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

It was a Friday afternoon. A man in his early twenties had arranged for a relative to park her car and wait for him around the corner, because he was afraid that what he was about to do might not go well. He entered the house and told his partner of three years what he had rehearsed so many times. Then he was kicked in the stomach and punched in the head, and his t-shirt was half torn off his body. He managed to get the front door open and ran to the waiting car. This man spent the rest of that day in a hospital being examined and x-rayed. Nothing was broken.

That man was my friend.

This all started two weeks earlier, when he, carefully at first, told his partner he didn’t think things were working for them. From that moment, something in his partner changed. His voice got louder. He started pushing my friend around the apartment.

In just a few weeks, a man who had never lifted a hand became someone my friend needed a witness parked outside for.

This partner had the gift of the gab and knew how to please the people around him. Everyone who met him thought he was a good guy. The relationship, however, was not good, but the damage wasn’t the kind that shows up on a body.

Instead, my friend stopped being himself. It felt like he was being micromanaged. He started losing interest in things he loved to do, only because they didn’t tick the boxes for his partner.

None of this was visible to people on the outside.

When exiting becomes a safety hazard

What my friend went through is a well-documented pattern in literature about intimate partner violence (IPV). It’s called Separation Assault: the period when someone tries to leave a partner, and the increased risk of serious violence.

Because the abusive partner’s sense of control is being threatened, exiting a relationship can be especially dangerous. A man can get punched in the stomach because he wanted to move out. Another pushed into a kitchen cupboard. Or slapped across the face by a partner who had been drinking, and who woke up the following morning acting as if nothing happened the night before - which is its own particular kind of abuse.

As friends of gay men who are being abused in a relationship, we unintentionally can play a part in this form of abuse.

“Just leave him.” “Why are you still living there?” “If it were me I’d have left him months ago.”

Well-intended bad advice.

Failing to first ask about their safety and moving too fast can be dangerous. It pushes a vulnerable man to do something when he is at most risk, with no plan, or someone parked around the corner, and no sense of what he is about to do.

The period that follows the exit of a relationship requires safety planning because an abuser’s behavior becomes unpredictable when they realize that their traditional coercive control no longer works.

What awaits men who escape

Domestic abuse services were built around a straight woman in a relationship with a straight man, and understandably so, since that is where the volume of abuse and fatalities takes place. But that framework doesn’t quite work for everyone else.

Often, when a gay man calls a helpline, he ends up talking to someone who has never dealt with a case like his. And if the police arrive at a house where two men are standing with a wrecked living room behind them, the situation gets read as a fight rather than an assault.

Data from the USA highlight that 26% to 37% of gay men experience IPV. In Europe, that number goes up to 40%. That’s two in five gay men. We are also more likely to experience physical IPV compared to heterosexual men. European data also indicates that over 85% of physical IPV against gay men is committed by male partners or former male partners.

And yet despite these high prevalence rates, male victims only represent 4% to 5% of people (worldwide) who get support from domestic violence shelters and support providers because male-inclusive resources are few and far between.

While my focus is on physical violence as the main issue, there is a second layer of assault that exists, especially for gay men. I have heard of men threatening to out their partners at their work or telling their family. Some have been threatened that their HIV status would be disclosed. It highlights how an abuser often holds a key to a door someone has spent his life keeping closed.

Why he doesn’t call it “abuse”

Someone once told me that people in abusive relationships tend to have low self-esteem. I find this standard explanation too simplistic. Many people who have low self-esteem are in healthy romantic relationships. On the flip side, many confident men get pushed against walls and cupboards.

Self-esteem alone does not explain who gets hit.

Growing up, gay kids can have parents who comment on how they sit or walk. In primary school, kids use unkind words to other gay boys. By high school, verbal bullying often turns into the physical kind. And there’s the harsher form of abuse that some gay men experienced in childhood that often doesn’t get spoken about. (A topic for another piece.)

Now, put a man with that history in a relationship where his partner belittles him in front of friends, grabs his arm aggressively in the car park, or pushes him when they argue.

