What is autism spectrum disorder? To fully understand this phenomenon, we have to employ the medical model.
Big disclaimer: the medical model is far from perfect.
According to this model, there is something inherently wrong with autistics. Historically, this rationale has also been used to marginalize and oppress us.
For most people, the social model is preferable, as it argues that the issue lies not with neurodiversity, but with society’s failure to accommodate it.
The social model aims to destigmatize autism, whereas the goal of the medical model is to diagnose and treat.
Pathologizing aside, getting an ASD diagnosis can open the door to disability-related legal protections, supports, and services. This is one example of how the medical model can be of use to those with autism, and their loved ones.
So, what is autism spectrum disorder?
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological developmental disability.
Autism is characterized by ongoing deficits in social communication and social interactions in a range of contexts. Other criteria for autism include “restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities”. 12
Autism symptoms manifest in the early development period and typically cause clinically significant impairment in key areas of functioning.
To receive a diagnosis of ASD, these symptoms must not be better explained by the presence of intellectual disability or global developmental delay.
A diagnosis of ASD is typically accompanied by a severity measurement of “Level 1”, “2”, or “3”. Level 1 means the individual requires some support, Level 2 substantial support, and Level 3 very substantial support.
(Remember how I mentioned the medical model is pathologizing? An example of this is the DSM-5 terminology I just used, such as “disability”, “deficits”, “symptoms”, “impairments”, and “severity”.)
Autism often appears alongside other conditions, such as epilepsy, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, sleep problems, gastrointestinal symptoms, anxiety, and depression.
Who gets diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder?
Males are diagnosed with autism at three times the rate of females, but this doesn’t necessarily mean autism isn’t as common among females.3
One study found that autistic females as a population are better than males at hiding their autistic traits. This results in fewer diagnoses, later diagnoses in life, and misdiagnoses.
It’s also been argued that autistic females may present autism in a way different from their male counterparts.4 And due to many measurements being male-centric, females may be overlooked by current diagnostic measurements.5
Additionally, autistics from racial minority groups are typically less likely to receive a diagnosis of ASD.6 Instead, they are more likely to receive other diagnoses such as ADHD and conduct and adjustment disorders.7
Many conclude that reflects medical disadvantages experienced by minority groups as a result of structural inequality.8 But it’s important to note that autism traits can also go overlooked or can be misinterpreted, depending on the sociocultural context. 9
Why are some people autistic and others not?
There are no clear answers here, however, some studies point to a range of environmental risk factors and protective factors.
These include advanced parental age, low birth weight,1011 fetal exposure to the epilepsy medication valproate,12 intake of certain vitamins,13 maternal autoimmune disorders, environmental toxins, and breastfeeding.14
Links have been made between unique gut microbiota compositions and the development of autism. Other studies have indicated strong genetic influences, concluding that autism is highly inheritable.151617
How does one get an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis?
To get an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, you need to be screened by a trained professional.
For children, there’s a range of tools. For example, the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers Revised, the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, and the Screening Tool for Autism in Toddlers and Young Children.181920
For older adolescents and adults, the gold standard for autism diagnoses is the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-2) module 4.21 Professionals typically use this tool alongside direct observations and taking patient history.
The Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) is another gold standard autism diagnostic tool that is suitable for both children and adults.22
Again, I want to point out here that these diagnostic tools may be gender-biased and thus more likely to detect male autistics than female autistics.
When seeking out a diagnosis, it is worth checking to see that the person doing the assessment is using the most current, research-backed screening measures.
If seeing a professional is not an option, adults can also use self-reporting tools such as the Social Responsiveness Scale, Second Edition: Adult form (SRS-2).23
Additional tools are available for assessing how autism is impacting one’s activities of daily living and quality of life.
How is autism spectrum disorder “treated”?
There is no biomedical treatment for autism spectrum disorder, however, psychotropic medications are available and often prescribed for those who are experiencing symptoms such as anxiety or depression.242526
For autism specifically, there is a range of therapies, the most commonly used being Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).27
ABA is designed to help autistic children with the development of social, communication, and expressive language skills.
The dominant strain of ABA has been heavily criticized by autism advocates for violating individual autonomy and even doing direct harm to clients.28
Critics have also pointed out that there are conflicts of interest among researchers who publish scientific literature in support of ABA as an autism intervention.29
Clearly, there is room for improvement when it comes to current ABA intervention. However, ABA is one of the few treatments that remain widely accessible.
In many US states, health insurance providers are required to cover ABA-related expenses under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
One alternative to mainstream ABA is Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBI). NDBI is more child-directed and provides intrinsic rewards for learning and participating.30
Other available interventions support the development of core skills among autistic children, such as social communication.31
Additionally, programs exist for young adults, such as the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS®).32
For autistic young people and adults, psychotherapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are recommended for those who experience comorbidities such as anxiety and depression.3334
These are available in both individual and group formats.35
Wrap up
So there you have it, my brief introduction to autism spectrum disorder.
Again, I want to stress that much of the content I shared is presented using the medical model.
But remember: viewing autism exclusively through this lens is not only limiting—it also fails to give consideration to some of the strengths of being neurodiverse.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
The first proof of my trauma recovery was the return of memories once thought lost.
In the years after I started my therapy journey, I would find myself going about my business—walking my dog, showering, or driving to an appointment—only to be suddenly ambushed by recollection.
Usually, these memories came to me in fragments: an odor, a feeling, a face, or a conversation.
I’d remember my excitement playing Link’s Awakening for the first time on my Gameboy Color. Or maybe I’d recall my late aunt’s tuxedo cat, Sylvester; the mockery of a snub-nosed boy in sixth grade.
Sometimes, I’d hark back to my first glimpse of the technicolor shells of iMac G3 in a school computer lab; the fantasies of collecting one of each “flavor”: Bondi Blue, Strawberry, Lime, and Tangerine.
Other times, I’d wax nostalgic about the rain rattling the tin roof of the family home or the particular smell of the department stores my mother would like to spend hours wandering in search of sales.
Now and then, I’d think fondly of the moments spent loitering at the local newsagent, thumbing through copies of PC Powerplay and Nintendo Power magazines, dreaming about one day owning all the latest gaming consoles.
With each of these memories came emotions, often in a big jumble: longing and regret, as if for something lost, bittersweet joy, and sadness.
A past rediscovered: the start of trauma recovery
When I think of time, I think of years, represented as a series of three-dimensional bar charts. Each bar represented a different month, arranged in a stair-like formation.
At the end of the month, I would imagine myself ascending a new bar, continuing until I had arrived in December, before moving on to the next chart behind it.
After my traumatic experiences, when I tried to peer back to the charts that had come before, my recall became hazy and my brain seemed to actively resist the effort.
If memories are like snapshots, all that was left to me were the countless throwaways that were returned to us when my family got our photos developed.
Always there were four or five shots that were to be out of focus. Sometimes a thumb was blocking the lens, or the flash of our disposable camera had blown out the image.
But the snapshots that now came to me, sealed for over 25 years inside some protective, internal vault, had all the vivid clarity of the present moment.
Puzzling as I was by this return, I was equally puzzled by the timing. The fragments were random and unconnected to my current circumstance. Just what was going on?
A sign of healing
For decades, trauma had strip-mined my consciousness of all evidence of my past; of memories both pleasant and painful.
Now, I was starting to amass a sizable collection. But having no idea what to do with them, I consigned them to a mental storehouse for later review.
Then, during one particularly humid summer—a summer that reminded me far too much of those of a childhood spent in the tropics—I was inundated by a wave of these memories, leaving me both bewildered and melancholic.
“It sounds like you’re healing,” my therapist replied, trying to normalize what to me felt painfully abnormal.
“But why? What function does this serve?” I asked through my tears. “Why now? I just want to understand.”
What I wanted was a cut-and-dry explanation for what is, for everyone, a messy and unpredictable recovery process.
Therapists liked to call this behavior “intellectualizing”. In my case, I was trying to bypass an emotional experience by using my intellect.
This “ego defense” was one I had depended upon for years to cope with my trauma. It was also one of the key obstacles to my healing.
Reintegration: the beginning of trauma recovery
So rather than resisting the wave, I rode it, allowing the memories and emotions they conjured to come and go.
Soon after, I embarked upon a single-minded hunt for various articles from my childhood.
This involved preparing a playlist containing every memorable song of the 90s and the early aughts. Next, I put together a book list containing every title my teen self had read.
After this task had been completed, I hunted down scans of the magazines I’d once flipped through and the illustrated video game guides and manuals I’d once savored during long car trips.
Often, my searches did not culminate in any action; I didn’t always listen to the music or consume this reading material.
Instead, I found a strange comfort in the fact I once more had possession of these formerly lost relics from my past.
This obsessive collecting on my part I realized was an outward expression of an internal process: reintegration.
The part of myself I had once cut off was returning piece by piece, and I was searching for props to help facilitate its assembly.
I was working, in my own way, towards a whole, coherent narrative of self and past.
“The goal of recounting the trauma story is integration, not exorcism.”1
Herman goes on to explain:
Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites…for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. Denial, repression, and dissociation operate on a social as well as an individual level.
Undertaking therapy allowed me to finally release the taut knot of my trauma survivor psyche. And with that release had come recollection—not just of traumatic events, but everything in between.
Memories in turn triggered “floods of intense, overwhelming feeling”, which proved wholly alien to me after years spent dwelling in the “extremes of amnesia…and arid states of no feeling at all”.
I was not in crisis; I was in a state of trauma recovery. And in order to complete that recovery, I would have to let go of the three skills that had permitted my survival through alienation from my own self—denial, repression, and dissociation.
When one cannot escape a reality in which one feels threatened and powerless, one finds ways of adapting.
I too had once acted as if nothing had happened, ignoring my emotions, burying memories, and mentally checking out when confronted by a frightening reality.
They had served an adaptive function. But maintained over time, they had caused the margins of my life to contract to a pinprick in which only survival is the only possibility, and never true flourishing.
This is a kind of living death; imprisonment in a psychological internment camp.
And now, finally, after years spent walking through a dim, gray limbo, I could see the possibility of a death revoked, and life renewed.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
Much of the small talk that happens on gay dating apps is, in my experience, a preface to a request.
“What you up to?” someone may ask, and behind this seemingly polite question, invisible gears are turning.
Maybe this stranger will hear my response and respond authentically, or maybe they will continue with the subterfuge of trying to gauge whether I’m willing and able to sustain a fantasy – or fulfill a desire.
