On gay men, secrecy, erotic desire, and the shame that sometimes outlives the closet.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being surrounded by people who love you and wondering whether they would feel the same if they knew everything about you.
For some gay men, this loneliness begins long before they have a word for their sexuality. It may begin in a school hallway, where a boy notices another boy walking toward him and suddenly becomes conscious of where his eyes are resting. Perhaps he looks away too quickly. Perhaps he feels his face grow warm. Nothing has happened, at least nothing anyone else would notice, but something has happened inside him. A private feeling has emerged, followed almost immediately by the need to conceal it.
He may not yet understand the attraction. He may not even experience it as sexual. There is simply something about the other boy’s presence that draws his attention. An excitement. A curiosity. A wish to remain nearby a little longer.
And then, perhaps, the uneasy thought that someone might notice.
Over time, he learns to become careful. He pays attention to the way he talks, the movements of his hands, the enthusiasm in his voice. He learns which boys are safe to admire openly, and which expressions of affection might invite suspicion. He laughs at jokes that make him uncomfortable. He learns to look interested when his friends discuss girls, sometimes inventing attractions of his own so that no one asks too many questions.
Eventually, the watching becomes automatic. He no longer needs to remind himself to be cautious. He simply knows how to move through the world without revealing too much.
Not every gay man grows up this way. Some encounter their developing sexuality with curiosity, affection, and acceptance. Others recognize themselves as gay only in adulthood, after years of experiences that carried different meanings at the time. But for those whose emerging desire was accompanied by fear, ridicule, or the expectation of rejection, concealment may become more than a response to an unsympathetic environment.
It may become a way of relating to themselves.
The closet, after all, is not only a place where we hide from other people. It can also become a place from which we learn to watch ourselves.
And sometimes, even after we have left it, we continue looking over our shoulders.
Learning to See Ourselves Through Other People’s Eyes
Imagine a boy sitting at the dinner table with his family. His father makes an offhand comment about a gay man on television. Perhaps it is dismissive, perhaps merely a joke. Everyone laughs, and the conversation moves on.
The boy laughs too, while cringing inside. No one knows that the comment has landed somewhere tender. No one sees him quietly registering the information: This is something I should not be.
He may continue eating dinner, answering questions about school, and participating in family conversation. Nothing outwardly changes. Yet something has been added to his understanding of himself.
He has learned that certain feelings may threaten his belonging.
Experiences like this do not always arrive as dramatic moments of rejection. Sometimes they accumulate in ordinary interactions: the assumption that he will eventually have a girlfriend, the teasing directed toward an effeminate classmate, the uncomfortable silence after someone mentions homosexuality. Each experience may be relatively small, but together they can teach a young person to anticipate how others might respond to his emerging identity.
Meyer (2003) describes how stigma-related experiences can produce minority stress, including the anticipation of rejection and the psychological effort involved in concealment. Pachankis (2007) further examines the cognitive and emotional consequences of hiding a stigmatized identity, emphasizing the vigilance that may accompany the possibility of being discovered.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, we might consider what happens when the boy gradually adopts the imagined perspective of those around him.
He begins monitoring himself through their eyes.
What started as an effort to avoid external humiliation may become an internal process of judgment. Even when no one is watching, he may feel watched. Even when no one is criticizing him, he may anticipate criticism. He learns to evaluate his gestures, feelings, and desires before allowing them to become visible.
The internal critic does not necessarily announce itself with words. Sometimes it appears as a tightening in the stomach, a sudden embarrassment, or an impulse to change the subject when something personal begins to emerge.
Over time, the boy may become highly skilled at presenting a version of himself that others find acceptable. He may be funny, accomplished, charming, athletic, socially perceptive, or exceptionally agreeable. These qualities can be genuine parts of his personality, but they may also help him maintain a comfortable distance between what others see and what he fears they might discover.
There can be a painful irony in becoming very good at being liked while remaining uncertain whether one is truly known.
The more successfully he presents the acceptable self, the less opportunity he has to discover how others might respond to the parts he keeps hidden.
Approval becomes reassuring, but not entirely convincing.
After all, they are approving of someone who has been carefully edited.
When Desire and Shame Arrive Together
Sexual desire is often described as something spontaneous, an experience that emerges from the body before we have had much opportunity to think about it.
Yet desire never develops in a psychological vacuum.
