleven the first time it mattered. A boy’s hand brushed mine and I wanted it to stay there. Instead, I pulled my hand back, like the contact had burned. That same week I told someone that I liked a girl in my class. I became one of the boys, like I was part of a club. I also started hiding parts of myself on instinct.

Nobody persuaded me into anything. I became aware of a fact about myself the way you become aware of your own height. I chose a lifestyle that left authenticity at the door.

What the Vigilance Costs

After a while, it just feels like part of who you are. You walk into a room and decide how much of yourself to show. You edit what you say, how you say it. Often, you’re unaware of this self-editing. From the outside, none of it looks dramatic. From the inside it’s a low hum that runs underneath everything, and eventually the hum has a cost.

At secondary school, I had a friend named Marcus. He stopped calling me when he caught me looking a half-second too long in the locker room. He never explained himself. I spent about two years afterward making sure that nobody else saw me looking at anything for that long again. I became even more determined to pass as one of the straight boys.

I think about that sometimes, how efficient this was. How little it required.

Eventually I realized something strange. The only lifestyle I had ever consciously chosen was the straight one.

That was the version of me that required planning. Editing. Rehearsal. I learned how to fit in and how to say the expected thing.

The performance I get accused of was actually everything I did before to avoid being seen as gay. When people say my orientation is a lifestyle or choice, they’ve got it backwards. The lifestyle was the disguise.

The Test I Use

I have a question I ask people who insist that being gay is a phase or something I can change. What year did you decide to be straight?

Nobody can answer it. They’ve never had to. Straightness is the default. For someone like me, it’s quite a demotion. Gayness gets filed under lifestyle. A fact about a person relabelled as a preference, so the majority gets to keep the word ordinary for itself.

I have a second question, too. Since being gay is a lifestyle, what is the heterosexual lifestyle? Is it having a mortgage? Or is it avoiding vulnerability, seeking achievement, or bonding with other men through sport or banter? If so, most of the gay men I know do this as well.

Occasionally, I throw in a third question: What would it take for you to be gay? There’s usually a long pause afterwards, because they quickly realize that no amount of protest or pressure could make them desire someone they don’t have a sexual and emotional attraction towards. Understanding this for themselves quickly erodes the lifestyle argument.

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Who Benefits The Most

The word exists because it’s useful. Seeing being gay as a lifestyle is something people get to debate instead of accept. Acceptance requires emotional maturity and the willingness to challenge one’s beliefs and assumptions. It requires confidence to disagree with people in your circle when they’re wrong.

Categorizing something as a lifestyle gives people the freedom to make someone’s existence a topic of discussion. Something they can debate, accept, tolerate, or campaign against.

Most of us know how strange this is. Nobody campaigns or argues against being left-handed or blue-eyed.

Yet gay people grow up hearing strangers debate their lives, relationships, and existence. As if we are topics for discussion rather than human beings. As though who we are is open for debate.

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My Father, Briefly

My father, if he’d lived long enough to get to know my husband, would have spent most dinners initially confused and the rest of the evening back to discussing football scores, money, weather, and if the tomatoes were any good this year. I imagine the conversations being so ordinary.

That is the limit most acceptance requires. It’s what people experience when the world treats them as a person instead of a category. It’s what people get when their existence is no longer being examined. A kind of dignity to have the right to be left alone and be unremarkable; the same privilege everyone else gets handed at birth. And what a beautiful thing that is to experience.

The Part That Is Also True

My husband and I have cooked the same few dinners badly for years, on purpose now. It’s become a private joke. There’s a man at the market who watched us once argue about basil and saves us the good tomatoes without being asked. We laugh each time we finish the other’s sentence in mid conversation.

None of that needed permission from anyone. It only needed time, and the two of us continuing to show up for it.

What Actually Sits Across From Me

After doing this work for over a decade, the pattern holds. Gay men arrive for their sessions anxious, worn thin, or quietly furious at a world narrating their lives the wrong way. They look, from the outside, like they have it together. They have good careers. Social lives. Sometimes they’re in a romantic relationship.

Underneath all of it, there’s a low-grade fatigue from carrying a word others chose for them. Their struggle is rarely with being gay itself. The exhaustion comes from defending a fact about themselves like it is an opinion they owe somebody. The orientation is fine. The argument around it is what wears them down.

There’s a life here. A life built out of routines, relationships, responsibilities, habits, and small decisions. Over time, these become repeated often enough they become a home.

The only unusual part of all of this is how often other people insist on treating it as though it is.

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

Until next week,
Gino x

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

Subscribe now

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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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.

I have never met this man. I do not know his surname nor what he looks like. But he knows mine and my face, and he has probably read a few of my articles.