For someone who is seeking to build connections, these obvious attempts at assessing sexual eligibility can quickly become soul-sapping.
So the last time someone asked “What you up to?”, it was hardly any surprise that I responded with, “Getting a frontal lobotomy”.
I was in my own way trying to shake my chat partner out of automaticity, but all I got in return was the acronym “lol”.
Clank, went the invisible gears, and within seconds, my chat partner was proceeding with his script.
“Cool. You looking?”
Some people may describe this kind of attention as affirming. Personally? I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m being treated less as a human being, than as a prospective reward.
These boxes reinforce desired behavior by dispensing a reward such as food, or punishment in the form of a shock from an electrified floor grid.
Andreas1/Wikimedia Commons
Skinner boxes are a perfect analogy for gay dating apps. The difference here is that messages, or more specifically, the attention they represent serves as the reward while being ignored is a form of punishment or negative reinforcement.
As app users, we maximize reward and minimize punishment using strategic and even deceptive self-presentation and engagement. We tailor profiles and our behavior in ways that will gain and sustain attention, even if they aren’t necessarily authentic.
We may boast about our preferences or prowess while using erotic photos as bait for our chat partners.
Some of us may go so far as to create fake profiles or message someone exclusively with the aim of receiving a response.
Messaging purely for attention, however, may be the first signs we’re developing a process addiction. Here’s why.
Why gay dating apps are addictive
At one point during his studies, the inventor of the Skinner box – American scientist B.F. Skinner – modified his boxes to dispense food pellets according to a random number of lever presses.
His pigeon test subjects, rather than being deterred by the unpredictability of the exercise, quickly learned to press the lever at random, even when no pellet was immediately forthcoming.
What Skinner realized was that this very same unpredictability had created a tension of expectations, which was released the moment the pigeon received their reward.
Skinner credits this tension-reward loop, also present in slot machines, as being the main driver behind addiction.
We can see that loop widely incorporated today in video games, social media, and even dating apps.
Consider the unpredictable nature of “rewards” on Grindr, Scruff, or Tinder: users log on and off at random, and the rate of replies can vary completely, sometimes even within the span of a single conversation.
Meeting someone off the app may begin as a tantalizing fantasy, but it’s one that ultimately can’t compete with the dopamine-seeking reward-loop offered by the back-and-forth of instant messaging.
The result is an experience that could be broadly described as ineffective, at least where it comes to generating face-to-face interactions.
Of course, if you were to canvas a group of gay men at random, I’m not sure a consensus would ever be reached on what constitutes an “effective” dating app chat session.
After all, everyone’s definition of a reward will vary from interaction to interaction, day to day, sometimes minute to minute. Yes, humans are a fickle bunch.
How addiction creates dating app sociopaths
Dating apps don’t help, in that, they all seem designed to facilitate any variety of interactions. Some may use the app with the intent to meet, while others are simply looking for a distraction or the thrill of erotic chat or photo exchanges.
Suppose we come to the apps with a specific goal in mind. Gamification in many cases will nudge us towards abandoning specificity, towards being open to any and all interactions, if only for the momentary gratification they promise.
Our sole purpose thus becomes the maintenance of the tension-reward loop.
Sustained use will lead many users towards a nebulous middle ground, simultaneously craving all of the above, yet never finding true satisfaction. And yet we keep coming back. Why?
Notably, Skinner found that pigeons in his experiments continued to peck a lever even once their appetite had been sated. His conclusion: the action of cranking a lever had in and of itself become “fun”.
You can see the same behavior among users. Like edgy, risk-averse stockbrokers bidding in an incredibly volatile market, we hedge our bets, messaging indiscriminately just to see who will bite.
After firing off scores of messages to multiple chat partners, we wait for the replies to trickle in.
Too much tension and frustration – not enough replies, significant delays, or “inferior” rewards – and our sense of enjoyment will diminish.
Our only recourse then is to either adjust our expectations or spread our net more widely in order to maintain the loop.
Profile grids and swipe stacks will come to resemble an ever-shifting buffet in what feels like a perpetual famine.
In the 10+ years in which I’ve used gay dating sites and apps, I’ve often caught myself logging in just to see who had messaged, less interested in the content of the communication than the sheer fact of its existence.
It became clear to me that so long as I was caught up in tension-reward loop – in the split-second objectification, relational multitasking, devaluation, and dismissal that seems baked into digital modes of interaction – I could hardly expect to form healthy relationships with other gay men.
How, when I was treating chat partners as mere levers to be pulled for personal gratification?
The single-mindedness with which we perform this action, according to researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, is the antithesis of empathy:
“Single-minded” attention means we are thinking only about our own mind, our current thoughts or perceptions. “Double-minded” attention means we are keeping in mind someone else’s mind at the very same time… When empathy is switched off, we think only about our own interests. When empathy is switched on, we focus on other people’s interests too.
It is in the absence of such empathy that we adopt sociopathic behavior. And just like the sociopath, many of us – consumed by our process addiction – will go to extreme lengths in the pursuit of satisfaction.
Consider these traits, as laid out in the seminal work on sociopathy, The Mask of Sanity:
superficial charm
absence of anxiety or guilt
undependability, dishonesty, egocentricity
complete inability to form lasting intimate relationships
failure to learn from punishment
absence of emotion
lack of insight into the impact of our behavior
failure to plan ahead
For those of you who have or continue to use gay dating apps, I ask you this: have you not experienced or dabbled yourself in superficial charm and unpredictability?
Or worse still: deceit, manipulation, and outright nastiness?
The system is hopelessly broken
Chances are you’re alone. Tragically, the addictive qualities of gay dating apps have created an environment where sociopathic behavior is now the status quo.
Strangers will issue demands and unsolicited erotic photos, interrogating our sexual preferences before blocking us at random.
While these tendencies are not specific to gay men, app-based reward loops positively reinforce these behaviors while failing to offer real accountability.
The result is an endless chain of victimization in which bad behavior is normalized and internalized and we all unwittingly find ourselves either in the company of or becoming, gay dating app sociopaths.
It’s no secret that gay dating apps aren’t designed to foster genuine, heartfelt connection, or for that matter to enforce personal accountability.
Their goal, rather, is to gamify interactions with the goal of sustaining use, indefinitely. But in so doing, they train us to associate self-worth with constant affirmation.
In our pursuit of that affirmation, we will find ourselves pulling out all stops to feed it, even if it means completely disregarding and discarding others along the way.
The system may be broken, but it remains profitable for app makers, so there is little motivation for change. But as individual users, we can and must hold ourselves to a higher standard of personal conduct.
We can do this by:
Exercising self-awareness: curbing usage motivated only by the desire to get a “fix”.
Empathizing, rather thanobjectifying: treating people with kindness, consideration and courtesy. Being honest and upfront with our intentions and not stringing people along when we aren’t interested in them.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
You would think that as gay men, we shouldn’t be bound by the same life goals as our straight counterparts.
Yet as much as we try to shuck off the expectations inherited from heterosexual living, many of us still continue to be burdened by them.
I remember as a child studying the greeting card stands at newsagents, noticing how certain birthday ages seemed to be assigned greater importance.
“Thirty” was one of them: a perfectly rounded number signifying the transition to competent maturity. An expectational cut-off point for all the usual milestones.
Until my teen years, I harbored ideas about the life I would live. They weren’t necessarily my own, but rather the ones all boys were prescribed: a wife, kids, and a house in the suburbs.
All of this, I somehow believed, I’d attain by the age of 30. But as my interest in other boys grew, I was eventually forced to surrender these signifiers of adulthood for the wicket picket fence dream they were.
Thirty is, when you think about it, an arbitrary number. Life expectancies in the West have steadily risen. We live for much longer now, and our lifestyles have shifted to accommodate this.
Yet when my third decade rolled around, I couldn’t help but feel like something was missing. Not only had I clung to those old expectations – I also secretly believed my worth as a person depended upon their attainment.
I found myself scrutinizing the zigzagging missteps of my life, criticizing each and every false move. Maybe if I had stayed in one city and planted my roots somewhere, I’d have a wider, stronger circle of friends; possibly even a partner.
Maybe if I hadn’t devoted most of my income to creative projects, I’d now have something approaching financial security. Maybe if I had kept my aspirations humble, I might have something more tangible than life experiences to show for it all. But to show whom, exactly?
I had lived what Passages author Gail Sheehy called the “wunderkind” life pattern, caught up in chasing risks and victories. I had deceived myself into thinking achievement would blot out insecurity, to discover that the victories I did achieve were ultimately empty.
To quote one of the men interviewed by Sheehy: “I’m near the top of the mountain that I saw as a young man, and it’s not snow. It’s mostly salt”.
Gay men and the failure of dreams
What troubled me most was an unarticulated belief that in spurning the dependable comforts of home and family, I had failed and was now declining into a life of gay spinsterhood.
I convinced myself that the connection and happiness I was seeking would forever remain out of reach. Everything I told myself to the contrary was just whistling in the dark. How’s that for a catastrophic spiral?
Life after 30 for some gay men is riddled with uncertainty. Society promised us one thing – then biology pulled the rug out.
Logging onto Facebook today, I see people I’ve grown up with buying homes, marrying, and having children. While they were hitting their life goals, I was like a wheel, spinning in the mud.
Resist comparative thinking
Comparative thinking is especially destructive where it comes to gay men. It does not acknowledge the fact that straight people have thousands of years of social tradition working in their favor. The modern gay community, on the other hand, is without precedent.
Worse still, in the spiritual teachings handed down to us, homosexual people are typically cast as undesirables living in the margins. There is little to no guidance offered to gay men committed to living an authentic, value-led existence.
And let’s not forget the fact that many gay men in the West could not, at least until relatively recently, get married. No surprise then that we should struggle to achieve these life goals at a speed comparable to that of heterosexual men.
The journey faced by all gay men
Still, as we grow older, missing familiar life milestones along the way, some of us may find ourselves asking: “So that’s it?”
We may flee our shame, grief, and dread, into the wilderness of material and sensual distraction.
For some gay men, however, these feelings are an opportunity to address the desires we once held for ourselves and begin the process of rewriting them.
In facing our supposed failings, we find we have no choice but to remove the yoke of social expectation. Those of us who make the journey through this valley of symbolic death will face the assailing winds of pain and doubt.
But if we push on, we will most certainly emerge anointed with a newfound sense of personhood. For it is in the struggle that we learn to articulate our personal definition of a “life well-lived”.
This journey does not simply involve grieving the things that could have or “should have” been: the children to whom we might have left our legacy, the symbolic safety that a life partner or a home offers. It also involves grieving the life that simply “is”.
