The identity impacts of growing up gay in a straight world

When exploring personal history during assessment with gay clients, something that feels easy to overlook is the subtle way our sexual orientation can be denied by the world around us, in hundreds of little details. Vivid memories of homophobic slurs at school are easily recalled, but forgotten is the quiet desperation of scrambling to think which other-gender classmate to pretend attraction to.

I remember being floored the first time I heard Ben Platt’s 2024 song All American Queen, in which a young man not only “takes his boy to the prom”, but is so welcome there that he is crowned prom king. Although this scenario might still lack credibility in many parts of the world, I wasn’t so much stunned by the story, but by the fact that in the 20-odd years since my own tentative waltz steps on a polished basketball court, the idea of taking another guy to that event had never crossed my mind. At all. Even just to discard the idea as wildly dangerous. The guide-rails of heteronormativity had so smoothly precluded the idea that I never once considered it, consciously or otherwise, until a folky bop on Spotify fired it at me like a guitar over the head.

The above example highlights that like all trauma, gay trauma isn’t just about the bad things that happened- it’s also about the great things that didn’t happen to us, even as we saw them happening for other people around us, and unconsciously learned to accept this double-standard in order to cope. I live in hope that more and more young queer folks can have more authentic early experiences, but for all those who learned ‘straight acting’ to survive, that shit matters. That shit happened, and that shit went into our backstory like the Hays Code slipped into 1960’s film scripts.

Practical impacts of this lack of role-modelling and societal representation include not having lifelong tutoring, discussions, and feedback on how to let somebody know that you like them. It also includes not having clear scripts for how healthy gay relationships begin, evolve over time, and how to manage conflict when it arises. Although stereotypes about straight relationships are problematic in most ways, they still represent a huge range of norms which are readily available, widely represented in popular media, and commonly known for heterosexual people.

Whereas gay relationships are… Well, take a moment to think of any stereotypes about gay relationships you can think of. They might be about the duration (short/long), or the structure (open/monogamous), or… Looking more like each other after a few years, maybe? I can’t think of many, myself. But I don’t think they give much guidance about how to be kind to your partner when you’re angry, how to address problems in a healthy way, or how to nurture a deeper human connection over time. Yet we often hold ourselves to impossibly high standards in relationships, and feel very upset when we don’t handle them perfectly, as though we forget how little guidance we had from society and our families growing up.

It’s important to acknowledge the little things we missed out on while growing up, not just the big things that happened but we wish hadn’t. Therapy provides a space to be gently curious about these little things, and develop our understanding that it’s normal and understandable to struggle more with relationship skills compared to people who are naturally suited to heteronormative scripts. There are also many practical skills with communication and self-regulation which therapy can help us learn, to help us feel more confident in building the satisfying relationships which we all deserve to have. Finding ways to accept our past can be a big help with improving our present, or as Brené Brown so nicely put it, “When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending”.