James Finn
2 min readMay 2, 2023

--

Gay male youth culture is so intimidating! It was when I was young in the 80s and 90s, and it is now, maybe even moreso.

Gay male culture in a certain sense is a toxic mess just waiting to happen. You take a bunch of guys who were always the outsiders in high school, who often felt left out, who are dealing with at least some self-loathing they can't quite get rid of, and then you throw them all together in bars and clubs and watch them form a culture.

What you often get is a mess. People overcompensate for insecurities, sometimes they unconsciously behave like the dominant social leaders who used to pick on them. They form cliques like the ones they used to be excluded from.

Physical beauty, modeled by unrealistic, photo-altered Insta-gays, can center in very unhealthy ways.

Racism adds to the problem. Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian Americans often feel especially vulnerable to toxic clique-ism.

I like how you write positively, though. Because gay male culture is a lot more than insecure cliques of buff 25 year olds holding court in gay bars as they show off designer fashion. Hell, there's often a lot more going on with the buff 25 year olds than meets the eye, especially when you realize that underneath the sassy exterior and the fashion accessories is a young man who used to cry himself to sleep at night over being excluded.

Maybe he doesn't realize his sass is a defense mechanism, but he probably will eventually as he grows out of his delayed adolescence. Or, at least, that's a pattern I've seen quite often.

I know I'm hopelessnessly overgeneralizing, but older gay men tend to be a lot kinder than young gay men – maybe because they've had to learn a lot of the hard lessons, dealing with experiences like you're writing about now.

Hang in there! And thanks for the story!

--

--

James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

No responses yet