#we only ever went to a single gay bar in my life bc we spent the entire time being roasted by a bitter old queen who wouldnt stop harrassing

[isa-ah]

literally how do I cope with a movie where the baseline message is that trans children are treated like monsters who will destroy society but ultimately the only person they're trying to hurt is themselves bc they lack the love, support and resources their peers get unconditionally. and that the surveillance state would kill as many civilians as it takes to eradicate trans kids to maintain the status quo by any means necessary.

[bartsugsy]

What’s your favourite Robron moment ?? 😊

OK YOU SENT THIS DAYS AGO AND IT’S BEEN STRESSING ME OUT BECAUSE HOW DOES ONE (1) HUMAN CHOOSE A SINGLE MOMENT???? answer: they do not choose a single moment

ANYWAY RULES ARE FOR LOSERS HERE’S 20 RANDOM MOMENTS I LOVE:

20. THAT TIME DURING THE AFFAIR ERA WHERE ROBERT WAS LIKE HEY AARON AFTER I’M MARRIED WE’RE STOPPING THIS I’M BREAKING UP WITH YOU AND THAT’S THAT AND AARON WAS LIKE ok but what if we didn’t AND ROBERT WAS LIKE OK GOOD POINT WELL MADE GUESS WE SHOULD MEET IN A BARN AND BANG ON THE DAY OF MY WEDDING THIS CAN ONLY GO WELL

19. THAT TIME WHEN ROBERT PAID AN INSANE AMOUNT OF MONEY TO HELP AARON FIND SANDRA BC HE NEEDED HER FOR HIS CASE AND THEN REFUSED TO LET AARON GO TO SEE SANDRA ALONE AND WAS JUST GENUINELY QUIETLY SUPPORTIVE. AND THEY STILL LOVED EACH OTHER AND AARON FELT THAT AND FELT LIKE HE HAD TO KISS ROBERT THEN AND THERE BECAUSE HE DIDN’T REALISE THAT ROB WOULD WAIT FOR HIM TO SORT HIS SHIT OUT FIRST BUT ROB EXPLICITLY CLARIFIED FOR HIM THAT HE WASN’T GOING ANYWHERE

18. A LITTLE EARLIER IN THAT ERA, WHEN AARON WAS HIDING OUT IN IRELAND AND ROBERT WOULD JUST WALK INTO EVERY SCENE DEMANDING TO KNOW WHERE AARON WAS. EVERY SINGLE SCENE.

17. THAT TIME AARON SPOKE HORRIBLE FRENCH (HE LIVED IN FRANCE FOR Y E A R S HOW DID HE COPE) AND ROB WAS LIKE ........i’m dating the hottest man alive?

16. THAT TIME ROBERT LITERALLY GAVE UP HIS COMPANY AND HIS ENTIRE FUCKIN HOUSE JUST TO GET AARON BACK BC HE WAS SO TERRIFIED FOR HIS SAFETY

15. THAT TIME DURING THE AFFAIR WHEN ROBERT FINANGLED IT SO THAT ALL OF THE WHITES WENT ON HOLIDAY AND HE JUST FULL ON MOVED AARON INTO HOME FARM AND THEY ACTED LIKE A FULL ON MARRIED COUPLE FOR THE ENTIRE WEEK, LIKE THE MOST INSANE PREVIEW OF THEIR FUTURE EVER DESIGNED

14. THAT TIME!!!! LACHLAN THREATENED ROBERT!!! SO AARON JUST FUCKIN???? KIDNAPPED???? HIM?????????? A LITERAL TEENAGER???????????? AARON KIDNAPPED A FUCKIN TEENAGER BC HE THREATENED TO PUT ROBERT IN JAIL (and yes used methods that hit v close to home for aaron to do so) BUT HONESTLY HE SHOVED A TEENAGER INTO HIS BOOT BC??? SURE?????? they’re both insane

13. OH YEAH THAT TIME ROBERT BURNED 100K BECAUSE AARON, FEELING ANNOYED AND PETTY, INSINUATED THAT ROBERT LOVED MONEY MORE THAN AARON AND FRANKLY AARON IS ONE OF THE ONLY PEOPLE ROBERT DOESN’T PUT MONEY AHEAD OF (or he used to, before he Grew As A Person tm) (i’m sure that won’t stick

12.THAT TIME THEY GOT MARRIED

11. ROBERT JUST WANTED TO THROW AARON THIS MASSIVE SYMBOLIC SHOW OF LOVE AND DEVOTION BEFORE HE WENT TO PRISON AND HE WANTED IT TO BE PERFECT AND WHEN IT WASN’T HE WENT OFF IN A STROP BUT AARON COULD LITERALLY GET MARRIED TO ROBERT WHILST STANDING IN A PILE OF LITERAL RUBBISH AND BE HAPPY BC AARON DOESNT CARE HE JUST WANTS TO BE MARRIED (ROBERT ALSO JUST WANTS TO BE MARRIED BUT HE HAS STANDARDS OK) AND SO AARON WENT AFTER HIM AND TALKED HIM DOWN AND THEN THEY JUST SAID FUCK IT AND GOT MARRIED ALONE, IN A PLACE THAT WAS SPECIAL TO THEM, BECAUSE IT WAS LITERALLY JUST FOR THEM AND ABOUT THEIR LOVE FOR EACH OTHER??? AND IT WAS ABOUT KNOWING THAT AFTER PRISON THEY’D STILL COME BACK TO ONE ANOTHER????? AND THAT TOOK LONGER THAN EXPECTED (WAY LONGER) (AND WAS A LOT MESSIER) BUT IT STILL HAPPENED BC THEIR FUTURES ARE WITH ONE ANOTHER AND THEY EARNED THAT AND BOTH FOUGHT FOR EACH OTHER MASSIVELY

10. THAT TIME AARON WAS IN HOSPITAL DURING SSW AND ROBERT SAT IN THE WAITING ROOM WITH CHAS AND LOOKED DEVASTATED BC HE COULD LOSE THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE NBD. ROBERT WAS SO SAD BUT ALSO SO FRUSTRATED WITH HIMSELF AND HE FINALLY GOT TO EXPRESS HIS REGRETS OVER THE AFFAIR ERA AND HOW MUCH ~TIME HE WASTED FUCKIN AROUND BC HE WAS SCARED AND ALSO LBR WANTED THAT WHITE MONEY AND POWER WHEN INSTEAD HE COULD HAVE JUST BEEN FUCKIN HAPPY AND LIVING HIS LIFE WITH AARON, WHICH IS ULTIMATELY THE ONLY FUTURE HE WANTS FOR HIMSELF AND AALDHSDFOH THE JOURNEY!! ROBERT SUGDEN!!!! HAS BEEN ON!!!!!!! IS SO GOOD FIGHT ME

9. SPEAKING OF HOSPITALS, THAT TIME ROBERT GOT HIT BY A CAR AND AARON FUCKIN RACED TO THE HOSPITAL AND CRIED AT ROB’S BEDSIDE DESPITE HAVING OSTENSIBLY MOVED ON FROM ROBERT BC HEY NEWSFLASH AARON NEVER STOPPED LOVING ROBERT JACOB SUGDEN. AND THEN THEY PROMISED TO BE FRIENDS AND ROBERT TOLD AARON HE’D BE THE BEST FRIEND HE’D EVER HAVE AND I DIED.

8. THAT TIME THEY JOKED ABOUT ANAL SEX IN THE SCRAPYARD #GAYCULTURE

7. THAT TIME!!!! ROBERT WENT TO A GAY BAR!!! TO TRY AND GET OVER AARON!!!! BUT BECAUSE AARON IS A FUCKIN LUNATIC WHO, AGAIN, NEVER STOPPED LOVING ROBERT JACOB SUGDEN, AARON FOLLOWED HIM AND THEN JUST SORT OF LURKED IN THE SHADOWS LOOKING SAD AND ESSENTIALLY WAS PREPARED TO TORTURE HIMSELF WITH WATCHING ROB PICK UP A DUDE BC HE COULDN’T STOP ROBERT BUT ALSO, INTERNALLY, HE REALLY WANTED TO STOP ROBERT

6. OH AND THEN AARON SAW ROB GO OUTSIDE ALONE AND TOOK HIS CHANCE TO SAY SOMETHING AND THEY JUST SORT OF SADLY FLIRTED WITH EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEY BOTH DESPERATELY WANTED TO BE TOGETHER??? AND FELT THAT THEY COULDN’T BE???? BUT STILL COULDN’T NOT FLIRT WITH ONE ANOTHER????????