For a long time, I pretended I was fine, that growing up as a gay man with a disability, suffering exclusion, bullying, the slow implosion of my family and the figurative loss of my parents had not affected me.
Attempting to escape the resulting depression and anxiety, I connected my sense of worthiness to striving and constant forward action. By setting milestones of my own making when those prescribed to me were no longer possible, I found purpose through achievement.
But to value one’s self conditionally is to live conditionally. And living conditionally is a life defined by fear, not fulfillment.
According to The Velvet Rage author Alan Downs, fleeing from pain into grandiosity is an almost universal behavior among gay men. Entering my 30s proved the tipping point in this regard. It was also an invitation to change.
Entering the ‘neutral zone’
What I lamented when I turned 30 was the fact I had not fulfilled socially prescribed rites of passage.
Rites of passage help mark the onset of new stages of life or social roles. Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep defines each rite as having three stages:
Separation of the individual/group from the larger collective.
Transition from the old ways of existence to the new.
Incorporation of the individual/group back into the collective.
Gennep noted that during the transition phase, those making the journey will find themselves caught in a neutral zone, where they would remain until the change has been internalized.
Transitions author William Bridge argues that completion of the middle step means letting go of “something that you have believed or assumed, some way you’ve always been or seen yourself, some outlook on the world or attitude toward others”.
This requires passage through five states:
Disengagement from “the old cue system that served to reinforce our roles and to pattern our behavior”
Dismantling of old habits and behaviors
Disidentification from old ways of being
Disenchantment: realizing you do indeed want to change
Disorientation: enduring the confusion and emptiness that follows your choice to let go
According to Bridge, a successful passage is thus marked by a willingness to let go, to experience the resulting crisis, and to embrace self-examination.
Seeking alone time
The middle step for me involved disengaging from systems that perpetuated my sense of having failed. Specifically, I applied “voluntary simplicity” to my social media usage, reducing and sometimes cutting it off altogether.
Why? You may have heard of the phrase conspicuous consumption: the purchase of luxury goods as a display of economic power. Social media I believe facilitates what I’ll call “conspicuous identification”: promoting images of an ideal self in a bid to capture social capital.
No longer did I need to compare myself to others, to analyze where I had supposedly fallen short.
By negotiating with my employer to switch from full-time to part-time work, I was able to disidentify from the rat race and my sense of self as an achievement.
In cocooning myself in therapy and self-help books, I gained better insight into the disenchantment I was feeling. I formed a daily meditation practice to help find meaning in the midst of my disorientation, placing me on the path of self-realization.
While dwelling in the neutral zone, I cultivated self-compassion and started deliberately setting aside time for things as simple as relaxing. I suddenly found I had the time and energy to work my way through aspirational to-do lists, lists that I long since consigned to the dust heap.
This allowed me to embrace those beliefs that were of most value to me while discarding those that had only kept me shackled to unhappiness.
Coming of age as gay men
Coming of age for many gay men means learning to surrender the baubles of distraction and to grieve old hopes.
In learning to let go of what we may have long clung to, we escape an existence governed by impossible dichotomies like success/failure, worthy/unworthy, good/bad, and come into an inheritance of vast inner wealth.
Without the struggle, there are no spoils. So it was, that in finally confronting the source of my inner torment, I understood that while my life had not “gone to plan”, my experiences had endowed me with compassion and empathy.
This realization inspired a career change, a shift towards a life of service, and the decision to launch this blog.
Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson argues that from our 20s onwards, we are caught between two opposing forces: intimacy and isolation. Once we have established a firm sense of identity and a desire to share our lives with others, a choice that may not come until our 40s, the struggle after this period becomes one between stagnation and generativity.
If we choose generativity, we achieve new levels of creativity and productivity in the service of others. We discover a life path oriented toward prosocial behavior and altruism.
It is only now, years after crossing the gulf of what I then saw as a major crisis, that I recognize the true value of the life I now live. And all things considered, I’m doing pretty darn well.
For those of you committed to making this transition, as countless others have done before you, I offer this assurance: you’ll probably think so too.
Takeaways
Recognize how you might experience disengagement, dismantling, disidentification, disenchantment and disorientation during this transition.
Find wholesome ways of easing your passage through the neutral zone.
Imagine what generativity might look like for you.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
Gay dating is riddled with pitfalls, but perhaps the most significant is the rampant judgmentalism we face – and inflict – upon one another.
The irony is that we approach dating expecting chemistry while treating each other in ways that make it almost impossible.
The catch-22 is that unless we feel safe unless we can let our guards down, we’re going to resist being vulnerable. And without vulnerability, there is no chemistry.
Judgment and gay dating
I met Bryce* one evening over boba tea. Bryce was a guitarist from the UK who had come to Los Angeles with big hopes of breaking into the music industry.
As we exchanged details about our lives, Bryce made a number of flattering remarks about my appearance, flashing flirtatious grins, while indicating he genuinely wanted to get to know me.
As our conversation rolled on, Bryce asked me about my family and we somehow got onto the subject of trust.
“I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt,” Bryce said.
“That’s great,” I replied. “I used to be the same.”
Bryce looked at me, expectant. I smiled, explaining I had firsthand experience dealing with a relative who was a pathological liar and that this had left me somewhat wary.
Almost immediately the warmth left Bryce’s expression. I excused myself to use the restroom, and when I returned he asked to call it a night.
Out in the car park, I offered Bryce a polite farewell hug.
“Oh, we’re going to hug, are we?” he sneered, then walked away.
I got into my car, confused. Had my comment had been mistimed? Had I overshared?
Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that no time would ever have been appropriate for such an admission.
For in opening up to Bryce, I had breached an unspoken code by which many gay men live: never expose your vulnerabilities.
Gay dating and expecting perfection
Being born gay almost always guarantees an inheritance of trauma or invalidation. Having been bullied and marginalized for our differences, in particular our emotional expressivity, we learn early on to hide these, lest others brand us “feminine”.
Some of us do this by constructing a perfect exterior, or by hiding behind keen wit, brand name wardrobes, gym-fit physiques, or career success. In many cases, this is the mark of insecurity, born of an unrelenting inner critic.
Deprived of self-compassion, we, in turn, become incapable of mustering empathy for others. When a romantic interest tries to be vulnerable with us, to let their imperfections hang out, there is a strong possibility we will treat this as an infraction.
Thus, having ourselves been rejected for being our authentic selves, we come to reject others for what we perceive as their weaknesses or flaws.
I believe it’s for this reason that many of us choose hookups over dating. We’re even more likely to avoid connections if we have in the past put ourselves out there, only to be shut down.
Hookups furthermore validate. They offer us instant gratification while sparing us the emotional risks typically associated with relationships.
In her bookDaring Greatly, Brené Brown notes that we commonly associate vulnerability with “dark emotions”. But so long as we remain terrified of recognizing, acknowledging, and discussing such emotions, they continue to exert significant control over all aspects of our lives.
Imperfection is a given
Most gay men will suffer some form of trauma and a degree of neuroticism by virtue of what we have lived through. Psychology Today defines neuroticism as “a tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and other negative feelings”.
Unfortunately, the popular doctrine of masculinity asks that we hide our anguish and struggles. Those who fail to do so are mocked and rejected. Social conditioning has more or less made emotional concealment a condition for acceptance as males.
But our wounds and imperfections are a fact of human existence, ones that will sooner or later be revealed in the course of dating.
While I believe this act of revealing should be treated as a generous gift and met with compassion and understanding, many of us resort instead to the scorn and rejection we ourselves have suffered.
When we do this, we don’t just perpetuate a cycle of harm – we rendergay dating an exercise in futility,
Until we have learned to be comfortable with our wounds and to reintegrate that emotional part of our identity we have split off as a matter of acceptance and survival, we will not treat vulnerability with the honor it deserves.
And so the meaningful relationships we all ultimately desire will continue to elude us.
Use discernment, not judgment
When dating, judgment may serve as a valuable defense mechanism, allowing us to screen out people who may pose a threat to our interests.
The gay dating world is, after all, rife with people who are irresponsible in their actions, inconsistent in motive, and generally lacking self-awareness.
This is especially true on gay dating apps, which cannot enforce personal accountability. People we’ve been engaging in a heartfelt chat with can, for example, decide to reject, ghost, or block us, often without an apparent cause or explanation.
It’s no wonder then our reaction is to always be protecting ourselves, yet there is a difference between preemptively attaching negative labels to someone and genuinely trying to understand and relate to them.
To this end, first dates should be treated as much as an exercise in rapport-building as one in information gathering. We should work to learn about our date’s habits and character; to build a holistic assessment in the place of making a snap judgment.
Chemistry is important, certainly, but true chemistry is a slow-burn phenomenon that can only flourish under conditions of emotional safety. So we must first create a gay dating environment in which it can flourish.
We do this by choosing discernment over judgment.
Discernment in practice
Judgment is a process of assigning values and drawing conclusions, while discernment is a process ofperceiving facts and making informed inferences.
Your date for example may tell you they find you very attractive. They may insist they are looking to date. But they may also label themselves a workaholic.
You will notice here a disparity between a stated desire and practiced action, one that seems to suggest this person may not really want to date. Dating, after all, would require that they be willing to shift gears; to consider putting people before things.
Workaholics by definition neglect their own needs. They are therefore unlikely to have the mental bandwidth to accommodate another person’s needs.
When a date defines themselves as a workaholic, they may be intentionally or unintentionally “Mirandizing” you. That is, they are reading you your rights as a romantic candidate, telling you what to expect. Namely, that their job will always come first.
If we probe a little deeper, workaholicism for many gay men is an expression of covert depression, masquerading as grandiosity. There is a possibility this person may have some challenges they need to work through.
Unless your date is taking proactive steps to help themselves, to be in a relationship with them may require that you be willing to accept – if not enable – their avoidance.
By making observations about the facts presented here, I have practiced discernment.
But discernment also tells me that while my date has admitted to being a workaholic, thisis a clue, not a conclusion.
Keep on gathering intel
Red flags may leave you with reservations, but it is imperative to keep an open mind, while also looking for data that may contradict or confirm the evidence at hand.
In the situation above, you may subsequently learn your date was joking about being a workaholic, or that they are in fact willing, ready, and able to break the habit.
With positive discoveries like this, we may feel tempted to abandon our assessment. Still, information gatheringis a process that cannot – and should not – be rushed when gay dating, lest we miss evidence of future problems.
