What I remember most from coming out to my parents was the morning after. My dad walked into my room at about 7:00 am, shook me awake, and decided to tell me what he was thinking.
“The path that you’re going down is a life of disease and depression.”
I rubbed my eyes while trying to wake up.
“I know, because I’m a doctor,” he continued.
If you are a parent reading this, I would recommend not saying this to your son if he ever comes out to you. But before I inspire any pity, let me say that things with my parents got better rather quickly, and I came out of the experience mostly unscathed. However, my dad’s comment has stuck with me, not because it haunts me, but because I think it is an intellectually interesting question. Surely, I thought, if my dad saw gay life as one of “disease and depression,” it was because he went to medical school during the AIDS epidemic — or, perhaps, the discrimination he saw during his lifetime did make it a worse life. Surely, I thought, things are and would continue to get much better for gay people.
But the more I thought about what my dad had said and the more I researched it, the more begrudgingly I came to understand where he was coming from, even if I did not agree with his sweeping generalization. LGBT people are more likely to commit suicide than straight people. They are also more likely to have cardiovascular disease, cancer, incontinence, asthma, erectile dysfunction, and more. I thought that, perhaps if only gay rights kept progressing, these numbers would go away. However, in Sweden, where gay civil unions and gay marriage have been legal since 1995 and 2009, respectively, men married to men are still three times more likely to kill themselves than men married to women.
That being said, laws concerning gay rights do impact gay health. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that visits to medical care facilities and mental health spending both decreased by a statistically significant amount following the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling in Goodridge v Dept. of Public Health that legalized same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth. However, legal activism intended to improve gay health by securing gay rights can only achieve so much. We must recognize that, in the well-being of gay men, external factors do not play as large a role as structural factors — factors which are not influenced by legislation, and oftentimes are not even necessarily linked to societal tolerance.
Minority Stress
Among the most sinister and difficult to eliminate influencers of gay sadness is minority stress. “Minority stress” is the term researchers have given to the excess stress members of stigmatized minorities feel above members of majority groups. Minority stress is said to be principally caused by prejudice and discrimination. One of the more invisible parts of minority stress is that it does not only occur when someone calls a gay person a name in the hallway or when someone bullies someone; it is chronic. Dr. Ilan Meyer, an expert at the Williams Institute, a UCLA think-tank focusing on the impact of policy on gay well-being, explained this to the HPR. He described the phenomenon of “rumination,” by which gay people focus and worry about how they are perceived by others, even when they do not know if the others they are dealing with harbor any anti-gay attitudes whatsoever. Meyer explained: “Let’s say you’re going to a job interview. It’s harder for you to perform when you have to worry about how you’re perceived or if the person interviewing you has homophobic attitudes. You have to monitor your behavior.” The mere possibility of others’ intolerance can mimic the impact of actual intolerance. When there is that chance, gay people are on alert. Therefore, stress does not necessarily decrease one-to-one with increased tolerance, and it may continue to be significant even as tolerance becomes more common.
The Difficulties of Dating
What makes a minority a minority, by definition, is that it is small. Being a sexual minority has the added difficulty that sex is a multiplayer game. If straight dating is difficult, then gay dating is made harder by pure numbers; if there are fewer potential matches, fewer matches are made. If a straight person can say, “there are plenty of fish in the sea” after a breakup, a gay person’s sea is more like a pond. In an interview with the HPR, Bryce Gilfillian ’12, an admissions officer and member of the gay community at Harvard, remembered from his days as an undergraduate that “there was very little dating in the gay community at Harvard.” Gilfillian did not only say that this observation was true in general but was also true in his social sphere, which revolved around theater, one of the more highly gay-concentrated communities.
Gilfillian added, “It’s hard to find because it’s invisible.” While some may have a better “gaydar” — ability to detect other gay people — than others, there is simply no secret sign that will definitively determine if someone is gay. When the guy you like in history class is almost certainly straight, the courting process is far more depressing. In other words, gay people find more rejection and cannot always tailor their courtship only to other gays. In addition, as the probability that the target of a romantic conquest reciprocates attraction decreases, so does the desire to even participate in the process altogether. Not only are there fewer matches for gay people, they also miss out on proportionally more matches than straight people. Dating is an important part of life; polls asking what people want most find that love is at or near the top. After all, the presence of love interests are ubiquitous in all genres of movies, and we find attractive actors and actresses to play them. If gay people have a harder time finding love than straight people, they will naturally be less happy.
