For Many Gay Men, It’s The Loneliness That’s A Killer
(updated on June 6th, 2021 from the original February 2021 essay)
“I know there’s someone out there
Waiting for me
There must be someone out there
There just has to be” — Has To Be by Madonna
I loved the 90s HBO sitcom Dream On as a kid. The main characther Martin’s internal dialog and thoughts always involved old movie clips. For me, its pop song lyrics. It sums up what I am feeling deep down in my heart, even though I try to ignore it or push it away. Whenever I feel lonely, I wonder whether there is someone special out there waiting for me.
Maybe Mariah Carey said it even better in her song Breakdown
“Well, I guess I’m trying to be nonchalant about it
And I’m going to extremes to prove I’m fine without you
But in reality, I’m slowly losing my mind
Underneath the guise of smile, gradually I’m dying inside
Friends ask me how I feel and I lie convincingly
’Cause I don’t want to reveal the fact that I’m suffering
So I wear my disguise ’til I go home at night
Then turn down all the lights and then I breakdown and cry”
In times of distress, I have a hard time telling people how I really feel. I don’t want to burden other people with my problems or bring them down.
Even my father noticed how lonely I was right before COVID-19 hit in February 2020 and offered to help me pay for a GAY CRUISE!
If you know my retired Army colonel father, you know that this was a huge step forward for him, though I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I probably would rather drown on the ship swimming pool than go on the gay cruise.
My social anxiety, low self esteem and introversion would just kick my ass in such a situation.
Despite being an introvert, I felt isolated and was unable to see friends during the COVID-19 quarantine. Starting in grade school all the way up to my last corporate job in 2014, I reached out to friends I had made over the years.
I made a bunch of great new friends through an insane Facebook “civil political discourse group” (it wasn’t) formed by “Dr.” Karlyn Borysenko (that’s a story in itself I will tell another day!). We were of all races, ages, sexual orientation and gender expression, but we all really like each other and get along really great.
San, my old college roommate, invited me to a Zoom dance party in January 2021. I thought what I was going to do would be silly, but it ended up being my highlight of 2021. The weekend doesn’t excite me as much as my new friend Sara’s intimate gathering of audiophiles.
Since I ran the Chicago Half Marathon with the AIDS Foundation Chicago in 2013, I have not met any new gay friends. Living in Chicago’s far west suburbs, I feel very disconnected from the LGBT community. There is no organized LGBT community in the west or northwestern suburbs, and Hunters, the last LGBT bar, closed its doors last year.
Perhaps you are thinking, “Well friends are friends, who cares whether they are gay or not?”
You raise an excellent point. Right now, I’d accept any good friend that will respect me and treat me right, but as gay men, there are just certain shared culture and history..music, film, singers, artists, actors and actresses.
We all experienced growing up being ostracized, bullied, or not accepted, which straight cisgender people cannot understand, especially if you are a gay man who is a Xennial and older.
We all share the struggle for our human rights that still continues till this day despite more acceptance of LGBT folks in the United States than there ever has been.
I was an early adopter of using the internet to meet other gay men, starting with usenet groups in 1995, then using AOL chat rooms and gay.com until the smartphone apps came out about 2010.
In the days before digital cameras and when few people had scanners for pictures, I felt like people were less focused on looks and sex like they are now with gay hookup, I mean “dating” apps such as Grindr and Scruff. People would actually have to take the chance to meet you without knowing what you looked like.
I met a lot of great friends on AOL and gay.com, then a lot of European friends on Planet Romeo. Planet Romeo is the only one left of those websites, and that’s a shadow of its former self.
The INFJ/INFP in me has trouble initiating new friendships, and I have always had this “outside looking in” feeling ever since I was 11 or 12 years old, feeling like I didn’t belong to any group.. Jock, nerd, band geek, popular crowd.
In my small high school, parties were fun because everyone knew each other, but when I got to college and even after graduation, I hated going to parties where I only knew a few people or only the host.
It was just me, a bump on the log with a drink, getting drunker and drunker as I silently judged everyone,. It would sometimes be so uncomfortable that I would have to leave after about an hour or so.
High school behavior and tribalism do not disappear when you graduate; they simply mutate and go underground. There are all sorts of gay groups in the United States, and many of them are fiercely loyal to their “tribe,” when it comes to people who do not fit in;
Muscle Marys, otters, bears, pigs, gaymers, pups, theater/musical lovers, leather daddies, twinks, 90s club kids, and I’m sure I’m missing some. Then things start breaking down on the lines of age/generation group (Gen X, Y, Z) and race.
As in high school, Chicago’s gay bars and clubs are crowded with the “beautiful people” set of gay men. In the United States, that means the white beauty standard muscular men who look like they live in a gym.
About 10 years ago I went to visit my old home of Croatia on a summer holiday. A former bodybuilder and personal trainer friend of mine was dating a very good-looking male model at the time, and we spent time on the Croatian coast together.