It emerges within families, cultures, relationships, and systems of meaning that teach us what kinds of wanting are acceptable. For some gay men, the first stirrings of attraction are accompanied by a sense that the feeling itself must be concealed.
Imagine another moment.
A teenage boy lies awake in bed, replaying an interaction with a male friend. Perhaps their shoulders touched while watching a movie. Perhaps the friend fell asleep beside him, close enough that he could hear the rhythm of his breathing.
The memory brings a feeling of warmth, anticipation, and longing. Then he feels embarrassed. He turns onto his side and tries to think about something else. The feeling has not disappeared, but it has changed. What began as pleasure has become entangled with self-consciousness.
He would like to return to the fantasy, yet wishes he had never had it.
This movement between desire and shame is worth considering psychoanalytically. Silvan Tomkins (1963) understood shame as an affect that can emerge when experiences of interest, excitement, or enjoyment are interrupted. Shame is likely to arise because something pleasurable has become obstructed, exposed, or experienced as unacceptable.
This formulation becomes particularly meaningful when the source of excitement is also the source of anticipated humiliation. A young man may discover that wanting another man produces two powerful experiences simultaneously: the pleasure of desire and the fear of what that desire reveals about him.
Eventually, the two may become difficult to separate.
Research has documented associations between internalized homophobia and shame among gay men (Allen & Oleson, 1999), while other studies have examined relationships among shame, internalized homophobia, and attachment insecurity (Brown & Trevethan, 2010). These findings do not suggest that shame is an inherent feature of homosexuality. Rather, they highlight the psychological consequences of developing a sexual identity within environments that may communicate negative meanings about it. In the literature, this is often referred to as a collective negative regard.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the question becomes how those meanings enter the individual’s emotional life.
A man may consciously reject those beliefs he encountered growing up, while continuing to experience emotional reactions shaped by them. He may understand that there is nothing wrong with his attraction to men and still feel embarrassed when expressing tenderness, revealing a fantasy, or acknowledging how deeply he wants to be loved.
The shame may no longer make sense to him intellectually. But feelings do not always surrender their authority simply because we have developed better explanations.
The Erotic Life of Secrecy
There is another possibility that makes the relationship between concealment and sexuality particularly interesting.
What happens when desire repeatedly unfolds under conditions of secrecy?
For some gay men, the earliest experiences of erotic excitement may have occurred in hidden spaces. A glance held a moment longer than expected. A conversation that seemed ordinary to everyone else but carried an unspoken possibility. A late-night message exchanged while the rest of the household slept. The anticipation of seeing someone whose presence had to remain unexplained.
There may have been excitement in the encounter itself, but also in the waiting, the uncertainty, and the private knowledge that something was happening beneath the surface of ordinary life.
Secrecy may have been necessary for protection. Yet the emotional atmosphere surrounding it could become part of the experience of desire.
Psychoanalysis has long understood erotic life as shaped not only by bodily pleasure but also by fantasy, memory, identification, and unconscious associations. Our desires often acquire meanings through the circumstances in which they emerge.
This does not mean that secrecy inevitably becomes erotic, nor that sexual practices involving anonymity, discretion, or transgression indicate unresolved psychological conflict. Such experiences can be freely chosen, pleasurable, and meaningful in their own right.
But in some individual histories, secrecy may become part of the erotic imagination.
Consider a man who grew up associating sexual excitement with situations in which discovery was possible but never quite occurred. He may have experienced attraction through glances across crowded rooms, brief encounters in private spaces, or moments of physical closeness that could not be acknowledged afterward.
Years later, he may notice that certain forms of anonymity or discretion remain particularly exciting.
Perhaps being approached by a stranger produces an intensity that feels different from being desired by a long-term partner. Perhaps the anticipation is more exciting than the encounter itself. Perhaps he is most comfortable with desire when the interaction has clear boundaries and neither person expects to become emotionally known.
There are numerous possible explanations for such preferences, and there may be no psychological conflict involved at all.
Still, if the man finds himself troubled by a recurring pattern and psychoanalysis might invite curiosity about what secrecy represents within his particular erotic life.
Does it offer freedom from ordinary social expectations? Does it permit him to experience desire without fearing emotional rejection? Does it provide a familiar sense of control? Or has the anticipation of exposure become associated with excitement in ways he has never consciously considered?
