In Response to "The Velvet Rage"

I wrote several drafts of this post, struggling to find a balance between including the experiences integral to the narrative and excluding the details that might malign or reveal too much about the others involved. I don't know if this version is the best balance, but I'm choosing to publish it now because I've been sitting on this material for almost three months. Please contact me if there are concerns about the content.

Note: all names have either been omitted or changed within the personal stories.

I recently finished the book (ok, the audiobook) The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World by Alan Downs. It’s very similar to another book (ok, another audiobook) I finished earlier this year—Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown—except it’s written by a gay man about gay men for gay men. I finished the 7-hour audiobook in two days, and then I started listening to it again. Needless to say, it’s captivating.

It’s captivating because there are many experiences or behaviors discussed that I at one time had or currently have, yet I didn’t realize were common to other gay men. Especially potent is the first portion of the book, which moves through a gay man’s childhood and young adulthood and suggests connections between who he is now and what he experienced in years past. Listening to (or reading) this book, the gay reader has an opportunity to draw connections to his own past, and he can reclaim the personal history that he didn’t know was his to claim.

I wrote this essay to gather some of my reflections on portions this book, particularly as it relates to my efforts to reclaim my own history now as an out gay man. What I mean by “reclaiming my history” is reinterpreting my past actions and experiences with the understanding that I was gay all along. Reclaiming my history is taking ownership of my past and asserting the consistency of my past behavior with my present identity. It helps construct a kind of “origin story” by creating a continuous narrative between my pre-out and post-out lives. For me, the ownership of this origin story aids in my journey of self-acceptance.

In this essay, I don’t intend to give a summary of the book. Rather, many of my musings are rooted in the concepts mentioned in the book, but branch out and take on lives of their own.

The first chapter of The Velvet Rage introduces our first relationships—our families, and especially our fathers. Our father was the first man we ever loved. The narrative in this section stresses the ways in which our fathers were emotionally distant, and how we grew closer to mom in response, developing our more emotional and feminine traits. The way the text is written, the reader would assume that this were a phenomenon common to all gay men. It may be true that many gay men share the experience of having a distant father; but, as my dad always says, “Generalizations are at least 10% wrong.” To Downs’ credit, he does occasionally state that some of us had emotionally present fathers. However, he treats these cases as exceptions to the rule. Consequently, many of the steps in his narrative are difficult to bridge without the underlying assumption that our fathers were inadequate.

Because my dad wasn’t like the man described in the book, I found this section difficult to understand. He was involved, present, and caring—sometimes to the point where I got so frustrated with him that I would just stop responding to his questions. A couple months after I came out to my parents, my dad took me out to dinner and asked me what my story was: when I knew I was gay, what it was like at church and going through a Christian high school, etc. I realize that this is an incredible blessing—few parents would take such steps to understand their gay son. But that’s the kind of man my dad is.

At Christian events growing up, I heard more than one speaker channel James Dobson’s theory that men who grew up without a dad or with a dad who was distant or abusive are more likely to be gay. In their adult lives, these men crave male intimacy that their fathers did not provide them, and so they seek this intimacy in male lovers. It seems like a plausible theory, and it probably helped keep me from asking myself any questions about my sexuality. I have a great dad, so of course I’m not gay, the story would play in my head. And that curtailed any self-assessment that should have been conducted years before I finally got around to it.

In the book Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, Justin Lee (the author) recounts his experience at a conference where Dobson’s theory was presented. Like me, his father was not distant, abusive, or absent. However, he knew he was gay, so needless to say, the theory presented in the conference was confusing to him. In an attempt to obtain more clarity, he talked to the speakers afterward. The speakers’ rebuttal was essentially that because he was gay, there necessarily were some instances when his father was insufficient. They recommended that he identify these instances so that the “problem” of his sexuality could be isolated and addressed. Paraphrasing Lee’s commentary on this interaction: what kind of ideology encourages someone to deliberately and meticulously search for faults in the people that he loves?