After all, when meeting other gay men we tend to put our best foot forward – at least initially. Over time, our true nature seeps out through the chinks in our armor. Such glimpses of our true selves are often the most telling.
One of the perils of expediting assessment while dating is that we may overlook this true self. Or we may never even get the chance because we’ve already ruled that person out, thus missing out on the opportunity to connect with a possible kindred spirit.
For this reason, we must strive to recognize the commonality in our stories and to offer one another the compassion we are all seeking – and rightfully deserve.
Takeaways
Dysfunction and imperfection are universal.
By dismissing a date, we may be perpetuating harm we ourselves have suffered.
True chemistry only happens when we feel safe.
When we judge, we create a hostile environment that undermines vulnerability.
The alternative is to practice discernment, compassion, and empathy.
* Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all individuals discussed in this article.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
It’s not uncommon to meet fellow gay men suffering from anxiety and depression. It’s also not unusual that they are either unaware, in denial, or unwilling to recognize these challenges, or to take the steps necessary to address them.
Some years ago, I had a falling out with my flatmates. At the time I was directing a major shoot at film school and was under immense pressure. Amid my mad scramble to find a new apartment, I decided to meet Samson*, a gay man in his 20s who worked as an IT consultant.
Having exchanged niceties, Samson quickly got down to brass tacks, advising me he wanted a flatmate willing to hang tea towels and stack dishwashers in a specific fashion.
As someone known for my somewhat OCD tendencies – I for example never allowed people to sit on my bed while wearing their “outside clothes” – I could to some degree relate.
But Samson seemed to take things one step further. A health fanatic devoted to all-natural products, he told me I wouldn’t be allowed to clean with bleach, on the account he might be exposed to its fumes.
Despite my reservations, I took the room. But from that first meeting onward, the stipulations piled up. One minute I was using too much fridge space, the next I was filling the kettle with “excess” water and wasting energy.
Samson even took to switching off the oven when he believed I was using it too long.
While he managed to bend some of his rules for me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my presence in Samson’s home was not welcome. I could tell that while he wanted to save on rent, but also wanted to live alone.
Worse still, whenever we happened to cross paths, Samson would complain. First, it was about his cutthroat colleagues at work. A week later it was the ex who seemed incapable of empathy, and the friends who failed to understand Samson’s very specific health choices.
Samson told me he was against eating hydrogenated oils, on account of them being carcinogenic. For him, discovering that a meal contained even a trace of such was enough to ruin an entire night out.
Listening to Samson, I felt torn. Some of his complaints were understandable, and yet I knew I was being used as a sounding board for his discontent.
I tried to bring empathy and some perspective to the issues Samson raised, and yet nothing I said or did made any difference. Samson was trapped in a cycle of negative thinking, focused only on assigning blame to others.
So long as he continued to see the apparent failures of others as a reflection of their respect for him – and by implication Samson’s worth as a person – this would likely continue.
Samson’s paradigm was clearly at fault here, but I became convinced that it was serving double duty as a smokescreen for Samson’s inability to manage his own distress.
By pretending it was not there, he would never have to confront it. Yet this unwillingness to accept and recognize his covert depression was precisely what was keeping him stuck. Rather than practicing introspection, Samson searched for scapegoats.
Once or twice I broached the subject of seeing a therapist. Each time, Samson produced a readymade excuse.
The few therapists Samson had approached would not take his health insurance. The nature of Samson’s job meant he was often on the road with short notice, making it difficult for him to plan therapy sessions in advance.
Then there was the question of trust: Samson didn’t want to open up to just anyone.
These were legitimate friction points, ones faced by many gay men looking to undertake therapy. But they were also excuses. As per the old maxim, if you really want to do something, you’ll find a way.
1. Gay men often suffer from depression
An inability or unwillingness to acknowledge one’s own mental health struggles is usually a product of self-denial; of alienation from one’s own authentic feelings.
Like a majority of men, we as gay men often suffer interpersonal prejudice and discrimination over our identities. These minority stresses can leave us stricken with shame while placing us at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide.
That risk is exacerbated by the fact that males are socially programmed to go at it alone. Masculinity is popularly coded as being self-reliant, an idea more widely echoed in our culture’s embrace of rugged individualism, i.e. the “I don’t need help from anyone” mentality (see my earlier article on embracing your authentic gay identity).
Gay men tend to be more emotionally expressive than their straight counterparts. Gender-atypical tendencies like this often lead to us being singled out and persecuted. Any wonder then we should be especially challenged when it comes to asking for help.
But forcing ourselves to repress our emotions and to cut ourselves off from the help of others leaves us prone to covert depression. This depression is often the reason many of us should seek help…and yet it can also serve as a major source of resistance.
Depression sufferers know all too well how we can become trapped in the stasis field of negative thoughts and “automatic”, self-perpetuating cognitive distortions.
In his book Feeling Good, David D. Burns notes that these distortions lead in turn to procrastination and “do-nothingism”. That is, we found ourselves restrained by the very same inertia we are seeking to escape.
Thus the depressive, lacking the motivation to change, surrenders to the comforting familiarity of their unhappiness.
Another reason it is difficult to take action is that covert depression operates as a kind of background presence that evades easy detection, or may be put down to just a passing “mood”.
Similarly, anxiety – depression’s fraternal sibling – may also be dismissed as an inevitable feature of modern life. It may even be regarded as a helpful crutch that gives the sufferer a motivational edge; a willingness to go the extra mile that is recognized and rewarded by employers.
2. We may have attachment difficulties
Caregivers play a crucial role not just in early development but our future wellbeing. They comfort us during times of distress, fostering a sense of security through healthy attachment. That attachment serves as a template for future relationships, shaping whether we are able to form close bonds with others.
Attachment also provides children with an internal working model of self-worth. It defines whether we see the world as a safe or nurturing place, or one full of pain, uncertainty, and anguish. It provides the primary reference point for our lived experience.
Ruptured attachment is the result of either active trauma, which typically involves a boundary violation such as physical or sexual abuse, or passive trauma, which involves some form of physical or emotional lack, such as neglect. Ruptured attachment can occur at any point during childhood or teenagehood.
Gay men experience both active and passive trauma when a parent rejects, neglects or attacks them over their sexuality, an experience which is all too common.
During early attachment, trauma is preverbal, making our suffering literally beyond words. As such, it can be difficult to “re-cognize” the experience and come to grips with its effect on us as adults.
Without the help of a trained practitioner, we will continue to live unknowingly in the shadow of our trauma, afflicted with mental health conditions like depression.
3. We may be unable to self-soothe
Ruptured attachment results in an inability to self-soothe. When our caregivers fail to properly “attune” to us and provide the correct behavioral modeling, we fail to develop this vital skill.
Self-soothing means being able to realize we are hurting, to give ourselves the comfort we need, and to seek it from others when we can’t.
Without self-soothing, we may find ourselves prone to “fight, flight, or freeze” in times of stress.
That is, we engage in one of three coping strategies: coming out guns blazing, running from danger, or shutting down. We don’t seek the support we so desperately need, leaving us beholden to depression and anxiety.
For gay men, depression is often compounded by longstanding shame. The distinction between guilt and shame, as pointed out by Brené Brown, is that guilt involves believing “I did something bad”, while shame involves assigning a permanent negative quality to yourself, like “I am bad”.
We come by shame firstly through socialization. Society teaches us our sexuality is abnormal, perverse, and even morally wrong. When this view is adopted by our caregivers, it may not necessarily lead to outright rejection, but rather words or deeds that are invalidating.
Invalidations, no matter how small they may seem, can inflict profound psychic wounds, Alice Miller says. If the only people in the world duty-bound to love you unconditionally mock or belittle you because of your sexuality, you may come to believe you are inherently unlovable.
The child with a devastating belief in his own unworthiness is likely to carry it into adulthood. If left unaddressed, this belief can leave us relationally impaired, resulting in an insecure attachment style.
Attached authors Amir Levine and Rachel Heller estimate about half of the adult population suffer from insecure attachment styles. In the case of gay men, this figure may arguably be even higher.
How a therapist can help gay men
Therapy is one way we can identify the impact ruptured attachment or invalidation has had upon us. It offers avenues for reconnecting with aspects of ourselves we may have become alienated from as a result of parental and social rejection and invalidation.
A relationship with a therapist ideally is reparative. They model the unconditional acceptance of an ideal caregiver, creating an accepting space in which clients can vent to thoughts and feelings they have been forced to repress, often as a matter of survival.
A good therapist uses compassion and insight to help their patients reintegrate alienated parts of the self. Through their guidance, gay men can come to terms with the loss and anguish they have suffered.
Therapy requires that we go to places we have been avoiding. After a lifetime spent mastering the art of emotional concealment, gay men undergoing therapy are asked to forgo their craft and expose their wounds and weak spots.
Embracing vulnerability in this fashion allows us to ultimately regain our long-lost ability to be emotionally authentic.
Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt… Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego… Either we question our beliefs – or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality – or we begin to challenge them.
Choosing a therapist
Making the decision to undergo therapy sometimes feels like half the struggle. Then you have to deal with the deadly triad: money, scheduling, and what Samson called trust, but which I like to think of as compatibility.
You can’t put a price on your mental wellbeing, so don’t let the cost alone thwart your efforts. If you don’t have a mental health care-inclusive health care plan, consider finding a therapist who offers sliding scale fees. If you need to take time out during working hours, negotiate with your manager or HR department.
When choosing a therapist, we all need assurance that we are in safe hands. We are, after all, seeking the unconditional acceptance we were once denied. Our chosen confidant, therefore, needs to show they will honor this responsibility.
Bessel van der Kolk suggests three criteria by which you can gauge this: comfort, curiosity, and collaboration. To that list, I would also add proactivity and accountability:
Comfort: Do you feel comfortable and safe in the presence of this therapist? Do they seem comfortable with you? In the words of van der Kolk: “Someone who is stern, judgmental, agitated, or harsh is likely to leave you feeling scared, abandoned, and humiliated, and that won’t help you resolve your traumatic stress”.
Curiosity: Does the therapist seem interested in you as a person? Or do they see you as just another patient to be handed a rote list of advice and instructions? Do they actually listen to you? Are they comfortable sitting with your distress? Or do they immediately leap into diagnosis and prescription?
Collaboration: Is the therapist demonstrating a genuine desire to work with you, to explore your issues in-depth and to formulate a treatment plan?
