Why Many Gay Men Feel Alone (Even Surrounded by People)
The epidemic of gay loneliness isn’t about being single. It’s about the survival tactics that saved us but left us strangers to each other.
He orders another drink and scans the room. It’s a Thursday night and the bar’s packed. Bodies everywhere. Music pounding. Conversations happening in clusters. He knows three people here, has slept with two others, and follows maybe a dozen on Instagram. His phone shows 847 followers, 23 unread texts, and four dating app conversations going nowhere.
He’s never felt more alone in his life.
Gets home at 1 AM. Scrolls until 3. Wakes up Friday with the same hollow feeling behind his ribs. Like hunger but lower. Like thirst, but nowhere to drink from.
This is the thing nobody tells you about being gay in 2025. Coming out was supposed to fix this.
The Data Nobody Wants to See
Here’s what research in 2024 showed, not opinion pieces by those who’ve never sat face-to-face with a gay man crying because he can’t remember the last time someone asked how he was.
Gay men report loneliness rates between 13% to 34.7%, compared to 2.9% to 9.6% in the general European population. That’s from a meta-analysis of 72 studies involving over 1,300 participants. Not a small sample. Not anecdotal. Not “well, in my experience.”
But here’s the part that should really stand out:
Gay men report feeling isolated despite being surrounded by others.
I often hear clients refer to the people in their lives as friends. What many realize is that they have acquaintances. From hookups. Guys they see at the gym. People they text when they’re bored or horny, or both.
What many don’t have is someone who notices when they go quiet for three days. Someone who’d drive over at midnight without asking why. Someone who initiates WhatsApp conversations instead of only replying when they feel like it.
The loneliness isn’t about being alone. It’s about being surrounded and still unreachable.
What We Learned at a Young Age
I’ve watched this play out in therapy sessions for many years now. A pattern repeats with such precision that it feels scripted. They may be different people, but all share a similar wound.
I can confidently say that many gay men learn to hide before they learn to talk about feelings. That’s the curriculum for most queer kids. How to read a room in microseconds, make yourself smaller, and perform a version of yourself that won’t get you hurt.
A 2025 study on Chinese gay men found that anticipated stigma from family, especially the pressure around filial piety and producing heirs, created guilt. These men internalized family expectations so deeply that they started rejecting themselves before anyone else could.
The shame becomes automatic. Breathing.
This isn’t unique to China. The mechanism is universal. When your existence threatens what your family values most, you learn to preemptively disappear. Not physically. Emotionally. You hollow yourself out to fit into spaces that weren’t built for you.
Then you come out. Only to discover the hollowing doesn’t stop just because you announced yourself.
The Cruelty of Community Rejection
What research calls “intraminority gay community stress” is what my clients call “the reason I deleted the apps again.”
In a Taiwanese study of 736 gay and bisexual men, intraminority community stress, the kind that happens when other gay men reject you, significantly mediated the relationship between minority stress and loneliness, depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
Read that again.
That isn’t just homophobia from straight people anymore. It’s a specific pain of being rejected by people who we thought would understand.
One client told me during a session, “When my family rejected me, I could blame them for being ignorant. But when gay men reject me, what’s my excuse?”
That’s the wound that keeps men isolated. You survived family rejection. School bullying. Workplace discrimination. Finally found other gay men. Expected you could exhale. Instead, you discovered a community with admission requirements.
Despite criticism about how apps are bad, it’s worth noting that apps didn’t create this problem. They revealed it. Made us see what we’d been doing to each other in bars, bathrooms, and coffee shops for decades. Sorting. Ranking. Performing quality control on each other.
No fats. No fems. No Asians. Masc only. Under 30 preferred.
It lands like a slap you’ve learned to call normal. And these aren’t just preferences. They’re a silent, community-sanctioned rejection practiced so often that it almost goes unnoticed. Or, feels as natural and normal as breathing.
The Friendship Drought During Your Mid-Thirties
There’s no tutorial for adult gay male friendship. Straight men have softball leagues, work buddies, and college roommates who become groomsmen. Built-in scaffolding for connection that assumes friendship happens through repetition and shared mundane rhythms.
Gay men got a different blueprint. One that prioritized looking acceptable over being known.
We learned to calculate safety in every interaction. Every gesture we make is monitored for signs that it might be “too much.” Many of us made ourselves smaller to avoid detection.
Now we’re 35, 40, 45, 55, with a contact list full of people whose names we recognize but who wouldn’t notice if we were to disappear.
That may read hard, but it’s sadly the truth for many of us. Not just gay men, but many of our siblings in the queer community.
