It was probably coincidence that Robert Goddard killed himself on the same day that Margaret Thatcher died. On 8 April 2013, at the offices of Attitude (the UK’s bestselling gay magazine, of which I am editor), as we watched the world’s reaction to the passing of a leader who had famously attacked schoolkids being taught they “had an inalienable right to be gay”, 30 miles away Rob was reaching the end of his ability to cope.
Rob was the younger brother of Attitude’s advertising manager, Andy. In 2001, Rob stepped in to cover his brother’s position while Andy went on his honeymoon. He was cocky, bubbly, laughed a lot and he embodied what it meant to be a young gay man at the turn of the millennium: physically fit, athletic, happy. He also had that most important thing on the gay scene: sexual currency.
In May 2008, I was working more closely with Andy, and I asked after Rob from time to time. Andy said he wasn’t doing well. He was drinking too much. He couldn’t stop taking drugs. He had split from his latest boyfriend. He had suffered a homophobic attack after getting off a bus. He was HIV positive and not coping. He had lost his job and moved back in with his parents. Together these things sound like a huge alarm bell, but spread across years they didn’t feel like an emergency; lots of gay men, like straight people, had transient relationships. Lots of gay men, like straight people, drank a lot and took drugs. Indeed, gay culture seemed to celebrate partying as a central tenet of our identity and Rob was smiling and laughing in the sexy Facebook pictures of him out clubbing, surrounded by friends.
The day after Thatcher’s death, Andy called the office to tell us that Rob had written notes to his parents and a birthday card to Andy, then gone to the seafront where he and his brothers and sister used to play as children, and hanged himself. He was 34 years old.
I share Rob’s story with you because his experience is not unusual. Despite how it may look, something isn’t working. I didn’t have to go looking for Rob’s story. Despite more LGBT people than ever leading happy, successful lives (thank goodness), it is becoming increasingly clear that a disproportionate number of us are not thriving as we should.
Talk of this is painful and flies against the zeitgeist. Culturally, homosexuality and misery have been linked so tightly by the haters over the years that they have become an offensive cliché to the point where any discussion is dismissed as prejudice. But discuss it we must.
More and more statistics reveal that LGBT people have higher levels of depression, anxiety, addiction and suicidal thoughts. The British Crime Survey 2009 showed that gay men used illicit drugs three times more than heterosexual men. It’s hardly a surprise. As therapist and author Joe Kort states so well in his book 10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives, what’s wrong is not our sexuality, but our experience of growing up in a society that still does not fully accept that people can be anything other than heterosexual and cisgendered (ie born into the physical gender you feel you are). It is the damage done to us by growing up strapped inside a cultural straitjacket – a tight-fitting, one-size restraint imposed on us at birth – that leaves no room to grow. It makes no allowances for the fact that, yes, indeed, some people are different and we deserve – and need – to be supported and loved for who we are, too.
Despite the extraordinary social changes, homophobia is still rife. Many LGBT people, especially those who are white, wealthy and live in big cities, may rarely encounter prejudice. Well-meaning straight people with gay friends don’t meet the young people who tell me they are spat on and homophobically abused every day in the street or, as one man recounted, that his father stops him from dining with his siblings in case he turns them gay, too. Go online and you will see that large numbers still struggle to accept their gayness. For many, it is still hard being different. This was typified for me by an email a young man suffering from severe anxiety disorder sent me last year expressing his frustration. “If there has been some massive change or revolution in the past few years,” he wrote, “it has passed me by.”
Though increasing numbers of young people spring out of the closet with confidence, many of us still live with the emotional scars of growing up hated. The generation before mine was decimated by HIV and Aids, and we were subjected to the accompanying extreme homophobia of the British media – most notably the tabloids, and most extremely by the Sun under the editorship of Kelvin MacKenzie.
People have forgotten that we endured a seemingly neverending propaganda campaign of breathtaking intensity. Considered public enemy number one, gay men and women were painted as dangerous monsters at every opportunity.
Today, years after Section 28 was repealed, its influence still lingers. Some schools have progressive policies and actively stamp out homophobic bullying. But many do not. During my time at Attitude, I have met parent after parent whose children have been bullied to death. One of them was Mark Houghton, a young man from Bournemouth whose mother was told he should toughen up when she complained about homophobic bullying. Years later, Mark died of an unintentional heroin overdose at the age of 27. Or Anthony Stubbs, a 16-year-old from Leyland, Lancashire, who took his own life as he struggled to accept his sexuality. Or 15-year-old Dominic Crouch, who was bullied after he kissed a boy on a school trip, and then jumped off a building, his devastated father also taking his own life the year after. And yet the media, unable to understand that young children can know they are gay (and be bullied for it – I was 10 or 11 when I realised) almost never explicitly address homo/bi/transphobic bullying or examine its consequences, such as the families that are left devastated. We – the media, parents, the country – just don’t seem to care.