Proactivity: Some therapists tend to take a nondirective role. As a result, you may feel you have to overcompensate. Sessions may become endless talk marathons, broken only by you prompting your therapist for participation. There is great value in a sympathetic ear, and venting is definitely part of the process. But given for example depression’s tendency to keep us trapped in automatic thoughts, we are never going to make the necessary shifts in our thinking without the help of someone willing to interrupt, redirect and even challenge, where necessary.
Accountability: Does your therapist honor their appointments with you? Do they cancel or reschedule on short notice? A therapist who is unpredictable or inconsistent can’t provide you with the security and caregiver-like “containment” you need. This also works in reverse. Do they help keep you accountable? Set tasks and homework? Without proper follow through on your behalf, your recovery may be hindered.
Remember: you are not locked into any therapist relationship. Treat the first session and those that follow like you would a date. You may be seeking immediate relief, but your objective should be to assess compatibility.
In the end, there is no use building a relationship with someone who isn’t capable of giving you the support you need. Be willing to shop around until you find the right fit. And if it isn’t working, be prepared to move on.
As with any endeavor, you will face setbacks. Sometimes these setbacks may simply come down to lack of motivation. If this is the case, break the task of finding a therapist into baby steps and try to complete one step a day.
The act of unlearning maladaptive behaviors and patterns can take months, if not years. Your recovery ultimately comes down to your being patient with the journey, flexible in your approach, and perhaps most importantly, remaining committed to your wellbeing.
Creating a new self unburdened by the injustices of your past first requires that you choose to break with the old.
“When I let go of what I am,” says Chinese philosopher Laozi, “I become what I might be”.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
Even today, gay boys and men grow up facing the dual challenge of cultural homophobia and its byproduct: internalized homophobia.
The chance they will suffer from the latter is magnified when that homophobia plays out in the family home.
When I was 14, I remember a relative telling me that HIV/AIDS was the result of “gay men having sex with monkeys”. Say what?
“Oh, but it’s true,” the relative insisted. “Scientists have proven it.”
Today, such a claim could be easily disproved with a quick Google search. And while confusing being gay with bestiality might have been laughable, the statement had carried a hateful subtext.
What this relative was really saying was that gay men were despicable sexual deviants.
That same message was conveyed in countless other situations. Once while visiting a friend of my father’s, I was forced to listen to him rant about a male flight attendant he’d noticed wearing makeup.
“He’s just a f****t,” the friend said, as if this explained everything. “I found it nauseating”.
These comments left me burning with anger. Any passionate defense I mustered would, of course, have outed me, and meant enduring the disdain not only of this homophobe but my father as well.
In high school, a girl I had considered a friend complained to the entire class about seeing a news segment about the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade.
“Why do gay people have to shove it in our faces?” she said. “It’s disgusting.” Never mind the fact she herself had chosento watch the segment.
Our teacher had simpered in agreement. Then—in a tone that was meant to convey tolerance—he stated that while he personally had no problem with gay people, he believed they should “keep their sexuality to themselves”.
Which is precisely what I did. With these kinds of comments being thrown about, there was zero chance I would be telling anyone about my sexuality any time soon.
It is no surprise then, that in this kind of hostile climate that we as gay men feel compelled to live lives of subterfuge.
The source of internalized homophobia
The same year I was told gay people should “keep their sexuality to themselves”, I undertook a job bagging groceries at a local chain store.
The store was occasionally visited by a rail-thin man wearing a goatee and garish gold jewelry, who had a tendency to mix and match his clothes: a tie-dyed shirt with cow-print pajama pants, a bucket cap with mandals.
I guessed by his mincing movements that he must be gay, a fact that left me puzzled. Every gay boy and man knew that flamboyant behavior invariably drew negative attention. Was this fellow trying to paint a target on his own back?
It is only with hindsight now that I realize this stranger’s campness was not necessarily an act of showy defiance but self-acceptance. The problem wasn’t his embrace of femininity, but the fact that I was uncomfortable with it.
Femininity, after all, was a quality I had long learned to disguise as a matter of survival.
Yet in accepting that my safety depended upon my ability to conform and “pass” as someone straight, I had unwittingly internalized homophobia.
The low down on gay men and femininity
Gay men face marginalization and persecution often because we tend to behave in non-heteronormative ways, which in turn enable others to identify our sexuality and use it as a basis for exclusion.
Gay men are typically portrayed in the media as being more feminine and are commonly labeled “sissies” and “pansies”.
But is there any truth to the claim that men are more feminine than their heterosexual counterparts?
In Gay, Straight and the Reason Why, author Simon LeVay reveals that gay people do indeed tend to be “gender-atypical” when it comes to certain “gendered” traits.
What traits exactly are gendered? According to LeVay:
In the area of personality, men rank higher than women on measures of assertiveness, competitiveness, aggressiveness, and independence… Women rank higher than men on measures of expressiveness, sociability, empathy, openness to feelings, altruism, and neuroticism… Men prefer thing-oriented activities and occupations (e.g. carpenter), whereas women prefer people-oriented activities and occupations (e.g. social worker). Women have better-developed aesthetic interests and less-developed technological interests than men.
As a group, gay men tend for example to score higher than straight men on tests measuring empathy, aesthetic interests, and verbal fluency.
Studies have revealed gay men are less physically aggressive. They are also gender-shifted towards instrumentality, expressiveness, and people-oriented occupations. (Note here the use of “shift”, as opposed to “inverted”; that is, gay men as a group do not completely adopt typically feminine traits.)
This masculinity involves a form of self-reliance that asks us to cut ourselves off from our emotional selves, our mothers*,and the support of our communities.
Socialization teaches us to view emotional expressivity and vulnerability as feminine traits that must be avoided at all costs.
The prevailing definition of masculinity, of what it means to be a “successful man”, is one of self-reliance.
This self-reliance and independence are further promoted by widely adopted social beliefs such as rugged individualism: i.e. “I don’t need anyone’s help, I can do this all on my own”, or the practice of stoicism, which advocates keeping a “stiff upper lip” in the face of hardship.
Self-reliant masculinity is promoted by the archetypal male hero in movies and television, be it the hardboiled detective of crime fiction, the tough-as-nails gunslinger of Westerns, or the ironclad action hero.
These characters typically prove their merit through unflinching courage and physical prowess.
According to this definition, the opposite of self-reliance is weakness. When we exhibit “feminine”—that is, the gender-atypical—traits, we inadvertently signal to others that our masculinity is “defective”, thus inviting homophobic scorn and condemnation.
Double-barrelled shame
Gay men historically have received a double dose of hostility, on account not only of gender-atypical traits but of being seen as inherently flawed.
Being gay was once viewed as an act of rebellion against the laws of God, as per the Bible’s accounts of Sodom and Gomorrah. Gays were viewed as “perversions”, on par with the likes of pedophiles.
The advent of modern science saw being gay reclassified as a mental disorder, a label that would remain until 1973 under the order of the American Psychiatric Association.
The perception that we were untrustworthy and possibly dangerous, however, persisted.
Consider for example the “Lavender scare”, in which thousands of gay people were purged from US military services and intelligence agencies from the late 40s and into the 60s.
In 1953, President Eisenhower even signed an executive order banning gay men from employment by the US government and its private contractors.
Suspicion towards gay men endured even from 1981 onwards, with the advent of what was initially called the “gay disease”, “gay cancer”, “gay plague” or “gay-related immune deficiency”.
The negative light in which we as a group are regarded and the emotional repression demanded of us places significant strain upon our mental health.
Given we naturally tend towards empathy and expressiveness, I would argue this strain is greater than that faced by heterosexual men.
In the face of social pressure to emulate ideals of “manliness”, and the dismissal, ridicule, and physical harm we may face when we defy them, many of us find ourselves falling in line.
We do this by taking on the loathing others harbor for our authentic selves, altering our self-presentation along the lines of the masculine ideal.
That is, we learn to conceal our more evident “feminine” traits, including our interest in other men. Some of us may even avoid all possibility of judgment by eschewing the company of heterosexuals and moving to live in a gay village.
But the inauthentic shell which we don as a matter of necessity may become a new comfortable norm. Self-loathing will likely leave us crippled by ongoing covert depression.
Unable to tolerate our vulnerability, we find ourselves in turn unable to tolerate it in others. We adopt judgmentalism, rejecting other gay men as we ourselves were once rejected.
Gay bars, clubs, and dating apps are rife with this kind of behavior, which in many cases is an expression of internalized homophobia. Consider, for example, those who write “no femmes” on their dating profiles, or demand a highly specific “masc” type or muscular physique in their partners.
While not as dramatic as a closeted man cruising a gay nightclub and attacking someone for making a pass at him, this is a latent form of internalized homophobia. It is characterized by an emotional repression so painful that many sufferers find themselves seeking refuge in grandiosity or addictive behaviors.
The irony of this repression and its byproducts is that they only further our existing sense of isolation, creating conditions ripe for more depression.
In order to free ourselves from the tyranny of homophobia, we must learn to accept and embrace all facets of our identity – without fear of reprisal. Source: Elise Gravel
The cure to internalized homophobia
In order to overcome self-loathing, we must first acknowledge how we have suffered by turning away from our authentic selves.
To break the hold internalized homophobia has on our lives, we must learn to accept and embrace all facets of our identity—without fear of reprisal.
For some of us, this may involve an outward exhibition of our more feminine traits. We may choose, like the goateed stranger of my teenagehood, to wear whatever we want and to act in the way that feels most natural to us.
Or we may simply seek to reconnect with and express our emotions; to let down our guards and create conditions in which others can do the same.
It is through such shared vulnerability that I believe we can ultimately achieve true healing, not just as individuals, but also as a community.
Takeaways
Being gay historically was seen to be a perversion or illness.
Gays as a group show some “gender-atypical” personality traits.
One is the typically “feminine” trait of emotional expressiveness.
Expressive gay boys and men thus face double the stigma.
If we are to heal, we must restore emotional authenticity.
* I acknowledge that disconnection from one’s mother may not apply to all men, for example in the case of being raised by a male caregiver, or gay parents.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
Well before I came into my gay identity, a man approached six-year-old me at the park and called me by a word I’d never heard before.
“You dirty little wog,” he said, apropos of nothing.
My dad overheard this and stormed over, executing some kind of judo move. Next thing the stranger was lying flat on his back—instant comeuppance I might have reveled in, had I recognized the racist insult for what it was.
This was my first real experience of prejudice, but it was by no means my last.
Growing up in small Australian towns, I was aware of the constant undercurrent of homophobia, xenophobia, and ableism. You’d catch it in the way people would weaponize words like “r*****d”, “s*****c”, “gay” and “special”.