5. THAT TIME AARON WAS LIKE HEY ROBERT DON’T COME TO COURT WITH ME AND ROB WAS LIKE .....YEAH WHATEVER AND THEN SHOWED UP IN COURT ANYWAY AND AARON WAS LIKE ??? BUT ALSO :’) AND ROB WAS JUST LIKE LOL SINCE WHEN DO I EVER LISTEN TO U

4. THAT TIME THEY TOOK THEMSELVES OFF TO A HOTEL AND THEN LEFT IT IN A LITERAL STATE??? AND THEN JOKED ABOUT IT???? BC THEY SPENT ALL NIGHT BANGING????? AND AARON HAD LITERALLY FORCED ROBERT TO TURN HIS PHONE OFF BC CLEARLY ROBERT HAS A PROBLEM #relatable #me (oh and meanwhile gerry was dying but yk we’re talking abt robron here)

3. GDI THAT TIME WHEN ROBERT LITERALLY THOUGHT HE HAD GOTTEN AWAY WITH SLEEPING WITH REBECCA AND STILL TOLD AARON THE TRUTH ANYWAY BC HE JUST??? COULDN’T LIE TO HIS HUSBAND???????? ROBERT, WHO LIED ABOUT EVERYTHING??? AND AARON UNDERSTOOD THAT GROWTH DESPITE OBVIOUSLY BEING HEARTBROKEN AND DEVASTATED RIP, BC AARON KNOWS ROBERT. THEY KNOW EACH OTHER SO WELL!!!!! 

2. THAT TIME WHEN AARON WAS SO ANNOYED THAT HE COULDN’T BONE ROBERT IN PEACE THAT HE DECIDED TO SUGGEST THEY MOVE IN TOGETHER AND THEN THEY (ULTIMATELY) FUCKIN DID AND THEN ROB WAS LIKE HEEEEY TIME 2 PROPOSE AND PLANNED THIS INSANE PLAN INVOLVING ALL OF THE BREAD IN THE VILLAGE TO SHOW AARON JUST HOW MUCH HE LOVES HIM BC HE DOES

1.5 WAIT I HAVE TWO MORE HOLY SHIT THAT TIME!!!!!!!!! THEY LITERALLY!!!!!!!!!!!! BOTH PLANNED TO PROPOSE TO ONE ANOTHER????? AT THE SAME TIME????????? IN THE EXACT SAME WAY?????????????? WHO ARE THEY WHAT IS THIS???? DID THEY LITERALLY LIKE.... HAVE THIS CONVERSATION MID-BONE???? WHY WERE THEY BOTH THINKING ABOUT PROPOSING AT THE SAME TIME WITH THE SAME PLAN TO GO BACK TO WHERE THEY FIRST KISSED???? AND THEIR FAMILIES, WHEN THEY FOUND THIS OUT, WERE JUST LIKE ....oh lol AND THEN NEVER MENTIONED HOW FUCKING INSANE THEIR RELATIONSHIP IS THAT THIS IS WHAT THEY DID gdi who are they. OH AND THEN THEY ACCIDENTALLY??? ENDED UP AT THE LAY-BY ANYWAY????? BECAUSE ROBERT’S CAR ACTUALLY BROKE THE FUCK DOWN BC GOD CLEARLY SHIPS IT OR SOME SHIT AND THEN AARON WAS LIKE lol where are we never seen it before x EVEN THOUGH NOT 24 HOURS EARLIER HE WAS WAXING LYRICAL TO LIV OVER HOW ROMANTIC IT WOULD BE TO TAKE ROBERT TO THAT VERY SPOT AND FUCKIN ASK HIM TO MARRY HIM. AGAIN. BECAUSE THEY’RE ALREADY FUCKIN MARRIED?????? god they’re lunatics. OH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND THEN ROB WENT TO PROPOSE AND AARON LITERALL GOT ANNOYED BC HE WAS LIKE NO IT’S MY TURN BACK OFF SUGDEN AND THEN THEY SAID IT AT THE SAME FUCKIN TIME bc they’re literally just insane i can’t deal with them.

1. that time aaron made a speech about how robert jacob sugden, knowing every terrible thing he’s ever done and having been victim to his stupidity, manipulation, hunger for power and money and general terribleness, is still a good person who deserves love bc as much as aaron knows the bad that robert’s done, he also knows all of the good and just how far he’s come - and robert knows now, bc he’s done so much to try and be a better person for aaron and for their family and now he literally is actually sort of proud of the person he’s become and so much of that is aaron’s influence and like... aaron makes robert a better person by loving him as much as he does and robert in return loves aaron more than anything and they both recognise this love within each other and does it literally go beyond common sense? yes. are they basically a cautionary tale as to why maybe there is such a thing as too much love? u know they are. but are they perfect for each other? RIP YES THEY ARE THIS ISN’T GOING UNDER A CUT READ THIS ENTIRE POST AND SUFFER WITH ME GDI

[fratboyfaith]

coming out!

okay, so, maybe i should start at the beginning?

yeah, okay. here we go.

history

as far back as I can remember, i’ve had crushes. like, almost an abnormal amount for such a young kid ahahah. want proof? every year of school I had a crush on at least one person, holy fuck. good god, i would have so many crushes on these random boys i never even talked to and i’d be in a constant dreamy state due to it.

i would watch movies and dream of experiencing the same things those women (who are literally faking love) portray on television.

i had my real first kiss at 5, with a girl

actually, she was the furthest I ever went with anyone, later on.

my “first kiss”, you know, the one that’s ‘the first’ as a pre-teen where it’s all awkward and shit, i had behind a library at 14

but when he kissed me, or rather, when I grabbed his face and kissed him because he was too hesitant to make the first move…

i felt nothing.

you know in movies, books, for god’s sake even songs, that thing…that tingle? apparently there’s this tingle you’re supposed to get? or that feeling you get when you’re with someone you ‘like-like’ -since we’re talking about 14 year olds

I didn’t feel that attraction, I didn’t feel anything. when we dated for a short period of time — the way grade nines do, you know — i felt nothing. 

I mean, I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with him, we hadn’t known each other that long, but when I say nothing happened, like I didn’t feel a single thing. before, during, and after.

we broke up a few days later due to my lack of affection, and of course the fact that he wanted someone else.

when we broke up, I didn’t get mad, didn’t get upset, didn’t feel anything.

I was just trying to follow the ‘normal teenager’ thing to do.

being 14, i just wanted to be as normal as possible.

experience

so then, i kept trying.

because to a 14 year old a boyfriend was such a big priority.

i made friends with a nice boy, we’re still friends to this day

what a great guy he is, and i’m honestly so glad he found someone he can spend his life with

we hit it off back the same year, 2014, everything was great

but then something shut off.

that was the start of me thinking there was something legitimately wrong with me for 6 years

right before we were about to date,

my whole opinion of him changed in literally in a blink.

like, it all shut off, that feeling… like, the attraction?

so, since all those feelings just *disappeared*, so did I out of his life.

this was a continuous thing from grade 9 to present day, ever since I started dating.

every single time I would go out with a guy, within days I would lose all feelings

and the weird part was that it never bothered me.

I never felt sad for losing feelings.

they just switched off as soon as we got close.

and the whole time, I thought there was always something wrong with me

like, there was nothing wrong with these people, most of my ex’s are quality* people!

*although there was one guy I dated who threatened me and told me to “drop dead” bc i broke up with him due to this ‘problem’ I thought I had. so that wasn’t really cool tbh

I kept trying so hard to find someone who I didn’t instantly lose feelings for as soon as we got close

i went through 27 people, in those 6 years, and every single one I lost feelings for instantly either right before being asked to be their girlfriend, or days after we started dating.

i always thought there was something wrong about me, and i hated myself for it.

i resorted to ghosting to every person who tried to get to my heart because the feelings were never mutual in my case,

for 6 years i ghosted so many people — even before it was called ghosting

and looking back now I can acknowledge that it was so wrong to do that…if I had the mind i did when i was 14 and started experiencing this, i wouldn’t of resorted to ghosting. 

but the idea of spending one more single day with a person i had lost all feelings for... to the point where it would make me uncomfortable to even be near them, was too much for me to handle.

so i broke up with the past partners, and ghosted the could-have-beens, so i wasn’t feeling this horrible discomfort, and i didn’t want to lie to them and fake my feelings for their happiness... because in my eyes that’s worse. 

