Sometimes a book comes into your life at the exact moment you need it. It’s a rare thing but it can suddenly change the way you look at your own life and if you’re lucky, it can also start to recalibrate the way you think. When I was browsing in Waterstones last week, having gone in with the strict intention of ‘not’ buying anything, my eyes were quickly drawn to the canary yellow cover of Matthew Todd’s new book, Straight Jacket: How to be gay and happy. I read the blurb on the back cover and it resonated so profoundly with me that I almost dropped it. I ran to the cash desk, paid for it, took it home, and immediately started to read it, gripped from the very first page like a deranged person.
And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past week, holding this hardback book with white knuckles and reading intensely, wincing and shaking every time I came across a sentence that cut through to the heart of what I’ve been feeling for the past few years. The simple fact is, gay men are moving towards a mental health crisis and despite the odd editorial piece in the gay press (and rather scant coverage in the mainstream media) no one has really been talking about it. Largely because we live in a highly defensive culture were for instance, if you highlight the effects of gay men having too much sex on their mental well being you’re ‘slut shaming’ them or if you raise concern over the trend of ‘chem sex’ parties and rising rates of HIV infection, you’re anti-gay liberation.
This is why Matthew Todd, ex-editor of one of the most popular gay mags in the country – Attitude – is perhaps best placed to be the one to put his head above the parapet, even if it means making himself a target for criticism. As he openly admits, his magazine has been both part of the problem but also a place to start this dialogue (his book actually stemmed from an article he wrote for the magazine). No doubt he will get a lot of flack for this and perhaps some of it is deserved. I have to say personally I’ve come to loathe Attitude at times, especially their social media feeds which consistently pump out images of people like Tom Daley. Is it any wonder gay men have body issues when the gay ideal we are held up to is an Olympic diver who spends several hours a day training and has a body none of us will ever attain?
However, I set this prejudice aside as I think writing Straight Jacket was an act of bravery on Todd’s part, not just because it will make him extremely unpopular, but also because he writes about his own personal struggles. The book is in three sections – Shame, Escape, and Recovery. What I found most powerful is how the book contextualises our behaviour as adult gay men in the context of ‘shame’ and what that means to us. In describing self-destructive behaviour, Todd says; “At the core of this problem is a shame that has been inflicted upon us so powerfully that those of us whom it affects often do not realise it.” This toxic shame comes from our environment from the day we are born by parents, siblings, friends, teachers. It can be purely unintentional or innocuous as telling a boy he mustn’t play with dolls, to being actively destructive, i.e. bullies using trigger words such as ‘faggot’ and ‘gayboy’ at an age before most of us even know what our sexuality means.
Although many generations of gay men have been subject to this kind of shame, it has been particularly intense for my generation as we grew up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s when anti-gay sentiment was at it’s most intense. Therefore not only were we subject to shame, we were also handed a narrative that being gay meant you would die young. Not a great start in life. What has exacerbated this problem – and Todd also touches on this in his book – is how there has been such rapid change in gay rights in this generation’s life time and how we have been unable to keep up. The narrative we grew up of dying young has changed to one of love and same-sex marriage and broad acceptance. Is it any wonder that given these two polarities most gay men feel confused about their place in the world?
It’s in the second section Escape that Todd will no doubt receive the fiercest criticism. He posits that our shame, our sense of feeling unsafe at school, and our hyper-vigilance (triggering fight or flight behaviour which leads to severe problems of anxiety later on in many gay men) is then dealt with by means of escape that ultimately puts us in danger; drinking too much, taking drugs, promiscuous sex enhanced by dangerous chemicals, body dysmorphia, anorexia and steroid addiction, to name a few. Even gay men’s penchant for losing themselves in fantasy – music, film, and theatre – is a distraction from having to face painful realities about our lives. A lot of men will probably struggle with reading about this because they don’t want to be told that they’re obsessed with hook-up apps like Grindr or that they’re having too much sex. Perhaps this is where the book is most powerful in holding up a mirror and asking us to take a long hard look at ourselves.
It’s perhaps in section three, Recovery, that Todd starts to lose a bit of steam, and really this subject would make a book of it’s own. Todd readily admits that recovery is hard and he writes about his various treatments, including the twelve step AA programme, which really helped him. But ultimately this limits the scope of his book as many of us are dealing with a multitude of issues and it’s often hard to find the help you need, or indeed be able to afford costly programmes of therapy which Todd describes. The rather bleak fact is, there isn’t enough support out there, especially outside of London. A quick search on one of the recommended sites, www.pinktherapy.com, only lists one active therapist in the county where I live. Therefore it can often be difficult to find the help you need from someone who would be sympathetic, although reading this book is a step in the right direction.
Towards the end of Straight Jacket, Todd becomes staunchly utopian, outlining services and centres that would cost millions to set up, although with no real plan as to how to implement or fund this it feels a little thin. He likens huge social centres that the Jewish and Asian communities have built as a model for us but I think this underlines a central problem with describing LGBTQ as a community. Our community often comes together once a year across the country to celebrate at Pride Marches and we’re very good at mobilising on single issues such as same-sex marriage or protesting Section 28 or rioting outside of Stonewall. But the fact is, if you’re Jewish or Asian you have very strong ties as a community – ethnic, religious, long-term historical oppression – which fuses a powerful bond. ‘Sense of community’ is also very deeply rooted in their culture.
The LGBTQ community on the other hand, as the acronym used to describe us suggests, is very diverse but can also be fractious, argumentative, and polarising. During the same-sex debate, many gay men said they didn’t want to be mainstreamed and that being queer meant being different, without realising that opposing same-sex marriage would ultimately mean they were denying this right to the parts of the community who wanted to get married (indeed, lobbying group Stonewall didn’t immediately come out as supporting same-sex marriage). Look at how vitriolic the debate around chem sex has become, with one side saying it’s destroying the gay community while another side say they are being ‘slut shamed’. Sometimes it’s this lack of finding a middle ground that pulls us apart. Before we start building social centres we need to find ways of encouraging solidarity between us.
That said, Todd’s book is a step in the right direction. He’s an evangelist and is on a mission to break many of the prejudices that exist within and without the community and I think we need more people like him. He has started the dialogue, it’s up to the community to continue it.
Buy Matthew Todd – Straight Jacket
Filed under: Book Reviews, Books, Gay Interest, Lifestyle, Psychology Tagged: Books, Gay, Lesbian, LGBT, Queer, Transgender
