It gets wired in early, John, and then keeps echoing for decades, which is why this work can take so long. There’s nothing late about still being in it at 55. I have clients starting out in their 70s, so you are very much on time for your own life.
Over the last three or four years, I've spent a lot of time deconstructing the belief system i grew up with - the one i had to survive. It's like I've taken all the furniture out of the house and put it on the driveway. Now i get to choose what i bring back inside.
Thank you for showing me, through this post and many others, what was actually happening beneath the veneer of my life.
That’s real work, David. Once you can see which beliefs were built for survival, you get a real say in what stays and what goes. I’m glad the writing has helped put language around it. It means a lot to me.
The continuous practice of watching yourself from outside your own body,
I do this a tremendous amount towards the point that I don’t know what my identity is. I act for others.
I was in a therapy group and the group was closing in a month. But we reached a great topic of discussion which we called: “grow yourself up,” meaning that we were supposed to grow ourselves up without any help.
I know that well, and it leaves a mark. When adolescence turns into “field research”, you learn performance before you get to learn yourself, and a lot of adult exhaustion starts right there.
I had a best friend when I was 15. I used to listen to him talk about his heterosexual fantasies. I'd study them so I'd know how I was supposed to act in order to keep passing as straight.
Spending your teens treating boyhood like a manual for survival can leave you fluent in performance and oddly estranged from ease. I hope being here helps you create your own life’s script.
Hahaha. By the time I was 18 I was learning all about being gay from first-hand (and mouth and ass) experience with several men who turned out to be excellent teachers. I'm 78 now and write my own gay BDSM erotica mostly based on my own experiences and fantasies.
That made me smile. Quite a leap from performing straightness at 15 to writing your own gay world at 78. There’s something deeply satisfying about that kind of authorship, earned, lived, and entirely your own.
Gino, Your insights continue to amaze me! At 80 (81 in a few weeks) one would think I have heard it all. What you look at, you do in ways that never dawned on me but in looking at your perspective makes perfect sense and informs and clarifies and changes who I am after having heard it. I will re-read this post and react to parts of it. One thing I already see is that my enjoying my solitude, and leaving behind conscienciously not wanting to socialize as much, not enjoying the extrovert part of me and the "entertaining" of the "room" is because of the double program that has been running my life and actions for so long. Thanks. I am more than grateful for having found you! Fondly, Michael
Michael, this is such a gift to read. That double program can keep performing long after the room has stopped asking for it, which is why solitude can feel less like retreat and more like real rest. Fondly received, and I’m glad this one gave you something useful to keep. 💙
Oh my gosh. This was beyond insightful. “Absence of destination” perfectly describes that lost 17-year-old who had absolutely no clue where to go in life, no lifelines, and would simply muscle through … and choose both the being useful and the read the room programs.
I’ve become the architect!
This made me feel so good about myself, Gino. It’s not artifice and it’s not hiding anymore. It’s elevated architecture.
Not renovation or repair or excavating. Authenticity and agency. 🥰💕
You always catch the nerve of it. There’s something deeply healing in seeing those old survival skills as part of the life you built, and I’m very into elevated architecture now 😂💙
Love reading and learning in this space. Thank you. Reading this piece Sunday morning in bed beside my husband, this passage jumped out for me (like “whoa, wait a minute..”): “Grief for the years given over to construction rather than living. For the self-knowledge you never got to develop in the ordinary, low-stakes, slightly embarrassing way that most people do. You learned yourself in crisis conditions. Which means certain parts of you have never been tested at room temperature. You don’t know how they behave without the threat holding them in shape.” There is truth here. It also taps on something I’ve been toying with in my work. Was it grief or joy or both? Was it an obstacle or a privilege. Was it “repression” or secret, winking thriving, “I know and see something about the world, that you don’t.” For me, I was maturing a sense of self, a “self”. I loved every minute (ok, almost every minute) But my self was a thriving, passionate, reasonably happy compartmentalized self. That could sound “bad” but I lived robustly, thrived, without question. It was fun, in a Ru Paul, wink wink queer meaning of fun. The jokes on them. What a journey! It hasn’t been a survival slog, even though I didn’t always express my big gay queer “self”. I did lots of amazing fun things, as an emerging confident “self”. It’s also always been very exciting to integrate aspects of myself-not really for “me” but for the external world. To “show off”, even “strut” the pieces, my pieces, in my own time and way. That’s my point, lots of joy and not entirely or even slightly grief. —From a thriver not just survivor.
