Gay Men, Not Suffering Spectacularly…

Newcomb, M., & Mustanski, B. (2010). Internalized homophobia and internalizing mental health problems: A meta-analytic review Clinical Psychology Review DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2010.07.003

I once knew a kiddyland radical in Melbourne, whose working-class migrant parents had toiled like Trojans in factories and shops to provide their children with a glistening life out in the McMansion suburbs. Here was a young man who never had to want for anything and yet, who absolutely loathed Australia and Australians (or ‘skips’ as he liked to refer to them). Devoid of any form of disadvantage in his own life, he leapt via gestalt onto the missed opportunities of his parents, as the sole justification for his perpetual anger. He truly believed that he had suffered so much and further, that the whole damned world should have to hear about it, incessantly…

One night this kiddyland radical called me, breathless and in tears, to tell me that his dog had just carked it while they were out jogging. He immediately took it upon himself to beat his chest that it was his fault for running the poor beast at a pace and in the heat. Moreover, he effortlessly embellished this minor tragedy, by instantly transforming it into the latest signpost of his totally fucked-up life. Doom and damnation and my grief and loss counselling skills stretched to the limit until, until he proclaimed, ‘you know how I feel’. ‘I know how you feel?’ To which he replied, yes, because my mother had recently died, I could more acutely empathise with the sudden death of his little doggy.

My ma had died after suffering with early onset, multi-infarct dementia for the previous dozen years or so. For 10 of those years, until my da became terminally ill with lung cancer, he and I shared care responsibilities for my ma. It was, despite the gut-wrenching agony associated with her inexorable cognitive decline, a deeply humbling time for me and an often-happy time for us all. However, during my ma’s transition from home to nursing home care, she was tortured while an inpatient at Boronia House, the psychogeriatric unit attached to James Fletcher Hospital in Newcastle. For reasons too complicated to describe in shorthand here, that torture caused her shocking physical and emotional pain.

Across those five long months in which my ma was tortured in Boronia House, I not only learnt that human rights violations do indeed occur here in Australia and that human rights violators can perpetrate their despicable acts without recourse to justice, I also learnt that there are varying degrees of suffering to which the human kind can be subjected…

When I read this article by Newcomb and Mustanski (2010, n.pag.), which seeks to add even more glittering tiles to the already monstrous mirror ball that is, ‘why are gay men so mad?’, I wondered, how did we ever get to this point whereby homosexuality became so synonymous with insanity? The media raves, services are mustered and gay men everywhere struggle with the ‘truth’ that whatever made us fag also made us crazy (2010). One of the clues contained herein is that the key informants for the ‘gay is mad’ hypothesis are usually well-heeled, white, inner city fags (2010). Middle-class sensibilities being what they are, have these immaculately coiffed pewfs guilelessly elevated their own piddling problems to the level of generalised, homo-pathology (2010)?

I say ‘possibly’, since the middle-class loves to construct the world around itself and hence their suffering must be on par with the suffering of everyone else. Sic, suffering is conveniently homogenised. Think John Legend lyric here, ‘(and) I hope one day you’ll see nobody has it easy’, to get a flavour of what I am talking about. As Newcomb and Mustanski (2010) concede, there is little research evidence to support the practice of theoretical dot joining between gay men and madness. For example, we still know so little about how socio-cultural variables influence the onset, aggravation and presentation of internalised homophobia (IH) (2010), However, that lack of hard evidence does not stifle in the slightest the oft-espoused grandiosity that increased IH=increased IMH (‘internalized mental health’) problems (2010).

The authors (2010) list several moderating effects that might influence the relationship between IH and IMH. Those effects include…

• Gender;
• Date ; and
• Age (2010).

In addition to the above considerations, Newcomb and Mustanski (2010) argue that future research should pay specific attention to the role that ethnicity plays in the psychological outcomes achieved by gay men who have been exposed to internalised homophobia (2010). Culture, location, organisation, and other contextual factors must also be included in any critical analysis of gay men’s mental health. I would also agree with the author’s (2010) rather big call that we should clearly distinguish between self-reports of ‘distress’ (et al.) by, and the objective identification of mental disorders in, gay men. A more representative view of gay men’s mental health and more accurate recording of any mental disorders present will invariably lead to a lessening of the hype that gay men are fully sick and getting sicker by the minute…

Oh, and one more thing…

Everywhere I turn nowadays, I bump into that crap stat that gay men are anything up to 14 times more likely to top themselves than straight men. To cite Newcomb and Mustanski on this convoluted faerie tale, ‘the research has been plagued by methodological issues’ (2010). That is, who we ask, what we ask them and how we interpret the data. In the absence of conclusive research evidence, the accepted approach to any unsettled subject should be to presage all comments as speculative and to err on the side of caution when coming to one or more provisional conclusions. Alas, when it comes to hedging bets on how many pewfs will plunge off the twig, gay rights advocates, dedicated homophobes and serious academics alike all jack up the numbers, spectacularly…