Gay Hook-Up Culture and Apps
Solutions intended to combat the difficulties of gay dating do exist. Recent years have seen a surge in the number of gay men using dating apps like Tinder or Grindr. An article on Mashable sums up the benefits of apps in its title, “Here are the best dating apps, since meeting people [in real life] is hell.” Gilfillian explained that gay dating apps “remove all of the straight people.” They also serve to facilitate longer distance interactions, hence increasing the potential dating pool.
For all of the solutions that these apps provide, however, they create at least as many problems. For example, unlike Tinder, Grindr allows users to message others in the same vicinity even if both partners have not demonstrated a mutual interest. The result is that receiving unsolicited or hurtful messages is commonplace for many users . I remember my concern when a friend of mine once showed me some messages he received: “Hark! I am available to you, oh angelic youth :),” and another, “Hi, cute kid! Looking at you from the bar … Leave the table and come home with me!!!! LOL.” Here, I saw that the unsolicited messages one receives on these apps can range from the weird to the disgusting to the downright hurtful.
It should be no surprise then, that many studies confirm that these dating apps are bad for mental health. Stories abound that racism is more prevalent on apps. They have also shown that men have a high risk of low self esteem when using Tinder, and Grindr topped a poll of apps that make people feel unhappy. People on apps are more willing to be mean behind the protection of a screen.
Along with apps, there exists a hook-up culture in the gay community. When I discussed this with Gilfillian, he said, “Dating is difficult. But hook-ups — that exists.” I replied, “This is obviously true,” and he agreed. The prevalence of a hook-up culture in place of dating is well-documented in scientific literature and generally agreed upon in the gay community. Gilfillian gave a potential explanation: “Intentions in gay spaces are more sexual because there are fewer opportunities elsewhere.” Hook-ups exist as a consequence of the difficulties of dating because they are a consolation — if you cannot fulfil your romantic desires, you might be able to fulfill at least your physical desires. In the specific case of gay men, it is quite possible that men seek sex more and thus the lack of a supposedly less willing sexual female partner found in heterosexual relationships, which results in more hook-up centered relationships. Hook-up culture is not going away anytime soon and can hardly be good for gay health.
Another consequence of there being fewer gay people is that there is a lack of role models — or more broadly, examples of how to behave. Gilfillian is originally from rural Texas where, as one might imagine, gay people were invisible if not non-existent. When I asked him about the transition to Harvard, he remarked that “seeing people at Harvard who were out was a very jarring experience — and not in a negative way. Seeing other people who were out was hugely important.” We are social creatures, and we learn how to behave from other people. If, especially in their high school years, gay people see little to no examples of how to behave, they are at a disadvantage. Meyer noted that, “High school is the time, developmentally, when people learn about relationships, experiment with relationships, have relationships — that fact that there are fewer LGBT people plays a role in limiting those experiences.” The limited experience of gay people growing up may put LGBT people at a developmental disadvantage.
Even ignoring the difficulty of dating, at least one study shows that gays are less likely to have close friendships. One explanation for men that I have come up with from my own interactions is that guys — especially teenage guys — love talking about girls. Even if the claim that men think about sex once every seven seconds on average is a myth, research shows that straight men think about girls enough to heavily influence their day-to-day lives. If gay men are excluded from some significant part of nearly every lunchtime conversation, we can expect that they would have fewer friends. While gay guys can find groups of girls to hang out with, and finding close relationships with straight guys is not impossible, this phenomenon might explain a good part of why gay men, on average, have a harder time making friends.
Disease and depression, on average, appear to be more common in the gay community, and for many reasons that do not seem easy to fix. Even as the prospects for gay rights and tolerance grow better, gay people — and specifically, gay men — may still start off life with a disadvantage. However, all of these numbers exist on average. Even if it is more difficult for gay people to fall in love, it is certainly not impossible or even very uncommon. And progress is being made: consider that Barack Obama, who projected the colors of the pride flag onto the White House after the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage, was against gay marriage as recently as 2012. Gay life is better now than it has been at any time in American history. The expectations for progress were low before, but now they are moving startlingly higher. We have had every reason to be excited, but let us not aspire to unreasonable goals. If I advocate for a fair bit of pessimism, that pessimism is only relative to unprecedented optimism.
The author has requested that their name be removed from the article for anonymity.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Gift Habeshaw