The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs Page A

working with a gay couple a few years ago who had reached the brink of disaster. Both men came to therapy on the verge of leaving, so much so that at the time I was surprised that they even bothered to seek help. The more I probed in the first session, the more it became clear that these two had been through years of active invalidation of one another.
    When the couple returned after that very tedious and painful first session, I learned of even more pain that plagued these two men. At some point, one of them had an affair with a close friend
of theirs. The other one found out about the affair and started blatantly soliciting men in one of the local gay bars for sex, right in front of his partner. And things got worse. He started bringing men to the house and having sex with them at times when he knew his partner could easily come home. For a short time, the other partner moved in with the friend with whom he was having the affair. This torturous game had gone on for years, back and forth, and it had destroyed virtually every ounce of good feeling between them.
    While no gay man is proud of it, it is true that gay men in stage two can become absolute geniuses at invalidating each other. Because we have such a low tolerance for invalidation and experience it so painfully, we also are hypersensitive to it in our environment. In other words, we’re always on the lookout for invalidation. As a result, we come to know it in all its forms and nuance. So when the time comes that we need to strike back at a perceived invalidation, what might we deliver? A good smack of the same in return.
    The stereotype of the bitchy, bitter queen comes from the image of the gay man who is stuck in stage two. He knows to expect invalidation, and he is armed with fistfuls of it in return. “Don’t mess with me, sister, cause I’ll bite back and bite back hard.”
    Depression can emerge in the gay man in stage two as it can in stage one, but for different reasons. In stage two, the gay man experiences a hunger for validation and a hypersensitivity to invalidation. In fact, he may become so sensitized to invalidation that he begins to see it everywhere he turns in life. His vision narrows, as if by intention he were eliminating from sight all traces of validation. What he does allow himself to see is a life full of invalidation.
    A colleague of mine recently treated a twenty-eight-year-old gay man who worked at a high-tech company in California. The
man had come to therapy on the verge of suicide. As the therapist worked with him, the source of his hopeless depression began to emerge: he was a failure. Because he hadn’t chosen to work for a firm where his stock options would now be worth millions of dollars, his current paycheck of $250,000 per year gravely reminded him that he was a failure.
    â€œWow!” you might say. “That’s screwed up.” And it is—on a very grand scale. But the dynamic underlying this incredible misperception of reality is common among gay men experiencing depression in stage two. Everything starts to sour and go bad—even the good things in life. It’s as if everything has become infected with invalidation. And the experience is deeply distressing and hopeless.
    While not all gay men in the throes of stage two experience this depression, a sizable number do. The toxic core of shame has the gay man utterly convinced that he is critically flawed, and this shame colors and dims his experience of life, causing him to filter out the good and grasp only the bad, difficult, and distressing.
    What is distinctly noticeable about this stage two depression is that the old sources of validation no longer seem to soothe the gay man’s distress. He works hard, but the feeling of validation is harder to come by. The beautifully furnished apartment no longer thrills him. His success at work feels as if it were a grating noise to his ears. The parade of sexual conquests with beautiful men