2018 me would have totally given an explanation bc ghosting is not cool at all.

i just shut out their feelings, because mine were already gone prior.

being i didn’t know what was ‘wrong’ with me, this was the only option in my eyes.

fast forward to last year (2017)

i met someone, we really clicked well, everything was going great, he showed me the classiness of dating that no one had shown me before

but it still happened (gosh darn)

I lost every feeling that i was trying so hard to hold onto

but no matter how hard my grip was, it always slipped out of my fingers.

obviously now i see that ghosting is such a dick move lol

so i actually gave him an explanation! he became the first guy I came out to! (further on the coming out part in like 5 or 6 sentences i know this is so long)

realization

in october 2017 i started digging deep into how i function as a person and trying to learn more about who i am..

i started to research a little, but gave up quickly.

like how do you try and explain in the google search bar that every time anyone tries to get close with you, you lose all feelings and shut them out instantly?

then it hit me

my voice in my head literally said to me ‘oh shit what if i’m asexual’

i spent the next 72 hours in my room researching everything about asexuality.

i found out there’s nothing wrong with me, and holy fuck was that a weight of my shoulders.

i discovered so much information and found out there are so many different kinds of asexuality.

the way ash hardell explained it in such depth... it’s like everything made sense. it’s like when she gave the definition for lithromantic/sexual it was about me.

i was so relieved, man you have no idea how relieved i was.

all of a sudden this ‘problem’ i had wasn’t a problem.

november 3rd 2017 to my mom, dad, and my best friend of 7 years, I came out as asexual.

i was so scared. like, usually i never get nervous. tests? exams? psh, if anything i’m too laidback and unworried.

my mom said to me “life can be just as fulfilling without having to get married or date, you can have amazing friends and support without a significant other” she was so accepting and supportive.

my Conservative Christian father told me “well, maybe you haven’t met the right boy yet that’s all”

lol what the fuck

it’s like… if a man comes out as gay, and someone were to say “maybe you haven’t met the right girl yet that’s all”

funny enough, even when I told my close friend —at the time— who was coincidentally homosexual, he said the same thing to me, which baffles me because I would have thought him all people would understand the difficulty of coming out and having everyone judge you because you’re different.

and furthermore, for the next month, that "you just haven’t met the right guy” quote was all I heard from everyone.

i went silent for a year.

every person i told, granted it was only a few of close friends and my parents, told me the same thing. 

pretty sure only one person didn’t use that line on me, so thanks anGeLiNa ilysm <3 

lesson: if someone is coming out don’t say shit like

“maybe you just haven’t met the perfect guy yet”

bc if they’ve gone through the difficulty of this, they’re probably PRETTY SURE that’s not gonna be the ‘cure-all’ remedy. 

for a year I held my tongue even though I knew the truth about myself, I was afraid of being stigmatized or told the same thing everyone else did.

until a few days ago, i was in this state of holding it all in for 13 months.

i was unsure if i should tell my new college friends, i was worried no one would like me. i feared stigmatization, i feared guys would think i was a prude 

i didn’t want to spend all my time trying to explain a sexual orientation i didn’t even 100% understand myself

I always liked the concept of falling in love, it used to be all I’d think about when I was younger

I see young couples holding hands walking in stores or down the street and i sigh because i wish i had that.

the concept of love really got me.

I would still have these crushes too, but I would never pursue them just because I never had an interest to.. and when I would, I would lose feelings instantly because deep within I never wanted intimacy.

so in my sociology class last week, asexuality was the topic we were learning, and with that it brought everything back

like a year hadn’t even passed.

but this time i was determined for some answers.

when I came out to my family and keona (to me, she is also family) I was still hesitant… for god’s sake I was hesitant until yesterday.

I didn’t like the feeling of this label making me *doomed to never love* as I still like the concept of love

but I needed to be honest with what i really want

when I’m in a relationship, i’m not happy. 

romantic reciprocation towards me makes me uncomfortable, it’s just who I am.

so why force it if it’s something i truly do not want? 

it doesn’t make me sad anymore, it used to. I always liked the idea of dating having an S/O, but in reality, deep within, for me.. I do not want that. I simply like the idea. I can’t change me, as soon as I discovered asexuality, i no longer saw it as problem anymore — if anything it takes soooooooo much pressure off.

so yeah, 

I still get attracted to guys. (and girls oooo fun additional tidbit)

still get crushes.

still walk by people and look them up and down bc damn hello *wink*

yeah i get horny i’m not a nun

yeah, i have a great personal sexual life

i’m not a fucking robot lol

yeah i’ll still flirt with you for fun

simply put: I just don’t want to be romantically or sexually close with someone else.

I have no desire to, and I’m okay with that

I’m still learning all of this as I go along,

i have wonderful friends who support and love me and that is all I could ever ask for <3 

i don’t see the high point of my life to be having kids or getting married tbh, i don’t actually even see that ever happening. 

no, life isn’t lonely, I love my solitude and I gain so much positivity and love from my family, friends, and the people around me. 

yesterday (dec 10th) i finally accepted myself — after countless years of trying to do something i’m not programmed to do.

i’m asexual/aromantic

literally am the same person as i was yesterday, last week, and last year

all this is, is a label and an event of acceptance of myself

not changing anything about myself

I am simple acknowledging who i am, and letting it be known, so I can further accept it myself and grow ♡

with doing this, I feel SOOOOO good oh my GOD

this was such a happy thing for me to write! this is a day of freaking celebration!

like, i don’t have to keep trying be something i’m not and it feels wonderful

i can finally start focusing on my version of happiness instead of trying to accomplish the traditional happiness…which ironically never made me happy.

my #1 girl is named faith and i’m focusing on her happiness, and this was a big acceptance chapter I needed to get through in order for her to flourish further. 

thank you for reading!

xx

tbh i’m not even going to proofread this so if there’s spelling mistakes my uPmOsT aPoLogiEs~

[gooseghoul]

make me dream bud, for the ask meme: Snape, Lupin and Lucius !

put 3 characters in my inbox and I’ll tell you who I’d slow burn/fake date/enemies to lovers with

thank you bud

Snape, Lupin and Lucius

putting this under a cut bc i accidentally wrote 3 feature length films of self insert fanfic.

honestly, lads, skip to the end for lucius. it’s the highlight of this post.

slow burn: snape.

so, it’s not that we’re not friends at school. bc we’d talk in potions (or, I’d talk and he’d glare), we’d trade transfiguration notes (he hated that I wrote everything mcgonagall said down), and he’d best me in defence (the only time I’d ever seen him smile). we weren’t friends, but we weren’t not not friends.

he went off the deep end his last two years in school. i’d still speak to him but didn’t seek him out. slytherin pride and all that. gotta stick together. gotta not get murdered by the dark lord.

he wasn’t the type to keep in touch post hogwarts. but with where he was headed in life, the most i was hoping for was that he’d have a “meh” opinion of me. so, if he was ever tasked with murdering me, he’d at least be somewhat quick about it.

the war ends and I run into him. he’s a mess. full mourning dress, looking a little bit queen victoria, absolutely brooding. don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate brooding. but man, sometimes you just need to pull yourself together. we’re not friends exactly. but he sees that i still see him as the angsty kid i went to school with and not the death eater he became. most other people have tainted views of him. i knew too much of his anger, too much of his teenage fear and hate to despise him. i’d seen him laugh in the common room with mulciber, in the courtyard with the girl whose death ended the war. i’d seen him that one christmas i’d stayed at hogwarts. seen him with no presents under the tree. a stocking empty.

how could i hate a kid i’d seen come to school with at the start of term bruises on his arms? i hated what he’d become, the direction he turned to, but as a slytherin i knew he had little choice. he didn’t have the means to say no. not that i’m sure he’d have wanted to. the boy was a bastard at times, cold and malicious, but he wasn’t evil. he didn’t have the heart to be evil.

he owled me every month from hogwarts. then, after a year, every fortnight. then every week. then every other day.

the month harry potter came to hogwarts i received no owls. no frantic floo calls. nothing but radio silence.

then he showed up at my doorstep unannounced, fire whiskey in hand, ranting about how the boy was just like his father. it was awful to listen to, but listen i did. because snape had been through this before: the torment at potter’s hands (although this time unintentional, possibly imagined), the need to fight back, to be drawn into something bigger. the cycle has begun again.

snape was cruel. ugly. an awful, vindictive man.

but i couldn’t shake that christmas morning from my mind. i couldn’t shake the sound of his laugh.