As gay people, we tend to think we’ve escaped once we leave school, but it is becoming clearer and clearer that severe bullying can change the course of an adult’s life. The ongoing Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE), carried out by a care consortium based in Oakland, California, claims to have found “staggering proof of the health, social and economic risks that result from childhood trauma”. It found that a child with four or more negative childhood experiences (such as having an addicted or mentally ill parent, or experiencing emotional, physical or sexual abuse) was five times more likely to become an alcoholic, 60% more likely to become obese, and 46 times more likely to become an intravenous drug user.
Of course childhood trauma can affect anyone, regardless of sexuality. If we go by numbers alone, more straight people are suffering. Poverty, divorce, abuse, not having demonstrative parents and many other things can cause problems. But the studies show that specific types of trauma increase the chances of adopting addictive behaviour and developing dependencies. In Time magazine, one of the ACE study’s founders, Dr Vincent Felitti, when discussing what type of childhood trauma did the most damage, said: “The one with the slight edge, by 15% over the others, was chronic recurrent humiliation, what we termed ‘emotional abuse’.”
Gay people are extremely lucky if we do not grow up experiencing chronic recurrent humiliation. For most of us, absorbing other people’s beliefs that we are worthless, disgusting, sometimes evil, and then suppressing our true selves is, simply put, our childhood.
For me, childhood trauma triggered the fight-or-flight reaction, and left me stuck in a constant state of high alert, never feeling safe or good enough. Trying to outrun those painful feelings, I bolstered my ego with achievements and a need for validation: trying to be the best at this or that, with a belief that I was either perfect – or a worthless loser. As with so many other traumatised people, I found myself swinging from feeling worse than everyone else to better than everyone else. It is an exhausting and confusing place to be.
For LGBT people, coming out is crucial, but it is not always the path to utopia that we expect. Many experts on shame believe that, as John Bradshaw says in his book Healing the Shame That Binds You, LGBT children “are the most viciously shamed and oppressed in our society”. Kort says that gay people suffer “covert cultural sexual abuse”. If we accept that, then coming out means mixing with other people who are, in a way, also abuse survivors. Usually this takes place in a network of bars and clubs, surrounded by booze, sex and drugs. What’s not to like, you might reasonably ask, and my 25-year-old self would wholeheartedly agree. But being a kid in a sweet shop soon loses its appeal. On coming out, what I needed was therapy – not (as the homophobic Christian speaker told me at school) to erase my homosexual inclinations, but to accept and come to terms with them.
Instead, I attempted to get over my dysfunctional childhood by drinking, bitching, partying and getting under as many dysfunctional adults as possible. I don’t think I’m alone. As last year’s Vice documentary Chemsex showed, the new wave of super-powerful drugs, such as crystal meth, G and mephedrone, are bringing these problems to the surface among a minority, albeit a significant one, of gay and bisexual men. I have lost count of the reports of friends of friends whose drug use has killed them, either by overdose or the results of the comedowns – so powerful that some refer to them as “suicide Tuesday”. Often families do not want to talk about what has killed their loved ones, but I would urge them to do so that we can address this problem.
The time has come for a root-and-branch revolution of the LGBT experience. I am calling for a government enquiry to look at the experience of LGBT children in school and how that correlates with their disproportionate mental health problems. We need to look at what’s working and what’s not, including the role of the gay media, and straight people need to step up to the plate. Most bullied LGBT kids have straight parents. Heterosexual people need to speak up and force an end to this barbaric situation where too many gay kids are so overwhelmed by shame that they take their own lives.
Most of all, we need a discussion about solutions and community. There is another way. I am happy to say that I am a recovering alcoholic and haven’t had a drink for more than two years. My life has transformed. Things aren’t perfect – I have many other issues, but I am making progress and others can, too – gay or straight. I have had life-saving help from amazing people and I want to share what I’ve learned with as many as possible. Gay people are often said to be at the head of trends. If we could lead on trauma recovery, we could change the world. Changing ourselves first is where the real solution lies.
Next year is the 50th anniversary of the (partial) decriminalistion of sex between men. I like to think that those men and women who lived before 1967 would be overwhelmed by the progress we have made. But I’m certain they would want us to live our lives to their greatest potential and not throw away the thing they could never dream of: the opportunity to love not only each other, but, ultimately, ourselves. If we really have the gritty determination that is so popular in the diva-ish anthems of gay clubs across the world, then the time has finally arrived to face the storm and find our way out the other side.
Straight Jacket by Matthew Todd (£16.99, Bantam Press) is published on 16 June. To order a copy for £13.59, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Phone the Samaritans free from any phone on 116 123. Call the LGBT Switchboard on 0300 330 0630 or email chris@switchboard.lgbt
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion