Sexuality and the Imprint of Shame: What Queer Guys (and Their Therapists) Need to Know — Part 1/3

PART ONE— UNDERSTANDING SHAME

I’ve been talking about shame and sexuality for about five years.[i] I’m both obsessed with and exhausted by this topic. Obsessed because it’s endlessly relevant to my clinical work in queer and trans communities, and exhausted because unpacking your own shame and that of your clients is an emotionally taxing experience. What follows are some observations about how shame operates on an individual and community level for all queer/trans guys who are into guys, as well as the therapists, social workers, and the other professionals who work with us.

To begin, consider the following statements and ask yourself whether or not you agree or disagree with each one. The answers will help you start thinking about shame more broadly[ii].

1. I sometimes feel shy about participating in meetings or group discussions.
2. I sometimes wonder if people are judging my appearance.
3. I’m hesitant to talk about my religious or cultural background at work or in other professional settings.
4. At times, I wonder if my opinion will be attributed to my sexual orientation, gender, race, or country of origin.
5. I work harder at appearing “professional” due to my sexual orientation, gender, race, or country of origin.
6. When I make a mistake, I scold myself and put myself down.
7. At times, I feel so “exposed” that I wish the earth would open up and swallow me.
8. I replay painful events over and over in my mind until I am overwhelmed.
9. Even when I’m seemingly included, I somehow feel left out.
10. When others talk about their successes, I feel inadequate about my life.
11. I feel insecure or anxious about others’ opinions of me.
12. My family of origin supports me in the choices I make and the life I want to carve out for myself.
13. I feel I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others.
14. All in all, I’m inclined to feel like I’m a success.
15. I feel like I have much to be proud of.

Take a moment to reflect on how these statements may have helped you deepen your own understanding of what shame can look like in your life.

Towards a Definition of Shame

First, let’s begin by distinguishing shame from guilt. I feel guilt when I think I’ve done something wrong or when I’ve transgressed my own moral code, like lying. By contrast, when I'm experiencing shame, I'm thinking about myself as a fundamentally flawed person. I haven't done something wrong; I am something wrong.

Shame can take a number of forms. For example, I might experience it as embarrassment, humiliation, or rejection. Shame doesn't just come out of nowhere - it arises in the context of social relationships.

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) defines shame as

…An intense feeling of being fundamentally flawed and unworthy. It surfaces fears and anticipation of possible rejection, embarrassment, or humiliation.

In her 2017 article, “Shame! A Psychodynamic Perspective,” the author and mindfulness expert Michelle May speaks to the social dimension of shame:

Shame is conceptualized as a social emotion, elicited by personal devaluation of a person’s action/behaviour from the standpoint of others … [and the] person perceives their social status/acceptance from others to be lost, diminished or less desired.[iii]

To restate: My shame is activated when I start to devalue myself as I internalize how I think you see me. I take your judgment and use it as a prompt to change myself. I then start to see myself through your gaze, whether that perception is actually how you think about me or not.

Psychologist Jane Bolton[iv] talks about the spectrum of shame and its varying intensity. She suggests we experience shame in a number of ways: shyness, discouragement, embarrassment, self-consciousness, and inferiority.

• Shame can manifest as shyness in the presence of a stranger, like when a child hides behind a mother’s thigh when being introduced to another adult.
• Discouragement can be connected to a feeling of defeat, at least temporarily, like when it seems impossible to get a job interview right after you finished an expensive graduate program.
• Embarrassment might be as menial as if to seek an empty bathroom in case you have to fart! You wouldn't feel embarrassed if somebody else wasn't there; it's specific to being in the presence of others.
• Self-consciousness is shame about performance: Will I be good enough? How will I be received? Will I be criticized?
• Inferiority is an all-encompassing devaluation of the self. Inferiority is not just a social experience that's limited to one incident, but rather a core belief that I hold about myself as I move through the world.

How Does Shame Develop?

There isn’t one agreed upon clinical etiology of shame. Psychologists and researchers often talk about shame as a consequence of trauma; sometimes as a response to envy; and possibly a sibling of disgust. Here are four broad sources of shame:

1. Being told “no”
2. Socialization around good and bad
3. Socialization around privacy and secrecy
4. Non-shared experiences of boundary violations

Sometimes shame develops through simple experiences of being told “No.” Lots of young children will play with or touch their genitals in public. Their parent will say, “No, don't do that.” Similarly, children may be ill-mannered at the dinner table, particularly in a restaurant, and they'll be punished. Parents experience a lot of pressure to punish such behaviour so that they're seen as good parents, or they simply repeat the disciplining patterns of their own parents. Children then internalize certain messages: “I got in trouble, so my genitals must be bad or gross.” “I got in trouble so it must be bad to draw attention to myself in public.” It would be more helpful if a parental “no” was more contextualized, as Lea Grover suggests[v]: "Darling, we don’t eat in the bathroom, so we don’t play with our vulvas at the dinner table.”