i’d see him in person more often. whenever he had a free weekend he’d floo in. mostly he complained about potter, but i tried to drag him away from that topic after a few weeks of nothing but anger. potions was a good bet, but even that devolved into how incompetent potter war.

so i put a “potter” jar on my mantelpiece and made snape pay a knut every time he even thought about the kid. after two weeks, the jar was half full and snape started insisting we meet in hogsmeade instead. neutral territory. easier for him. as far away from that damn jar as possible. but the point had been made. potter was mentioned no more.

i didn’t see him when the mark burnt black on his skin. not for a good week. then snape was tumbling into my hallway numb from the torment. in all the time i’d known him, he’d never been so quiet.

i lead him to my bed and he fell asleep there. i took the sofa. it was the first time he’d stayed the night. it wasn’t the last.

it was weird how it progressed. how it went from cups of tea wordlessly granted, to stolen looks, fingers lingering too long, touches that weren’t there before. he didn’t like me like that. didn’t love me like how he’d loved that girl from before. i knew that in my heart. knew i’d always be second best. knew he didn’t truly have it in him.

but i was there and one touch led to another. one barking laugh at something i’d read in the paper. one christmas morning spent away from the castle. one fire whiskey too many.

a year and a half of normal. of the something between us being more than friendship and slightly less than love.

then the end of harry potter’s sixth year. the end of dumbledore’s tenure. i couldn’t look at him. couldn’t speak to him. couldn’t touch him.

that last year I wish I could live again. my family and I were safe. though we weren’t death eaters we were purebloods, slytherins, good people who’d never gone out of our way to say anything about muggles. snape wasn’t part of that year. was part of that awful regime.

I regret it. now that Potter’s story came out. now that the truth of Severus Snape had reverberated throughout the wizarding world. even i, one of the people closest to him, who had known and loved him the longest out of all, had believed him a monster. but snape was dead. gone. and he had died for love. so confusing a concept that at times i didn’t think him capable of it.

(but the way he’d talked of potter. how he ranted and raved – that was love, wasn’t it? love of the mother, hatred of the son.)

he was dead but not completely. i see him there, in the flash of a student’s cloak; black like the mourning robes he never shed. there, in the biting remark spun in the air over a pint at the bar. and there, in the ugly sun which rises now over the wizarding world. it is a world not free from hate nor vitriol, but one recovering from a war which would have been fateless without him.

fake date: lupin. sirius black cannot stand anything slytherin. to him, understandably, slytherin is the epitome of all that is wrong with the world. certainly all that is wrong with hogwarts. sirius black hates the fact that lupin is on civil terms with me and actually kind of friends. we sit together in potions. while we’re not the best students, slughorn thinks we work well together and refuses to separate us.

so, The Prank has just happened. I’ve no idea what went on, but that weird Snape kid in my year looks shaken up. Sirius Black looks actively guilty. And Remus Lupin is angry. I don’t think I’ve seen Lupin angry in my life. Lupin is so angry he misses our study group, and almost puts the flobberworm mucus in the potion too early. but he doesn’t care that the potions could have gone horrifically wrong.

a week later he finally comes to the library. i ask him what’s wrong but he doesn’t say anything. eventually he hisses, “Black did something stupid. so fucking stupid. he doesn’t even see what he did wrong.”

he’s calling Sirius ‘Black’. Sirius Black is never anything but Sirius.

“I hate him. I’m never speaking to him again. I wish I could just— I wish I could show him how awful— do something that would make him see—”

he looks at me, a gleam in his eyes. “M. you’re a slytherin.”“er”“You’re a pureblood.”“eeeerrr”his eyes are beginning to look a bit manic. “you’re friends with snape”“friends is a strong word for knowing the kid’s name.”

“M. I need you to know that I mean this completely platonically. But I trust you and I think this could work. Will you be my girlfriend?”

platonic? girlfriend? “remus, you know—“

“sirius hates everything about you.” (thanks bud). “not you specifically. but everything you embody. pureblood. blood supremacy. voldemort”

“okay, listen, mate. just because I’m slytherin doesn’t mean I’m up for maiming some muggles.”

“no. but sirius thinks you are. he thinks you’re all the same.”

I think of regulus in the years below, and how, yeah regulus is a blood supremacist like most of us. but he’s not that.

“right. i don’t see what this has to do with platonic dating.”

“It’ll show Sirius how much he’s hurt me. that I’ve turned to you out of all my friends. that he didn’t even know I’d been thinking of you.”

so, Lupin is great. but also sometimes, just sometimes, he’s a bit of a dick. but you know what, if remus lupin wants to date you you do not say no. even if it’s platonic, strictly revenge dating. even if you think that maybe lupin should just talk through his feelings (his weirdly passionate feelings) with Sirius.

“fine. let’s do it.”

Sirius Black is pissed off. we start off small. walking to classes together. stopping by the gryffindor table to say hi to Lupin. we even let ourselves be caught holding hands in the corridor. how scandalous.

the slytherins corner me and ask what the fuck i’m doing with a gryffindor. so i tell them: I’m doing this to bring the blood traitor Sirius Black down a peg. I want to destroy him. Snape doesn’t look at me anymore. but honestly, his impact on my life was so little that I’d barely notice had one of the Black girls not pointed it out.

we’re in the corridor one day before lupin’s prefect patrol. stood by the gryffindor common room just talking while lupin waits for his partner (lily?) to arrive. lupin’s holding my hand, thumb running over my knuckles absent mindedly. no-one’s around, but you have to put the effort in, right? you have to believe what you’re doing to act it well, right?

“bear with me” lupin says looking behind me. and kisses me.

it’s weird. but maybe…. M, maybe you’re not as gay as you thought you were.

there’s a horrified sound behind you. a hissed word and a door (portrait?) slamming shut. but all that exists in the world is remus lupin.

he pulls away after a moment. utters a single word fuck before kissing me again.

after hogwarts we marry and have 15000000000 cats and my family is super rich so that skinny boy never has to starve again and we build a werewolf bunker under our country estate and all is well. (until his two best friends are murdered and their child survives them but grows up abused and not know who he is but y’know we can gloss over that part.)

enemies to lovers: lucius.

i was a couple years above draco at school. the malfoys hated my family as we were both slytherins and blood traitors (lmao at me pretending i am in anyway a pureblood). post war the malfoys are trying to redeem themselves. draco and i go to the same university (st andrews school of magic), we run into each other in the classics dep and start talking. we become slow friends and i stay at his house over summer. his mum’s house, bc lucius and narcissa divorced post-war.

lucius is there one day, sees me, spits some vitriol and storms out. there’s a number of awful meetings with lucius, but draco isn’t willing to put his parent’s desires above his own anymore. bc he is not his parents. turns out, lucius resents me bc my family and i were good slytherins, so we didn’t get fucked over post-war. lucius and i have a number of mr darcy / elizabeth bennett style arguments with draco bashing his head against the table.

the next summer, i spend a couple weeks with draco at his dad’s place. there, lucius reveals he’s not a complete cock and is actually trying to repent but doesn’t know how. i’m kind of like, hey, so maybe this guy isn’t as bad as he seems. hey, draco, your dad’s kind of cool once you get past the whole being a death eater thing. slowly lucius starts spending more time around the house when draco, me and our friends are there. lucius starts talking to me like i’m a human being and not a rat.

hey, draco, you know your dad has great hair right? you know he’s actually kind of handsome if we ignore how stress has aged him. hey, draco —

cue a scene straight from clueless. one of lucius malfoy’s albino peacocks (because he smuggled some out from the manor during the divorce) walks behind me, a fountain suddenly starts spouting water.

“oh my god, draco. i’m in love with your dad.”

…

…

…

draco says, “no fucking shit you doorknob”

i don’t do anything bc lucius is a dick. he’s always been a dick. i’ve hated his family since before i could talk. he’s hated mine since before i was born. but he’s also….. kind of a dilf? draco thinks the whole thing is really weird, but also he’d rather me than some of the people who’ve been trying to court lucius. so like, he starts trying to hint at a possible relationship.

hint is a strong word.