To that gay man, it’s a pattern too close to home.

He’s already been spoken to scornfully by someone who supposedly loved him. Experience has taught him to absorb and minimize assault because safety was priority number one growing up. Getting home in one piece took priority over standing up for himself.

That is why the adaptation gay boys develop to stay safe is what keeps gay men from calling out the abuse. Instead, they frame it as bad temper, a rough day, or a few drinks too many.

What people see and can do

Noticing if someone we care about is in danger doesn’t require an exposé. Notice the bruise that gets explained by a wall he walked into. The scratch that the cat caused. The phone that goes face down on the table when a message arrives. The friend who cancels the weekly coffee, three times in a row. The man who answers a question that was addressed to his partner. The cousin you haven’t seen for four weeks because he’s been too busy.

I am not going to tell you to stage an intervention or to give a speech about how the gay man in your life deserves better. These may feel useful, but they can leave him feeling more exposed.

Instead, ask him a question with no advice attached. Say you have noticed his absence for a while or a new bruise. Say it again in a fortnight.

What most men in this position lose first is a relationship where they are not being managed. Simply being asked a question without a “right” answer can be a meaningful thing to give back.

My friend got out. He had a relative in a car around the corner, and was taken to a hospital. I wish I had sat with more men who also had someone parked outside.

If you have been in an abusive relationship, please remember you did nothing wrong. And if you did try to reach out for help and no one believed you, I’m sorry that happened.

If there is one thing I know for sure, we are all human. That means that anyone can find themselves in a situation like the one my friend did. Abuse of any kind does not discriminate. Survivors should be met with empathy, belief, and no judgment.

As for abusers, being accountable matters. Abusing someone is a choice and has no excuse. Taking responsibility, seeking professional support, and committing to never repeating harmful patterns is an important path to healing.

Thanks for being here, and remember, you’re not broken, and you’re not alone.

Gino x

P.S. Here’s a limited special offer of $20/year. That’s 75% off the normal price.

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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.

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.

I wouldn’t have been able to write this composite without pointing to what some would call “progress.”

Some gay men get married because it’s the “obvious” next step in their relationship. Others get married because it’s almost an expectation from family, friends, and society. And then there’s a third reason why gay men get married: the legal reason.

When Daniel and his husband got married, they became each other’s next of kin. This allows Daniel to sign his husband’s forms and avoid waiting for permission from the nurse at the front desk to enter his room. It alleviates the tiresome fighting to be with the person you love most. However, marriage and the legal system still leave a lot to be desired once Daniel’s husband is admitted.

While the paperwork recognizes Daniel as a spouse, systemically, little has changed with the people who staff the day-to-day operations. Very few healthcare workers have been trained on how to engage with same-sex couples. Simple things like asking who manages the medication and who manages daily meals become awkward topics of discussion.

There can be days when you arrive to visit your partner and the new nurse on duty asks who you are and mentions that only family members are allowed. And there can be days when you help your partner with meals, and you get that one second extra look from the other person in the room.

By the time you reach the age that Daniel and his husband were in their 60s, you personally don’t think much of it. After all, this is something that they’ve had to live with all their lives.

It does beg the question: why, at this stage of someone’s life, do they still feel like they’re under the microscope?

This experience is not shared by all gay men. Someone in his seventies with a history of hiding for so many years experiences something different from someone in their forties who has lived a life expecting people to treat him as an equal.

Sometimes the gay man who lives in the city might have an LGBTQ-friendly healthcare facility to go to, unlike the man who lives three hours away from the nearest medical facility. And while money might be able to buy a private room and not having to be on the waiting list for too long, it can’t guarantee you’ll have staff who know they shouldn’t call your husband of 30 years a friend.

Race can make this more challenging. I’ve worked with black elderly gay men who have and do struggle with various health challenges. Some with HIV and diabetes and others with health concerns typical of men of a certain age. What stands out is how systemic challenges still follow them. I remember a few of them sharing how they had lived a life of being judged, suspected, and managed by institutions. These experiences end up shaping how they experienced the care facilities they visited in ways that don’t get taught in medical school.