Erotic fantasy does not necessarily seek what makes us comfortable. Sometimes it returns to situations that carry emotional intensity, uncertainty, and especially contradiction. And what once had to remain hidden for survival may later become part of the private language through which desire is experienced.
Being Wanted Is Not Always the Same as Being Known
A man can be naked in front of another man and still feel that very little of himself has been revealed.
This is one of the more interesting distinctions between sexual exposure and emotional vulnerability.
To be desired can be deeply affirming. For someone who spent adolescence fearing that his attraction to men made him unacceptable, another man’s interest may provide a powerful experience of recognition. A look across a bar, a flirtatious exchange, or the experience of being physically wanted can communicate something that was once difficult to imagine: Someone wants me as I am.
But sexual recognition and emotional recognition do not necessarily involve the same psychological risks.
Sexual encounters can provide opportunities for pleasure, intimacy, experimentation, and connection without requiring an extensive disclosure of one’s emotional life. The boundaries of an encounter may be clear, where all parties involved may understand what is being offered and what is not.
Emotional intimacy introduces a different kind of uncertainty.
Imagine a man who is comfortable meeting strangers for sex but becomes uneasy when someone he genuinely likes begins asking about his feelings. He can express desire without hesitation, but struggles to say that he misses someone. He can initiate physical contact, yet feels exposed when a partner reaches for his hand in public.
The difficulty may not lie in sexuality. It may lie in the experience of being emotionally visible.
Perhaps sexual desire feels manageable because it allows him to participate without revealing the parts of himself he has learned and needed to protect. Emotional closeness, by contrast, may awaken fears that are harder to negotiate with. He might worry about appearing needy, becoming dependent, or discovering that someone who desires him sexually does not actually want the rest of him.
This does not mean that casual sex is inherently avoidant or that romantic partnerships are necessarily more psychologically mature. Neither conclusion follows from the behavior itself. Some people genuinely prefer sexual connections without romantic attachment, and others experience deep emotional intimacy in relationships that do not resemble conventional partnerships.
The question is whether an individual’s choices feel freely available or constrained by fears that remain difficult to recognize.
A man may discover that he has developed a comfortable relationship with being desired but a much more complicated relationship with being loved.
Being desired may tell him that he is attractive.
Being loved asks whether he can believe he is worth staying for.
For someone whose early experiences involved hiding important aspects of himself, the latter may feel far more uncertain.
Coming Out Does Not Mean the Closet Disappears
We often imagine coming out as a movement from darkness into light, from concealment into authenticity. There is a door, an act of courage, and then the possibility of living openly.
For many gay men, coming out is indeed transformative. It can bring relief, connection, self-recognition, and the ability to experience relationships without the constant burden of hiding one’s sexual orientation.
But the psychological effects of concealment do not always end when the circumstances requiring it change.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) challenged the notion that the closet is a single, fixed state from which someone emerges permanently. Disclosure is relational and contextual. A person may be open in one environment while remaining cautious in another. New relationships and situations can introduce new decisions about what to reveal.
Research similarly suggests that concealment has complex relationships with psychological well-being. Pachankis et al. (2020) found that concealment is associated with mental health in ways that vary across circumstances. Hiding one’s sexual orientation may create psychological burdens, but it can also protect against real threats of discrimination or rejection.
Psychoanalysis invites us to consider a further possibility: the external closet may disappear while aspects of its internal organization remain.
A man may be openly gay, surrounded by affirming friends, and comfortable discussing his sexual orientation. Yet he may still carefully manage how much longing, tenderness, insecurity, or dependency he allows others to see.
He may no longer conceal that he is attracted to men, but continue to conceal how much he wants their affection.
Perhaps he prides himself on being emotionally independent. He tells himself that he does not need anyone, that relationships are complicated, or that he prefers keeping things casual. Some of this may be entirely true. But he may also notice a particular discomfort when another man begins to matter to him. He becomes anxious after sending an affectionate message. He regrets revealing that he was hurt. He feels embarrassed by his own longing and quickly tries to recover the appearance of indifference.
The old expectation may be difficult to name, but its emotional logic is familiar.
If I reveal too much, something bad will happen.
What began as concealment of sexual orientation may have become a more general difficulty allowing certain aspects of the self to be visible.
In this sense, coming out is not necessarily the same thing as becoming known.
The Masculinity We Learn to Perform
For some gay men, concealment is also intertwined with complicated expectations about masculinity.