“hey, dad, M would be a great step mum right?” “hey, dad, doesn’t M look like she could do with a sugar daddy to help her off her feet. if only we knew someone who had a lot of money.” “oh, hey, dad. don’t we have lots of money?” “hey, dad, i can’t be her sugar daddy bc I’m too young. the laws of sugar daddies disallow any relationship between us. if only there were another single man in this family with access to our fortune.”

meanwhile, the malfoy’s most recent house elf is trying to bash draco’s head against the table.

i get invited to the malfoy’s christmas party. i’m working on my postgrad and draco has just finished his first semester of honours.

there’s mistletoe. lucius is standing next to me. but there’s mistletoe. at the christmas party. at the christmas party where lucius is standing next to me. under the mistletoe.

we kiss. really awkwardly bc i’m about 5 gin and tonics into the night but also really eager. bc shit son. shit son. this universe’s M is str8 as heck for the absolute daddy that is Lucius Malfoy.(draco is head bridesmaid at our wedding. a single albino peacock is best man. it is a beautiful, if not visually confusing, affair.)

[defunctblogtobedeleted]

8/26/17, 6:27pm - Some Kinda Closure pt 3

So this week had some shenanigans. Got drunk with aaron and cody, found out gay guys think I’m hot as shit, so that’s always a nice ego boost. Also I talked to Aaron and these guys at the bar about me joining their amateur pool team. They said I’m gonna be on the very low elo end of the spectrum (he said I’d be like a 2/9) but that makes sense considering how it’s probably the exact same as melee. I’m pretty fucking pumped to get into that.

Finally drug it out of Angie that she was like kinda ghosting me so that I could start hitting up girls on tinder again. There was this cross dresser dude who wanted to drive an hour and a half round trip just to give me an NSA blowjob before i went to work, and I was both perturbed and extremely flattered. Like how thirsty do you have to be to just want to go down on someone? Am I like that? Is that how girls think about me when I want to drive out to sleep with them? Crazy. But super neato. Ended up passing on it, was excited to cross trans off my bucket list but he wasn’t actually trans just liked dressing as a girl. Does that count? hm.

Anyway, dealt with a bunch of bullshit in parking fees, my laptop’s been on the fritz, that could be better, but nbd. Finances are super stable right now so that’s great. Bought new scrubs and I look great in them and they feel wonderful. Thought I’d hate this brand but feels fine. 

Been playing a fuckkkkton of hearthstone instead of melee. This new set made my deck ALMOST viable but there’s some op bullshit going around. So I’m just trying to see how high I can take it, but I think I’ve peaked. Gonna unlock this nifty card back and call it quits unless there’s a patch. Was saying I’d try to make legend by the end of the year but if that means playing the op classes then that sounds fucking gay lol. Which is ironic, I think about how i’ve said a ton of times in melee “if you didn’t think your character (/class) was the best, why would you play it?” and yknow I guess if I was trying to win that’d be a reasonable thing to think but it’s just fun. So nah. Anyway, I really wanna kick it into gear with melee soon though, so gotta take a break from it, I’ve been playing hearthstone like incessantly lol since I’m like the only person in the world trying to make this deck work I’ve been doing all the experimenting on my own.

Ok so all of this post probably could’ve been skipped if it weren’t for this shit that went down on tuesday at the melee tournament. HAD to make a post to tell this story because it blew my mind.

I show up to play dubz with weilin, and there’s this girl with downs in line in front of me. She’s telling the geeks cashier melissa, who I had just gotten in trouble for flirting with a few weeks ago, that she wanted to enter the tournament but didn’t have any money so what could she do. She was like uhhh what. no it costs money for the prize. And she’s like yeah but I don’t have money. And i just stepped in and was like it’s no problem, I’ll cover her because melee is cool as fuck and I didn’t want her to feel like she wasn’t welcome just because she didn’t have money. Lex later told me that was a good look, bc melissa must have told him, but I tried to shrug it off because I was trying to be cool and not tell anyone about it hahaah.  So me and weilin do alright, ALMOST fucking beat blackchris and sneak but i choked, and we had this crazy great set against dashtip where we had a 5 stock comeback, but then got demolished by hifiRone. Fucking sucked, I felt like we could’ve beat them but I also felt really spent. I didn’t really sleep well the night before from playing too much hearthstone. So intermittently throughout the tourney I’m chilling out back on the steps staring at the tree and the sky and thinking about how that baby blue and green are the best colors and just trying to zen out, but when I go out before my singles bracket, Nicole, the girl with downs who I paid for, is hanging around outside.

I decide to be polite and say hey and talk to her for a bit, even though I’m really out there to be as alone and quiet my mind as much as possible. I ask her how the tournaments going for her and how she’s doing and she says it’s fun and she’s great but she’s been really upset lately. I say oh no, what’s the matter. She says that her sister’s been trying to have a baby but that her other sister just had a baby so she didn’t want her to. I say well that’s a little silly wouldn’t you want both your sisters to have kids? She says yeah, but the first sister’s daughter passed away. I don’t remember the wording she used, but to me it sounded like a miscarriage of like an infant. So I go into my like neutral condolences like “so it goes, these things happen but that’s why it’s more important for your sister to have a baby too right?” Yknow, because slaughterhouse 5 is still my go to for dealing with death. She says well no, when my niece got hit by a truck it really scared me. I’m like WHAT. she got hit by a truck? She says yeah. And she looked at me like she wanted me to help but I couldn’t do anything to save her. She just looked at me in the eyes as she died. I keep having nightmares about it So I was like hooooly shit. That’s understandable. That sounds horrible.

But just like that she was off the conversation. We talk about something else for a moment and then I’m staring up at the tree again and she says “I have a boyfriend.” So I say that’s great, is he nice to ya. (I’m thinking this girl is like 16 or something, turns out she’s 25 like me). She says well no. He hits me and whenever I annoy him he punishes me. I’m like WOAHHH WHAT THE FUCK. that’s not okay. you’ve gotta tell him he can’t do that. You’re a person like anyone else and you don’t deserve that no matter what fuck that shit fucking call the cops if he treats you like that ever. EVER. I go on like this for like a While because she says like he’s a grown man who can do what he wants and I say well You’re a grown woman and so you can do what you want to so grown people can’t do that to each other it’s fucked up.

All that shit like rattles me, man. I’m like thinking about how shitty someone can have it and how fucking silly it is for me to be worried about anything. I feel like horribly depressed and for the first time think about quitting the tournament before i get knocked out. I just play it out half assed and head out to go home, but someone out front gives me a cig and some random strangers just introduce themselves and start talking to me and it makes me feel really good about life again. Like yknow it sucks that people have it so bad off, and it’s unfair that I have it so much better off than other people. But I have to remember from all the shit that’s happened that my life is fucking excellent and I’m doing really goddamn well. I love my life, it’s still fucking awesome.

But on that, I’ve gotta wrap this up and head out. I’m leaving work and seeing this beautiful chinese girl from tinder in just a few minutes. Gonna drink and chat and listen to some good indie rock. Should be excellent. And if not lol I have another date with this skinny cute uncg girl tomorrow. Fuckin killin it lmaoo.

Wish me luck, fam.

[esqreverblog]

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

This is my friend Jeremy.

“When you have it,” he says, “you have to keep using it. When it’s gone, it’s like, ‘Oh good, I can go back to my life now.’ I would stay up all weekend and go to these sex parties and then feel like 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 exact circumstances of the overdose, only that a stranger called an ambulance and he woke up here.

Jeremy is not the friend 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 work 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-Fi, he’s way behind on work emails.

“The drugs were a combination of boredom and loneliness,” he says. “I used to come home from work exhausted on a Friday night and it’s like, ‘Now what?’ So I would dial out to get some meth delivered and check the Internet to see if there were any parties happening. It was either that or watch a movie by myself.”

1.That’s not his real name. Only a few of the names of the gay men in this article are real.

Jeremy[1] is not my only gay friend who’s struggling. There’s Malcolm, who barely leaves the house except for work because his anxiety is so bad. There’s Jared, whose depression and body dysmorphia have steadily shrunk his social life down to me, the gym and Internet hookups. And there was Christian, the second guy I ever kissed, who killed himself at 32, two weeks after his boyfriend broke up with him. Christian went to a party store, rented a helium tank, started inhaling it, then texted his ex and told him to come over, to make sure he’d find the body.

For years I’ve noticed the divergence between my straight friends and my gay friends. While one half of my social circle has disappeared into relationships, kids and suburbs, the other has struggled through isolation and anxiety, hard drugs and risky sex.

None of this fits the narrative I have been told, the one I have told myself. Like me, Jeremy did not grow up bullied by his peers or rejected by his family. He can’t remember ever being called a faggot. He was raised in a West Coast suburb by a lesbian mom. “She came out to me when I was 12,” he says. “And told me two sentences later that she knew I was gay. I barely knew at that point.”