A Black man in his 70s is someone who lived through decades of segregation and, when going to a medical facility, was like entering a system that saw him more as a subject than a human being. It’s easy to forget that, depending on where you lived, elderly gay men in their 60s, 70s, or 80s lived a life where homosexuality was still considered a mental illness. These men carry with them the weight of being rejected by their family, church, and community. They are men who have learned to conceal who they are for the sake of safety.

There’s this automatic assumption that when you enter a care facility, you are a straight, white, middle-class man who has a loving family and a caring wife. Staff have been trained on LGBTQ inclusion. But it’s often the shallow kind, dominated by rainbow stickers, the correct use of pronouns, and assuming that queer elders are white by default.

When Daniel laminated the three photos the day before his husband entered the facility, he was also practicing his lifetime of experience on managing how people perceived the two of them. It’s a survival strategy that reappears, and it can easily be misread by institutional default thinking.

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The most extreme version of an equal treatment is found amongst the men who don’t have a Daniel in their lives: men who didn’t partner with anyone, or who have outlived their partner or husband, or those who don’t have adult children to check in on them either through a Sunday phone call or by visiting where they’re at.

I’ve worked with men in their 50s and 60s who have told me how they have put off discussing this topic, either at home or in therapy. There’s a discomfort in facing a reality and being confronted with the void that exists in queer elderly healthcare.

As a gay man myself, I think about this and how it will affect my husband and myself. We’re not at retirement age. But at some point that day will come. Neither of us truly knows who will show up long term. It’s an uncomfortable thing to admit in a post that is meant to be useful, but it’s also the truth.

As much as I would like this to be a post about how far we have come, the reality is gay men are aging, and the care institutions that we will encounter are not designed with our needs.

Robert Burns’ Scots-language poem “To a Mouse” is a metaphor for what I have heard so often. Gay men who have built their houses, their environment, and a place of safety. They have all sorts of security, everything is wonderful, and then, one day, something comes along, and the whole thing comes crashing down.

Do what you can to avoid this.

Find out if there is any legal way to secure your interests. It’s important to become aware that so many people put this off. And end up in the clutches of the medical system, which is no alternative. Documenting this is the single most important thing you can do now.

Where do you start?

Take control of how you want to be treated. Document things like whether you explicitly reject artificial feeding, whether you want to be placed on a mechanical ventilator, breathing machine, and kidney dialysis, and explicitly assert that you don’t want to go into any facility and would rather be treated at home.

A few clients have told me they even included not to have a spiritual adviser enlisted and not wanting any medication or medical interventions that minimize physical or mental pain due to illness or incapacity.

Failing to have these in black and white puts pressure on your husband or next of kin, during a time that is already stressful. Your life is at risk of being managed by default standard procedures built for straight men who have functional families.

A chaplain showing up, estranged family members making decisions, being kept alive to safeguard the facility legally, or being under-medicated due to conservative medical practices.

And a little bit of advice an attorney friend once told me. Get it signed and witnessed, and send a copy to your doctor and a copy to your husband or partner. Just because the system doesn’t prioritize some in the queer community doesn’t mean you can’t make them act in your best interests.

None of that will fix the gap we still experience. But it does mean that the man or people you love won’t have to build a case of who you want in the room or making important decisions, like Daniel did, with his laminated photographs.

If this is a question you’ve been avoiding too, I’d like to know. Reply to this email and tell me what part landed.

Until next week,
Gino x

If someone came to mind while you were reading, please send this to them.

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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.

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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, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.

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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The Text That Arrives Late

You’ve heard it before. Why hasn’t he texted me back? Or that constant behavior of keeping to look at your mobile phone for a text from the person you went on a date with.

When no text comes, adrenaline and cortisol increase. These are stress hormones, and they shoot up. We come up with different versions of why the person doesn’t like us anymore or what we did badly on our date. The self-sabotage is a way of dealing with this unpredictability.

