Gay Men Are Allowed to Be Boring
What nobody tells you about the most radical thing a gay man can do: absolutely nothing interesting.
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 undecisive on what to watch on TV. 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.
The Word Doing the Work
Somewhere there is a version of me being described that I don’t recognise. 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-edting. 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 realised 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 insists 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.
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.
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 they aren’t treated as a category and instead treated as a person. 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 their are in a romantic relationship.
Underneath all of it, there’s a low-grade fatigue from carrying a word others chose for them. Almost none are struggling with being gay. They’re exhausted 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. Not a lifestyle. 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
The Formation Programme
You understand the pattern. It still runs you.
Up to six gay men map that pattern together over twelve weeks. You leave with a written Pattern Map you built yourself.
Online, worldwide. Join the waitlist for the next cohort.
Gino Cosme is a therapist and writer. He provides professional support for gay men in the UK and across Europe through psycosme.com, and coaching for those based in the US and Canada.
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.
I can totally relate. I've been with my husband for 37 years and yes our life has developed into a series of routines, shared experiences, friendships and so on. I wouldn't trade it!
The reason heterosexual people don't understand queer people is because they wake up everyday and they are them,in a world that is made for them.They don't even notice the damn Privilege they have over people like us.I remember being with a hetero person in my past life and everyday i woke up,i had to perform straightness and it felt like drowning but in slow motion. I know my life is not "style" because i don't do any preparation to live it,i just wake up and boom i'm queer