This is a picture of me and my family when I was 9. My parents still claim that they had no idea I was gay. They’re sweet.

Jeremy and I are 34. In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history. As recently as my own adolescence, gay marriage was a distant aspiration, something newspapers still put in scare quotes. Now, it’s been enshrined in law by the Supreme Court. Public support for gay marriage has climbed from 27 percent in 1996 to 61 percent in 2016. In pop culture, we’ve gone from “Cruising” to “Queer Eye” to “Moonlight.” Gay characters these days are so commonplace they’re even allowed to have flaws.

Still, even as we celebrate the scale and speed of this change, the rates of depression, loneliness and substance abuse in the gay community remain stuck in the same place they’ve been for decades. Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives. We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode. And just like the last epidemic we lived through, the trauma appears to be concentrated among men. In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three. Despite all the talk of our “chosen families,” gay men have fewer close friends than straight people or gay women. In a survey of care-providers at HIV clinics, one respondent told researchers: “It’s not a question of them not knowing how to save their lives. It’s a question of them knowing if their lives are worth saving.”

I’m not going to pretend to be objective about any of this. I’m a perpetually single gay guy who was raised in a bright blue city by PFLAG parents. I’ve never known anyone who died of AIDS, I’ve never experienced direct discrimination and I came out of the closet into a world where marriage, a picket fence and a golden retriever were not just feasible, but expected. I’ve also been in and out of therapy more times than I’ve downloaded and deleted Grindr.

“Marriage equality and the changes in legal status were an improvement for some gay men,” says Christopher Stults, a researcher at New York University who studies the differences in mental health between gay and straight men. “But for a lot of other people, it was a letdown. Like, we have this legal status, and yet there’s still something unfulfilled.”

This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon. In the Netherlands, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, gay men remain three times more likely to suffer from a mood disorder than straight men, and 10 times more likely to engage in “suicidal self-harm.” In Sweden, which has had civil unions since 1995 and full marriage since 2009, men married to men have triple the suicide rate of men married to women.

All of these unbearable statistics lead to the same conclusion: It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men. The good news, though, is that epidemiologists and social scientists are closer than ever to understanding all the reasons why.

WHETHER WE RECOGNIZE IT OR NOT, OUR BODIESBRING THE CLOSET WITH US INTO ADULTHOOD.T

Travis Salway, a researcher with the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, has spent the last five years trying to figure out why gay men keep killing themselves.

“The defining feature of gay men used to be the loneliness of the closet,” he says. “But now you’ve got millions of gay men who have come out of the closet and they still feel the same isolation.”

We’re having lunch at a hole-in-the-wall noodle bar. It’s November, and he arrives wearing jeans, galoshes and a wedding ring.

“Gay-married, huh?” I say.

“Monogamous even,” he says. “I think they’re gonna give us the key to the city.”

Salway grew up in Celina, Ohio, a rusting factory town of maybe 10,000 people, the kind of place, he says, where marriage competed with college for the 21-year-olds. He got bullied for being gay before he even knew he was. “I was effeminate and I was in choir,” he says. “That was enough.” So he got careful. He had a girlfriend through most of high school, and tried to avoid boys—both romantically and platonically—until he could get out of there.

By the late 2000s, he was a social worker and epidemiologist and, like me, was struck by the growing distance between his straight and gay friends. He started to wonder if the story he had always heard about gay men and mental health was incomplete.

When the disparity first came to light in the ’50s and ’60s, doctors thought it was a symptom of homosexuality itself, just one of many manifestations of what was, at the time, known as “sexual inversion.” As the gay rights movement gained steam, though, homosexuality disappeared from the DSM and the explanation shifted to trauma. Gay men were being kicked out of their own families, their love lives were illegal. Of course they had alarming rates of suicide and depression. “That was the idea I had, too,” Salway says, “that gay suicide was a product of a bygone era, or it was concentrated among adolescents who didn’t see any other way out.”

And then he looked at the data. The problem wasn’t just suicide, it wasn’t just afflicting teenagers and it wasn’t just happening in areas stained by homophobia. He found that gay men everywhere, at every age, have higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cancer, incontinence, erectile dysfunction,⁠ allergies and asthma—you name it, we got it. In Canada, Salway eventually discovered, more gay men were dying from suicide than from AIDS, and had been for years. (This might be the case in the U.S. too, he says, but no one has bothered to study it.)

“We see gay men who have never been sexually or physically assaulted with similar post-traumatic stress symptoms to people who have been in combat situations or who have been raped,” says Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the Fenway Institute’s Center for Population Research in LGBT Health.

Gay men are, as Keuroghlian puts it, “primed to expect rejection.” We’re constantly scanning social situations for ways we may not fit into them. We struggle to assert ourselves. We replay our social failures on a loop.

The weirdest thing about these symptoms, though, is that most of us don’t see them as symptoms at all. Since he looked into the data, Salway has started interviewing gay men who attempted suicide and survived.

“When you ask them why they tried to kill themselves,” he says, “most of them don’t mention anything at all about being gay.” Instead, he says, they tell him they’re having relationship problems, career problems, money problems. “They don’t feel like their sexuality is the most salient aspect of their lives. And yet, they’re an order of magnitude more likely to kill themselves.”

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.

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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.

James, now a mostly-out 20-year-old, tells me that in seventh grade, when he was a closeted 12-year-old, a female classmate asked him what he thought about another girl. “Well, she looks like a man,” he said, without thinking, “so yeah, maybe I would have sex with her.”

Immediately, he says, he panicked. “I was like, did anyone catch that? Did they tell anyone else I said it that way?”

This is how I spent my adolescence, too: being careful, slipping up, stressing out, overcompensating. Once, at a water park, one of my middle-school friends caught me staring at him as we waited for a slide. “Dude, did you just check me out?” he said. I managed to deflect—something like “Sorry, you’re not my type”—then I spent weeks afterward worried about what he was thinking about me. But he never brought it up. All the bullying took place in my head.

“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.”

“On TV I was seeing all these traditional families,” James says. “At the same time, I was watching a ton of gay porn. ... So I thought those were my two options.”

Or, as Elder puts it, being in the closet is like someone having someone punch you lightly on the arm, over and over. At first, it’s annoying. After a while, it’s infuriating. Eventually, it’s all you can think about.

And then the stress of dealing with it every day begins to build up in your body.

Growing up gay, it seems, is bad for you in many of the same ways as growing up in extreme poverty. 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, a former consultant who quit his job two years ago to make pottery and lead adventure tours in the Adirondacks. “Our gut reaction is to deal with things now the way we did as children.”

Even Salway, who has devoted his career to understanding minority stress, says that there are days when he feels uncomfortable walking around Vancouver with his partner. No one’s ever attacked them, but they’ve had a few assholes yell slurs at them in public. That doesn’t have to happen very many times before you start expecting it, before your heart starts beating a little faster when you see a car approaching.

But minority stress doesn’t fully explain why gay men have such a wide array of health problems. Because while the first round of damage happens before we come out of the closet, the second, and maybe more severe, comes afterward.

"YOU GO FROM YOUR MOM'S HOUSE TO A GAY CLUB WHERE A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE ON DRUGSAND IT'S LIKE, THIS IS MY COMMUNITY? IT'S LIKE

THE FUCKING JUNGLE."N

No one ever told Adam not to act effeminate. But he, like me, like most of us, learned it somehow.

“I never worried about my family being homophobic,” he says. “I used to do this thing where I would wrap a blanket around myself like a dress and dance around in the backyard. My parents thought it was cute, so they took a video and showed it to my grandparents. When they all watched the tape, I hid behind the couch because I was so ashamed. I must have been six or seven.”

By the time he got to high school, Adam had learned to manage his mannerisms so well that no one suspected him of being gay. But still, he says, “I couldn’t trust anyone because I had this thing I was holding. I had to operate in the world as a lone agent.”

He came out at 16, then graduated, then moved to San Francisco and started working in HIV prevention. But the feeling of distance from other people didn’t go away. So he treated it, he says, “with lots and lots of sex. It’s our most accessible resource in the gay community. You convince yourself that if you’re having sex with someone, you’re having an intimate moment. That ended up being a crutch.”

He worked long hours. He would come home exhausted, smoke a little weed, pour a glass of red wine, then start scanning the hookup apps for someone to invite over. Sometimes it would be two or three guys in a row. “As soon as I closed the door on the last guy, I’d think, That didn’t hit the spot, then I’d find another one.”