Just like Lee’s experience, my history blows a hole in Dobson’s theory. It also undermines much of the logic fueling the first chapter or two of The Velvet Rage. In fact, as I listened to the audiobook, I found myself attempting to rack my brain to find dirt on my dad—the ways in which he was inadequate for me. This is not only a nearly futile endeavor in my case, but also a destructive one as well.

I mentioned the time that my dad took me out to dinner to learn my story. At one point during that conversation, he stated that when I was young, both he and my mom noticed I was a bit different in how I interacted with others, especially with my friends. When I came out to people who had known me for several years, including my siblings and parents, common feedback was, “Yeah, I could see it,” or, “Yeah, that makes sense.” How was I different from the other kids growing up? What did everyone notice about me? What things did I do that made my parents and teachers know that there was something odd about me, but that they couldn’t quite identify?

So I probed my dad on this topic. As an example, he brought up that I shared many of my friends with my older brother. That doesn’t strike me as particularly unusual; but then again, how could I know?

I wonder if the fact that I had virtually one friend in middle school is related to my sexuality. In middle school, I spent nearly all my time with him before classes, during breaks and lunch, and after classes. I felt no need to be close with anyone else; I was content with him wherever we were together. (Although maybe it’s not related. The same logic could be applied to his relationship with me, but he’s straight and married now.)

There are some instances I can think of that probably raised some eyebrows. When I was four years old, I pretended on more than one occasion to be Jane from Mary Poppins. (Why not Michael?) I remember pretending to be a girl named Bailey, who was a character in a musical the children’s choir was preparing at church. I remember detaching a mop base and wearing it on my head to emulate long hair while pretending to be a girl. I remember one visit with my grandmother in which she was giving some of her earrings to the women of my family (mom, aunts, female cousins). I took a pair that were made of seashells and announced that I was going to create a “pretty collection”. There probably were additional blatant instances such as these; but were these obvious signs enough to tip an observer off, or were there more subtle cues as well?

As I got older, I must have unconsciously learned to internalize the external behaviors that could have been perceived as cues that I was different. So some of these behaviors appeared as thoughts, which are indicators as obvious to me now as a billboard screaming, “I’M A FLAMING HOMO”. Several instances in high school makes a lot more sense when viewed through the gay lens. It helps me understand why I felt such a strong desire to be friends with that one guy in my freshman year Bible class. I didn’t realize it, but I was attracted to him. And it explains why I went about the pursuit of a friendship with him in such an awkward way (sending him messages through our school’s “encouragement card” system rather than talking directly to him)—I was self-regulating my behavior around him to ensure that I wouldn’t go too far. Spoiler alert: we never became friends.

The gay framework explains why I kept imagining what a classmate in my freshman year geometry class looked like naked. He had a nice body at the time (and I’m sorry to report that he’s somewhat let himself go since high school).

I repeatedly fantasized about nearly all the boys on the cross country and track long distance team. I often cycled through their names in my head and identified whose pants I’d like to go up. I grew especially emotionally close to one of them during my sophomore year, chatting with him nearly daily on Facebook. Hindsight tells me, “no shit you were attracted to him!”

As a member of the boys’ track long distance team my freshman year, I was informed that I would have to undergo “initiation”. The veteran guys on the team alluded to it with a smirk on their faces; I secretly hoped it was something sexual. I asked one of the juniors on the team, whom I was extremely attracted to, what the initiation was. His response was, in a quiet voice, “You get raped.” I played it off as if I were afraid of it, and I even asked another freshman teammate if I should change in the bathroom rather than in the locker room; but I actually wanted it to happen. I wanted to know the experience of sex with another man. So on that afternoon when a teammate picked me up, carried me into one of the bathroom stalls adjacent to the locker room, and simulated dry humping from behind me, I was honestly a little bit disappointed. I was hoping for more.

The gay narrative explains why I got (and still get) so hurt when my guy friends hung out without me. The cases that readily come to mind are a pair of friends I had during my sophomore year, and another pair during my senior year. When these last two got girlfriends following graduation, I fell into a depression because of the perceived time I would be losing with them. I longed for close, emotionally connected male relationships; and whenever opportunities to further these were rejected, I was devastated.