A boy may learn that being perceived as feminine invites ridicule long before he understands his sexual orientation. He may become attentive to the way he walks, speaks, dresses, or expresses emotion. Masculinity becomes something to monitor and, at times, something to perform.
He may learn to lower his voice, restrain gestures, avoid appearing too enthusiastic, or distance himself from boys whose femininity makes them targets. That effort may be exhausting, particularly when the qualities he attempts to suppress are spontaneous expressions of his personality.
Yet these expectations can persist within gay male social environments as well. Masculinity may be idealized, eroticized, or treated as a form of social currency. Particular bodies, appearances, and performances of masculinity may receive more attention, while femininity or vulnerability may remain associated with shame.
A man may feel attracted to masculine men while simultaneously fearing that he himself is not masculine enough. He may admire the very qualities he feels compelled to perform.
There can be a painful psychological tension in wanting another man while also wanting to be the kind of man who would never be rejected by him.
Some men respond by cultivating strength, muscularity, sexual confidence, or emotional independence. These qualities may reflect genuine interests and sources of pleasure. They can also become ways of managing earlier feelings of inadequacy.
The distinction is not always obvious, nor does the presence of one meaning exclude another.
A man may genuinely enjoy bodybuilding while also finding that physical strength offers relief from the vulnerability he associates with his younger self. He may feel sexually empowered by his masculinity while remaining uncomfortable with expressions of softness or dependency.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, these contradictions deserve curiosity rather than judgment. The question is not whether a particular expression of masculinity is authentic or defensive. Human behavior often serves multiple psychological purposes at once.
What matters is whether the person feels free to inhabit different aspects of himself without fearing that one will invalidate the others.
When Shame Survives Acceptance
One of the more confusing experiences for someone who has been openly gay for many years is discovering that shame can still appear unexpectedly.
It may happen while holding a partner’s hand in a familiar neighborhood. Perhaps no one is staring. No one has said anything. Yet the man becomes unusually conscious of the gesture and feels an impulse to let go.
Or it may happen during an ordinary moment of tenderness. His partner says, “I love you,” and instead of feeling reassured, he becomes uncomfortable. He makes a joke, changes the subject, or responds with less warmth than he actually feels.
Later, he wonders why.
He knows there is nothing wrong with loving another man. He may have spent years building a life in which that love is celebrated. Yet some part of the experience still evokes a familiar sense of exposure.
Our conscious beliefs and emotional expectations do not always develop at the same pace.
A man may reject the prejudices he encountered growing up while continuing to carry emotional memories of what it felt like to be judged, ridiculed, or misunderstood. He may know intellectually that he is safe while experiencing visceral anxiety in situations resembling those in which he once felt vulnerable.
This does not mean that he has failed to accept himself.
It may mean that acceptance has become available in his external life before it has been fully integrated into his emotional expectations.
Relational and intersubjective psychoanalytic perspectives emphasize that our emotional experiences develop within relationships and that earlier patterns of recognition or rejection can influence how we experience subsequent interactions. Stolorow (2002), for example, describes affective experience as shaped within relational contexts.
A man who learned to expect humiliation may initially find tenderness unfamiliar. Someone who spent years hiding his desires may experience another person’s genuine curiosity as intrusive rather than reassuring. A person who learned that love was conditional may struggle to trust affection that does not require him to perform.
These experiences can gradually change, but not simply because someone tells him that he has nothing to be ashamed of.
Sometimes a different emotional expectation develops only through repeated experiences of being received differently during vulnerable disclosures.
What Becomes Possible When We No Longer Have to Hide?
There is a moment that sometimes occurs in psychotherapy when someone begins telling a story and stops midway through a sentence.
He looks away. Perhaps he laughs nervously or apologizes before continuing. He may say that what he is about to describe sounds strange, embarrassing, or difficult to explain.
The therapist may have heard nothing particularly unusual. Yet for the person speaking, something significant is happening. An experience that has long remained private is approaching the possibility of being known.
Such moments cannot be rushed.
Shame often involves more than fear of criticism. It usually involves the expectation that revealing something about ourselves will fundamentally change how another person sees us. Even a neutral or curious response can initially feel difficult to trust.
The psychoanalytic task is not to persuade the person that his feelings are acceptable through reassurance alone. It is to understand how those feelings developed, became associated with danger, and what occurs between patient and therapist as they begin to emerge.
