As a young gay man, the first man you loved was your father, and you craved from him love, affection, and tenderness. What most of us received from our fathers fell far short. Why? To start with, our fathers were raised, as we were, to be tough, stable, and emotionally detached. On top of that, many of them were veterans of wars that forced them at a young age to suppress their emotions and to commit unspeakable acts against humanity in the name of patriotism. In sum, many of our fathers grew up in a culture that offered them power in exchange for stoicism and buried emotion. As we grew older, we acted differently than the straight boys did. Those boys often pushed us aside, as different and strange, as did many of our fathers, too. Perhaps they were threatened by their own homoerotic fantasies, or maybe they just didn’t know how to handle us and so they retreated in confusion. Whatever the cause, most of us grew into our young adult-hoods without having had a truly loving, honest, and safe relationship with a man. Not with our buddies, and certainly not with our fathers. The natural and organic expectation of a boy is that he will be nurtured and cared for by both a mother and a father. It was an agreement that was written into the genetic code of our souls—our fathers would love and lead us, and in exchange we would respect and honor them. For many of us, our fathers broke this agreement at a very tender time in our lives.




Of all the invalidation we will receive in our lives, this is by far the most damaging. The first man that we love—arguably the man we will love the most in our life—is incapable of validating us at a time when we need it most. It is emotional betrayal of the worst sort. The wound created by this betrayal will go on to affect us throughout most of our lives.
Our mother, too, likely sensed that we were different. She moved in to protect us from what she rightly sensed would be a slow and subtle betrayal by our fathers. She nurtured. She favored us. She over-validated us to compensate for the betrayal she saw us suffer.
The end result of these strained family dynamics was that the only authentic validation we may have experienced as a young man came from our mothers. And this validation was usually directed at the things that our mothers valued—the feminine ideals. Hence, the feminine qualities (not to be confused with effeminate qualities) of our true self were validated the most.
Psychologically speaking, this made us comfortable, even drawn to the feminine, and resulted in a better-developed tender side. We cultivated creative, compassionate, and nurturing talents. In addition, we became comfortable in the company of women. While this wasn’t true for all of us—some of us had fathers who were emotionally present regardless of our sexuality—it was true for many of us, to a greater or lesser extent.
So as mere children, years before we would have *** for the first time with a man, we had suffered rejection by our peers, emotional neglect from our fathers, and overcompensating protection from our mothers. We survived by learning to conform to the expectations of others at a time in our development when we should have been learning to follow our own internal promptings. We became puppets of a sort—allowing those around us to pull the strings that made us act in acceptable ways, all the while knowing that we couldn’t trust ourselves.
What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in the church? Mother’s little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved. How could we love ourselves when everything around us told us that we were unlovable? Instead, we chased the affection, approval, and attention doled out by others.
Not surprisingly, the long-term effect was an inability to validate ourselves. The ability to derive internal satisfaction and contentment didn’t emerge from our adolescence as it should have. Instead, we sputtered along looking to others for the confidence and well-being that we needed to protect ourselves from being overcome with shame. What normally becomes an internal, self-sustaining process of self-validation in the healthy, young adult remained infantile within us, and we instead became sophisticated in the ways of coercing acceptance from the world around us.
So the little boy with the big secret becomes the man who is driven to avoid shame by hiding his dark truth. Famished for authentic validation and without a reliable sense of self-direction, he develops a sophisticated radar for those things and people who will make him feel good about himself.




To a great extent, these are the gay men we have known. This is you and me—a little boy with a terrible secret who hides his curse behind a curtain made of crimson velvet. It may surprise many to learn that his secret is not his sexual appetite for men. No, it is something darker, stinging, and filled with rage.
His secret he cannot reveal, not even to himself, for fear that it will consume him completely. Deep inside, far from the light of awareness, the secret lives. Go down beneath the layers of public façade, personal myth, and fantasy. Peel away the well-crafted layers, for only then can you see the secret clearly for what it is: his own self-hatred.


Something about growing up gay forced us to learn how to hide ugly realities behind a finely crafted façade.
Why is this so? We hid because we learned that hiding is a means to survival. The ***** truth about who we are wasn’t acceptable, so we learned to hide behind a beautiful image. We learned to split ourselves in parts, hiding what wasn’t acceptable and flaunting what was. We learned to wave beautiful, colorful scarves to distract attention from our gayness—like the matador waving a red scarf before the bull to distract the beast from goring his body. We became experts in crafting outrageous scarves.
The truth is that we grew up disabled. Not disabled by our homosexuality, but emotionally disabled by an environment that taught us we were unacceptable, not “real” men and therefore, shameful. As young boys, we too readily internalized those strong feelings of shame into a core belief: I am unacceptably flawed. It crippled our sense of self and prevented us from following the normal, healthy stages of adolescent development. We were consumed with the task of hiding the fundamental truth of ourselves from the world around us and pretending to be something we weren’t. At the time, it seemed the only way to survive.
One cannot be around gay men without noticing that we are a wonderful and wounded lot. Beneath our complex layers lies a deeper secret that covertly corrodes our lives. The seeds of this secret were not planted by us, but by a world that didn’t understand us, wanted to change us, and at times, was fiercely hostile to us.
It’s not about how good or bad we are. It’s about the struggle so many of us have experienced growing up gay in a world that didn’t accept us, and the ongoing struggle as adult gay men to create lives that are happy, fulfilling, and ultimately free of shame.
This life we created for ourselves—the one that we thought gay men were supposed to be enjoying—can be empty and unfulfilling. But we’re stuck in a role—a way of life—that is rooted in our shame and holds us back from creating the life we really want. Somewhere along the way, we picked up the idea that a happy gay man was one who had lots of *** and at least one handsome man on his arm at all times. Wherever this “ideal” of gay men is featured, such as in entertainment or advertising, they are depicted as handsome, muscular men who seem to have it all—sensitivity, stylish good looks, and a body that would drive Cleopatra and Marc Anthony wild with desire.