So, needless to say, boys were complicated and risky to have as friends in high school. Perhaps that’s why I spent so much of my time with female friends. Perhaps I found them easier to connect with because there was far less risk of such deep emotional devastation. I could get close to them and meet my needs for emotional vulnerability without being attracted to them.

And that explains why I didn’t date in high school. I put forth the pretense that “high school dating is stupid” as my rationale at the time. Granted, high school dating is indeed stupid, but that wasn’t the whole story. The truth was that instead of being attracted to the only permissible gender within my social circles, I was watching gay pornography. I was waiting until I was more “mature”, as I called it. I equated my sexuality with immaturity, as something that I would eventually outgrow.

I certainly hoped that I would outgrow it before I went to college. I frequently fantasized that once I was in college and free from my parents’ supervision, I could establish a relationship with a guy who would meet me somewhere to exchange blowjobs in one of our cars. I was truly terrified of the prospect of this freedom. I desperately craved the sexual fulfillment, but this action was outside the ethical boundaries of my evangelical Christianity.

In response to this tension that pulled me in opposite directions, I sought out forms of support that other Christian mentors had told me worked. During my sophomore year, a senior friend of mine, in tears, shared with a small group that he struggled with watching (straight) pornography. I reached out to him later that evening and asked if he would like to be my “accountability partner”. As he and I talked more with each other about our struggles, I knew that he and I had fundamentally different problems. The porn he was watching was the porn that he was supposed to watch; my vice was doubly perverse. I was unique. I had no idea how I could help him because I could not understand his desires. I’m sure he must have felt the same way about me. Despite the futility of this arrangement, I sought to maintain emotional intimacy with him, because I needed male emotional intimacy.

That was why, during my junior year of high school, when he returned home from college and did not find time to see me during his winter break, it hit me hard. He and I had been vulnerable with each other, and it felt as though he had abandoned me. That relationship was one risk that did not pay off.

During my freshman year of high school, my parents must have discovered some internet history that I neglected to delete. During the subsequent confrontation late one Tuesday night, my dad, in an attempt to understand, asked if I had had any experiences in middle school of being called “gay” or its associated slurs. I said no; and the truth is, I still can’t recall any instances. I never had the experience of being bullied for being gay; probably because I was a good Christian boy and didn’t even conceive the notion that I could be gay until I was 18, much less embrace the identity.

But even if I had been bullied and called “gay” or “faggot” or “fairy” or whatever, that should not have made a difference. I didn’t need to be “primed” to be interested in gay pornography—that’s not how it works. It was who I was all along. If it were that simple, it could just as simply be undone, and perhaps I would have felt less shame around the issue. But neither my parents nor I was able to understand that.

During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, there were many nights that I stayed up late looking at gay internet pornography. After each of these nights, I went to bed full of shame, crying, and praying that God would make me stop. As I fell asleep, I followed an obsessive-compulsive routine. I listened to select Christian songs in a particular order and then prayed; and I believed that as a result of my demonstrated contrition, any evidence of what I had looked at that night would not be found. I dared not fall asleep without listening to those songs or praying. One morning after one of these nights, I had an email in my inbox from my mom. I remember the subject was “Three [adjective] Lies”. All I remember—and all that mattered—from the body of the email was that the third lie she listed was that I was gay. She had found some evidence from the night before.

How could she have known I was not gay? What right did she have to assert such a claim?

For the record, I had indeed followed my compulsive routine after this occurrence, but it had failed. I frantically sought a reason for the routine’s failure. Maybe I didn’t pay close enough attention to one of the songs. Maybe my prayer wasn’t sincere enough. Maybe I had become too “comfortable” with the routine and was not showing enough remorse.

The day after that first confrontation during my freshman year was the first time in my life that I seriously contemplated suicide. And it was possibly the only time in my life I had suicidal thoughts directly associated with my sexuality. Subsequent suicidal incidents in my late teens and early twenties were always directly associated with stressors that were specifically not my sexuality. When I told my first boyfriend that I had struggled with suicidal thoughts, his immediate question was, “Over being gay?”, to which the answer is, largely, “No”. It’s taken as a given that gay men will struggle with suicidal thoughts in their lifetimes, but it seems difficult for people to grasp that a man who happens to be gay can also have suicidal thoughts independent of his sexuality.