It went on like this for years. Last Thanksgiving, he was back home to visit his parents and felt a compulsive need to have sex because he was so stressed out. When he finally found a guy nearby who was willing to hook up, he ran to his parents’ room and started rifling through their drawers to see if they had any Viagra.

“So that was the rock-bottom moment?” I ask.

“That was the third or fourth, yeah,” he says.

Adam’s now in a 12-step program for sex addiction. It’s been six weeks since he’s had sex. Before this, the longest he had ever gone was three or four days.

“There are people who have lots of sex because it’s fun, and that’s fine. But I kept trying to wring it out like a rag to get something out of it that wasn’t in there—social support, or companionship. It was a way of not dealing with my own life. And I kept denying it was a problem because I had always told myself, ‘I’ve come out, I moved to San Francisco, I’m done, I did what I had to do as a gay person.’”

For decades, this is what psychologists thought, too: 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.

“It’s like you emerge from the closet expecting to be this butterfly and the gay community just slaps the idealism out of you,” Adam says. When he first started coming out, he says, “I went to West Hollywood because I thought that’s where my people were. But it was really horrifying. It’s made by gay adults, and it’s not welcoming for gay kids. You go from your mom’s house to a gay club where a lot of people are on drugs and it’s like, this is my community? It’s like the fucking jungle.”

“I came out when I was 17, and I didn’t see a place for myself in the gay scene,” says Paul, a software developer. “I wanted to fall in love like I saw straight people do in movies. But I just felt like a piece of meat. It got so bad that I used to go to the grocery store that was 40 minutes away instead of the one that was 10 minutes away just because I was so afraid to walk down the gay street.”

The word I hear from Paul, 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,” Paul says, “grew up and became bullies themselves.”

“Gay men in particular are just not very nice to each other,” says John, the adventure tour guide. “In pop culture, drag queens are known for their takedowns and it’s all ha ha ha. But that meanness is almost pathological. All of us were deeply confused or lying to ourselves for a good chunk of our adolescence. But it’s not comfortable for us to show that to other people. So we show other people what the world shows us, which is nastiness.”

Every gay man I know carries around a mental portfolio of all the shitty things other gay men have said and done to him. I arrived to a date once and the guy immediately stood up, said I was shorter than I looked in my pictures and left. Alex, a fitness instructor in Seattle, was told by a guy on his swim team, “I’ll ignore your face if you fuck me without a condom.” Martin, a Brit living in Portland, has gained maybe 10 pounds since he moved there and got a Grindr message—on Christmas Day—that said: “You used to be so sexy. It’s a shame you messed it up.”

For other minority groups, living in a community with people like them is linked to lower rates of anxiety and depression. It helps to be close to people who instinctively understand you. But for us, the effect is the opposite. Several studies have found that living in gay neighborhoods predicts higher rates of risky sex and meth use and less time spent on other community activities like volunteering or playing sports. A 2009 study suggested that gay men who were more linked to the gay community were less satisfied with their own romantic relationships.

“Gay and bisexual men talk about the gay community as a significant source of stress in their lives,” Pachankis says. The fundamental reason for this, he says, is that “in-group discrimination” does more harm to your psyche than getting rejected by members of the majority. It’s easy to ignore, roll your eyes and put a middle finger up to straight people who don’t like you because, whatever, you don’t need their approval anyway. Rejection from other gay people, though, feels like losing your only way of making friends and finding love. Being pushed away from your own people hurts more because you need them more.

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The researchers I spoke to explained that gay guys inflict this kind of damage on each other for two main reasons. The first, and the one I heard most frequently, is that gay men are shitty to each other because, basically, we’re men.

“The challenges of masculinity get magnified in a community of men,” Pachankis says. “Masculinity is precarious. It has to be constantly enacted or defended or collected. We see this in studies: You can threaten masculinity among men and then look at the dumb things they do. They show more aggressive posturing, they start taking financial risks, they want to punch things.”

This helps explain the pervasive stigma against feminine guys in the gay community. According to Dane Whicker, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Duke, most gay men report that they want to date someone masculine, and that they wished they acted more masculine themselves. Maybe that’s because, historically, masculine men have been more able to blend into straight society. Or maybe it’s internalized homophobia: Feminine gay men are still stereotyped as bottoms, the receptive partner in anal sex.

A two-year longitudinal study found that the longer gay men were out of the closet, the more likely they were to become versatile or tops. Researchers say this kind of training, deliberately trying to appear more masculine and taking on a different sex role, is just one of the ways gay men pressure each other to attain “sexual capital,” the equivalent of going to the gym or plucking our eyebrows.

“The only reason I started working out was so I would seem like a feasible top,” Martin says. When he first came out, he was convinced that he was too skinny, too effeminate, that bottoms would think he was one of them. “So I started faking all this hyper-masculine behavior. My boyfriend noticed recently that I still lower my voice an octave whenever I order drinks. That’s a remnant of my first few years out of the closet, when I thought I had to speak in this Christian Bale Batman voice to get dates.”

Grant, a 21-year-old who grew up on Long Island and now lives in Hell’s Kitchen, says he used to be self-conscious about the way he stood—hands on hips, one leg slightly cocked like a Rockette. So, his sophomore year, he started watching his male teachers for their default positions, deliberately standing with his feet wide, his arms at his sides.

These masculinity norms exert a toll on everyone, even their perpetrators. Feminine gay men are at higher risk of suicide, loneliness and mental illness. Masculine gay men, for their part, are more anxious, have more risky sex and use drugs and tobacco with greater frequency. One study investigating why living in the gay community increases depression found that the effect only showed up in masculine gay guys.

The second reason the gay community acts as a unique stressor on its members is not about why we reject each other, but how.

In the last 10 years, traditional gay spaces—bars, nightclubs, bathhouses—have begun to disappear, and have been replaced by social media. At least 70 percent of gay men now use hookup apps like Grindr and Scruff to meet each other. In 2000, around 20 percent of gay couples met online. By 2010, that was up to 70 percent. Meanwhile, the share of gay couples who met through friends dropped from 30 percent to 12 percent.

Usually when you hear about the shocking primacy of hookup apps in gay life—Grindr, the most popular, says its average user spends 90 minutes per day on it—it’s in some panicked media story about murderers or homophobes trawling them for victims, or about the troubling “chemsex” scenes that have sprung up in London and New York. And yes, those are problems. But the real effect of the apps is quieter, less remarked-upon and, in a way, more profound: For many of us, they have become the primary way we interact with other gay people.

“It’s so much easier to meet someone for a hookup on Grindr than it is to go to a bar by yourself,” Adam says. “Especially if you’ve just moved to a new city, it’s so easy to let the dating apps become your social life. It’s harder to look for social situations where you might have to make more of an effort.”

“I have moments when I want to feel desired and so I get on Grindr,” Paul says. “I upload a shirtless picture and I start getting these messages telling me I’m hot. It feels good in the moment, but nothing ever comes of it, and those messages stop coming after a few days. It feels like I’m scratching an itch, but it’s scabies. It’s just going to spread.”

The worst thing about the apps, though, and why they’re relevant to the health disparity between gay and straight men, is not just that we use them a lot. It is that they are almost perfectly designed to underline our negative beliefs about ourselves. In interviews that Elder, the post-traumatic stress researcher, conducted with gay men in 2015, he found that 90 percent said they wanted a partner who was tall, young, white, muscular and masculine. For the vast majority of us who barely meet one of those criteria, much less all five, the hookup apps merely provide an efficient way to feel ugly.

Paul says he’s “electrified waiting for rejection” as soon as he opens them. John, the former consultant, is 27, 6-foot-1 and has a six-pack you can see through his wool sweater. And even he says most of his messages don’t get replies, that he spends probably 10 hours talking to people on the app for every one hour he spends meeting for coffee or a hookup.

It’s worse for gay men of color. Vincent, who runs counseling sessions with black and Latino men through the San Francisco Department of Public Health, says the apps give racial minorities two forms of feedback: Rejected (“Sorry, I’m not into black guys”) and fetishized (“Hi, I’m really into black guys.”) Paihan, a Taiwanese immigrant in Seattle, shows me his Grindr inbox. It is, like mine, mostly hellos he has sent out to no reply. One of the few messages he received just says, “Asiiiaaaan.”