When the text arrives, the opposite happens: dopamine goes up. Emotional unpredictability (panic) turns into desire (relief). This is experienced as a magnetic attraction, where as it’s really a stress cycle mistaking the threat of abandonment for the thrill of desire.

A client in his early thirties told me he keeps time (yes, with a watch) of how long he waits before checking his phone. Fifteen minutes if it’s someone new. Two hours if he wants to seem unbothered. He knows the math doesn’t mean anything but he does it anyway.

Dismissing Men With Emotional Awareness

We all have a friend or someone we know that does this. They go on two to three dates with somebody who communicates well, has empathy, has a great emotional vocabulary, and is an all-round nice guy. Then they lose interest, concluding that there was no spark.

Mystery becomes a familiar ground, with emotional ambiguity and sense of possible rejection mirroring experiences growing up.

This can be described as a flat or unexciting person. A gay man who grew up witnessing his parents in a constant state of conflict. The mother who often walked out on arguments. The child who wondered whether his father loved him, never receiving the attention and affection he wanted from his father. These become the bedrock of how we start to see relationships when you grow up with mystery instead of red flags.

Then there are men who are noncommittal or emotionally guarded. Here sits a known recognition of emotional unavailability. This distance gets confused with intimacy, and we explain this to ourselves by intellectualizing and romanticizing what’s going on. We start seeing this person as a complex person, with “depth”. Instead, this is a subconscious quest to find love from someone who withholds it. A childhood need for validation, and not receiving it when things are peaceful.

Some men are in long-term relationships, stable and have no major issues. Things are going well. Except, they don’t feel that way. They experience being hyper-aroused and feeling unsafe in the silence. They constantly think that this is the “calm before the storm.” Where they actually need to break the peace so things feel familiar. It can be nitpicking, or micro-arguments, or it can be analyzing the smallest shift in their partner’s voice. Anything to get to the experience of increased adrenaline returning to a high-stress state.

I worked with a couple who had been together for one year. One partner started picking fights over the smallest of things. The kind of arguments where complaining about dish soap had nothing to do with dish soap. We all know the kind.

He, like many other partners I see, told me later he felt scared when things were okay between them with nothing going wrong. Nothing going wrong meant nothing good in his house growing up.

Feeling Horny When He’s Emotional Distant

Sex and libido have a way of being reactive to the state of a romantic relationship. When a partner pulls away or is emotionally absent, libido increases. The person feels sexually excited to be intimate with his partner, only to feel rejection from a lack of interest.

When sexual desire is high in the partner, sexual desire comes down. Sexual desire decreases when the partner is vulnerable, more affectionate, and perhaps needy. Here we use sex to disconnect from the partner.

A client once described how he wanted his husband most when his husband was working late or traveling on business. When the husband came home from work early or sat close, he found reasons of being the first to go to bed.

Post-Breakup Obsessions

Breakups are difficult, but what is harder is not being able to let go of a short-term, volatile fling. Three-month relationships seem to leave a bigger scar than a three-year relationship.

Some gay men spend months analyzing what went wrong before the breakup, mimicking hypervigilance and rejections. Questions like: what happened? Was I a mistake? Did I ask too much? The perfect playground for the inner critic to have its say.

I recall a man who, after a 10-week relationship, spent four months checking his ex’s Instagram stories every morning. A previous relationship that lasted six years was easier for him to let go of. Ten weeks, with someone unpredictable, took four months to move on.

Many of the things that I’ve discussed here form part of a psychological pattern: not being attracted to stable, emotionally available partners, and where partners who are predictable are seen as being boring or lacking sexual energy.

The holy grail of dating actually has nothing to do with chemistry and sparks. It has to do with how we have come to see relationship patterns created through our formative experiences, both early and later in life.

The question worth asking when it comes to dating and romantic relationships is often less about the other person having a spark and more to do with what’s going on with us or what’s playing out on our side.

This then lands on the question worth asking oneself in any situation, “What am I responding to when I call something chemistry?”

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 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.

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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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