I felt so out of place thinking I was way below their league in looks, and I had been starving myself and ended up injuring myself overtraining getting ready just to get ready for the trip so I could look as good as possible on the beach next to them.
Little do people realize, that eating disorders among gay men are way more prevalent than anyone realizes.
“42 percent of men who have eating disorders are gay*
Gay and bisexual men are seven times more likely to binge, and twelve times more likely to purge than heterosexual men*
Many people who suffer from eating disorders battle with co-morbidities, such as substance abuse, and may engage in risky behavior. In fact, up to 50 percent of individuals with eating disorders abuse alcohol or illicit drugs, compared with just nine percent of the general population** Eating Recovery Center
A lot of gay men turn to alcohol and substance abuse to cope. I know I have downed too many drinks in my adulthood thinking I would loosen up and be more social, to purposely wear down my own inhibitions and be more social.
“Substance abuse is a significant problem among members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ ) community. From alcohol abuse and binge drinking to the use of harder drugs like methamphetamines, heroin, and opioids, many people in the sexual minority struggle with addiction. Statistics show that LGBTQ adults are more than twice as likely as their heterosexual counterparts to use illicit drugs and almost twice as likely to suffer from a substance abuse disorder.1 What makes substance abuse in the LGBTQ community so prevalent? There are many contributing factors, and below are some of the most common triggering issues that LGBTQ people face.” — American Addiction Center
There is almost no LGBT culture forty miles from Chicago in the western suburbs, which is very isolating. In 2014, I moved home to help my dad take care of my mother with Alzheimer’s.
There are certainly gay men out here, but I don’t really know any, and all of my friends are in the city.
I jokingly call my friends who live in Chicago “geographic snobs” or “geographists” because no one ever offered to come out to the suburbs to see me. But who could blame them? Some don’t even have cars, and unless you like urban sprawl, outlet malls, and a riverboat casino, there isn’t much for you to do in Aurora, Illiniois. Even I HATE living here, so why would I torture someone with the same?
All of my straight, heterosexual friends have settled down and have children. I understand that they can’t hang out anymore like we used to or close the bars down with me staying out till the wee hours of the morning as I did in my 20s and 30s. I am not even sure I can stay out anymore that late. My liver isn’t what it used to be!
I am far from the first one who has noticed what Michael Hobbes described as “The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness” , a landmark essay in Huffington Post called came out in 2017.
“Still, even as we celebrate the scale and speed of this change, the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades. Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives. We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode. And just like the last epidemic we lived through, the trauma appears to be concentrated among men. In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex — or some combination of the three. Despite all the talk of our “chosen families,” gay men have fewer close friends than straight people or gay women. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: “It’s not a question of them not knowing how to save their lives. It’s a question of them knowing if their lives are worth saving”
I, like Hobbes, have been “perpetually single”. There have only been a couple of serious relationships in my life, and one of them ended shortly after I moved halfway around the world. As a result, my ex has moved on and is married now, and I am happy for him (really, I am, we are Cool, as Gwen Stefani said), but here I am feeling like a spinster. I feel that I’m horribly unlucky in love or that I’m a deeply flawed person no one wants to be around.
I had one slightly-more-than-friends-but-not-a-relationship-friend, and he was the only person I kept in touch with while my mom was ill. Unfortunately, I put all my eggs in one basket with him, and he moved to Albania to join the Peace Corps in January 2018. I felt even worse after he left because I felt like I had no one at all. I wasn’t really honest about how I felt about him while I was here, but I didn’t want to be a drama queen when he told me he was leaving, so I just suppressed it all and faked that I was happy for him and acted like I didn’t care he was moving away.
Let’s fast-forward to the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine from 2020–2021;
ALL people, gay, straight, or upside down, feel lonely and cut off from friends and family.
While the states are now opening up, for well over a year you couldn’t go out for a drink, to a movie or to a bar or have a date in an enclosed space. I saw my sisters twice in all of 2020 and they only live 20 minutes away.
I certainly wasn’t having sex during the pandemic. I wasn't having sex before COVID-19 to be fair, so little changed for me. I joke with my friends that I am now an incel, or rather, a gaycel. It doesn’t even have to be sex, but I long for the simple human touch of a hug, a kiss, or a cuddle that is a distant memory for me and many others.
The following quote from Judy Dench’s character in “Notes From A Scandal” really struck a chord with me.
“Barbara Covett : People like Sheba think they know what it is to be lonely. But of the drip, drip of the long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. What it’s like to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor’s hand sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. Of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.”
Like going to Zoom dance parties and Zoom virtual coffee hours. I am closer to my sister than I was before the epidemic. We talk in some form via text or phone call every day.
I am running the Chicago Half Marathon again for AIDS Foundation Chicago/T2, I hope I can make some gay friends, or any friend actually through Saturday training like I did in 2013.
At the end of the day, it’s up to me to ensure my own happiness and to get out and meet people. As Jewel so eloquently said “Who will save your soul if you don’t save your own”.
And of course as Seal Henry Samuel said “It’s the loneliness that’s a killer”.
