You’ve probably heard that gay men are image-obsessed, promiscuous, and unable to sustain relationships.<\/p>\n
Are we image-obsessed, or did this single story come first, repeated until we internalized it as how we see ourselves, and eventually how others see us, too?<\/p>\n
I was recently interviewed by Pat Brothwell, a journalist who writes about identity<\/a> and culture, for a Pride Month piece<\/a> exploring this phenomenon in his journalism. <\/p>\n He’d come across an earlier article I wrote drawing on Chimamanda Adichie’s talk \u201cThe Danger of a Single Story<\/a>,\u201d one of my favorite talks, where she describes the consequences of using one narrative to define a person or a group. <\/p>\n As she puts it, the problem with a stereotype isn’t that it’s untrue, but that it’s incomplete. It takes one story and makes it the only story.<\/p>\n Pat told me he’d been watching a single story spread through a growing genre of online discourse, where people make sweeping claims about \u201cthe gay community\u201d being shallow, image-obsessed, emotionally unavailable, or incapable of commitment. <\/p>\n So why are we, both inside and outside the community, drawn to these broad narratives, and are they true? What’s more, why does it matter?<\/p>\n A few things are happening at once, I told Pat. Part of it is introjection, the process by which we unconsciously take in the thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes of the people and culture around us. Most gay men grew up introjecting messages about who gay men are, and those narratives become part of how we see ourselves and each other\u2014the single story. <\/p>\n I grew up without marriage<\/a> ever being an option. Same-sex<\/a> marriage wasn’t legal nationwide until 2015, and for most of my life, gay male relationships weren’t modeled for me. I had no sense of what two men in a healthy, loving relationship looked like. It wasn’t technically even “real” in my consciousness. Going from the closet and the fear<\/a> of being gay to almost no understanding of gay relationships informs how many gay men relate to one another.<\/p>\n For gay men, introjection can manifest as internalized homophobia, which influences the second component, projection<\/a>, where we take what we unconsciously fear about ourselves and place it onto an entire group. <\/p>\n Part of it is also confirmation bias<\/a>, our tendency to notice what supports a belief we already have while overlooking everything else. Once someone believes gay men are shallow or image-obsessed, they’ll register every example that fits the single story and skip past the ones that don’t.<\/p>\n As a therapist who specializes in working with gay men, I hear a lot of clients talk about the very aspects of the gay community Pat described. For many, the community can be a retraumatization of the childhood<\/a> experiences of exclusion they were hoping to leave behind. I want to validate their experience because there are certainly elements that are true. I also want to help them develop insight into their schemas, or patterns of thinking<\/a>, and look for the exceptions that challenge the single story.<\/p>\n As much as there are gay men who are emotionally unavailable and image-obsessed, there are also gay men who aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n When we rely on the single story of gay men, it\u2019s easy to see them as shallow or image-obsessed. Research shows that gay men have higher rates of body dissatisfaction than heterosexual men, which is clinically relevant in my work. <\/p>\n When we explore what’s underneath, though, it\u2019s often related to minority stress<\/a>\u2014the chronic stress gay men experience as a result of ongoing stigma<\/a>, discrimination<\/a>, and exclusion, from society, family, and early environments where their identity was ignored or invalidated. So the single story becomes a conversation about minority stress, and less about vanity.<\/p>\n By understanding the connection between unhealthy body standards and minority stress, we can challenge one of the more pervasive single stories about gay men.<\/p>\n Gay men are bombarded with images about body standards, and it’s important to acknowledge how inescapable these images are, everything from pornography<\/a> to social media<\/a> to marketing<\/a> at gay bars, to the images the media uses when reporting on gay men. Most marketing directed toward and about gay men relies on a narrow, sexualized standard of bodies.<\/p>\n