Then there were the charming portmanteaus people would make of my name and those of infamous political figures, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
As a gay Middle Eastern kid with autism, I was subjected to more than my share of the nastiness.
In high school, some bullies caught me reading a play on the bus and branded me a “f****t”. I had a plastic water bottle thrown at my head.
In order to survive, I hid. By spending my lunch hours in the library reading and not talking to my classmates, I made myself a smaller target.
All the while, I secretly plotted my revenge. One day, I told myself, I would grow up to be someone very BIG and IMPORTANT and SUCCESSFUL—and then I’d show them.
The grandiosity I dreamed of would be the panacea to my feelings of being inferior.
Holding fast to my belief that I was someone important, I vowed to defy my bullies; to prove that I was inherently better. It was a thin veneer for my battered self-esteem and the shame of being different.
When grandiosity overtakes authenticity
For the remainder of my school years, I adopted a fierce work ethic. When I graduated, I was a straight-A student, at the top of several classes.
I was pleased—but I was not vindicated. And so, I labored on, well into my adulthood, abandoning my authentic gay identity.
I lost any concept of downtime. Weekends and holidays were sacrificed in pursuit of lofty goals and ambitious projects.
I accrued degrees, traveled the world, relocated several times, wrote multiple unpublished books, and released a feature documentary. Still, it was not enough.
My way of surviving had become my way of living. The world, as a result, had grown hopelessly grey, while I had become a prisoner at the mercy of an inner critic, whose voice was that of ancient bullies.
In an attempt to manage my depression, I would work around the clock for months on end, before the anxiety driving me gave out and I crashed.
The all-consuming preoccupations of grandiosity would flip into depression, then back again to grandiosity.
While trying to dig myself out of a serious bout of suicidal ideation, I was finally forced to accept that I was trapped in a cycle, one that was only getting progressively worse.
This survival mechanism had paradoxically created conditions ripe for self-destruction.
In the words of Self-Compassion author Kristin Neff, “Feelings of shame and insignificance can lead to a devaluing of oneself to the extent that it even overpowers our most basic and fundamental instinct—the will to stay alive”.
This, unfortunately, is a reality for many gay men. Pressured by society to reject our authentic gay identity, our lives are overshadowed by an enduring sense of worthlessness.
Gay men and depression
In I Don’t Want to Talk About It, a book detailing the silent epidemic of male depression, author Terry Real explains that as boys, we are socialized to split-off so-called “feminine” traits of emotional expressiveness and vulnerability.
We are told to turn away from the nurturing care of mothers, from our own emotions, and from the help of others. Instead, we are coerced into embracing a limited and perfectionist form of masculinity.
But this masculinity is not a state of being, so much as a kind of membership that is at constant risk of being revoked.
Given the widespread prejudicial association of being gay with femininity, we as gay boys in this sense are at particular risk of judgment, ostracism, abuse, and harm.
In most cases, we have no choice but to repress our shamed non-heteronormative identities.
Cut off from our emotional selves and the nurturance that is so critical to our flourishing, all boys suffer a form of passive trauma, which—if left unaddressed—can lead to covert depression.
Our inability to seek the help we need, to soothe ourselves in times of distress, combined with the pressures of conforming to an impossible ideal and the shame of not measuring up, inevitably forces us to seek relief.
So we turn to addictions such as drugs and drinking, or behavioral or “process” addictions like sex, gambling, food, video games or exercise, or the “performance-based esteem” offered by grandiosity.
What is grandiosity?
Grandiosity is a way of coping with the loneliness and grief of self-alienation. It can wear many faces, including those of achievement, perfectionism, and workaholism.
Grandiosity is, in essence, the flip side of depression, and many of us spend our lives alternating between the two, with devastating effects.
In The Velvet Rage, Downs outlines the struggles gay men face in the course of ignoring or silencing their emotions.
When we fail to investigate and integrate them into our gay identity, we are essentially “foreclosing” on our conferred identity as victims (to borrow a term by James E. Marcia).
We become trapped in a narrative that is not of our own making.
While grandiosity may anesthetize us against pain in the short run, whatever relief we might find comes at a cost.
Afraid that the ground might fall out from under us, we become dangerously addicted to chasing even more grandiosity.
The pursuit ofmeritocracy is further fueled by the belief that we live in a world where all hard work is rewarded, and effort makes all dreams possible.
This belief, however, can be dangerously deceptive, as philosopher Alain de Botton points out in his excellent TED Talk.
“Somebodyness” refers to the popular Western belief that we are destined to one day be “somebody”. It fosters the idea of individual exceptionalism.
While these ideas can be motivational, for the grandiose gay man, they may lead him to view success and recognition as the only true measure of his self-worth.
When he fails to constantly achieve, he is thus likely to blame himself, to the exclusion of all other factors, thus denying himself the right to self-compassion.
In seeking external validation rather than internal validation, we grow increasingly distant from our authentic selves, which further reinforces the pursuit of grandiosity.
It is crucial therefore to recognize the role grandiosity is playing in stopping us as gay men from breaking harmful patterns and achieving true healing.
Authenticity = healing
Brené Brown in her book The Gifts of Imperfection describes authenticity as “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are”.
For Brown, authenticity involves:
“cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable;
exercising the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle; and
nurturing the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe we are strong enough.”
Thus, before we can achieve the true healing and self-acceptance offered by authenticity, we must first reclaim our split-off emotional selves.
Here are a couple of suggestions I have found helpful on my own journey:
1. Stop running from your gay identity
Our recovery depends upon our willingness to be self-aware. Self-awareness for me is a process of connecting the dots: we come to devise a clear story about how our past experiences have influenced our present circumstances.
Daily journaling and meditation help foster conditions for self-reflection. Two books I have found helpful for facilitating journaling are Jen Grisanti’s Story Line, which is designed for screenwriters but is nevertheless helpful, and Katherine Woodward Thomas’ Calling in “The One”.
It is through the process of excavating buried experiences that we will start to identify with our painful emotions and understand why and how we have repressed them.
These “Aha!” moments help bring into better focus the sources of our grandiosity. They enable us to reconnect with our authentic gay identity.
2. Do a cost-benefit analysis
Once you’ve identified why you might be driven towards grandiosity, draw up a simple cost-benefit analysis.
At the top of a page, write the habits or behaviors you are grappling with. Then create two columns below, one labeled “Advantages”, and the other “Disadvantages”.
Now grade both columns out of a shared pool of 100 points. Is it a 50-50 split? 60-40? 30-70? Your honest assessment should give you a good idea of whether it might be time to revise your grandiose habits.
You can find a sample version of a CBA by Feeling Good author David Burns here.
3. Face your depression
In order to reclaim our emotional authenticity, we have to surrender our addictive defenses, such as grandiosity, re-identify with the injured parts of ourselves and reject our entrenched sense of shame.
We do this by allowing our covert depression to surface as overt depression; by embracing the emotions we have long suppressed. It is by doing this that we reclaim emotional authenticity.
In the words of author Terry Real: “Depression freezes, but sadness flows. It has an end”.
This transformation can be achieved with the kind of corrective experiences offered by a therapist.
Through their support, we learn to “reparent” ourselves: to reconnect with our split-off emotions, and to employ self-soothing in times of distress.
4. Reprioritize self-care
Alongside self-soothing, we must also learn to employ regular self-care. A common belief with grandiosity is that your health, well-being, and happiness should never come first.
You can combat this perception by practicing self-care as a matter of priority. Consider:
Scheduling at least an hour of downtime every day.
Ensuring at least one day of the week is designated work-free.
Set time limits on activities you know lead you towards grandiosity.
Start self-nourishing hobbies like reading, gardening, or hiking.
Treat yourself to a bath, a massage, or a fancy meal out with a close friend.
Embrace your authentic gay identity
Ultimately, your journey towards wholeness can only happen if you are willing to accept that the promises of grandiosity are ultimately flawed.
You won’t prosper by them—not at least in the metrics that truly count. Nor will you feel better about yourself in any enduring or substantial way.
And the independence you achieve through grandiosity is a fallacy because it by its very nature demands your dependence.
We are social creatures. Relationships with others are crucial to our sense of wholeness. And to love and be loved requires that we first be vulnerable. It necessitates interdependence.
So rather than clinging to some much-vaunted masculine ideal, we would be better served by embracing our authentic, vulnerable gay selves, rather than allowing ourselves to be defined exclusively by our achievements.
Dismantling long-held ways of living is not an overnight process. But next time you catch yourself grappling with the inner critic, treat it as an opportunity to call grandiosity out on its crap—and to start being that little bit kinder to yourself.
Takeaways
Reconnect with your authentic gay identity through journaling.
Conduct a CBA of your current “survival tactics”.
Employ the help of a qualified professional to address your covert depression.
Make self-care a daily habit – starting from this very moment.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
Cocktail: The Joykiller. Description: The perfect cocktail for the aspiring wet blanket. Ingredients: Four ounces of perfectionism, a dollop of workaholism, a splash of stubbornness. Method: Mix, shake well, strain into a glass of rigid thinking. Serve with a twist of stinginess.
Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.
I
Exploring India for most people may sound like a great way to spend a vacation, but for someone with undiagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), it was an unmitigated disaster.
Days before my trip, I completed a web series and the first draft of an alternate history fantasy novel—one of several creative projects on a never-ending, self-perpetuating carousel of work.
Having accrued more than a month’s worth of leave, I decided that the best way to spend my time “off”, naturally, would be to start yet another project.
Me, outside Dehli’s historic Parliament House.
No, I was not going to be going on an adventure and collecting photos for a post-trip slideshow with family and friends.
Instead, I was going to conduct research for a novel—a sequel to another book I technically hadn’t even finished yet. Talk about getting ahead of myself!
I booked a ten-day guided tour around the arid northern Indian state of Rajasthan, once a patchwork of princely states under the British Raj.
This I figured was the very least amount of time I would need to document every inch of my surroundings. I couldn’t afford to miss a single thing.
Printing a copy of my novel draft, I packed my camera and boarded my flight. First stop: Mumbai, where I spent a few days visiting a friend, before striking out on my own to New Delhi.
The next ten days passed in a frantic blur. When I wasn’t snapping photos at some site of historical significance, I was ensconced in my hotel room bed, eating from room service trays as I scrawled notes on my already-dog-eared manuscript.
Room service would knock and I would bark a reply. My sheets and towels didn’t need changing, thank you very much. I could manage just fine with the ones I had.
If I had hoped to soak up the ambiance of my surroundings, I found myself too preoccupied to do even that.
