Gino Cosme is a gay psychotherapist with over a decade of clinical work with gay men. This is Unfiltered Clarity, a weekly essay on the patterns gay men live but rarely name.
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.