However, a counterpoint is summed up in the mere title of Downs’ book: “the trauma of growing up gay in a straight man’s world”. This book has made it clear to me that I spent most of my childhood and teenage years swimming against the current without even realizing it. I will never know just how much easier my life might have been if I were straight. Perhaps the stress of just being gay, regardless of my awareness of it, made me more susceptible to being overtaken by my anxiety and depression in the ways that I was.

A friend of mine from high school told me a story from her college Welcome Week orientation. In their orientation groups, the new students had to list the top ten adjectives that they believed described them. These lists were subsequently trimmed down to the top five, the top three, and finally the top adjective. She told me of one male student in her group for whom “gay” rose to the top. She said she could not understand why someone would choose that adjective as the core definer of his personality.

Considering the content discussed in The Velvet Rage, that choice makes sense to me. Gay men spend years attempting to disguise our differences and to hide our shame. Consequently, we ran from our true selves and donned many façades for most of our lives in order to fit in. In fact, if someone else were to author a list of ten adjectives describing us, some of these adjectives might be based entirely on false pretenses. As a result, I argue that it takes incredible bravery to assert that “gay” is the top adjective. This signifies that the gay man has (at least partially) abandoned the false images of his identity that he had presented. In a world that opposes being gay, he has allowed himself the freedom to be. This is also why choosing “gay” as the top adjective is fundamentally different from a straight person choosing “straight” as their top adjective.

In The Velvet Rage, Downs characterizes a gay man’s first relationship as tumultuous, particularly when both men in the relationship have not overcome their shame of being gay. That adjective applies to my relationship with the first man I fell in love with, which happened during the first half of my undergraduate years. Now, I am careful to distinguish this man from my first boyfriend. My first boyfriend was not the first man I fell in love with. In hindsight, I think Sean holds that slot.

I fell for Sean at an extremely unfortunate time: it was at the height of my depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts; it was during the period in which we were both members of a homophobic Christian fraternity; and it was when he was denying his sexuality by pretending (hoping?) to be straight.

I met him at a Christian fraternity rush event at the beginning of my first semester at Berkeley. I opted not to pledge the fraternity that semester; however, he was also part of the church college fellowship I attended. The desire to get closer to him was a non-trivial factor in my decision to pledge the following semester. I suppose not surprisingly, then, Sean was the first brother that I “interviewed” after I began pledging. One Sunday morning in February, we cooked pancakes and bacon at the fraternity house and drove into Tilden Park. There he told me about the recurrent sexual relationship with a guy that he had had in high school. He described the immense shame that he had felt related to this sexual relationship. His flavor of Christianity was incompatible with this behavior, so he actively rejected his feelings and had managed to convince himself that he was attracted to women now. But the admission of his past only made me more attracted to him. I anticipated the future further emotional intimacy that we would experience discussing and dissecting the nuances of our struggles of attraction to men. But these conversations never happened, despite his promise to “talk more about this later” after I came out to him.

Sean’s straight-façade made him a favorite of the fraternity; he was someone who had demonstrated that “conversion” was possible. The more brothers I came out to, the more I heard, “Have you talked to Sean yet?” His esteemed position in the fraternity delegitimized the pursuit of the thought experiment that Christianity and same-sex attraction could coexist. And he himself was a relatively outspoken critic of his past, and of homosexuality more generally. He both directly and indirectly perpetuated a toxic, homophobic fraternity culture that invalidated a core part of my identity. Despite this, my attraction to him only continued to grow.

Near the end of my pledge semester, it came time for those of us living in the fraternity house the next fall to select our rooms. I was low on the priority list for room selection since I was a pledge, and I was fourth of five within my pledge class. As my pledge brothers made their selections, I hoped that no one else would select the remaining open slot in Room 8, the room that Sean had selected. I wonder if the tone with which I said, “Room 8” conveyed an eyebrow-raising amount of enthusiasm.

