The Quiet Joy Gay Men Keep Missing
Why safety feels like boredom and ordinary moments matter more than celebration
His shoulders dropped on a Thursday afternoon.
Not at a rally. Not holding hands in public as some defiant act of visibility. Not during any moment that Instagram would recognize as joy.
He was sitting on a bench outside a coffee shop in Lisbon, watching pigeons fight over a dropped croissant when his phone buzzed. A text from his husband about dinner. Nothing poetic. Just “Thai or Mexican?”
And his shoulders dropped.
He didn’t know they’d been up near his ears until gravity reclaimed them. He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath through the entire morning until air suddenly felt optional instead of tactical.
That was me.
That’s the joy they don’t put on rainbow merch. The kind that feels like your ribcage remembering how to swing open. The kind that happens in 11-second intervals between scanning for threats.
We Learned the Wrong Definition
Social media taught us that joy looks like celebration and visibility. Like shouting louder than the shame. Like proving we’re unbreakable by never showing cracks.
So we perform it. Post it. Caption it with rainbows and fire emojis. We announce our joy like it needs witnesses to be real.
Platforms reward spectacle. The attention economy pays in views and saves, not in lowered heart rates, so the loudest moments get indexed as the only ones that count.
And on some days, that performance is a matter of survival. Visibility as resistance. Celebration as warfare. We need those moments.
I’m not against celebration; I’m against pretending it’s the whole story. Pride isn’t bad; it’s incomplete and sometimes expensive. The double bind is this: the same visibility that keeps us seen can also keep our nervous systems on-stage. Both truths can be real at once.
But nobody warned us that the loudest joy might be covering for the quietest grief. That even queer spaces could become another place where bodies still calculate danger. Where you’re still monitoring who’s watching, who’s filming, who might turn your existence into tomorrow’s controversy.
A client said it cleaner than anyone. Mid-thirties, works in tech, goes to every event in Berlin’s queer scene. In one session, he sat there crying. Not because something terrible happened. Because he realized he’s been performing happiness so convincingly that he forgot to check if he actually felt it.
“I posted 47 photos from the summer,” he said. “And I can’t remember a single moment where I wasn’t thinking about the angle. About looking happy enough.”
That’s the wound. So busy proving we’re thriving that we forgot how to just breathe.
What Safety Actually Looks Like
It doesn’t photograph well.
It looks like standing in your kitchen making toast while your boyfriend scrolls his phone at the table, neither of you performing anything for anyone.
It sounds like the silence after a GP intake form asks your pronouns and you tick the box without bracing for a conversation. It’s the receptionist who doesn’t turn your answer into a moment.
It’s also the night your friend group stops mid-conversation and everyone realizes, wait, nobody’s explaining their pronouns or justifying their existence. Everybody just... is.
It tastes like ordering food without the waiter’s face doing that micro-expression thing when you say “my husband.” When the transaction is boring because it’s simply a transaction. When ordinary feels like luxury because ordinary was never available before. It’s the email from HR that uses your name correctly the first time, or the landlord who doesn’t blink at two men on the lease.
One composite drawn from multiple sessions: A man relocated from a smaller European city to Barcelona. Not for a job. Not for school. For the specific privilege of walking to the corner shop without his boyfriend becoming a referendum on everyone’s comfort. Years later, he still tears up sometimes at how boring his life has become. Grocery shopping. Laundry. Netflix. No drama. No commentary. No strangers deciding his relationship is their opinion piece.
“I didn’t know safety could feel this quiet,” he said during sessions. “I thought it would be louder.”
But safety whispers. It shows up in the gaps between checking over your shoulder. It lives in the moments you forget to be strategic about your hand placement. It exists in conversations where nobody needs you to educate them or prove you’re palatable or shrink yourself into something they can handle.
