Matthew Todd - Straight Jacket

Written by Matthew Todd, editor of Attitude, the UKs best-selling gay magazine, Straight Jacket is a revolutionary clarion call for gay men, the wider LGBT community, their friends and family. Part memoir, part groundbreaking polemic, it looks beneath the shiny facade of contemporary gay culture and asks if gay people are as happy as they could be and if not, why not?

In an attempt to find the answers to this and many other difficult questions, Matthew Todd explores why statistics show a disproportionate number of gay people suffer from mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, addiction and suicidal thoughts and behaviour, and why significant numbers experience difficulty in sustaining meaningful relationships. Bracingly honest, and drawing on his own experience, Matthew breaks the silence surrounding a number of painful issues, explaining:

• how growing up in the closet can overwhelm the gay child with a deep sense of shame that can leave young people with a perilously low sense of self-worth and a powerfully negative body image
• how many gay men overcompensate for childhood shame by pursuing unobtainable perfection, aspiring to have perfect bodies, boyfriends and lives
• how gay culture, so often centred around alcohol, drugs, quick sex and even quicker wit, exacerbates the problem, and what we can all do to make things better

Meticulously researched, courageous and life-affirming, Straight Jacket offers invaluable practical advice on how to overcome a range of difficult issues. It also recognizes that this is a watershed moment, a piercing call-to-arms for the gay and wider community to acknowledge the importance of supporting all young people and to help older people transform their experience and finally get the lives they really want.

Contents

Dedicated to the memory of Mark Houghton, and all those lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning or intersex young people whose lives ended too soon, and to their families, with the hope of change

A place where there isnt any trouble Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. Its not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. Its far, far away, behind the moon, beyond the rain

Dorothy Gale,
The Wizard of Oz, 1939

Expect sarcasm

Grindr profile, 2015

If youre about to start reading this book, I feel very delighted for you, because you are in for a treat. Its a book that should have been written a long time ago, but it wasnt, so here we are at last and its a great place to be.

Matthew Todd has contributed a great deal to the LGBT community as an obscenely talented man playwright, comedian, writer, magazine editor (Attitude, of course) and gay rights activist. I think Straight Jacket is his crowning achievement thus far. Although its unfortunate that Matthew had to have the experiences that made it possible for him to write it, Im extremely grateful for the hard-won insights contained in this book and I hope lots of people will read it. I know it will help other people avoid the mistakes many of us have made. For me personally, its just nice to feel so very understood and its a relief to hear these words from another gay man.

I feel I should say a few words about my own experience. It took me, has taken me, is taking me a very long time to feel comfortable in my skin. I grew up in a small Midwestern town where it was communicated to me at church and school that being gay could only ever possibly lead to Hell and would permanently shut me off from God and the world in general, and that a creature such as I could not expect to have any sort of future. I believed what I was told because at the time I had no reason not to. Why would those I trusted and loved and looked to for protection, and who proclaimed to love me and want only the best for me, tell me things which were not true? I was told and led to believe that any sort of homosexual relationship I ever entered into could not possibly work because such relationships were inferior, sick, perverted and just plain wrong.

Sometimes I hear, and not just from straight people, For crying out loud, shut up, get over it, it cant have been that bad, pull yourself together, quit feeling sorry for yourself, quit living in the past, youre an adult... That I am now an adult and therefore responsible for myself and for figuring out how to navigate this world is certainly true. I also know that self-pity has never done anyone any good, and that I must learn to let the past go and live in the moment. However, this deeply ingrained and total rejection of the self has countless negative and long-lasting consequences: in my case, drug, alcohol and sex addiction which ultimately lead to HIV infection. I had already given up the booze and drugs when I became infected through continuing to indulge in destructive behaviour I somehow still believed was normal. The process of overcoming these consequences (minus the HIV, of course) has taken place over the course of many years and I rather doubt it will ever be complete. Who knows?

I think it is quite clear that, as we have entered into an age of ever-increasing tolerance and acceptance towards the LGBT community, the trauma many of us have experienced continues to cause us to project the past on to the present. We have internalized the negative messages we received to such an extent that many of us continue to be unable to accept ourselves (and therefore each other), even though most of the people with whom we come into contact on a daily basis couldnt care less who were sleeping with and dont pose us any threat. Many of us have suffered from years of post-traumatic stress disorder, every type of addiction known to man, obsession with beauty and success, crippling anxiety disorders, eating disorders, depression and isolation. Perhaps we think that if we admit to these things they would certainly be used against us by those who seek to deny us equality as proof that homosexuality cannot work (never mind that all these phenomena are present in every part of every society, regardless of sexual orientation). Maybe we think that, if we are to be accepted, we must be morally beyond reproach, or at least perfect in some sort of way. We cant be gay and average or, God forbid, below average. We should be rich and/or beautiful with a perfect body, excel in everything we do, be lousy with talent, have exquisite taste in everything and also impeccable style; we must be either comfortingly masculine or camp in a way that isnt threatening, or is at least amusing; we must make an effort to fit in. I think many of us have become overachievers who are tortured by crippling perfectionism because we think this is what we must do in order to survive.

Of course there are those in the LGBT community who perhaps dont know what the hell Im talking about, and that is certainly fantastic. But unfortunately there are many gay men and women who know exactly what Im talking about. Straight Jacket is a book about the trauma many have experienced growing up gay, the many ways in which it manifests in daily life and how to begin the process of overcoming it. I think everyone, no matter what their background, could, can, will benefit from reading this book. After all, its a book about understanding ourselves and each other more. There is no us and them, either inside or outside the LGBT community. This is a lie we can no longer afford to believe if we hope to conquer the past and live happier, more fulfilled lives.