Yup, this is the nuance. For some men the early split held grief and sparkle at the same time, and the hidden life was full of wit, pleasure, appetite, and a very alive self. Then integration becomes opening the curtains so the outside world can finally catch up.
Absence of representation leading to absence of destination? This feels really insightful. And true for many unfulfilled gay men. But not for specific personality types, such as enneagram 5's: naturally secretive, introverted and analytical. These folks suffer as much as anyone who wants, but won't find, a fulfilling partner. Yet they thrive by pursuing other fulfilling journeys and destinations. These folks analytically tolerate the low probability of lifetime partner success. They reframe it as bad luck in the life lottery that gave them the double whammy of minority sexual identity and a secretive, private personality. They move their energy to the good luck parts of themselves. Eagerly embracing other affirming & valuable pursuits that give their lives profound meaning.
Personality changes the shape of the wound and the shape of the adaptation. Some men really do channel that energy into work, ideas, friendship, craft, or solitude with depth, and build a meaningful life there. The missing relational map still leaves a mark, even when the rest of life is beautifully built.
Yes. I think everyone should be open to opportunities for deep, enduring relationships. But no one should feel 'less than' or damaged because they didn't bang their head against a wall looking for one, particularly when the odds were strongly against it. Hope, yes. But get on with your life too - it's the only one you have.
This might be an exaggeration but crisis makes you unidirectional. Excess pressure—especially when it's insurmountable and sudden—makes you ill-equipped to learn without it.
I have been studying about how crisis teaches you and what it does. And you just perfectly described how gay men get affected by such events.
I learned to mimic the straight men I saw and trash the gay man I am. The former happened in calm situations.
So I took my time to study deeply and patiently, how they talked, what they cared about, what is appreciated, what is shamed.
I never learned to be gay—or expose my gay side—in the calm. It was only during chaotic hookups when I learned about it. I regulated my gay self in chaos, and I regret that it was the only option I had.
I wish I can have a gay community, in real life and not just online, who'll get me, see me and maybe, hold me.
That teaches your body to link gayness with adrenaline instead of ease, which is a brutal education to carry into adult life. Real life community matters because calm, ordinary gay connection can slowly rewrite that association and make room for something gentler.
Ok, here's the thing, I'm not gay and I'm not a man, and your words get me every time. You are speaking uniquely to gay men, I have no doubt, but the fact that your words find audiences beyond the one you intend, speaks to your ability to see humanity.
Here's the line that got me from this essay: "many of my clients experienced not just an absence of representation, but an absence of destination. "
This resonates with me so much I have tears in my eyes. As I struggle to find the words to include in my autobiographical documentation of my journey to survive a traumatic brain injury that I suffered on my last day working as a psychiatric nurse clinician, after 38 years, in 2024. More importantly, as a neurodivergent RN, I always knew how to where a mask to prevent any one from ever reading anything into my behavior. After a lifetime, there was a part of me that I couldn’t keep imprisoned under guilt and shame. I allowed a part of me hidden to finally exist, at 56 years old, in 2021. Now, with many disabilities and brain injuries after the felonious assault at my NYS OMH nursing job in 9/17/24 that has been on the news, I treasure my identity as a member of the LGBTQ community, as a bisexual healthcare professional, married to a woman, which is what I wrote on Grindr in 2021 when I first “came out” to my wife and daughters with no hidden life at all. I was so good at wearing a mask of invisibility, aside from being an advocate for anyone needing compassionate healthcare, I spent so long hiding that even in my semi authentic state 4 years ago, I was meeting people in communities unfamiliar to me, mostly leaning into my skills as an RN and volunteer working with people with terminal and permanent illnesses. I never told the few gay men I met that I was afraid, holding onto who I always wanted to be, but never was. I was an actor on the stage of life for so long, I was no-one, eventually. Now, I will not hide from anyone. I came so close to passing, with a TBI and a NDE, I want to advocate for other members of the LGBTQ community, who may be trapped in their own heads quietly hating themselves. I have been there, and I will work to help others find their own voices.
