this is one of the most important LGBT articles I have ever read in my life. It struck several chords with me and I recommend everyone to take some time to read it.
I was just reading this post about gendered socialization as it relates to emotional labor and I can’t find it anymore but I suspect the topic is particularly relevant to this post. Men, including gay men, never learn how to do emotional labor in their interpersonal relationships and straight men offload that labor onto their wives and girlfriends more often than not but if there’s no women around to offload the emotional labor it just … doesn’t get done. They just get increasingly mentally unwell????
So like, someone tell Michael Hobbes I have a very simple answer for his question.
Gay rights didn’t cure loneliness because toxic masculinity.
This is fascinating (in the sick to my stomach kind of way) that this is the same issues being brought up about bi, ace, and trans people: oversexualization of the community, the importance of positive representation and visibility, as well as intersectionality. It’s no wonder many minority groups don’t feel accepted into the LGBT community at large. They’re literally getting shamed out of the community by people trying to one up each other to display their masculinity to /feel loved at all/ and that’s. That’s a problem.
I also noticed this as a trans guy, but since I’ve had so much self made DBT skills on abuse and self care, especially related to my anxiety (where I got actual DBT), I’ve mostly shrugged it off and figured other guys in the community were doing that too. But thinking back on my experiences, that’s probably not actually as common as I thought.
Quote from article:
Pachankis, the stress researcher, just ran the country’s first randomized controlled trial of “gay-affirming” cognitive behavior therapy. After years of emotional avoidance, many gay men “literally don’t know what they’re feeling,” he says. Their partner says “I love you” and they reply “Well, I love pancakes.”
…Emotional detachment of this kind is pervasive, Pachankis says, and many of the men he works with go years without recognizing that the things they’re striving for—having a perfect body, doing more and better work than their colleagues, curating the ideal weeknight Grindr hookup—are reinforcing their own fear of rejection.
Why Didn’t Gay Rights Cure Gay Loneliness?
Published
Steel Phoenix Studios 