Over time, experiences that once seemed impossible to discuss may become less threatening. A man may begin to acknowledge desires he previously dismissed, grieve how he never allowed himself to feel, or express anger toward people whose acceptance he once depended upon.
He may discover that some of his sexual preferences reflect genuine pleasure and curiosity, while others have become entangled with familiar attempts to avoid rejection or manage shame.
He may also come to appreciate the ingenuity of his younger self.
The boy who monitored his gestures, concealed his attractions, or carefully measured what could be said was not necessarily weak or inauthentic. He was responding to the world as he understood it, finding ways to protect relationships, preserve belonging, and maintain a sense of safety.
There may be grief in recognizing how much effort this required. There may be anger about what was lost. And there may be tenderness toward the younger self who had to carry so much in private.
Psychological growth does not require repudiating those adaptations. It may instead involve recognizing that some are no longer necessary, while developing greater freedom to choose which parts of ourselves we share, with whom, and under what circumstances.
Privacy can become a preference rather than an obligation. Sexuality can become a source of pleasure without needing to resolve every uncertainty about self-worth. Intimacy can become something we approach with curiosity rather than something we must control through distance.
And the wish to be loved may gradually become less shameful.
The Possibility of Being Seen
Perhaps what lingers after years of concealment is not simply a fear that others might discover who we are. It is the habit of imagining ourselves through the eyes of someone who might disapprove.
We may continue editing ourselves long after the original audience has disappeared.
The boy who once looked away in the hallway becomes a man who hesitates before expressing affection. The teenager who learned to keep his fantasies private may become an adult who struggles to reveal what he wants from a partner. The young person who carefully studied the expectations of others may grow into someone who remains exceptionally attuned to how he is perceived, sometimes at the expense of recognizing what he actually feels.
These patterns do not describe every gay man, and they need not determine anyone’s future.
But when they occur, they remind us that sexuality develops within a broader emotional life. The meanings attached to desire are shaped by the experiences through which we first encountered it, the relationships in which it became possible and impossible to express it, and the responses we imagined or received from others.
There is no single way to resolve the legacy of concealment. For some, growth may involve becoming more comfortable with public affection. For others, it may mean finding greater freedom in their sexual imagination without automatically judging the forms their desire takes. Still others may need to develop the capacity to express emotional dependency, tolerate intimacy, or recognize that wanting another person does not make them weak.
And for some, the work may involve acknowledging that they are already living in ways that feel deeply authentic, even when their choices do not correspond to conventional expectations about relationships or sexuality.
What matters is the possibility of greater psychological freedom.
Not freedom from vulnerability, since intimacy will always involve some risk, but freedom from the automatic assumption that vulnerability must be concealed.
The closet once provided a place to hide what felt dangerous to reveal. For some, it was an essential refuge. But a refuge can become confining when we no longer recognize that its walls remain around us.
Perhaps one of the quieter achievements of psychological growth is realizing that we can open a door without knowing exactly how another person will respond.
We may still choose to close it. We may still protect certain parts of our private lives. We may still approach intimacy cautiously, particularly when our histories give us good reason to do so.
But the choice begins to feel more like our own.
There is a difference between having something private and believing that something about us must remain hidden.
For men who learned early that desire could threaten belonging, discovering that difference may be one of the more profound experiences of emotional freedom.
Perhaps the deepest wish was never simply to come out of the closet.
Perhaps it was to find someone with whom we no longer felt the need to hide.
References
Allen, D. J., & Oleson, T. (1999). Shame and internalized homophobia in gay men. Journal of Homosexuality, 37(3), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v37n03_03
Brown, J., & Trevethan, R. (2010). Shame, internalized homophobia, identity formation, attachment style, and the connection to relationship status in gay men. American Journal of Men’s Health, 4(3), 267–276. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988309342002
Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674
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Pachankis, J. E., Mahon, C. P., Jackson, S. D., Fetzner, B. K., & Bränström, R. (2020). Sexual orientation concealment and mental health: A conceptual and meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 146(10), 831–871. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000271
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. University of California Press.
Stolorow, R. D. (2002). From drive to affectivity: Contextualizing psychological life. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 22(5), 678–685. https://doi.org/10.1080/07351692209349012
Tomkins, S. S. (1963). Affect imagery consciousness: Vol. 2. The negative affects. Springer.