The ‘Failed’ Boy

What do we mean when we refer to internalized homophobia?

With their scientific-sounding names, many diagnostic terms with Greek or Latinate roots give the impression, often-misleading, that they refer to specific and well-understood phenomena. Take Gender dysphoria, for example. By now, most consumers of popular media can recite a rough definition they’ve repeatedly heard, and they probably assume gender dysphoria refers to a single, easily diagnosed condition. But as most exploratory therapists have learned, the term has a variety of meanings for different clients and may have little to do with biological sex or gendered identities. Sometimes it simply means – I’m terrified of growing up.

Such diagnostic terms also obscure the visceral, felt qualities of the conditions they name. I’ve always found it ironic that a profession focused on emotional suffering tends to avoid the kind of language that might actually evoke it, no doubt because we want to emulate the more empirical “hard” sciences. Internalized homophobia utterly fails to convey the full agony of loathing yourself because you’re different, because you don’t talk, feel, or move the ways boys are expected to do. Instead, it sounds like an almost mechanical process: you’ve taken into yourself and absorbed an external social attitude of rejecting gay people and so in turn reject yourself for your same-sex attractions.

Societal attitudes toward homosexuals no doubt affect our self-acceptance, especially as we consolidate our identities during adolescence and our 20s; but the dawning awareness of being “different” in a painful way often arises much earlier, long before we have any idea what it means to be gay. For many of us, the shame took root in childhood as we came to realize that we didn’t fit in with others of our sex. Many of my clients have told me stories about a youthful event that seemed to distill the dawning awareness of their difference, and the shameful feeling of somehow being a failure. Here’s mine.

As I recall, I was sitting that afternoon in a small room adjacent to our garage, the one we always called “the office,” my hands poised above my mother’s manual Olympia typewriter. I would have been 10 or 11 at the time and was teaching myself to type with the help of my sister’s high school typing manual. My father arrived home from work early that day, entered from the garage, and announced that he was taking me to Little League tryouts. That very afternoon. I should get myself ready to go.

For non-American readers who may be unfamiliar with it, Little League baseball is a rite of passage for many children in the United States (boys-only back then), their first serious encounter with organized sports. They show up for tryouts where their skills are assessed, then they’re sorted into teams and the competition between them unfolds over several months. Like many boys who will later grow up to be gay, I disliked rough and tumble play and steered clear of sports. I didn’t own a glove and my father hadn’t ever thrown ball with me. I’d never once played the game.

What lingers in memory from those long-ago tryouts are a few brief images infused with fear and humiliation. Blindly swinging my bat at an incoming pitch … waiting in dread, my fist with the borrowed glove pointed skyward, as a ball dropped from the sky … throwing pathetically wide of my mark. I know now that other boys that day must have felt awkward and inadequate, but I alone ran off the field in tears and fled to the dugout, desperate to disappear.

Afterward in the car, my father and I rode home together in shame-ridden silence – that part I remember well.

I couldn’t have put it into words back then, but I know now that I felt like a failed boy. I’d been aware before that I was unusual (how many 10-year-olds in those pre-computer days taught themselves to type?) but never in such a humiliating way. Other men have memories far more excruciating … of fathers who spurned them, of boy-gangs who bullied or beat them up, of savage mockery that drove them into silent despair. Internalized homophobia utterly fails to convey the pain of feeling that you’re a failed boy, an outcast, a “loser”.

At its core is the painful self-awareness that you’re different from other boys in a bad way. Your natural manner of talking and moving may draw attention to that difference; it might evoke distaste, dislike, and disapproval from other people – first from your parents and eventually some members of your peer group. You can’t help being the way you are, but you might try to conceal it, to “defeminize” yourself, as Ben Appel has put it. When you reach puberty and develop crushes on other boys, you know you must hide your feelings. You might instead try to express yourself as if you were instead attracted to girls like the ”normal” boys.

As you pass through your teens and twenties, here’s what internalized homophobia actually feels like … at least for some people, at least for the younger me:

The fear that you’re damaged in a fundamental way and beyond repair.

A low-level but constant dread of exposure and ridicule. A feeling that you’ve got something shameful to hide.

The conviction that you’re unlovable.

Self-hatred so unendurable at times that you turn to drugs or alcohol and compulsive sex to escape from it. Awakening the day after to an even deeper self-hatred.

When your suffering seems unendurable, the suicide solution calls out to you. Even oblivion feels better than loathing yourself this much.

At the age of 19, deeply depressed and vaguely suicidal, I found a therapist who saved my life. Unfortunately, he also supported my belief that I could “cure” my gayness and become a normal heterosexual man who was in no sense a failure. I married and fathered children; it took me decades to accept myself.

Other men my own age followed the same path; some were bisexual but many hated themselves for being gay and married women to escape from it. Heterosexual marriage for us was the cure, a triumph over feelings of failure, and a proof that we were “normal” like the other guys.

For young men today, afflicted with internalized homophobia, there’s another cure on offer. Gender transition means you can escape from your shame-ridden self and transcend the failed boy you despise. You’re a girl born into the wrong body, not a failed boy. Another beautiful and beguiling lie.

In future essays in this space, I’ll be writing more for and about these young men. That might be you. If this essay gets close to your own feelings, you might be contemplating transition or have already tried it, only to realize the “cure” didn’t ease your pain. I’ll be writing more about gay shame and all the ways we try to escape from it, and about how we may come to accept and ultimately feel proud of ourselves as men.

Joseph Burgo has been a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst for more than thirty years. More about his work can be found on his website www.josephburgo.com.