Peter, what you’ve lived through would flatten most people, and there’s a fierce kind of clarity in deciding you won’t disappear after all of it. The part that stays with me is your refusal to spend the rest of your life protecting other people from your truth. I’m glad you’re here, and I think your voice is going to matter to a lot of people.
This is exactly what I mean. When the map is missing, even a steady, love-filled life takes a staggering amount of invention. Most people never see the labour in that. I’m glad you stayed long enough to build a life your 21 year old self could not yet picture.
I threw myself on to drug-fueled hookups because I was convinced my life is never gonna be what I dreamed like it would be.
I moved back in with my parents and have been with them for > 1.5 years now. I thought this would do me good but I slid back into depression and drugs.
I just started to pick myself back again. But I am knocked down once again because of my surgery last night. It's painful watching my old parents—although emotionally unavailable and underdeveloped—run back and forth.
I have no idea what I am going to do next, how to make money, what job will I have to take. I have been crying for so long and aching to be held by a man although it seems unlikely considering i live in India.
Wanna hear something funny? I'm gonna be 26 in 2 weeks.
So to read your life rebuild at 48 gave me hope that I may not end up homeless and lonely under a bridge in India.
Thank you for saying this so honestly. I’m really sorry you’re in so much pain right now, especially straight after surgery, when everything already feels more exposed.
26 is still very young, even if it does not feel that way from inside this moment. Being back with emotionally unavailable parents can pull old wounds wide open, and depression plus drugs can make the future look much smaller and darker than it really is.
Please don’t try to solve your whole life from this exact point of pain. The next step is enough. Recover from the surgery. Get proper support for the depression and the drug use. Keep telling the truth somewhere real, not only online.
A lot can change from 26. More than you can currently imagine. I know that may sound hard to believe today, but it’s true. I’m glad this gave you some hope. Hold on to that.
So well said — and so rarely said by anyone else. Growing up with the feeling of not belonging takes a lifetime to work through (still at it at 55).
It gets wired in early, John, and then keeps echoing for decades, which is why this work can take so long. There’s nothing late about still being in it at 55. I have clients starting out in their 70s, so you are very much on time for your own life.
Over the last three or four years, I've spent a lot of time deconstructing the belief system i grew up with - the one i had to survive. It's like I've taken all the furniture out of the house and put it on the driveway. Now i get to choose what i bring back inside.
Thank you for showing me, through this post and many others, what was actually happening beneath the veneer of my life.
That’s real work, David. Once you can see which beliefs were built for survival, you get a real say in what stays and what goes. I’m glad the writing has helped put language around it. It means a lot to me.
The continuous practice of watching yourself from outside your own body,
I do this a tremendous amount towards the point that I don’t know what my identity is. I act for others.
I was in a therapy group and the group was closing in a month. But we reached a great topic of discussion which we called: “grow yourself up,” meaning that we were supposed to grow ourselves up without any help.
I know that well, and it leaves a mark. When adolescence turns into “field research”, you learn performance before you get to learn yourself, and a lot of adult exhaustion starts right there.
I had a best friend when I was 15. I used to listen to him talk about his heterosexual fantasies. I'd study them so I'd know how I was supposed to act in order to keep passing as straight.
Spending your teens treating boyhood like a manual for survival can leave you fluent in performance and oddly estranged from ease. I hope being here helps you create your own life’s script.
Hahaha. By the time I was 18 I was learning all about being gay from first-hand (and mouth and ass) experience with several men who turned out to be excellent teachers. I'm 78 now and write my own gay BDSM erotica mostly based on my own experiences and fantasies.
That made me smile. Quite a leap from performing straightness at 15 to writing your own gay world at 78. There’s something deeply satisfying about that kind of authorship, earned, lived, and entirely your own.
Yes, indeed. It's an excellent act of sublimation. I am the slaves I write about.
Thank you.
