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.”ġ. Only a few of the names of the gay men in this article are real. Jeremy 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.įor 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. 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. 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 think you'll enjoy these related videos below and for more great content featuring your favorite artists, sign up for Fuse+ to access all our videos.We’re twice as likely to have a major depressive episode. In case you missed it, check out how Frank Ocean, Jay-Z, Tyler, the Creator and more all contributed to 20 Proud LGBTQ Music Moments From the Past Year. And it could take the power out of that word." People would be so f-cking confused! They wouldn't know what to do. The same as 'n-gga.'" Tyler continues, "Let's say Frank started using the word 'f-g,' just jokingly. "He knows me, and he knows I don't care about being gay. round of applause?īut does Ocean's sexuality change Tyler's heavy usage of the F-word (not the four-letter one, by the way)? Not quite. But that's my n-gga." Coming from someone whose Twitter bio is "I AM NOT A D-KE," it's possible that's as sensitive as Tyler gets. "I kinda knew, because he likes Pop Tarts without frosting on them, so I knew something was weird. "Yeah, I was one of the first people he ," Tyler told the magazine (via Complex). Ocean revealed his sexuality in a blog post last summer, confessing that his first love was a man. Odd Future frontman/most eloquent orator Tyler, the Creator tells Rolling Stone that he knew bandmate/close friend Frank Ocean was gay before the Channel Orange singer ever came out.