I get emails like this regularly. Ever since this newsletter crossed a certain threshold, the replies have changed. They used to be brief: “This resonated” or “Needed this.” The kind of words you would say to a writer whose work lands.

Now the replies I receive are confessions.

What I get in my inbox

I want to be clear about what I mean by confessions, because the word carries religious weight that I’m purposefully borrowing.

A man in his mid-forties told me he fantasizes about leaving his partner after they have a good weekend together. Bad weekends give him a reason to stay, which is fixing the problem. The good ones, where there’s an absence of problems, leaves him questioning whether he wants to be there. He has never said this to anyone. He said it to me in 600 words with a typo in the subject line.

A younger guy replied to my post about the nice gay contract to say he’d been performing kindness for so long that he didn’t know whether he was generous or terrified. He asked if I thought there was a difference. I sat with that question for a few days.

Another man in his mid-fifties emailed me to say he hadn’t told his best friend that he envied him. His friend was rejected by his family yet still managed to build a life on his own. He envied that his friend had been forced to find out who he was whereas he still wondered if people accepted him or the version of himself he let them see.

I kept coming back to that last one.

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The shape of these letters

The confessions I receive share a certain characteristic. They name something the person has been carrying for a while. Usually it’s something small that doesn’t justify having a serious conversation, or it’s too personal to mention in passing. You don’t turn to your husband and say, “I think my kindness comes from fear.” Well, you could. But you don’t. So you keep it to yourself, often for years.

Then you receive a newsletter that describes the matter from a slight angle. And something clinical starts to happen.

When someone describes their own experience directly, it feels exposing. There’s an audience, and the audience has a reaction, and the reaction matters. But things shift when someone else describes a parallel experience to theirs. The reader recognizes the disclosure, which requires less courage than a confession, because the spotlight stays on the writer rather than the reader.

That’s what adjacency does. It gives the reader the experience of being seen without the risk of being watched. My essay names a territory. The reader thinks, if he can say that, I can say this. The writing lowers the threshold by going first.

As a therapist, I rarely ask new clients, “Why can you tell me this but not him?” It’s too direct. Instead, I describe a pattern I’ve observed in the session or across similar clients, and I watch the person lean into the recognition. The newsletter does the same thing: I describe a general pattern, and some readers lean in. Both act as a sort of mirror.

There is a difference. In therapy, the leaning-in leads to a conversation. In a newsletter, it leads to a one-way disclosure to a stranger. Which raises a question I didn’t expect to think about.

Why confess to a newsletter writer

A therapist is paid to listen. The professional frame sits around everything the client says. This creates safety and distance at the same time. Clients will say things in session they won’t say anywhere else. They know that what they say will be held inside a professional container, which shapes what they say and how.

A partner is free to listen, which makes the cost of speaking different. What you say to your husband lives in the relationship. “I cry in the shower, and I’ve been hiding it from you for eleven years” is information that will permanently change what your partner knows about you. That’s a high price for something you haven’t fully understood yourself.

A newsletter writer sits between the two. I’m public enough to feel accountable. My name and face are attached to the words, so there’s a sense that I’ll treat what they send me with care. I’m also distant enough that nothing they share with me will follow them home. Their reply goes into my inbox and stays there. It doesn’t sleep next to them or come up over breakfast.

Also, many of these readers have watched me go first for months. I’ve written about my own shame, my father, my anxiety. They already know things about me before they email me. I know nothing about them.

In most relationships, disclosure is reciprocal. A synchronized dance of sorts. You share something, the other person shares something, and this exchange builds trust over time. My newsletter completes my half of many exchanges. By the time a reader writes to me, I’ve already disclosed. They’re responding.

Which means what looks like a confession is often a response. I’ve been talking first all along.

What the confessions tell me (and what they don’t)

These men have husbands. Partners. Close friends. Some have a therapist. They have people. And the thing they couldn’t say, they said to a man who sends them an email once a week.

Gay men learn to become acceptable early in life. That version informs many of our relationships. The confessions are the parts of ourselves that don’t survive contact with other people’s expectations. The man who envies his friend won’t say it because it could change the friendship. The man who questions his own kindness won’t raise it with his partner because it might change how his partner sees him.

I believe this perspective is accurate but I’ve started to wonder whether it’s the whole picture.

Because here’s what revising an earlier draft forced me to consider: am I assuming that private feelings need to be spoken aloud to the people closest to you?

The Melbourne man cries in the shower. I described this as concealment, which it is. It is also, possibly, a private practice that serves a function his marriage doesn’t need to absorb. The shower is where he processes something. The processing works. He comes out, dries off, rejoins his life. Does his husband need to know about it? I used to think the answer was yes. As I've been writing, I’m less certain now.