Sean was the incoming fraternity president for my first active semester, the fall of my sophomore year. He appointed me to be “Worship Chair” shortly after I was activated. I accepted the role, but hesitantly, because I was still processing the trauma I experienced while pledging as recently as two weeks earlier—in fact, I was considering rejecting my fraternity membership entirely. After a month of unsuccessfully attempting to move past the trauma of pledging, I sent him a message on Facebook in mid-June saying, “I don’t want to be worship chair.” He never responded, never acknowledged receipt. There was so much sub-text that I wanted to tell him, so much pain underneath those mere seven words, that his silence was invalidating.

Sometimes the invalidation that I received from him was more overt. Within one week of returning to Berkeley, I began to tell him about the trauma I suffered during the pledge process, and that the doctor who diagnosed me with obsessive-compulsive disorder characterized my experiences as emotional abuse. I hoped for validation in response to my total vulnerability with him; instead, he responded by saying, “That wasn’t emotional abuse”, and proceeding to tell me that I didn’t know what emotional abuse was.

In the spring of my sophomore year, a few of us, including Sean, took a trip to a national fraternity event. During this trip, I noticed that Sean expressed physical affection with everyone from our chapter except me. As the trip wore on, the lack of physical affirmation I received from him devastated me. In the car one evening, another brother commented on how touchy-feely the members of the other fraternity chapters were. Sean responded, “Well, I do more than my fair share of physical contact for our chapter.” I almost vocally objected, “Except with me,” but I remained silent.

Following this incident, I shut down emotionally in his presence. I did not speak to him for two weeks unless I needed to. Because I was his roommate, he took notice of my passive-aggressive behavior, and he talked to one of my pledge brothers about it. During this period, I developed tunnel vision. I took notice of every hug, every back rub, every pat he gave to other fraternity brothers. Finally, one evening, I told him it hurt that he would not touch me, but he had no qualms freely touching everyone else. His deeply invalidating response was far from an apology: “I’m sorry that my actions have such a strong effect on you.” He shifted the blame onto me, as if my desires were unreasonable and evil. On the contrary, my desire for physical affection from him makes perfect sense in hindsight given my attraction to him.

One theory is that his avoidance of physical contact with me was because he was attempting to avoid temptation through physical contact with gay men in general. However, he had no problem initiating physical contact with the two other gay fraternity brothers; I was the exception, not the rule. A second theory is that his avoidance stemmed from a reciprocal attraction to me. My therapist at the time proffered that theory. In hindsight, that theory does seem plausible—or maybe I’m just being arrogant.

Of course, if all my interactions with Sean had been similarly wounding, perhaps my love for him would have waned. But there were plenty of experiences in which he gave me the validation I needed. During one of my most serious suicide incidents to date, he stayed up with me until sometime after 3 AM, listening to me attempt to verbalize the deep pain I felt. As I prepared to go to sleep, he invited me to sleep in his bed with him. The following afternoon, after I came back from class, I lay on my bed, too depressed to get up. When he arrived to the room, he said nothing, but gently placed his hand on my back—a trivial action that offered so much relief.

Two days later was Thanksgiving. I had a Skype call with him from a Starbucks near my grandmother’s house. On the call, I told him that I wanted to deactivate from the fraternity, and I asked him how I could do so. Without any hesitation or pushback, he helped me create an action plan to inactivate. He gave me the unquestioning support that I needed in that moment. He was validating my experience.

I suspect that the occasional validating experiences such as these were enough to keep my feelings for him alive, even though he fell short more often than not.

In The Velvet Rage, Downs mentions that two gay men who have not overcome their shame over being gay have great potential to wound each other. So I cannot pretend that the tumult Sean and I experienced was exclusively his fault.