None of this is new, of course. Walt Odets, a psychologist who’s been writing about social isolation since the 1980s, says that gay men used to be troubled by the bathhouses in the same way they are troubled by Grindr now. The difference he sees in his younger patients is that “if someone rejected you at a bathhouse, you could still have a conversation afterwards. Maybe you end up with a friend out of it, or at least something that becomes a positive social experience. On the apps, you just get ignored if someone doesn’t perceive you as a sexual or romantic conquest.” The gay men I interviewed talked about the dating apps the same way straight people talk about Comcast: It sucks, but what are you gonna do? “You have to use the apps in smaller cities,” says Michael Moore, a psychologist at Yale. “They serve the purpose of a gay bar. But the downside is that they put all this prejudice out there.”

What the apps reinforce, or perhaps simply accelerate, is the adult version of what Pachankis calls the Best Little Boy in the World Hypothesis. As kids, growing up in the closet makes us more likely to concentrate our self-worth into whatever the outside world wants us to be—good at sports, good at school, whatever. As adults, the social norms in our own community pressure us to concentrate our self-worth even further—into our looks, our masculinity, our sexual performance. But then, even if we manage to compete there, even if we attain whatever masc-dom-top ideal we’re looking for, all we’ve really done is condition ourselves to be devastated when we inevitably lose it.

“We often live our lives through the eyes of others,” says Alan Downs, a psychologist and the author of The Velvet Rage, a book about gay men’s struggle with shame and social validation. “We want to have man after man, more muscles, more status, whatever brings us fleeting validation. Then we wake up at 40, exhausted, and we wonder, Is that all there is? And then the depression comes.”

OUR DISTANCE FROM THE MAINSTREAM IS ALSO

THE SOURCE OF OUR WIT, OUR RESILIENCE,OUR EMPATHY, OUR SUPERIOR TALENTS FOR

DRESSING AND DANCING AND KARAOKE.P

Perry Halkitis, a professor at NYU, has been studying the health gap between gay people and straight people since the early ’90s. He has published four books on gay culture and has interviewed men dying of HIV, recovering from party drugs and struggling to plan their own weddings.

That’s why, two years ago, his 18-year-old nephew James showed up trembling at his doorstep. He sat Halkitis and his husband down on the couch and announced he was gay. “We told him, ‘Congratulations, your membership card and welcome package are in the other room,’” Halkitis remembers. “But he was too nervous to get the joke.”

James grew up in Queens, a beloved member of a big, affectionate, liberal family. He went to a public school with openly gay kids. “And still,” Halkitis says, “there was this emotional turmoil. He knew rationally that everything was going to be fine, but being in the closet isn’t rational, it’s emotional.”

Over the years, James had convinced himself that he would never come out. He didn’t want the attention, or to have to field questions he couldn’t answer. His sexuality didn’t make sense to him—how could he possibly explain it to other people? “On TV I was seeing all these traditional families,” he tells me. “At the same time, I was watching a ton of gay porn, where everyone was super ripped and single and having sex all the time. So I thought those were my two options: this fairy-tale life I could never have, or this gay life where there was no romance.”

James remembers the exact moment he decided to go into the closet. He must have been 10 or 11, dragged on a vacation to Long Island by his parents. “I looked around at our whole family, and the kids running around, and I thought, ‘I’m never going to have this,’ and I started to cry.”

I realize, the second he says it, that he is describing the same revelation I had at his age, the same grief. James’ was in 2007. Mine was in 1992. Halkitis says his was in 1977. Surprised that someone his nephew’s age could have the same experience he did, Halkitis decided his next book project would be about the trauma of the closet.

“Even now, even in New York City, even with accepting parents, the coming out process is challenging," Halkitis says. “Maybe it always will be.”

So what are we supposed to do about it? When we think of marriage laws or hate crime prohibitions, we tend to think of them as protections of our rights. What’s less understood is that laws literally affect our health.

One of the most striking studies I found described the spike in anxiety and depression among gay men in 2004 and 2005, the years when 14 states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Gay men in those states showed a 37 percent increase in mood disorders, a 42 percent increase in alcoholism and a 248 percentincrease in generalized anxiety disorder.

The most chilling thing about those numbers is that the legal rights of gay people living in those states didn’t materially change. We couldn’t get married in Michigan before the amendment passed, and we couldn’t get married in Michigan after it passed. The laws were symbolic. They were the majority’s way of informing gay people that we weren’t wanted. What’s worse, the rates of anxiety and depression didn’t just jump in the states that passed constitutional amendments. They increased (though less dramatically) among gay people across the entire country. The campaign to make us suffer worked.

Now square that with the fact that our country recently elected a bright orange Demogorgon whose administration is publicly, eagerly attempting to reverse every single gain the gay community has made in the last 20 years. The message this sends to gay people—especially the youngest ones, just grappling with their identity—couldn’t be clearer and more terrifying.

Any discussion of gay mental health has to start with what happens in schools. Despite the progress taking place around them, America’s educational institutions remain dangerous places for kids, filled with aspiring frat boys, indifferent teachers and retrograde policies. Emily Greytak, the director of research for the anti-bullying organization GLSEN, tells me that from 2005 to 2015, the percentage of teenagers who said they were bullied for their sexual orientation didn’t fall at all. Only around 30 percent of school districts in the country have anti-bullying policies that specifically mention LGBTQ kids, and thousands of other districts have policies that prevent teachers from speaking about homosexuality in a positive way.

These restrictions make it so much harder for kids to cope with their minority stress. But luckily, this doesn’t require every teacher and every teenage lacrosse bro to accept gay people overnight. For the last four years, Nicholas Heck, a researcher at Marquette University, has been running support groups for gay kids in high schools. He walks them through their interactions with their classmates, their teachers and their parents, and tries to help them separate garden-variety teenage stress from the kind they get due to their sexuality. One of his kids, for example, was under pressure from his parents to major in art rather than finance. His parents meant well—they were just trying to encourage him into a field where he would encounter fewer homophobes—but he was already anxious: If he gave up on finance, was that surrendering to stigma? If he went into art and still got bullied, could he tell his parents about it?

The trick, Heck says, is getting kids to ask these questions openly, because one of the hallmark symptoms of minority stress is avoidance. Kids hear derogatory comments in the hall so they decide to walk down another one, or they put in earbuds. They ask a teacher for help and get shrugged off, so they stop looking for safe adults altogether. But the kids in the study, Heck says, are already starting to reject the responsibility they used to take on when they got bullied. They’re learning that even if they can’t change the environment around them, they’re allowed to stop blaming themselves for it.

So for kids, the goal is to hunt out and prevent minority stress. But what can be done for those of us who have already internalized it?

“There has been a lot of work with queer youth, but there’s no equivalent when you’re in your 30s and 40s,” Salway tells me. “I don’t even know where you go.” The problem, he says, is that we’ve built entirely separate infrastructures around mental illness, HIV prevention and substance abuse, even though all the evidence indicates that they are not three epidemics, but one. People who feel rejected are more likely to self-medicate, which makes them more likely to have risky sex, which makes them more likely to contract HIV, which makes them more likely to feel rejected, and so on.

In the last five years, as evidence of this interconnectedness has piled up, a few psychologists and epidemiologists have started to treat alienation among gay men as a “syndemic”: A cluster of health problems, none of which can be fixed on their own.

Pachankis, the stress researcher, just ran the country’s first randomized controlled trial of “gay-affirming” cognitive behavior therapy. After years of emotional avoidance, many gay men “literally don’t know what they’re feeling,” he says. Their partner says “I love you” and they reply “Well, I love pancakes.” They break it off with the guy they’re seeing because he leaves a toothbrush at their house. Or, like a lot of the guys I talked to, they have unprotected sex with someone they’ve never met because they don’t know how to listen to their own trepidation.

Emotional detachment of this kind is pervasive, Pachankis says, and many of the men he works with go years without recognizing that the things they’re striving for—having a perfect body, doing more and better work than their colleagues, curating the ideal weeknight Grindr hookup—are reinforcing their own fear of rejection.

Simply pointing out these patterns yielded huge results: Pachankis’ patients showed reduced rates of anxiety, depression, drug use and condom-less sex in just three months. He’s now expanding the study to include more cities, more participants and a longer timeline.

These solutions are promising, but they’re still imperfect. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the mental health gap between straight people and gay people close, at least not fully. There will always be more straight kids than gay kids, we will always be isolated among them, and we will always, on some level, grow up alone in our families and our schools and our towns. But perhaps that’s not all bad. Our distance from the mainstream may be the source of some of what ails us, but it is also the source of our wit, our resilience, our empathy, our superior talents for dressing and dancing and karaoke. We have to recognize that as we fight for better laws and better environments—and as we figure out how to be better to each other.

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.”