Why does everything have to be gay now

He started to wonder if the story he had always heard about gay men and mental health was incomplete. He had a girlfriend through most of high school, and tried to avoid boys—both romantically and platonically—until he could get out of there. Only a few of the names of the gay men in this article are real.

The bottom line is this: being gay, bi, trans, or what have you is not some “trend” made up by. Gay men were being kicked out of their own families, their love lives were illegal. It was either that or watch a movie by myself. While one half of my social circle has disappeared into relationships, kids and suburbs, the other has struggled through isolation and anxiety, hard drugs and risky sex.

He is trim, intelligent, gluten-free, the kind of guy who wears a work shirt no matter what day of the week it is. If it means “I reject the gender binary,” fine—although the majority of gay people don’t. Salway grew up in Celina, Ohio, a rusting factory town of maybe 10, people, the kind of place, he says, where marriage competed with college for the year-olds.

And there was Christian, the second guy I ever kissed, who killed himself at 32, two weeks after his boyfriend broke up with him. All of these unbearable statistics lead to the same conclusion: It is still dangerously alienating to go through life as a man attracted to other men.

In a survey of gay men who recently arrived in New York City, three-quarters suffered from anxiety or depression, abused drugs or alcohol or were having risky sex—or some combination of the three. There are still a few homophobes among Millennials and Gen Z-ers, but progress is being made.

He was raised in a West Coast suburb by a lesbian mom. Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea he used anything heavier than martinis. My parents still claim that they had no idea I was gay. All that being said, an argument against "not everything has to be gay" is that not everything is - and not enough is.

Travis Salway, a researcher with the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, has spent the last five years trying to figure out why gay men keep killing themselves. A group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuals get that. He got bullied for being gay before he even knew he was.

None of this fits the narrative I have been told, the one I have told myself. Jeremy is telling me this from a hospital bed, six stories above Seattle. The good news, though, is that epidemiologists and social scientists are closer than ever to understanding all the reasons why.

As recently as my own adolescence, gay marriage was a distant aspiration, something newspapers still put in scare quotes. By the late s, he was a social worker and epidemiologist and, like me, was struck by the growing distance between his straight and gay friends. Like me, Jeremy did not grow up bullied by his peers or rejected by his family.

Jeremy and I are In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history. About two years ago I switched to cocaine because I could work the next day. If it means “I reject discrimination based on sexuality,” fine—most straight people now do, too.

Scientists may have finally solved the puzzle of what makes a person gay, and how it is passed from parents to their children. Public support for gay marriage has climbed from 27 percent in to 61 percent in Gay people are now, depending on the study, between 2 and 10 times more likely than straight people to take their own lives.

Jeremy is not the friend I was expecting to have this conversation with. And just like the last epidemic we lived through, the trauma appears to be concentrated among men. There's way too much homophobia and suppression still present even in progressive places for the needle to swing too far towards inclusion yet.

I barely knew at that point. This feeling of emptiness, it turns out, is not just an American phenomenon. The first time we met, three years ago, he asked me if I knew a good place to do CrossFit. This is a picture of me and my family when I was 9.