The wound is the trauma caused by exposure to overwhelming shame at an age when you weren’t equipped to cope with it. An emotional wound caused by toxic shame is a very serious and persistent disability that has the potential to literally destroy your life. It is much more than just a poor self-image. It is the internalized and deeply held belief that you are somehow unacceptable, unlovable, shameful, and in short, flawed.
What makes the wound of shame so destructive? To experience such shame, particularly during our childhood and adolescent years, prevents us from developing a strong sense of self.
A sense of self is the development of a strong identity that is validated by your environment. The nerdy teenager develops an identity that includes “science genius” because among other things, he joined the science or math club and discovered other teenagers who validated his talent. Same thing for the jocks and head-bangers—they developed a sense of self from the validation they received by hanging out with others who share and value similar interests and abilities.
Straight boys developed their sense of their sexual self by taking girls out on dates. Everyone, including their parents, validated them for this behavior. Hence, they came to accept it as part of themselves. Gay men, on the other hand, rarely had this experience. In large part, we played the part and took girls to the prom so that we’d fit in, all the while knowing it was a farce. Although we received validation for our actions, it was meaningless because we knew at the deepest level that we were play-acting. Consequently, we developed a pseudo-self, which wasn’t a natural growth of our abilities, desires, and intelligence. It was a self that would earn us validation by others, but our true selves remained hidden from everyone.
Our core belief that one is unacceptably flawed prevented our organic self from developing as it does in an emotionally healthy boy. Instead, it became frozen in time, undeveloped, and somewhat juvenile in form. How we coped was by presenting to the world a self that was explicitly designed to help us get by.
We all seek validation every day. It is one of the essential psychological needs of every person.
For example, when you are at work and make a comment during a meeting, you want to know that you were heard by those present. They don’t have to agree with you (although agreement would be perceived as even more validating), just hear what you had to say. To take this example a step further, imagine speaking up at a meeting and in the middle of your comment, someone else starts talking. That would be experienced as invalidating, and you would probably attempt to make your comment again.
When you come home from work that night, you tell your partner about your day. If he ignores you, falls asleep while you’re talking, or immediately starts talking about his day, you’ll likely feel further dismissed and invalidated. What you want from your partner at that moment is recognition that you may have had a difficult day at work.
When you really pay attention, you realize that much of life’s everyday pleasure and frustration comes from either being validated or invalidated, even in interactions with complete strangers. You complain at the restaurant about your meal, and the waiter whisks it away for improvement. That’s validating. If he were to argue with you and tell you that the meal is perfectly fine the way it is, that’s invalidating.
As you have probably noticed, there are different levels of validation. Just being acknowledged, recognized, or heard is a low-level form of validation. Having someone genuinely compliment you is a higher level of validation. In most everyday situations, we are seeking low-level validation. We don’t need complete agreement or compliments (although these are awfully nice to receive), just acknowledgement and a little understanding will do.
The only type of validation that really counts, however, is authentic validation. For example, if you go to see your therapist and he responds to everything you say with standard phrases like “Tell me more . . .” or “That’s interesting . . .” while not offering concrete advice or analysis, his interest in you begins to feel false and, consequently, less validating. Or, for example, if you drive your neighbor’s new convertible to the store and get lots of compliments on it, you’re not likely to feel all that validated since it really isn’t your car. Authentic validation is honest validation of something that matters to you.
Why is authentic validation important? Because when we are validated for a pretense, the validation is hollow, it’s baseless, it’s not at all satisfying. For example, if you had someone else write your term paper for a class and you subsequently received an “A” on it, that isn’t validating. Or more to the point, when a gay man presents a false, inauthentic self to the world and is subsequently validated for that façade, he will feel hollow, and the validation won’t be satisfying.
The young gay boy who learns to “fake out” everyone and act straight becomes starved for authentic validation. He immediately and unconsciously discounts all validation since he knows what he is presenting to others isn’t authentic.
Authentic validation is absolutely necessary for the development of a strong sense of self. Without it, the self does not develop properly. Further, authentic validation inoculates us from the ravages of shame. If we are receiving adequate amounts of authentic validation, then shameful comments or feelings simply have little impact on us. After all, if others are providing authentic validation, what do we have to feel shameful about?