On the emotional poverty of gay men
Turns out upholding the patriarchy was not a slay
I read bell hooks’ formative book The Will To Change over the tail end of my summer holidays. Lazing on deck chairs in southern Albania, my poor travel companion suffered through various “fucks” and “oh wows” culminating in spontaneous rants about just how deep the tendrils of the patriarchy showed up even in the most unexpected corners of our lives. It was a reminder more than a revelation, something I already knew but perhaps shamefully had allowed to fade into the recesses of my mind. Not the existence of the patriarchy per se, but the fact that men too suffered in this prison of our making.
The book was hitting different because this year I have been forced out of my patriarchal patterning by pure necessity. It's been a year of emotional turmoil, experiencing the grief of a relationship ending in a way that totally enveloped me, that I couldn’t possibly weather alone. The entire ordeal forced me into an uncomfortable level of disclosure with friends, an unveiling of the emotional world which up until this point I had largely managed to contain. For the first time ever, I called a friend crying. I messaged at the point of crisis rather than once the crisis had de-escalated. I let my loved ones in even when I didn’t know what I wanted from them, when my feelings were messy and confused, when I felt I was breaking.
And not coincidentally, all the friends who encouraged me to do this, and who actively made themselves available, were women.
hooks speaks in her book about alternative masculinities, about encouraging men to dream up what a masculinity that doesn’t come prepackaged with the subjugation of women could look like. I read this smugly at first. I am the alternative masculinity, I scoffed, the world is constantly reminding me of it. My queerness makes sure of that.
And, like, sure. This isn’t categorically wrong, but it’s a conveniently shallow analysis. The masculinity I embody is an alternative one, but not the one hooks is advocating for. Me and many of the queer men around me hold up oppressive norms of masculinity, while simultaneously performing a ritual of distance from them, as if our queerness absolves us. Eye rolling at straight men being emotionally constipated, while containing the rawest of our feelings to be processed alone. Grimacing at the unchecked sexual objectification of women, while objectifying women through reductive idolatry. Finding covert ways to challenge masculine beauty ideals all while never straying too far from them.
So big whoop, gay men perpetuate the patriarchy, not an original thought. But what I’ve been openly wondering is what the consequences of this are on our ability to care for each other. While we cling onto these core tenets of manliness, of containing our feelings, we deny each other the chance to see our suffering mirrored, validated, spoken to. In many ways we are a group united through a shared suffering, a shared repudiation of the heteropatriarchal expectations of our gender, and yet as men we so rarely let each other in to the details, the plot points of our desolation.
When I look to my gay male friends, I see that we circle gingerly around each other’s emotions while performing availability to them. Liberated from the expectation of total stoicism, we have the ability to offer each other care, to look each other in the eye and acknowledge the existence of challenging feelings. But that’s often where it ends. “I’m here for you” we all say to each other, while never daring to take each other up on the offer, to actually let each other into the unchecked mess of our emotional world. After all, what could be more vulnerable than to actually ask for the help we are collectively feigning the existence of?
It’s why I’ve always struggled with the framing that gay men are in “community”. Community by definition confers a sense of mutual support that in my experience, gay men of my generation only puncture the most superficial layers of. We support each other in ways that don’t require of us a shared vulnerability, that conform to our conditioning as men who must trudge through life’s various hurts alone.
I sense that it wasn’t always this way, that in times of collective grief we are able to break through this barrier. The AIDS crisis is full of heart-wrenching stories of gay men acting as families do, of guiding each other intimately through the most abject physical and emotional suffering. We can care for each other when it really counts. But I lament a world where we can only access this from each other when in the midst of global catastrophe.
I have been trying to break the cycle of emotional poverty among my gay friends, in part because I don’t want to rely solely on the women in my life (who are socialised into, and much better practiced at, finding strategies for mutual support) to be the receptacle of all my distress. But it’s hard. Me and the gay men in my life are all islands, the building of such a bridge between us has to be a mutual endeavour, both parties have to be willing to spill their guts a little. And I sense that holding us all back is the fear, often shaped from a lifetime of being misunderstood, that our emotional needs cannot truly be met. How can we begin to build a type of support system we've never actually experienced? How can we trust that when we find the courage to open up, we will actually be held in all our complexity? And how can we band together to address the core of the problem - the patriarchal system we both benefit from and inherently resist against?
I don’t yet have the answers. In fact, I think I'm still forming the questions.
Thanks for reading and hello from London! I so appreciate your comments and replies so please keep them coming if you feel so inclined. I'm experimenting with writing every fortnight, as the cadence feels much more manageable and allows me to delve into something with a bit more consideration. How do you feel about a fortnightly newsletter over a weekly one? Here's a little travel snap below. Have a great week!
Thanks for this piece, Alexander! I really enjoyed it, and especially connected to the point about not fully expressing our pain or emotional needs for fear of not being fully understood, of not getting our needs met. While I do have gay male friends I have crossed this barrier with, the loneliness and forced emotional self-sufficiency that many of us experience as kids is a tough habit to break. A lot of practiced self-soothing. I’ve been toying with my own feelings around gay “community” and the ways it feels both safe and inadequate — this piece gave me some more insight into that feeling, so thank you.
I’m yet to develop with gay and non-gay men the kind of friendship I have with women. What makes it so hard to get close to men and have the kind of openness and genuine intimacy that I can easily have with women?