We're also socialized to evaluate what is good versus bad according to dominant belief systems. For example, in my experience as a young Muslim man, I was told that alcohol was very bad. When my peers were drinking alcohol and I was drinking with them, they were having a great time whereas I was feeling like a bad person. Some might argue that I actually just felt guilty because I felt I did the wrong thing. But here's the overlap: when you think you have failed an entire belief or values system, or way of being, that sense of failure will impact how you feel about yourself on a larger scale. That’s shame.

There is also a lot of socialization around privacy and secrecy — an especially interesting dichotomy. Think about your family secrets: what were you told not to discuss outside your home, and how necessary it was to safeguard that information? There are two possible outcomes of this kind of enforced secrecy. One, you learn about good boundaries and the right to privacy, or two, you feel the burdensome weight of harbouring a secret that came with feelings of fear, loyalty, and responsibility. Secrets are isolating and can help plant the seeds of shame. A lot of us may experience confusion between privacy and secrecy in the context of relationship communication. If I don’t want to share my masturbation fantasies with my partner, is that because I see it as private or because it’s a (dirty) secret?

Last, there are non-shared experiences of boundary violations. When we experience violations like physical or sexual abuse, and we don't have the opportunity to talk about them, we have few resources to make sense of what's happened to us. And, TikTok therapy likely doesn’t provide the quality of support one needs. This kind of secrecy often generates shame because the only way we can understand these experiences is by taking partial responsibility for what's happened to us, even though it's not our fault. Why do we make the leap from harbouring a secret to feeling somehow responsible? Perhaps that’s a way to feel in control and move forward in the absence of validation from others about the experience of being victimized.

Sources of Shame for Gay Men

From an early age, gay and queer guys know we might be punished for the things we do or the things we like: games, toys, television shows, clothing and our secret internet searches. Even if we are not explicitly punished, we get a sense that we will not be celebrated for our choices. We internalize that message deeply.

When we challenge gender roles as young people, we get punished: “Boys don’t really do that; the girls do that.” An example: I went to East Africa to visit family a few years ago, and was buying some traditional clothing. The men's garments have really long arms so I said to my aunt, “I want the ladies’ arms, the ones that cuff just below the shoulder, so it looks like I have some arm muscle.” But the sales clerk said, “No, that's the woman's style.” I had to stop everyone and say, “We're not going to talk about what men and women wear; we're just going to talk about which style and fit works for me. And then if you want to charge me extra for the seaming, I will pay.” I was having to self-advocate and resist gender roles in my 30s.

But it's so hard to take such actions, even as an adult gay man. When we're young, we receive constant messages about what we should and should not do. All of the activities we participate in, at school, in public spaces, or at recreational centres, are gendered. Then we develop self-consciousness around others because those gender-segregated spaces have their own culture in which we must participate.

This situation hopefully has changed somewhat since I was in middle school or high school. But by and large, we don’t study anything, at least during our primary education, that reflects our diversity of experiences. There are no history books that discuss how queer people have contributed to their societies. When we don’t see ourselves in history, we're constantly trying to figure out where we fit. As a result, we understand ourselves to be outsiders.

This sense of not fitting in is reinforced by popular culture. We watch films that not only present a story about heterosexuality but celebrate it. It's not that I don't want to partake in that celebration; I like going to weddings as much as anyone. But when living on the margins, the ambivalence about our own ability to participate in hetero lifestyle milestones sets in at an early age. And yes, the law now allows many queer folks access to the institution of marriage but those celebrations often need to be reimagined in significant ways to work for us. As queer and trans people, we still grieve the loss of not being able to take part in culturally important activities and we have to mentally prepare to not be celebrated to the same degree as our heterosexual counterparts. Our resilience is in being able to “queer” everything, but that comes after we work through our shame about not fitting into a mould that was sold to us the one way to be.

Society's emphasis on sports, particularly for men, provides another source of shame. Sports are connected to local or national identities and offer a way to connect with other men. As well, we talk endlessly about how sports build character. What we don't discuss is that sport can be an extremely difficult space to navigate, even for cisgender, straight men.

Many gay or queer guys have experienced toxic masculinity in the context of male team sports or locker rooms. I almost never passed as straight, yet there were moments where my sexuality wasn't held against me. In those moments, when I wanted to be like one of the guys and they would accept me, I would absolutely participate in making derogatory comments about women or making fun of other more femme guys. How awful to think you need to put people down in order to survive, to navigate spaces, and to be accepted.