Instead, I found myself staring down, first in confusion, then horror at the metal nozzle projecting on from the toilet seat, not quite ready for the culture shock presaged by a bidet.
When I was outdoors, I distracted myself with a packed schedule. This meant that I was, more or less, constantly moving at a sprint, checking off sightseeing to-do lists in advance of my departure for Rajasthan.
Relaxing, I told myself, would be a waste of my hard-earned leave time, and a plane ticket to boot. Ever the master of delaying gratification, I told myself I could take a proper vacation later, some other time, but only after I had truly earned it.
The Amber Fort in Jaipur.
II
This unwillingness to relax took its toll, however, and by the time the touring car finally arrived to whisk me away to Rajasthan, I was practically manic.
I may have already conducted a ton of research, and yet I still hadn’t completed the second draft of my novel.
Then there was the irksome fact I’d had to sacrifice a crucial train trip to several UNESCO World Heritage sites due to last-minute itinerary changes.
Having planned my visit with the goal of literally seeing everything possible, the completionist in me ached with the idea that I might miss a single thing.
And given my life was already bursting with other commitments, I couldn’t reasonably expect I’d be making a return trip anytime soon.
For the remainder of the ride to Rajasthan, I sat in the back of the car, earphones in, head bowed, reviewing page after page of my manuscript.
If I’d hoped to take satisfaction in my progress so far, I instead found the novel to be sorely wanting. The dialogue was clumsy, and the characterizations paper-thin.
Desert vistas crawled past my car window, and crumbling stonework ruins whizzed by, but I didn’t see them.
Not considering myself to be a “true” tourist, I was opposed to the camel and elephant rides that came as part of my tour package and reluctantly agreed to take them.
My driver slowed the car, pointing out to me grazing antelope. I looked up only long enough to feign wonderment, before resuming striking out text and scribbling corrections.
At the end of each day, I would lock myself in my hotel room and refuse to come out. There was still too much work to be done.
When people dragged their chairs in the restaurant one floor above, generating what sounded like thunder in my room directly below, I complained about the noise to the hotel receptionist.
Didn’t these people realize I was engaged in serious work, churning the next cross-genre literary masterpiece?
How lucky they must be, these carefree vacationers. They didn’t carry with them multiple internal timepieces that were forever ticking over. They didn’t have to fear ceaseless deadlines.
When one hostel I was staying in notified me that hot water was only available one hour of the day, I barked at the receptionist.
Didn’t he understand I ran on my own schedule? That I had places to be and things to do?
Walking among the tide pools in Mumbai.
III
My anger was proportional only to my dissatisfaction with myself. Forever hovering over me was the dreaded realization that there would need to be many more rewrites before my novel would be fit to show to the world.
And even then, when I finally did, time and distance would reveal to me a dozen blindspots that had gone unseen and undermined all my carefully planned and meticulously researched story sequences.
This was a position I had more or less already arrived at the minute I’d wrapped work on the first draft.
If there wasn’t a problem, I would be sure to find one. My reasoning? It was better to preempt criticism and get the jump on disappointment than suffer a sucker punch from a stranger.
With each leg of the journey, my tour driver grew increasingly agitated, hunching over the wheel like someone with chronic road rage, intent on mowing down whoever might cross his path.
He stopped offering me free bottles of water and stopped calling my name. I was no longer “Mr. Ehsan”, but someone to be addressed strictly out of necessity—and only then in a clipped voice.
Colorful saris in Jodhpur.
When, finally, I asked him what the matter was, he revealed he had been expecting to receive a daily tip from me.
In the years of chaperoning foreign vacationers during the height of the tourist season, my driver had apparently never met someone who clung as stingily to my purse strings as I had.
In my defense, however, I had already paid a princely sum to the tour company.
And then there was the fact that in my home country—Australia—we simply didn’t tip. Never mind my driver was expecting only a nominal amount. Not tipping him was, I told myself, a matter of principle.
Besides, I’d practically spent all the money I had getting here. And let’s remember, this wasn’t a true vacation, but a research trip.
I wasn’t some privileged Westerner with deep pockets, but a reluctant martyr for my own ambitions.
This approach did not go down very well with one of my tour guides. When I failed to tip him at the end of our two-hour-long walk, he stood over me, glowering. I pretended not to notice.
As far as I was concerned, he was the one who had breached social norms by expecting payment on top of the fee he’d already received from our tour company.
Inside the Red Fort in Delhi.
IV
The rest of the trip slipped by like an afternoon dream: majestic hill forts of gold sandstone, soaring pink city walls, a shimmering sprawl of blue buildings at the edge of the Thar desert.
Towards the end, I climbed a hill to a viewpoint frequented by tourists. Local kids had gathered to fly kites or beg politely for pencils.
One of them was singing, accompanied by a wizened man on the harmonium.
As I watched the sun dip toward the horizon, I was struck by the realization that for all the beauty that surrounded me, I was not moved. I felt in some ways cut off, my feelings trapped behind a rigid, impenetrable shell.
Since my late teens, all I’d was a steely determination to survive in the face of whatever hardships might be thrown in my path.
The skies turned from gold to amber to umber. The young singer crooned a final, wistful tune. A crack appear in the shell, and suddenly I was crying.
I felt like a jack-o-lantern that had its insides scraped out. Empty, and exhausted.
Then came the profound sense of loneliness—a stalwart companion from earlier days.
A stranger flying a kite on a hill overlooking Jaisalmer.
Rigidity as a survival mechanism
This same loneliness I credited for launching my never-ending crusade of workaholic perfectionism.
Since my late teen years, I felt perpetually harried by a need to be productive. I’d create lists of things I wanted to achieve and, one by one, ticked them off with machine-like efficiency.
My default was “bustling”. When I wasn’t running to catch buses or bolting from commitment to commitment, I was writing a new story, shooting a new film, and undertaking a new degree.
My home was not a sanctuary—it was a workplace. I spent most of my time in front of my computer, taking the occasional break to tidy, clean, cook, and work out. When I wasn’t running on a physical treadmill, I was always running on a figurative one.
Nothing I did was ever good enough; I could always do better. Everything was a problem to be fixed. There was forever room for improvement.
This philosophy extended to not just my life, but that of others as well. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and I hammered away to the detriment of my relationships.
In my mind, this behavior had the perfect rationale. I was someone with big dreams, the job I was doing wasn’t my true passion, and I lacked any sense of financial security.
The only way I was going to rise above these obstacles was by applying myself.
These standards I had set for myself, however exacting they might seem to others, were in my estimation fair.
If I could learn to follow them with religious zeal—so why couldn’t they?
As righteous as I felt on this path, what I failed to acknowledge was that this work I endlessly generated for myself was really just a kind of coping mechanism.
For too long, I had been troubled by the sense that something fundamental was wrong in the world; something that threatened my sense of wholeness, worthiness, and safety.
But so long as I stayed in the saddle of workaholism, I could avert the many impending crises I imagined loomed large over my life.
Grandiosity, or Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder?
My behavior, I would later learn, had all the hallmarks of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD).
OCPD, according to the DSM-5, involves a more “a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency”.
Key traits of OCPD include:
Preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules
Perfectionism that interferes with task completion
Excessive devotion to work and productivity
Being overly conscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values
Being unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects without sentimental value
Reluctance to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they follow your precise way of doing things
People with OCD experience uncontrollable, persistent thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions), which they often have some degree of insight about.
People with OCPD on the other hand cling to their way of doing things and seem comfortable with their self-imposed systems of rules, believing nothing is inherently wrong with their style of thinking.
A positive diagnosis
My trip to India represented a crisis point in my life. The rigid habits, rules, and structure by which I’d lived my life had been challenged, and the control I was forever grasping was slipping from my grasp.
When presented with demands to change, rather than making the necessary concessions, I dug in. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.
The misunderstanding and misery that had resulted could, in hindsight, have easily been averted.
I could, for example, have surrendered my constant need for productivity and been more mentally present, and actually enjoyed this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I could have also smoothed ruffled feathers by tipping my driver and guides, rather than stingily withholding.
It would take some years—and many more immovable objects—however, before I would achieve true insight into my behavior.
And even then, surrendering my self-appointed moral high ground would prove no easy task.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
Confessions of a Control Freak is a memoir blog series exploring the impact of Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, its origins, and the rocky path to recovery. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of all featured individuals. Subscribe to receive all future posts. More about OCPD here.
I
“Police car!” I murmured.
At the far end of the alley, a police van had crawled into view. No sooner was it glimpsed, however, did the vehicle reverse back the way it had come.
My filming companion Nia looked up from the camera viewfinder.
“I can’t see anyone?” she said. “I think we’re good.”
At that very instant, we were standing a few feet from the McDonald’s parking lot, recording a scene for one of my college film assignments.
A still from our rather daring shoot.
By scene, I am referring to a few shaky shots of me approaching the storefront, toy handgun in hand.
It was meant to be a cinematic allusion to a shooting that had occurred in the 80s. Minus, of course, the shooting part.
Nia and I had spent the past 15 minutes filming me doing multiple takes of me walking up an alley in a hoodie and taking a few bold strides across the lot.
After each take, we’d return to the alley to review the footage, whereupon I would identify some fault. Either I was walking too fast, the shot was too shaky, or the framing was somehow off.
I’d asked Nia if she didn’t mind “getting one more in the can”. A freshman keen for more filming experience, she’d obliged.
Soon, what had started as a quick-and-dirty exercise had ballooned out to become my own private Ben Hur.
“I’m pretty sure I just saw a paddy wagon,” I said, after a moment.
“Well, they’re gone now,” Nia said, raising the camera for another take.
“OK,” I said warily, “but this is the last take.”
Certainly, this wasn’t the first time today I’d said it, but this time I meant it.
I was part way across the McDonald’s parking lot when I heard a shout.
“Drop the weapon!”
Officers burst from cover, surrounding me like in some scene from a cop show, guns pointed in readiness to shoot.
Instinct took over and I squatted, placing the toy gun on the ground.
“On your knees,” one of the officers shouted. “Hands behind your head.”
Next thing I was being cuffed and forced onto my face. Somewhere nearby I heard Nia’s voice.
“We’re making a student film,” she cried, playing the part. “The gun isn’t real! The gun isn’t real!”
“Shut up!” someone barked. My pockets were searched and a barrage of questions followed.
Me in one of many roles I would play over the years.
Did I have anything on me I shouldn’t have? Did I not realize that from a distance my gun had looked real? That I had been this close to being shot?