One of the most powerful moments in therapy was when a client finished his coffee, stretched his arms above his head, and said, “I’m bored,” as if it were a revelation. Like boredom was a miracle. Like not being in crisis every waking minute was the plot twist he’d been waiting for.
Another: a gay man at the immigration desk who said “my husband” and the officer didn’t turn it into a moment. He told me later, in session, that he cried in the hotel elevator, not from fear, but because nothing became a debate.
That was safety: unremarkable by design.
A note of honesty: access to this kind of “boring” safety is uneven even within gay men. Class, race, disability, immigration status, and geography all change how available it is, and how much it costs.
Why Your Body Won’t Believe It Yet
Here’s what the Instagram activism never tells you.
Your nervous system catalogued every moment you couldn’t be yourself. Every time you dropped your partner’s hand when strangers approached. Every pronoun you swallowed. Every laugh you faked at jokes that cut. Every outfit you changed because it felt too visible.
Your body kept score. And it’s still keeping it.
Quick distinction, so we don’t blur terms: safety is the condition (the context stops threatening you); joy is the felt state that sometimes arrives when your body believes the safety is real.
So when actual safety shows up, your body doesn’t trust it. The system that kept you alive doesn’t have an off switch, just a dimmer that moves in increments so slow you barely notice.
That’s why safe spaces can feel dangerous. Your threat-detection system, honed over decades, continues to scan for the punchline. Waiting for the moment someone says “just kidding” and the acceptance evaporates. Bracing for betrayal because hope always came with a bill due later.
Therapists see it in therapy sessions. The way clients’ shoulders stay tense even when they’re laughing. The way they hold their coffee cups like shields. The way their eyes flick to the door every few minutes, tracking exits just in case.
One client described it perfectly. “I’ve been safe for six months now. Living in London. A partner who loves me. Friends who get it. Job that respects my pronouns. And I’m still waiting for the other shoe. Still flinching at shadows. My body hasn’t gotten the memo that the war ended.”
But see, the war didn’t end. It paused. And our bodies know the difference. Decades of minority stress research support this: chronic vigilance doesn’t disappear just because an environment improves; it unwinds slowly.
Joy isn’t a light switch. It’s a savings account you fund in moments so small they barely register as deposits.
How to make deposits when your life still feels noisy: name one “boring safety” moment each day (write it down); choose when and where to be visible on purpose rather than by default; borrow nervous-system calm from safe people and places (a friend’s kitchen, a regular cafe, a weekly group) until your own settles.
Like the first time you mention your boyfriend to a coworker and they just... move on. No follow-up questions. No visible recalculation of your humanity. They just say “cool” and ask if you’ve seen the latest Dune film.
Boring. Revolutionary.
Like the afternoon you wore that shirt, the one that reads as queer from fifty paces, and walked through Tesco without your shoulders climbing toward your skull. Without the running commentary in your head about whether you’re too visible, too obvious, too much.
Like the dinner party where you’re the only queer person and nobody makes you the night’s anthropology project. Where they don’t ask you to translate all of gay culture or explain why visibility matters or defend your right to be in the room. Where you’re just another person eating pasta and complaining about rent.
These moments don’t make good content, or go viral. They can’t be commodified into empowerment narratives or resistance aesthetics.
But they’re where joy actually lives. In the gaps between performing. In the breath you didn’t realize you’d been holding. In the moment your vigilance system takes a coffee break, and you experience ten seconds of existing without strategy.
A composite client was at dinner with mostly straight friends. Good people. Imperfect but trying. Midway through the meal, someone asked about his weekend plans. He mentioned his husband without the usual internal audit of whether this crowd could handle that information. Just said it. Like it was boring. Which it was.
And nobody flinched.
Nobody performed acceptance, asked intrusive questions, or made his marriage into a teaching moment. They just nodded and passed the bread.
He went home and couldn’t sleep. Kept replaying that moment. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was ordinary. And ordinary felt like someone had rewritten the rules without telling him.
