Being gay is hard

March 02, 2017

The Epidemic of
Gay LonelinessBy Michael Hobbes

“I used to get so ecstatic when the meth was all gone.”

This is my friend Jeremy.

“When you hold it,” he says, “you have to keep using it. When it’s gone, it’s like, ‘Oh excellent, I can go endorse to my life now.’ I would stay up all weekend and leave to these sex parties and then feel prefer shit until Wednesday. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day.”

Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. He won’t tell me the correct circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.

Jeremy is not the confidant I was expecting to have this conversation with. Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea he used anything heavier than martinis. He is trim, intelligent, gluten-free, the kind of guy who wears a function shirt no matter what day of the week it is. The first time we met, three years ago, he asked me if I knew a good place to do CrossFit. Today, when I ask him how the hospital’s been so far, the first thing he says is that there’s no Wi-

How can a feeling of belonging be forged in a setting where one’s existence is forbidden? That is the question that LSE’s Dr Centner and his co-author Harvard’s Manoel Pereira Neto explore in their groundbreaking research into Dubai’s expatriate queer men’s nightlife.

But it was not an easy topic to research. Dr Centner explains: “It's an illegal, or criminalised, identity and put of behaviours and practices, so in a very general sense, it's a taboo. And taboo subjects are very often under-researched, sometimes because people possess a hard second gaining access, gaining that trust, but also because, even if people secure that access, there could be significant repercussions for themselves as researchers, or for the people who are the research participants.

“As two queer researchers, we were able to enter the worlds of relatively privileged Western gay expatriates. Secrecy is often the norm, but the field was familiar to us, through previous visits and research projects.”

These were indeed ‘parties’ ...[but] not bars identified as queer . Not a unattached venue’s webpage uses the word ‘gay’ or related euphemisms, nor do they hint at targeting

by Fred Penzel, PhD
This article was initially published in the Winter 2007 edition of the OCD Newsletter.
OCD, as we know, is largely about experiencing serious and unrelenting question. It can generate you to suspect even the most basic things about yourself – even your sexual orientation. A 1998 research published in the Journal of Sex Research found that among a team of 171 college students, 84% reported the occurrence of sexual intrusive thoughts (Byers, et al. 1998). In arrange to have doubts about one’s sexual identity, a sufferer need not ever have had a homo- or heterosexual experience, or any type of sexual experience at all. I have observed this symptom in young children, adolescents, and adults as adv. Interestingly Swedo, et al., 1989, start that approximately 4% of children with OCD experience obsessions concerned with forbidden aggressive or perverse sexual thoughts.
Although doubts about one’s hold sexual identity might seem pretty straightforward as a symptom, there are actually a number of variations. The most obvious form is where a sufferer experiences the mind that they might be of a different sexual orientation than they formerly believed. If the su

There’s an Entire World of Concealed Pain Within Being LGBTQ+
It’s no surprise that the rates of suicide and suicidal ideations/attempts are higher among gay, lesbian, pansexual, and transgender persons. Navigating experience as a young person is challenging enough without having to grapple with your own individuality. I still find it complicated to candidly discuss my journey of being gay. How execute I express such an unfathomable amount of inner turmoil? A personal struggle unlike anything else.
It’s indescribably damaging having to cloak an intrinsic part of yourself during your formative years. You’re battling something you don’t fully understand and may even own been taught to fear or hate. There’s an entire planet of hidden pain within existence LGBTQ+. Little deaths you life every day; unbeknownst to the world around you. You bring this secret cemetery. Adding novel plots as you go while concealing an unbearable truth as if your life depended on it; and sometimes it felt like it actually did.
I spent a long time living in this sort of suspended hell. The longer you endure that type of masked existence the more damage you incur. It’s as though I spent over half of my life in a cage from the