I’m glad it landed. A lot of us got very skilled at surviving and very underpractised at wanting, so this shift matters more than people realise. 💙
Gino, Your insights continue to amaze me! At 80 (81 in a few weeks) one would think I have heard it all. What you look at, you do in ways that never dawned on me but in looking at your perspective makes perfect sense and informs and clarifies and changes who I am after having heard it. I will re-read this post and react to parts of it. One thing I already see is that my enjoying my solitude, and leaving behind conscienciously not wanting to socialize as much, not enjoying the extrovert part of me and the "entertaining" of the "room" is because of the double program that has been running my life and actions for so long. Thanks. I am more than grateful for having found you! Fondly, Michael
Michael, this is such a gift to read. That double program can keep performing long after the room has stopped asking for it, which is why solitude can feel less like retreat and more like real rest. Fondly received, and I’m glad this one gave you something useful to keep. 💙
Gino, And you are a gift to me! Fondly, Michael
Then we’re gifts to each other. Happy Sunday ☺️
Oh my gosh. This was beyond insightful. “Absence of destination” perfectly describes that lost 17-year-old who had absolutely no clue where to go in life, no lifelines, and would simply muscle through … and choose both the being useful and the read the room programs.
I’ve become the architect!
This made me feel so good about myself, Gino. It’s not artifice and it’s not hiding anymore. It’s elevated architecture.
Not renovation or repair or excavating. Authenticity and agency. 🥰💕
You always catch the nerve of it. There’s something deeply healing in seeing those old survival skills as part of the life you built, and I’m very into elevated architecture now 😂💙
Love reading and learning in this space. Thank you. Reading this piece Sunday morning in bed beside my husband, this passage jumped out for me (like “whoa, wait a minute..”): “Grief for the years given over to construction rather than living. For the self-knowledge you never got to develop in the ordinary, low-stakes, slightly embarrassing way that most people do. You learned yourself in crisis conditions. Which means certain parts of you have never been tested at room temperature. You don’t know how they behave without the threat holding them in shape.” There is truth here. It also taps on something I’ve been toying with in my work. Was it grief or joy or both? Was it an obstacle or a privilege. Was it “repression” or secret, winking thriving, “I know and see something about the world, that you don’t.” For me, I was maturing a sense of self, a “self”. I loved every minute (ok, almost every minute) But my self was a thriving, passionate, reasonably happy compartmentalized self. That could sound “bad” but I lived robustly, thrived, without question. It was fun, in a Ru Paul, wink wink queer meaning of fun. The jokes on them. What a journey! It hasn’t been a survival slog, even though I didn’t always express my big gay queer “self”. I did lots of amazing fun things, as an emerging confident “self”. It’s also always been very exciting to integrate aspects of myself-not really for “me” but for the external world. To “show off”, even “strut” the pieces, my pieces, in my own time and way. That’s my point, lots of joy and not entirely or even slightly grief. —From a thriver not just survivor.
Yup, this is the nuance. For some men the early split held grief and sparkle at the same time, and the hidden life was full of wit, pleasure, appetite, and a very alive self. Then integration becomes opening the curtains so the outside world can finally catch up.
Absence of representation leading to absence of destination? This feels really insightful. And true for many unfulfilled gay men. But not for specific personality types, such as enneagram 5's: naturally secretive, introverted and analytical. These folks suffer as much as anyone who wants, but won't find, a fulfilling partner. Yet they thrive by pursuing other fulfilling journeys and destinations. These folks analytically tolerate the low probability of lifetime partner success. They reframe it as bad luck in the life lottery that gave them the double whammy of minority sexual identity and a secretive, private personality. They move their energy to the good luck parts of themselves. Eagerly embracing other affirming & valuable pursuits that give their lives profound meaning.
Personality changes the shape of the wound and the shape of the adaptation. Some men really do channel that energy into work, ideas, friendship, craft, or solitude with depth, and build a meaningful life there. The missing relational map still leaves a mark, even when the rest of life is beautifully built.
Yes. I think everyone should be open to opportunities for deep, enduring relationships. But no one should feel 'less than' or damaged because they didn't bang their head against a wall looking for one, particularly when the odds were strongly against it. Hope, yes. But get on with your life too - it's the only one you have.
This might be an exaggeration but crisis makes you unidirectional. Excess pressure—especially when it's insurmountable and sudden—makes you ill-equipped to learn without it.
I have been studying about how crisis teaches you and what it does. And you just perfectly described how gay men get affected by such events.
I learned to mimic the straight men I saw and trash the gay man I am. The former happened in calm situations.
So I took my time to study deeply and patiently, how they talked, what they cared about, what is appreciated, what is shamed.
I never learned to be gay—or expose my gay side—in the calm. It was only during chaotic hookups when I learned about it. I regulated my gay self in chaos, and I regret that it was the only option I had.
I wish I can have a gay community, in real life and not just online, who'll get me, see me and maybe, hold me.