Near the beginning of our time rooming together, I asked him to occasionally check in and ensure that I was actively practicing cognitive techniques to manage my anxiety. I let him know that he could press me a bit if I demonstrated hesitation. Early one Sunday morning, I woke up to prepare for a full day of work. He also woke up, and before he left his bed, he asked how I had been handling my anxiety. I did not feel like having such an emotionally intensive conversation at that hour, so I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. Yet he repeatedly pressed me with increasing aggression to answer, even going so far as to follow me down to the kitchen as I grabbed a granola bar for breakfast. After I left the house, I received a text from him saying, “Wow, not even a goodbye. You must be really mad.”

It was all too much for me. But rather than resolving the issue, I gathered my essential items from my room and slept in the open bed in one of my pledge brothers’ room for a week. During this time, I did not speak to Sean. After I had had time to gather my thoughts, we talked and resolved the issue.

He had good intentions. He wanted to help me. And he did exactly what I asked him to do. But what was a compassionate action was poorly received. And I left him in total darkness. I can only imagine the despair and confusion he must have felt; my silence must have been deafening.

For the entire duration of his senior year and my sophomore year, he pursued a relationship with a girl from UCLA, Kelly. This pursuit did not sit well with me. At the time, I thought it frustrated me because he was deluding himself by denying his latent same-sex attractions which I was certain still existed. His occasional comments of, “she’s so hot!” did not convince me. While his inauthenticity did indeed frustrate me, I now realize that I also felt intense jealousy. I wanted that relationship to fail because I did not want to lose Sean. It was the same pain I felt after my high school guy friends got girlfriends following graduation.

Near the end of the school year, I asked him if Kelly knew about his history with other guys. To plant any seed of doubt that I could, I pressed him further, asking him if he was even sure that he was straight. He admitted to me that he was most likely bisexual. I halfway obtained the confessional that I wanted to hear; but my motivation had been to sabotage his relationship with Kelly. What did that say about my values?

I am certain I dealt Sean many more horrendously wounding blows during the height of my desire for him. But I am oblivious to the pain that many of these have caused, just as he is likely oblivious to the wounds he dealt me.

After he graduated, he and I met up every couple of months at his prompting to get dinner. But once he and Kelly broke up and he came out, he disappeared from my life almost entirely. We got dinner one evening shortly after I moved to San Francisco, and I asked him how the transformation from homophobic Christian to posting pictures with his boyfriend on Facebook had occurred. I then told him that he was the source of much emotional damage for me because of the toxic homophobic fraternity culture he perpetuated. He apologized; and, unexpectedly, he asked me why I stayed in the fraternity. That shocked me, given his historically pro-fraternity stance. I never expected him to validate the doubts I had had about my membership in the fraternity.

It is clear from this text I have written about Sean that I have not healed from the emotional wounds I experienced during my first love. And that I haven’t fully gotten over my first love. Notwithstanding all the pain he caused me, I still wish he were in my life, even as a friend. Not to mention that I am still madly physically attracted to him. Today, he does not respond to my occasional text messages. It still feels to me as though there is unfinished business between us. I don’t know what that business is, but that single dinner we had was not enough closure.

I know it was insufficient because a large part of me doesn’t want him to be happy. I often get angry seeing photos of him with his boyfriend or with a group of other gay men. I get angry learning which of my gay friends are also friends with him. I got angry when I learned that a friend of mine had sex with him—something I have wanted for six years. I suspect I get angry because he fully embraces his sexuality now, so other gay men get to reap the benefits of gay Sean. Conversely, I received nothing from him despite passionately desiring him for two years. That feels unfair. In addition, he never had to experience the oppression that he directly perpetuated, so his current ownership of the gay card seems hypocritical.

This seems like an awkward and abrupt place to end the essay, but in a way, it also seems appropriate. It’s somewhat reflective of where I find myself today. This essay contains both many “aha!” moments as well as allusions to underlying shame and insecurity. Similarly, I find myself in the middle of a journey toward self-acceptance—a journey in which both moments of clarity and moments of shame coexist. Yes, it’s uncomfortable and awkward to simultaneously confront these two emotions, but all I can do is take them head on while moving forward. I view the reclamation of my history as an important part of this journey, and writing this essay has given me the courage to take another few steps forward.

Oh, and yes, I do recommend reading The Velvet Rage.