Where do adult gay men meet friends? The question haunts Reddit threads, search engine queries, AI chats, and therapy sessions.
The bar feels like a marketplace where platonic connection is off-brand. Dating apps optimize for sex, not hiking buddies. Hobby groups do exist, but it’s exhausting when you are the only gay person and already tired from performing everywhere else.
I have a friend who stopped going out after he lost his job. Same person. Same friends. But suddenly, no weekend invites. No “you coming tonight?” texts. Just quiet.
He told me once, “It’s like I became invisible the moment I stopped being impressive.” His unemployment wasn’t the issue. He, like many of us, had been accepted on a trial basis.
Your Body Already Knows All of This
You feel it as tightness across your shoulders. For some, it’s that knot that lives between your shoulder blades, you can’t quite reach. For others, it’s a hollow behind your ribs that shows up Sunday afternoons; a specific flavor of emptiness that tastes like pennies and regret.
Your throat holds sentences you never finished, especially the ones that felt too honest. Too complicated. Too much like showing the parts of yourself you spent decades learning to hide.
This is what loneliness looks like in a nervous system trained to scan for danger. You walk into rooms full of your “people,” and your body still tenses. Still calculates how much of yourself is safe to show.
Research on minority stress and loneliness revealed that marginalization was linked to both social and emotional loneliness. This relationship is mediated by stigma preoccupation, which triggers social anxiety and social inhibition.
In other words, we’re so busy watching for rejection that we can’t fully engage and connect with others.
Your loneliness isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival strategy that worked when you needed it to. When being seen meant being harmed. When connecting with other people, you are required to edit yourself until you are unrecognizable.
The problem isn’t that you’re broken, because you’re not. It’s that the strategies that saved you are now starving you.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Loneliness raises stress hormones and increases mortality risk at rates comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes daily. That’s not me using another metaphor. That’s cardiovascular research.
Your isolated nervous system is killing you slowly while you tell yourself you’re fine... just busy, just introverted, just picky about who you let in.
Gay and bisexual men show higher rates of depression and suicidal ideation when lonely. The research is unambiguous. The studies from Spain, the Netherlands, Taiwan, and the UK have the same conclusion. Our loneliness isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s lethal.
And we’re sitting in it, as if it were a weather condition. Unavoidable. Just how things are.
The EU Fundamental Rights Agency reported last year that 53% of LGBT individuals across the EU experienced some form of harassment, with similar rates in Spain (53%), Italy (51%), Belgium (53%), and other EU countries.
We’re not talking about ancient history. That’s last Tuesday. That’s the guy at your gym. That’s why your body never fully relaxes, even in “safe” spaces.
The loneliness compounds. Yesterday’s microaggression stacks on top of last week’s dating app rejection stacks on top of your father’s silence when you came out fifteen years ago. Your body keeps score in ways your mind refuses to acknowledge.
What Recognition Feels Like
As you are now aware, I am not providing steps or giving you a roadmap out of this. That’s not what you need, and it’s not what I do in this newsletter.
I’m offering recognition. That powerful moment of thinking, “Finally, someone said it.”
Your loneliness makes sense. It’s not personal failure. It’s a structural consequence.
You learned to be unknowable because being known was dangerous. You learned to isolate because connection came with conditions you couldn’t meet without erasing yourself.
That was an intelligent adaptation to an environment that wanted you to be smaller, quieter, less yourself.
The question isn’t why you’re lonely. The question is what it would feel like to be fully present with someone who isn’t performing either. Someone who sees the whole of you. The parts you spent decades hiding. The needs you learned to call needy. The softness you were taught to bury.
Your nervous system might not believe that’s possible yet. And that’s okay. It has been scanning for danger for so long that it has forgotten there might be something else to look for.
But recognition is a start. Knowing the loneliness isn’t yours alone. That it’s not personal failure but a shared consequence. That thousands of us sometimes feel the exact same hollow behind our ribs and call it normal.
Maybe that’s the first small crack in the isolation. Not fixing it. Just naming it. Not as a weakness but as evidence. You survived by learning to be lonely.
Now you get to learn something different.
If you enjoyed this post, please tap the Like button below. ❤️ It really does help.
This Substack is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any mental health condition.
Client and personal examples may have been altered to safeguard privacy and maintain confidentiality.
I think this is one of the best pieces that I have ever read on Substack, ever - if not THE best.
I related to it so very deeply.
I wish everybody who knew me would read this.
Thank you 🙏
Every single piece of this hit like a bag of bricks. Thank you for saying the hard parts out loud!