The men who email me are a particular subset: men who read a newsletter about gay psychology and feel compelled to reply to a stranger. A subset of men who don’t have anyone in their lives they can safely disclose to.

This newsletter functions as a third space for these men. Something between therapy and partnership, where you can put a feeling into words and leave it there. The feeling is expressed, received, and then the inbox closes.

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The question I can’t fully resolve

Over time, you develop an idea of who your partner is, and they develop an idea of who you are. The relationship grows around those ideas.

But some truths don’t fit the picture. If the man who questions his kindness raises it with his partner, he’s asking his partner to see something new about him. To make room for a doubt that wasn’t there before. The moment he says it, their understanding of him changes.

The closet taught us to manage this calculation instinctively. What can I safely share in this relationship? Which truths need to be processed elsewhere? The skill is so old and so automatic that most gay men are not consciously aware of it. It feels like privacy. Sometimes it is privacy. And sometimes it’s the closet wearing a more comfortable outfit.

To be honest, I cannot always tell the difference. I’m not sure the men writing to me can either.

One reader, after several months of replies, told me he had shown one of my essays to his partner. Then he read his own reply out loud. His partner listened and asked why he hadn’t said any of this before. He said he didn’t have the words for it until he saw it written down. It needed to come from outside the relationship.

That changes my reading of the confessions slightly. Some of these men are concealing. Some of them are discovering what they think by writing to me. The newsletter helps them identify the feeling, and the reply helps them articulate it. Without those two steps, it remains something they experience but can’t explain.

What I do with what you tell me

To the men who have written these letters, and the men who will: I read every one. Some stay with me for days. Others change how I write the next post.

I don’t save them. I don’t share them. I don’t use your words in essays without compositing so heavily that the original is unrecognizable. I recognize the trust you gave me, and I carry it the same quiet way you offered it.

I reply to some. When I do, it’s usually brief. I try to name what I heard without interpreting it, which is hard to do in an email at 7am. Sometimes I ask a question. Usually I don’t. The reply is mostly a way of me saying: this arrived. I read it. It mattered.

And I want to be honest about one more thing.

I know I’m the rehearsal. These confessions land in my inbox and stay there. They don’t demand anything from a partner, change a relationship, or create consequences at home. The risk is low, and that’s precisely why they happen.

Whether the rehearsal needs a performance is a question I used to think I could answer. I was going to write a paragraph here about how the men closest to you are waiting for the version of you that already exists in your emails. It was going to end on an encouraging note.

Some truths may need a partner. Others may need a therapist. And some may need a stranger’s inbox and nothing more. It’s not my place to tell a man who has found words for something that those words belong somewhere else.

The fact that you said it was already the point.

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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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 was being careful. Being practical. Most gave it no name at all, because the changes were too small to dignify with a word.

The thing I want to name

What I want to write about is what sustained pressure does to a body over time.

Anticipatory grief is the technical term for the dread that arrives before the loss does. People who care for the dying know it well. So do people watching parents disappear into dementia. The body grieves on an eventuality you cannot control. It begins “composing the eulogy” while the person is still alive.

Gay men in 2026 are doing a version of this. Our visibility took fifty years to build and one political cycle to feel suddenly conditional. We are grieving things we still technically hold.

I wrote a while back about the hypervigilance gay men carry into rooms, the constant low-grade scanning for who is safe. This is the same machinery scaled up. The scan has stretched from a room to a country, a continent, the next election, the next executive order, the next time a colleague casually shares an article and you have to decide whether to engage or look at your phone.

The cost is different at that scale. Scanning a room takes twenty minutes. Scanning a political climate takes months, then years.

What pre-bracing does

Here is what nobody tells you about pre-bracing for months. The brace becomes the posture.

Spend twenty weeks expecting a punch and your shoulders settle into a new place. You walk around in a body that has already pre-absorbed something that has yet to happen. You feel exhausted in ways your actual life cannot account for. You wonder why you are tired. You took the weekend. You slept fine. You are still tired.

After something stressful, the body needs time to return to its resting state. When the next difficult thing arrives before the last one has finished with you, you never fully get back to where you started.

Do that for long enough and the resting state shifts. Your normal becomes subtly worse than it was a year ago. The floor dropped gradually, which is the only reason you did not notice it dropping.

That is what I mean by the baseline moves. You are a different man at rest than you were two years ago. That version arrived while you were busy.

Re-closeting that calls itself something else

The quiet edits are the part I find most worth talking about, because they happen in men who would tell you that they are out.