“Not that I’m aware”, “apparently not”, “it never entered my mind”, went my responses.
Little did the officer questioning me know that a few hours prior, I had considered painting over the toy gun’s fluorescent orange tip “for the sake of realism”, only to change my mind at the last minute.
This reflexive decision may have been what ultimately saved my life.
I tried, lamely, to explain myself, while the officer chastised me for my recklessness. It was revealed that just before Nia and I had shown up, a McDonald’s patron had called the police to report her child missing.
This patron had been sitting in her four-wheel drive, parked in the McDonald’s lot when I’d rolled up, toy gun in hand. Our eyes had even met on the first take.
By the second take, however, the woman had vanished. It was only now I realized that she in her panic had somehow connected her child’s disappearance with my appearance and called the cops on me.
II
I was 19. Just a kid, really. And I was about to be arrested and charged. My fledgling film career—if that was what you wanted to call it—was, as of that moment, over.
But after a few minutes, the police officers realized the extent of my naivety, and Nia and I were let go with only a warning.
We drifted back to the college campus, shell-shocked, trying to process what had just happened.
I eventually made my way home, vowing to never do something so stupid again. A few hours after my brush with death, I worked up the will to look through the footage on my desktop.
The resulting footage proved rather dramatic. Applying a black-and-white filter conveyed a certain impression of documentary realism. Our little gambit, it seemed, had paid off.
But there was one problem. We had plenty of takes of me approaching the McDonalds, but none of me firing the gun. We hadn’t, in short, got the money shot…pun not intended.
And given the gun was barely visible in my low-res MiniDV footage, how would viewers ever realize what I was trying to depict?
The “money shot”.
The solution was obvious, if unpalatable, but I summoned my courage all the same. I was a serious filmmaker, and no serious filmmaker should be stopped by some fear of being arrested. Or say, killed.
Having honored my resolution not to take my life into my own hands again for a total of three hours, I collected my filming kit and went out to the front lawn of my apartment complex.
Mounting the camera on a tripod, I pointed it towards the sky. Then, checking that the coast was clear, I hit record, extended the toy gun into view, and proceeded to hammer the trigger.
I played back the shot on the camera’s built-in LCD. The result was gloriously realistic, the toy pistol’s slider flicking backward with each pull of the trigger.
Tucking the toy gun out of view, I packed up my gear and returned indoors to begin work editing my masterpiece.
III
A few days later, the assignment was complete. It wasn’t due for a few more weeks yet however, which left me with time—time should be spent sharpening the filmmaking saw.
When the due date rolled around, I had not one but three films to submit from. I showed my classmates what I had accomplished and their only response was to stare.
What person in their right mind would do a school assignment three times?
But this was, I told myself, what was required if I wanted to become a capital P Professional.
So I continued to film, adding new techniques bit by bit to my repertoire. Spooling through the raw footage, I would marvel at what I’d accomplished.
But I also wavered between a celebration of my artistic ability and insecurity.
More often than not, I was the (grudging) star of my own show.
Would my stilted acting pass for naturalistic? Would viewers appreciate that my choice to weave the camera around subjects was inspired by the rich tradition of cinéma vérité?
What I ultimately ended up with would be either worthy homages to my favorite films or confused pastiches: a little bit of everyday Italian neorealism here, a little bit of classic horror tension-building there.
As my skills improved, the bar rose. Determined to rise with it, I agonized over the little details: the choice of camera angle, the position of a prop, the lilt of an actress’s voice.
My growing competency meant that while my classmates were mastering basic editing in iMovie, I was trying to recreate Apple’s classic “silhouetted dancer” ad.
My strategy was something that may best be described as…unique.
One attempt at creating a chroma key effect involved assembling a green screen on my tiny balcony (because it offered the best lighting).
Recording myself singing the backing track required that I crouch beneath a tented mattress (because it dampened reverb).
This still was a part of a swooping camera rise, complete with racked focus, over some composite images. It took days to perfect.
Then, finally, performing the actual dancing required I shimmy and pirouette in my underwear for all my neighbors to see (because wearing clothes interfered with pulling a key).
As time went by, my experiments grew bolder. I taught myself how to operate a soundboard and assemble a 5.1 surround soundtrack, tasks which involved spending days locked in the sound-dampened gloom of a mixing studio.
I taught myself to composite live footage with special effects, creating complex tracking shots across Photoshopped fantasy landscapes.
The plastic shell of my Macbook laptop was literally going to pieces, and yet still I would sit patiently as it rendered its shot, sometimes for hours, sometimes days, leaving the entry-level computer basically inoperable.
For a final project, I directed a short film set in both modern and 1980s East Germany (despite being in Sydney, Australia), with dialogue written exclusively in German (which I didn’t speak fluently), using native Germans (who weren’t actors).
The only limits, I told myself, would be those set by my own imagination.
There was no length I wouldn’t go to for my craft.
IV
These various projects were so time-consuming that I was barely able to hold down a job.
On one hand, I was content to live on the smell of an oily rag, but on the other, the absence of funds meant I had to serve multiple roles on any given project: storyboarder, scriptwriter, sound recordist, mixer, composer, producer, director, and editor.
And when there were no actors, I would hit “record’ and insert myself in front of the camera instead.
I cast myself in a variety of roles: cosmic fetus, creepy Hollywood executive, political terrorist, medieval village boy, zombie, time traveler, and barbarian warrior. Limits of my imagination, indeed.
When one role called for me to shave my head and don a monk’s habit, I didn’t hesitate. I was a card-carrying anything-for-art-ist.
As for having no funds or actors, there were always friends I could beg to shoot, star, or be interviewed.
None of them proved immune to my approach, which could perhaps be best described as “exacting”.
I’d dominate group meetings, interrogate doubters and argue detractors into silence. If someone gave me an inch, I’d take 10 miles.
One of my less elaborate special effects composite shots, complete with grade, smoke effect, and screen shake.
Some may have dared crack a whip or brandish a chair against this onslaught, but fewer still would be able to back me in a corner.
During a shoot, I’d niggle and micromanage. Inevitably I would learn that my volunteer crew members either weren’t up to snuff or didn’t share my level of dedication, I’d shoulder them aside and take the camera or boom.
When an actor didn’t hit their mark, I’d overcorrect with detailed instructions. A dozen takes were, as a general rule, mandatory.
My “leadership”—and to call it that would be generous—was met with hostile silence and exchanged looks.
“Can you believe this guy?” my collaborators seemed to be saying to one another.
I was unrelenting; exhaustive in my film-from-every-angle approach and exhausting with my endless stream of instructions.
There was one person, Nia—poor, indefatigable Nia—however, who weathered it all, always with a bounce in her step and nary a broadside.
From her very first on-camera debut as a victim of spousal abuse, Nia carried herself with total aplomb.
When confronted with a vacant role, what did I do? I shaved my head and pulled on a monk’s habit.
When asked if she would be willing to smear her face with fake blood, she didn’t so much as blink and even offered to do it herself.
When handed a frying pan and instructed to wail on a phonebook in lieu of her onscreen abuser, Nia summoned rage with the ease of a seasoned pro.
When her role called for an emotional breakdown, Nia melted into hysterics so electrifying I almost didn’t dare to yell “cut”. And all of this on the first take.
After the incident outside McDonald’s, I wouldn’t have blamed Nia if she’d decided to back out of future projects.
Yet time and time again, Nia would turn up, eager to do anything that was asked of her.
V
There were many things Nia was prepared to tolerate in the name of my cinematic vision, but hectoring was not one of them.
Some months later, Nia turned up on a set we were both volunteering on, waving a script I had sent her several days late.
Fearing that her little flourishes might somehow signal to the crew we were amateurs, I asked if she wouldn’t mind putting it away.
“Stop bossing me around,” Nia snapped and walked away.
This show of defiance was not only out of character—it was also just plain confusing. Couldn’t Nia see I was trying to save her—and by extension, me?
Despite our little row, Nia agreed to feature in another film of mine. She was to star as a wood nymph: a malevolent, shape-shifting seductress.
Not only did Nia agree to brave the cold, sludge-filled waters of a public lake—she also did it topless.
While Nia was her usual no-questions-asked self, I sensed for the first time some reluctance. This proved our last collaboration together, and we soon fell out of touch.
Then, some years later, by pure accident, I happened to spot her crossing the campus.
“Hey, Nia!” I called. Nia turned and saw me.
“Oh, hi Essy,” she said, without so much as breaking her stride.
“How have you been?” I asked, catching up to her.
“Sorry, can’t talk—late for class!” Nia explained and left me in the dust.
This was, I understood, a dismissal…and possibly a deserved one at that.
The loss of my chief collaborator proved a blow to my filmmaking ambitions. It also left my conscience burdened more than ever by the realization that maybe—just maybe—it was my obsessiveness and not others’ lack of staying power that was driving them away.
My drive to reach some always-out-of-reach destination had meant not only that I had failed to truly make the journey, but that I also made it hospitable for my travel companions.
If people like Nia had been the cement foundations of my aspirations, I was like the workman with the earmuffs and jackhammer.
The problem wasn’t so much that I was a workaholic as that I—barring all obstacles save complete physical incapacitation—refused to settle for anything less than absolute perfection. And absolute perfection, for anybody, is a pretty tall order.
When I couldn’t get access to a location for filming, I green-screened my way into a photo instead.
I convinced myself all the same that it was one I absolutely had to meet. That road to success was not paved by half-measures, after all.
But very quickly the pursuit of perfection would bleed into other aspects of my life, sometimes quite literally. I brushed my gums so hard that they bled, then eventually started to recede.
While trying to meet one of my many perpetual deadlines, I sat at my desk, absently cramming the contents of a salad bowl into my mouth.
Thinking I was biting into a piece of capsicum, I chomped down on the tine of a metal fork instead.
Later that week, while surveying my normally perfect pearly whites in the mirror, I saw that the bottom part of one front tooth had broken off.
Most people I expect chip their teeth through genuine misadventure: a drunken faceplant or a brawl.
But not me. I had managed such a feat with nothing less dramatic than an eating implement.
This was, I realized, a case in point. My perfectionism and untiring ambition meant I was also forcing outcomes and rushing processes. Processes as basic as eating.
My little accident not only landed me in a dentist’s chair with a hefty bill—it also led me to a troubling realization.
Sooner or later, there would be another accident just like this. And the results, potentially, could prove far, far worse.
Essy Knopf is a therapist who likes to explore what it means to be neurodivergent and queer. Subscribe to get all new posts sent directly to your inbox.
