You’ve probably heard that gay men are image-obsessed, promiscuous, and unable to maintain relationships.
Are we image obsessed?or is that one story first and repeated until we internalize it as how we see ourselves and eventually how others see us?
I recently interviewed Pat Brothwell, a journalist who writes about me person and culture, for a Part of Pride Month studies this phenomenon in journalism.
He had come across an earlier article I had written based on a speech by Chimamanda Adichie.The danger of a single story“,” is one of my favorite speeches where he describes the consequences of using a single story to define a person or group.
As he says, the problem with a stereotype isn’t that it’s wrong, but that it’s incomplete. It takes one story and makes it the only story.
Pat told me he’s watched one story spread in a growing genre of online discourse where people make sweeping claims that the “gay community” is shallow, image-obsessed, emotionally unavailable or incapable of commitment.
So why are we drawn to these sweeping narratives, both inside and outside of society, and are they true? Also, why does it matter?
Several things are happening at once, I told Pat. Part of it is introjection, the process by which we unconsciously adopt the thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes of the people and culture around us. Most gay men have grown up internalizing messages about who they are as gay, and these stories become part of how we see ourselves and each other—the only story.
I grew up without it marriage is always an option. Homosexual marriage wasn’t legal nationwide until 2015, and for most of my life, gay male relationships weren’t a role model for me. I had no idea what two men in a healthy, loving relationship looked like. It wasn’t even technically “real” in my mind. From the closet and fear having almost no understanding of homosexual relationships means how many gay men are related to each other.
For gay men, introjection can manifest as internalized homophobia, which affects the second component, projectionwhere we take what we unconsciously fear about ourselves and project it onto the whole group.
Part of it too confirmation biasthe tendency to notice things that support a belief we hold, while ignoring everything else. When someone thinks gay men are shallow or image-obsessed, they list every instance that fits a single narrative and skip the ones that don’t.
As a therapist who specializes in working with gay people, I hear many clients talk about the specific aspects of the gay community that Pat describes. For many, society can be re-traumatizing childhood an experience of exclusion they hope to leave behind. I want to confirm their experience because there are elements that are true. I also want to help them understand their knowledge schemas or thought patternsand look for exceptions that call one story into question.
As much as there are gays who are emotionally unavailable and obsessed with image, there are also gays who are not.
When we rely on a single narrative of gay men, it’s easy to see them as shallow or image-obsessed. Research shows that gay men have higher levels of body dissatisfaction than heterosexual men, which is clinically relevant in my work.
When we explore what’s underneath, it’s often about the minority stress-chronic stress experienced by gay men as a result of constant stress stigma, discriminationand ostracism from society, family, and early environments where their identity is neglected or abolished. So one story becomes a conversation about minority stress and less about vanity.
By understanding the connection between unhealthy body standards and minority stress, we can challenge one of the most common lonely stories about gay people.
Gay men are bombarded with images of body standards, and it’s important to recognize how inescapable these images are, everything pornography for social networks for marketing in gay bars, to the images the media uses to report gays. Most marketing aimed at gay men relies on narrow, sexualized standards.
For example, viral article Wired published earlier this year. The images depict gay men as hypersexualized stereotypes, including two limp wrists reaching out to shake hands from the zipper of their pants. I just googled images for “gay men” and most of them were shirtless and had muscles.
Challenging one narrative means asking whether the narrative we accept is true. Gay men are not monolithic, and our relationships, desires, and values are as varied as we are. Shared identity does not mean shared experience.
The work of separating who we are from what we assimilate is at the heart of my upcoming book, Being fitit helps cure gay men shamelove themselves and deserve the life they want.
When we exchange one story for a fuller story, we begin to relate to people more than who we think they are.