You are out. Of course you are out. You have been out for fifteen years. You have a husband. You posted about him. Your parents have met him, the parents speak to each other now, there are Christmases, and there is a wedding photo somewhere visible in your house.

And also, in the last six months, you have stopped correcting the assumption that the man on the email chain is a colleague when he is your spouse. You have started using “partner” with new clients until you have read them. There was a Pride event you would normally have attended that you skipped this year, because the optics felt complicated and you were too tired to argue with yourself about it. Or the relative who said something in a family group chat that you would normally have pushed back on, and you stayed quiet, because the cost of the argument felt larger than usual and your energy felt smaller than usual.

The closet involved pretending. Rationing involves measuring. The two things feel different from the inside, and the body registers something being held back regardless of which one is happening to it. It just pays for the holding back. The reason behind it makes no difference to the bill.

The harder thing to say

Visibility is what changed everything. It is the only thing that ever has. The men in the seventies who held hands on streets while people threw bottles at them were doing public work that none of them would have called work. They were making themselves into evidence.

So when a climate makes you ration your own visibility, even in small ways, you are participating in the thing the climate wants. This is what bodies do under sustained low-grade threat. They contract. The contraction becomes automatic. You become a smaller target without ever deciding to.

The therapeutic move here is to notice you are doing it. To know that you did not decide to. To understand that something costs you when you do, and to name the cost so that the cost stops being invisible. Stopping is a later question, and a more complicated one.

The men who told me about their small edits all seemed slightly relieved to say them out loud. As if naming the behavior gave it a shape they could finally see. Few of them were going to stop overnight. Most were unsure they even should. They could just see, finally, what the months had been doing.

If you have been wondering why you feel tired in a way that the weekend does not touch, this is part of it. Or, you find yourself doom-scrolling for a particular feeling that is half information and half confirmation that the dread is justified, the dread is justified, and the scrolling is doing something other than easing it.

You have been doing invisible work for months. Your body knows it even when your calendar does not. You did not agree to carry this, and you have been carrying it well, and no one, including you, has thought to ask how heavy it is.

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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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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The invitation came through a mutual friend. A rooftop party in a part of the city where the air itself feels more expensive. Four hundred euros for a ticket. A queer charity event, technically. The gay men there had the specific ease of men who have either never calculated whether they could afford the bar tab, or who calculated it once, years ago, and have since built an identity around not having to.

I stood near the edge with a drink I hadn’t paid for, watching.

Something more confused than contempt, which surprised me. Because some of these men had been where I had been. Some had grown up hiding. Some had survived families that would have preferred them gone. And now they were standing in Loro Piana and talking about their second properties in Comporta with the same fluency that I once learned to talk about football.…

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He laughed when his therapist asked what he wanted for himself.

A practiced laugh. The kind that buys time while the brain searches for an acceptable answer.

“I want to stop being so reactive,” he said. Also not the question he'd been asked.

This man had a career, a relationship, an apartment with considered furniture and a plant he hadn’t killed. He had assembled all of it with quiet precision across his thirties, with no original model to work from. He was, by most external measures, doing fine.

He was also gay, which matters to everything that follows.

But something in that question, what do you want for yourself, snagged on something internal he couldn’t locate. Like reaching for a shelf that isn’t where you remember it.

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Gay desire was unavailable before it was anything else. You wanted men for years before you could have them, before it was safe, before there was any realistic prospect of it being returned. That fact has consequences you probably haven’t connected.

Notice what happens in your body when he doesn’t text back.

Not the anxious thoughts (you already know those). The physical thing underneath.

The low-grade hum of wanting that sharpens rather than fades when he goes quiet. The way your attention snaps to your phone not in spite of the silence but because of it. The way he becomes more present in your mind precisely as he becomes less available.

Now notice what you do with that silence.

You start filling it.

You reconstruct the conversation you’d have if he called. You revisit the last tim…

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You didn’t hear about the divorce from him.

You heard about it at a party, six weeks after it happened, from someone who assumed you already knew. And you stood there with a drink in your hand doing the math.

The diagnosis, three years ago, where he was the first person you called. Before your partner, before your family. The time he sat outside the hospital waiting room for four hours because you asked him to and he just did. The fights you’d had, the things you’d said out loud to him that you haven’t said to anyone else since.

Six weeks. A party. Someone else’s mouth.

You drove home doing that specific kind of arithmetic where you keep getting the same answer but keep checking the sum because the answer doesn’t make sense.

You thought you were load-bearing. You were not.

The friendship is over. You’re not sure he knows it’s over.

That bewilderment, the gap between what you thought the friendship was and what it turned out to be under actual pr…

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