Working While Gay in the World of Toxic Masculinity
There is no Work-Life Balance, only Life
Whether it is your soul, your psyche, or your body, any encounter with the socially ‘toxic’ will kill you.
The only question is, how fast?
The toxic intersection in my head where my gay identity collides with Western capitalist notions of human value, ideas of masculinity, anti-LGBTQ narratives, and mental health, is epically chaotic. There are times when the collisions of forces are so powerful that I feel like a self-sustaining fusion reactor of emotion; they go on and on, the energy of the inputs creating a greater output.
It’s killing me. It’s killing us.
A man is his work
The evolution of our economy has placed money at the center of the human world and work as the means to earn it. Money is how we value ourselves and others, and work is often the keystone of our identity. For that system, our value as a human is directly proportional to our ability to produce.
Our society has deeply linked work and masculinity. Specifically, the work that is made visible is the work of men in the public sphere, work that is structured to have a palpable and visible impact on the lives of others. ‘Women’s Work,’ relegated to the domestic…
