The Velvet Rage Read Online Free PDF

few crazed, right-wing enemies, but it’s only a matter of time before their homophobic finger-wagging is considered a mistake in the service of social evolution—like the McCarthy-era speeches and racially motivated lynchings. There
is a real sense that social attitudes and values toward gay men are shifting for the better. Times are definitely changing.
    Yet in my work as a psychologist, my clients who are gay men sometimes talk about being despondent, depressed, even suicidal. They tell me about the constant struggle to find fulfillment and lasting love. Some recount stories about lots of sex, with lots of different men at exotic parties in the finest locations around the globe. Others confess feeling over-the-hill at thirty-five, as if life were over because the twenty-somethings no longer want them. Still others are caught up in their own world of money, art, fashion, and palatial homes.
    Virtually all of the gay men I work with agree on one thing: no matter how accepting society becomes, it is still very hard to be a gay man and a truly happy person. We may have gained so much, but something critical is still missing.
    If you’re “out,” you no longer harbor that “dirty little secret” about yourself, but you likely do continue to hide your true self behind the beauty you manufacture. And nobody knows how to create style more than gay men. We decorate the world. We decorate our lives. We decorate our bodies. And we do it all in an effort to hide our real selves from the world. Gay men are the worldwide experts on style, fashion, etiquette, bodybuilding, art, and design. In every one of these fields gay men predominate. If this weren’t so, there would be few tuning in to the hit television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy .
    We specialize in makeovers of all types and sizes. We’re experts in making things and people look good . We are professionals in remodeling ugly truths into high-fashion dreams.
    Ever stop to wonder why this is so? Is there really a gay creativity gene that we all inherited? When you think about it, is it actually plausible that our sexual orientation genetics would somehow
also give us a talent for hair, makeup, and rearranging the living room?
    I don’t think so. There seems to be something more to it. Something about the experience of being gay causes us to develop our “fashion” skills. Something about growing up gay forced us to learn how to hide ugly realities behind a finely crafted façade.
    Why is this so? We hid because we learned that hiding is a means to survival. The naked truth about who we are wasn’t acceptable, so we learned to hide behind a beautiful image. We learned to split ourselves in parts, hiding what wasn’t acceptable and flaunting what was. We learned to wave beautiful, colorful scarves to distract attention from our gayness—like the matador waving a red scarf before the bull to distract the beast from goring his body. We became experts in crafting outrageous scarves.
    The truth is that we grew up disabled. Not disabled by our homosexuality, but emotionally disabled by an environment that taught us we were unacceptable, not “real” men and therefore, shameful. As young boys, we too readily internalized those strong feelings of shame into a core belief: I am unacceptably flawed. It crippled our sense of self and prevented us from following the normal, healthy stages of adolescent development. We were consumed with the task of hiding the fundamental truth of ourselves from the world around us and pretending to be something we weren’t. At the time, it seemed the only way to survive.
    One cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not planted by us, but by a world that didn’t understand us, wanted to change us, and at times, was fiercely