The Gay Man the Algorithm Ignores
How gay culture built a product, and who got left off the label.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Gino, this really hit home for me. I came out when I was 48 and I thought that coming out was the hard part. It was actually everything that came after it - trying to find who I was after a lifetime of living for other people. I lost myself in that somehow. I didn't even know what authentic me looked like. I'm slowly learning, but it's hard when you don't fit the "ideal gay" stereotype. Thank you for writing this.
The phrase “rewards aspiration and scarcity” sure leapt out at me. That’s a powerful notion to be aware of when others’ lives on those platforms make us feel any level of less-than.
Thanks very much for this. Always appreciate your wisdom and insight.