The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World

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Lots of that was to do with supporting/being supported by a queer community which seems utterly absent from his world. Boiling it down to the simplest possible terms, Downs posits that shame is the root of gay men's mental health issues.

I know the author was writing based on the experiences he's had with his clients, and those clients may've been very well-off, but there was just something extremely off-putting with the constant mention of wealth and high gay society. During this stage he may take on many sexual partners in his attempt to make himself feel attractive, sexy, and loved—in short, less shameful. The second stage is "Compensating for Shame" and describes the gay man's attempt to neutralize his shame by being more successful, outrageous, fabulous, beautiful, or masculine. And that is only marginally less true of gay men, a group that has lots in common but, by virtue of our diaspora, so very much that sets our microunits apart from one another. To be gay in an uncompromisingly straight world is to struggle to find love and, once found, to hold onto it.His sheer inability to consider any outside factor in his analysis of what plagues gay men is of course a necessity of the genre he's writing in, but it's also just so incredibly limited and so patently ignorant of how our countries socio-economic insecurity can contribute to individual insecurity, especially for young gay men (who as he smartly points out, aren't generally the most secure people to begin with) is a depressing omission. Some actually have no memory of feeling shame over being gay—they marched out of the closet at a young age and never looked back. What wisdom is contained between these covers is theirs, and anything less is more than likely my doing. Everything that is familiar feels somewhat foreign, and there is a growing awareness that life must be slowly redefined in all aspects.

I've wondered if the book is simply outdated, but as it was published in 2005 and updated in 2012 I'm not willing to give it that out. He does a beautiful job of unfolding the way those can affect a person and how they drive us to run from negative feelings and seek external validation. The very short case that I felt I identified with personally, was answered too quickly and singularly to be of much benefit. rigorously speaking, Downs isn't being very scientific once he gets past the data about gay men's health problems; in addition to the fact that he's a therapist who specializes in treating gay men, and so is more likely than most to see many extreme cases of gay men beset by mental health issues, one senses that he is often writing about his own journey from denial to chasing extrinsic motivators to an eventual sense of passion and contentment). Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world.

Relying on personal experience and years of counseling gay men and gay couples, he penned The Velvet Rage to assist men with letting go of shameful feelings about their sexuality they may be unaware of harboring. The other day, as we were sitting around the office trying to be thoughtful about trans rights legal guidance for the city, a moment of levity transpired. My life and my work have taken on a depth of meaning and fulfillment that I would have never known otherwise.