Shame for many gay men can be traced back to pressures to date girls and to make sure other guys know you find girls attractive. How protective. And uncomfortable. There’s also much to cringe at (and be ashamed of) when I recall the toxic ways I used to resolve conflicts—drawing on my masculine socialization, of course. I got into so many fights in my early teens. Why? My family never engaged in physical fighting at home, yet it was something I relied on when I was in middle school. Perhaps I felt like I couldn't fit in, wasn't white enough, and wasn't masculine enough. Consequently, I responded with fists, back-talk, wisecracks from the back of the class. These were all forms of communication, and they were all strategies that I used to take up a space when I had already internalized the idea that there wasn’t an easily designed spot for me to step into in the classroom and on the playground.

The Consequences of Shame

How do we anticipate rejection around our sexuality before we've even walked into a space or decided to come out? Whether our families accepted us or not, or their response was somewhere in between, many of us have had to think long and hard about the consequences of sharing something so fundamental about our identities. Not only do we experience vulnerability when coming out, but we also have to "package" our story, and then be prepared to educate others. We had to be ready for any possible question instead of just being able to say, "I'm thinking I might be attracted to guys, eh.” Such ordinary-seeming disclosures just weren't accepted.

Even after we’ve come out to friends and family, we can still experience shame about the type of relationships we have. Many gay men are in open relationships as I have been as well. Why do we hesitate to tell our straight friends and family? What are the risks of the narratives they project onto us? Do we begin to see ourselves through their eyes? That, after all, is how shame works: I see myself through your gaze and I internalize your judgment.

Shame and its relationship to health, body image and sexuality.

A generation ago, HIV was a source of fear. Today, it can seem like a source of shame. Some of my clients talk about being HIV positive as yet another facet of their lives that will prompt the disappointment of friends and family. As one told me, “They already had to deal with me being gay, which was a disappointment or a failure. They had to readjust their expectations for me. Now they think my diagnosis, which they see as terminal even though it should just be considered a chronic illness in this day and age, means that I failed again.”

Our bodies, even in the absence of infection, can incite shame. We’ve all seen the trends in desired body types change over time from hairless twinks to muscle bears. At each stage of a trend, some people are well represented and celebrated while many of us feel left out. We take personal responsibility for being excluded and therefore feel ashamed. My relationship to body hair, which basically grows from my hairline to my toes, is a source of shame for me, or at least it was because this was the thing that made me not white when I was in middle school. This is the thing that made me stand out in gym class and drew more attention. Later in life, I recognized just how much I had internalized the white gaze. It influenced how I saw people from my own South Asian community and even came to construct desire. Maybe you can relate: do you desexualize other people that look like you because you understand another type of body (perhaps one that is taller, broader shouldered, and with fairer skin) to be more attractive? I can’t help but wonder: what does it mean for a community of gay men if everyone is experiencing shame in this way?

Finally, we have to think about how shame affects and undermines sexual pleasure. I'm a therapist who talks to people about sex and relationships all the time. But in my own relationships, I have trouble saying things like, "Do a little bit more of this, a little less of that." Sometimes I can, but often I'd rather it just be over. What's that hesitancy about? Why is sex not about pleasure? How did it start with pleasure, but led to me “checking out” as the sex became about something else?

Shame and Expectations

One form of trauma that many gay men, and racialized folks, in particular, experience comes from internalizing the high expectations imposed on us by our communities and families. If you took the road less travelled in your career path (so, anything outside of being a doctor or lawyer), you decided you don’t want to have kids, or that you won’t be having a big wedding, you may feel like you’ve let your people down. Each of these expectations comes with mourning a loss of how you will not be celebrated and how you might even be seen as deficient. Many of us adapt by compensating in other ways and continue to seek family approval by investing in other forms of achievement, like higher education. This workaround can be great career-wise but it can also produce other forms of isolation. Now, you’re smart in ways that make the distance between you and the people you let down feel even bigger.

Next: Part Two — Defenses Against Shame.

Endnotes

[i] In 2017, I was honoured to open the Guelph Sexuality Conference and then the 2018 CBRC Summit in Vancouver, with this topic as my keynote address. I adapted my presentations into a workshop for Sex Down South in 2019, when I had the honour of attending as a Sex Celeb along with some badass icons: Midori and Afrosexology. More recently (November 2021), I offered a training session on queer men’s mental health with service providers at Engage Men’s Health in Johannesburg, where I once again explored the complexities of internalized shame. The international resonance of this topic has motivated me to revise my presentation as a three-part essay.

[ii] Adapted from David R. Cook EdD (1988). Measuring Shame: Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 4:2, 197-215.

[iii] May, M. (2017). Shame! A System Psychodynamic Perspective. The Value of Shame, 43-59. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-53100-7_2.

[iv] Bolton, J. (2009, May 18). What We Get Wrong About Shame. Retrieved June 18, 2017, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-zesty-self/200905/what-we-get-wrong-about-shame.

[v] Grover, L. (2014, July 29). Darling, We Don’t Play With Our Vulvas At The Table. Retrieved from Scary Mommy website: https://www.scarymommy.com/dont-play-vulvas-table/.

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