18 Gay Youth. Is there anyone out there?

For some reason I’ve started to balk against the concept of ‘giving advice to the gay youth of today’ I’m finding that there’s negativity sweeping into my attitude. Like I’ve stopped feeling philanthropic and the misanthrope is getting the better of me!

What’s the point of trying to help those who don’t want help? Are they beyond help? Am I beyond being able to help?

Then yesterday I had a shaft of enlightenment during which I became aware of my disdain towards a younger friend who was monopolising attention with his youthful charm. The penny then dropped for me that this sourness I’m feeling is a kind of internalized homophobia but not quite! Maybe a dash of internalized homophobia mixed with a dislike of characteristics that were very pronounced in me when I was in my own youth. On reflection I was highly narcissistic and that was my defence from feeling bad, wrong dirty, unacceptable and invalidated-stripped of my spiritual foundations and desperate for acceptance by at least someone, somewhere.

In a community idealizing youthful good looks I could happily nestle myself into an appreciative coterie and avoid those older and wiser who maybe could see through the defences covering my insecurities.

I gorged myself on the appreciative-ness of others, which, was intoxicatingly addictive. I wouldn’t however have been capable of responding to someone feeling older, or less attractive, or ready for some validation in another sphere or along a different axis.

I was simply overpowered by the seductive influence of my charm and its capacity to satisfy my bulimic appetite for being appreciated physically and sexually. And of course there was the power of testosterone fuelling the process so that the supremacy of sexual satisfaction over friendship, over a desire for mentorship, over more substantial and sustained relationships, ensured that once the testosterone had declined and once the damage of the past had had been healed so I didn’t feel quite so bad or so wrong or so dirty or so unacceptable or so invalidated, I can now survey my social arena and understand why there is now an arid scrubland with only one or two substantial friendships having been able to survive the harsh and inhospitable conditions of my capacity to sustain them.

So maybe there are swathes of gay youth being propelled through their existence wounded by society’s homophobia but insightful enough to their defences that they are prepared to put down their armour and risk exploring what’s going on for the sake of a more enriched and substantial life experience. But then again-maybe there aren’t!