That’s queer joy. Not the parade, but the moment after. When you realize your heartbeat stayed steady through something that used to spike your pulse. When the ordinary stops feeling like enemy territory.
You’re Allowed to Want the Boring Version
The one without parades or politics or constantly proving your right to breathe. The one where your queerness isn’t your brand, your burden, or your only interesting quality. Where you get to be as complicated and unimpressive as anyone else.
You’re allowed to be tired of being inspiring. Exhausted by visibility. Done with making every coffee shop hand-hold into a statement about resistance. Permission to want a life so unremarkable that nobody writes articles about how brave you are for existing.
Because here’s the theft nobody names. We were told joy looks like celebration, visibility, and being unshakeable. So when joy shows up quietly, we don’t recognize it. We think we’re doing it wrong.
A client spent an entire session crying because he’d finally found a queer community that felt safe. And he couldn’t stop waiting for it to become dangerous. Couldn’t believe safety could last. Kept testing it, pushing boundaries, waiting for the rejection he’d been conditioned to expect.
“What if this is it?” he asked. “What if safety just feels like this? Quiet and boring and nobody making a big deal?”
What if it does?
What if joy isn’t the absence of pain but the presence of moments where pain takes a lunch break? What if the revolution isn’t about being unbreakable but about collecting the small moments when you get to be soft?
This piece could end with something poetic about resilience. About how we’re all going to be fine. About healing timelines and hope.
But that feels like lying.
The truth is messier. Some days, shoulders still live near the ears. Some weeks the vigilance system runs at full capacity and you’re back to scanning rooms for exits you won’t need. Some months, you forget that you’re allowed to just exist without making it a statement.
And some random Thursday afternoon, shoulders drop while watching pigeons fight over pastry. While texting about dinner options. While doing nothing remotely political or performative.
Those Thursdays matter more than the Instagram algorithm will ever understand. Those moments when bodies finally trust rooms enough to stop performing safety and just be safe. When joy isn’t loud but present. When peace feels possible instead of suspicious.
We’re all still learning. Still depositing those small moments into the safety account. Still teaching our bodies that not every room is hostile. Still practicing the radical act of lowering our guard for longer than ten seconds.
And maybe that’s enough. Maybe joy isn’t about transcending the fear. Maybe it’s about the gap between one scan for danger and the next getting slightly longer. About shoulders staying down for eleven seconds instead of nine.
Maybe it’s about pigeons and Thai food and the text messages that don’t require threat assessment.
Maybe it’s already here. Quietly waiting.
Happening in the spaces between being brave.
And if you still want the parade sometimes, take it. Loud and quiet can feed each other. The point is choosing which one you need, not performing one because the internet pays better for it.
Where do you feel safest being yourself? Not performing safe. Actually safe. Even if it’s just in your own kitchen, that counts.
If you'd like to follow the quieter, everyday side of my work, I share brief notes here.
Please forward this to someone who might find it helpful. And if you liked this post, please tap the Like button below. ❤️ It really does help.
All client examples in this piece are composites drawn from years of clinical 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.
How about the time I went “gay haven” and was so invisible that I got sat on. Not come hither, not Sit on Daddy’s lap - he like everyone else just didn’t see me. Next day I dressed like a thug and all of a sudden people noticed…and ran for cover. I agree with everything, how does one even start if one isn’t considered “worth noticing”??
As a queer and an introvert, I have spent most of my life keeping to myself and a small group of friends. When I got married, I was pulled (yes kicking and screaming) into a large group of acquaintances. Frankly, queer spaces or not, the pageantry, the forced laughter, the accusation of "being in a bad mood" because I didn't come say hi - it all set's my teeth on edge. Recently I've withdrawn back to my writing, my books, quiet evenings in a chat with a close friend: my partner is not pleased, but I feel more at peace.
He says he truly love the drama and activity of it all, but I see how much it wears on him too.
Your work keeps me thinking.