That teaches your body to link gayness with adrenaline instead of ease, which is a brutal education to carry into adult life. Real life community matters because calm, ordinary gay connection can slowly rewrite that association and make room for something gentler.
So well explained. Thank you.
Thanks, Leslie. A lot of these patterns stay foggy until someone names them plainly, and then the whole structure starts to make sense.
Ok, here's the thing, I'm not gay and I'm not a man, and your words get me every time. You are speaking uniquely to gay men, I have no doubt, but the fact that your words find audiences beyond the one you intend, speaks to your ability to see humanity.
Here's the line that got me from this essay: "many of my clients experienced not just an absence of representation, but an absence of destination. "
That means a lot 💕I write through a very specific doorway, and sometimes that specificity is exactly what lets the wider human thing come through.
I think so often it does, that's been part of the gift of Substack, it's starting to see all of the threads to humanity.
This resonates with me so much I have tears in my eyes. As I struggle to find the words to include in my autobiographical documentation of my journey to survive a traumatic brain injury that I suffered on my last day working as a psychiatric nurse clinician, after 38 years, in 2024. More importantly, as a neurodivergent RN, I always knew how to where a mask to prevent any one from ever reading anything into my behavior. After a lifetime, there was a part of me that I couldn’t keep imprisoned under guilt and shame. I allowed a part of me hidden to finally exist, at 56 years old, in 2021. Now, with many disabilities and brain injuries after the felonious assault at my NYS OMH nursing job in 9/17/24 that has been on the news, I treasure my identity as a member of the LGBTQ community, as a bisexual healthcare professional, married to a woman, which is what I wrote on Grindr in 2021 when I first “came out” to my wife and daughters with no hidden life at all. I was so good at wearing a mask of invisibility, aside from being an advocate for anyone needing compassionate healthcare, I spent so long hiding that even in my semi authentic state 4 years ago, I was meeting people in communities unfamiliar to me, mostly leaning into my skills as an RN and volunteer working with people with terminal and permanent illnesses. I never told the few gay men I met that I was afraid, holding onto who I always wanted to be, but never was. I was an actor on the stage of life for so long, I was no-one, eventually. Now, I will not hide from anyone. I came so close to passing, with a TBI and a NDE, I want to advocate for other members of the LGBTQ community, who may be trapped in their own heads quietly hating themselves. I have been there, and I will work to help others find their own voices.
Peter, what you’ve lived through would flatten most people, and there’s a fierce kind of clarity in deciding you won’t disappear after all of it. The part that stays with me is your refusal to spend the rest of your life protecting other people from your truth. I’m glad you’re here, and I think your voice is going to matter to a lot of people.
This is exactly what I mean. When the map is missing, even a steady, love-filled life takes a staggering amount of invention. Most people never see the labour in that. I’m glad you stayed long enough to build a life your 21 year old self could not yet picture.
I am tearing up reading this.
I threw myself on to drug-fueled hookups because I was convinced my life is never gonna be what I dreamed like it would be.
I moved back in with my parents and have been with them for > 1.5 years now. I thought this would do me good but I slid back into depression and drugs.
I just started to pick myself back again. But I am knocked down once again because of my surgery last night. It's painful watching my old parents—although emotionally unavailable and underdeveloped—run back and forth.
I have no idea what I am going to do next, how to make money, what job will I have to take. I have been crying for so long and aching to be held by a man although it seems unlikely considering i live in India.
Wanna hear something funny? I'm gonna be 26 in 2 weeks.
So to read your life rebuild at 48 gave me hope that I may not end up homeless and lonely under a bridge in India.
Thank you.
Thank you for saying this so honestly. I’m really sorry you’re in so much pain right now, especially straight after surgery, when everything already feels more exposed.
26 is still very young, even if it does not feel that way from inside this moment. Being back with emotionally unavailable parents can pull old wounds wide open, and depression plus drugs can make the future look much smaller and darker than it really is.
Please don’t try to solve your whole life from this exact point of pain. The next step is enough. Recover from the surgery. Get proper support for the depression and the drug use. Keep telling the truth somewhere real, not only online.
A lot can change from 26. More than you can currently imagine. I know that may sound hard to believe today, but it’s true. I’m glad this gave you some hope. Hold on to that.
I needed to hear this. Thanks, G. 🤍