The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World

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I consulted some more reviews here on GR, and convinced myself that the book must get better per some good scores I see.

I started to get bullied at secondary school, not because I told anyone, but because I wasn’t into sports and preferred drama and music. At school I did have feelings of shame regarding being gay and my religion, but I’ve realised that God made me the way I am and that it can never be a sin to love someone. I understand that for many aforementioned men this book might be an interesting reading, yet, in the context of today’s world (especially the US), this book is highly irrelevant. You imagine that if the book brings greater awareness of gay mental-health issues, that can only be a good thing. It wasn’t until my early 40s, a few years ago, that I actually thought, you know what, I’m gay and I need to do something about it.Somehow, the life we are living isn't leading us to a better, more fulfilled psychological and emotional place. Not everyone has a voice suited for narrating and I found the narration to be a tad monotone and too soothing (better suited for narrating a meditation exercise than a multi-hour book). We are in no way more pathological or deviant than any other man who has walked this planet, present or past.

To be more inclusive of the lesbian experience would undoubtedly result in a book that does the lesbian experience an injustice. The byproduct of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, rejection, and anger—a toxic cocktail that can lead to drug abuse, promiscuity, alcoholism, depression, and suicide. It came recommended to me by a few friends who found the psychology powerful and the step-wise exploration enlightening. Some didn't survive the AIDS crisis, and countless others didn't survive the angst of knowing they wouldn't die, that HIV was a chronic, manageable illness, and so they dove deep into the darkness of crystal meth, alcohol, and the like, dancing their way into the arms of death.Conspicuous consumption and a culture of exhaustive gay acquisition – that absolute need to have the newest and shiniest and best of everything – is deconstructed.

Glad I read it because I keep seeing it everywhere, and also because there are some general insights that were useful, but mostly I’m disappointed and irritated by this silly framing of the most privileged and visible queer men as the standard by which all queer men can be understood. After being married for several years and spending even more years in therapy, I began to accept myself for the man that I am, not the one that I or my family had wished for.The archetypal Gay Man at the center of the whole book is clearly white, urban, coastal, and affluent. Someone said that someone else who had been involved in the drafting had said, "Don't LGBTQ people want gender and sex to be conflated?