In the US and a lot of other places, June was Pride Month, and I noticed that was used as a sort of shorthand in social media over here for June-ish. Never mind that the UK capital just held it’s Pride last Saturday, in July, or that in the British Isles, it’s more of a “Pride Season” stretching from late spring to early autumn. A lot of people over here were referring to Pride Month. The main reason I noticed this was that in the last couple of days, I saw several people declaring that they were kinda pleased that Pride Month was nearing its end. Not because they didn’t want to celebrate Pride, but because the media coverage of it resulted in increased scrutiny from bigots, and hence increased attacks. Add to that additional bad news, (eg the Scottish Government kicking the can down the road as regards the Gender Recognition Act.) and it seemed to many that extra pressure was been loaded upon us just as we were expected to be all Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy! in the streets.

Obviously, Prides aren’t at fault here, nor the increased visibility which goes hand in hand with it. But at times it can seem like a double-edged sword. It’s easier to keep in safe queer spaces. But that’s also a double-edged sword too. In an earlier post, I was talking about the way society polices my outward behaviour, and I was reminded of it by Ely Percy’s post on her blog the other day.

Almost as soon as I read that, I noticed Garry Mac had tweeted about an article he had read.

This is the article , from HuffPro Highline, that Garry’s referring to. It starts with a lot of stuff that is familar to me.

The term researchers use to explain this phenomenon is “minority stress.” In its most direct form, it’s pretty simple: Being a member of a marginalized group requires extra effort. When you’re the only woman at a business meeting, or the only black guy in your college dorm, you have to think on a level that members of the majority don’t. If you stand up to your boss, or fail to, are you playing into stereotypes of women in the workplace? If you don’t ace a test, will people think it’s because of your race? Even if you don’t experience overt stigma, considering these possibilities takes its toll over time.

For gay people, the effect is magnified by the fact that our minority status is hidden. Not only do we have to do all this extra work and answer all these internal questions when we’re 12, but we also have to do it without being able to talk to our friends or parents about it.

So much of that rung true for me. My first surprise from the article was that it didn’t actually matter that I hadn’t directly experienced bullying or violence.

John Pachankis, a stress researcher at Yale, says the real damage gets done in the five or so years between realizing your sexuality and starting to tell other people. Even relatively small stressors in this period have an outsized effect- not because they’re directly traumatic, but because we start to expect them. “No one has to call you queer for you to adjust your behavior to avoid being called that,” Salway says.

[…]

“The trauma for gay men is the prolonged nature of it,” says William Elder, a sexual trauma researcher and psychologist. “If you experience one traumatic event, you have the kind of PTSD that can be resolved in four to six months of therapy. But if you experience years and years of small stressors- little things where you think, Was that because of my sexuality?- that can be even worse.”

I remember someone I met on a gay retreat, an older man, reflecting back on his life, noting that he was “pretty lucky”- that is, he hadn’t had that much oppression compared to other gay men of his age. I suppose I can say something similar to myself. I wasn’t bullied at school because of my sexuality- although I expect I would have been if it was known. There’s only one job I think I might have lost because of sexuality- although I did keep it largely hidden until the last decade. I’ve never been attacked in the street- but I’ve always kept an eye for any dangerous situations.

Do you see the pattern here? I’ve not been a huge target of prejudice- mainly because I’ve been policing myself so at not to be in the position of being at a target of it, because I’d seen or heard about it happenning to others. Even if you’ve had a pretty lucky life as a queer person, you’re still forever living in the shadow of what might happen if you’re not so lucky.

A 2015 study found that gay people produce less cortisol, the hormone that regulates stress. Their systems were so activated, so constantly, in adolescence that they ended up sluggish as grownups, says Katie McLaughlin, one of the study’s co-authors. In 2014, researchers compared straight and gay teenagers on cardiovascular risk. They found that the gay kids didn’t have a greater number of “stressful life events” (i.e. straight people have problems, too), but the ones they did experience inflicted more harm on their nervous systems.

Annesa Flentje, a stress researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, specializes in the effect of minority stress on gene expression. All those little punches combine with our adaptations to them, she says, and become “automatic ways of thinking that never get challenged or turned off, even 30 years later.” Whether we recognize it or not, our bodies bring the closet with us into adulthood. “We don’t have the tools to process stress as kids, and we don’t recognize it as trauma as adults,” says John, […] “Our gut reaction is to deal with things now the way we did as children.”

The second surprise in the article was it’s finding that this doesn’t stop when one comes out in the LGBT+ community. In fact, the stressors continue, especially if you are a gay man:

For decades, […] what psychologists thought [was] that the key stages in identity formation for gay men all led up to coming out, that once we were finally comfortable with ourselves, we could begin building a life within a community of people who’d gone through the same thing. But over the last 10 years, what researchers have discovered is that the struggle to fit in only grows more intense. A study published in 2015 found that rates of anxiety and depression were higher in men who had recently come out than in men who were still closeted.

The word I hear from […] from everyone, is “re-traumatized.” You grow up with this loneliness, accumulating all this baggage, and then you arrive in the Castro or Chelsea or Boystown thinking you’ll finally be accepted for who you are. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race. “The bullied kids of our youth […] grew up and became bullies themselves.”

I did go out in the LGBT+ scene a bit when I came out, but not that much. I now realise I held it a bit at arm’s length. It was partly the bitchiness, which I didn’t have the social skills to cope with, but I suspect that was the most obvious symptom of something else. It’s much, much better now than it was when I came out, but for the most part, the majority of my interaction with the LGBT+ in central Scotland was via the alt-drag scene, which was, even at the time, a very different sector of the community to the mainstream of LGBT+.

Now, as part of my work with Order of Perpetual Indulgence, I’ve probably spent more time in the scene in the past 2.5 years than in the previous 20+. There’s less bitchiness, but these days I can handle it when it comes up. However, I still hear the odd thing: like one time just last year, when I overheard an older gay man mentioning to a friend about hearing of a younger drag queen’s personal problems, and feeling like wanting to tell the younger to “f… off, and come back when you’ve suffered some more.”

… And, as I think those thoughts, Dale Peck drops his bomb in The New Republic.

Talk about synchronicity. What was that quote from the Highline article I was reading?

All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race.

… Or not being “gay” enough for Dale Peck. If the above quote looks like something you might hear in a bar, it apprently began with some irrelevant gossip which was even more bar-worthy.

Dale’s op-ed was deleted within hours of it’s appearance on the New Republic website. To be fair Peck’s history does suggest he is an attention-seeker. (In many ways an ancestor of Milo Yiannopoulos, maybe with a better signal-to-noise ratio.) Even given that, the op-ed is a very public manifestation of the behaviour detailed in the Highline article.

The article lists other factors, such as toxic masculinity, and hook-up apps like Grindr, which reduce face-to-face contact, and add in the social media problem of performing for the internet, and also initiatives to combat these problems. It’s a long read, but it’s worth it. I’ll end with this final quote.

I keep thinking of something Paul, the software developer, told me: “For gay people, we’ve always told ourselves that when the AIDS epidemic was over we’d be fine. Then it was, when we can get married we’ll be fine. Now it’s, when the bullying stops we’ll be fine. We keep waiting for the moment when we feel like we’re not different from other people. But the fact is, we are different. It’s about time we accept that and work with it.”