Wired Against Wanting: How Homophobia Gets Inside Gay Desire

A conversation that circulates frequently within the gay male community is that it’s difficult to find love. Central to this is the role that Apps have in structuring the gay dating experience, marked by quick hook-ups, ghosting, and a culture of superficiality at the level of who is desirable and who is not.

Of course, things are not all that different in the straight world. People, regardless of their sexual orientations, complain of how difficult online dating can be. But there is something specific about growing gay that I think deserves attention as context for what makes dating differently difficult. This something has to do with the impact of homophobia in shaping how wanting someone is navigated. The understand it, we have to return to the question of homophobia and specifically, what it is really about.

Homophobia as a Gang Mechanism

Not everyone exposed to homophobic attitudes becomes homophobic. This is a fact worth remembering because it implies that homophobia is not passively absorbed. It is a personal matter. In order for homophobia to exist, it has to be cultivated in the mind. And Psychoanalysis reminds us that when things get cultivated in the mind, they tend to have an emotional function. Homophobia, then, seems to have a role in how someone regulates their emotional world which also explains why some people hold onto it as though their lives depended on it.

The psychoanalyst Herbert Rosenfeld described a particular psychological state that operates like a gang: a part of the personality organised around a brutal logic, which recruits the rest of the Self into conformity through intimidation. The gang promises belonging and protection, but its price is the suppression of anything soft, needy, or vulnerable. Disloyalty to the gang is met with contempt or exile, just like gangs in the external world.

Homophobia towards gay men seems to operate like a gang, only transposed onto the outside world: it has an organised quality to it (laws, religion, culture…etc.) and gets directed towards those who threaten what it means to be ‘masculine’. Gay men become the target because they represent what the gang finds intolerable: same-sex desire and femininity which betray what it means to be ‘masculine’. Men like women and women like men. Men cannot be who they want. This is the logic of the gang. Homophobic violence that gets directed at gay men is how the gang enforces its power.

Apps are gang-led

Of note here is what happens when gay men internalise the gang, taking it up as their own. Nowhere is this more visible than in gay dating culture where Apps are involved (although arguably not limited to Apps).

The rejection that happens on dating apps isn’t random. It organises itself around a remarkably consistent set of criteria: a particular body type, a particular version of masculinity, and a specific kind of coolness and unavailability. This maps quite closely onto what the gang has decided is acceptable (a rejection of femininity, neediness and vulnerability). Men who fall outside these criteria are blocked or ignored, and at worst met with contempt in ways that carry the original hostility woven into homophobia.

Now, of course, people have preferences. But preferences do not trigger the kind of response I’m talking about. When hostility takes over, it’s because love has disappeared. And the psychological mechanism responsible for that is one under discussion – the internal gang.

The man doing the rejecting is, in this moment, identified with the gang. He is the enforcer of rules that were bestowed onto him before he had a chance to choose. And the man being rejected is facing something that is deeply familiar: a replaying of an early experience in which desire is met with revulsion.

This brings us to where it all begins – during the earliest years of life.

An Early Imprint

For many gay men, something happens in the early years which is thought to shape emotional development. This something involves a father, not necessarily consciously so, or cruel, sensing something in his son that disturbs him. A softness or a sensitivity that doesn’t fit the script of what a boy is supposed to be. And the father, for reasons to do with his own undigested anxieties, pulls back.

What gets established in that moment is a kind of imprint: desire gets entangled with rejection. The wish to be loved by a man combined with the experience of that wish being turned away, something Scott Harms Rose (2007) has termed Oedipal rejection. Some may say at this point that not all children have fathers, which is true. It is also worth noting that the emphasis on the father does not imply that the formative relational matrix begins with him. Psychoanalysis reminds us that the earliest organising experiences of love and rejection precede the Oedipal configuration entirely, starting in the first year of life. The father’s withdrawal may be the most legible (and obvious) version of the imprint, but something similar is often already in motion from an earlier time before gender and sexuality acquire their later meanings.

Irrespective of each person’s developmental trajectory, and the family constellation, gay boys seem to internalise these relationship experiences as they internalise all other key relationship experiences. These then shape how future relationships are experienced and navigated. The gay boy who grows up wanting that which cannot be had, carries a specific emotional pattern that shapes the experience of searching for love itself.

Two general psychological positions emerge which I have found particularly common:

1.     An identification with the rejecting figure. This is the man who has become, in some internal sense, the father (or someone else) who distances himself from intimacy. On the apps, he is the one who enforces the gang's logic, who cannot let himself be too keen and tends to ignore anyone who seems too 'needy' or at times, too feminine.

2.     An identification with the rejected child. This is the man who is still, on some level, reaching for what he never got: the love of a man (or someone else) whose interest was somewhat absent or withdrawn. He tends to bring a hunger to relationships that can feel humiliating to him, and shows a particular vulnerability to partners who replicate the familiar dynamic of warmth entangled with distance.

These positions are of course not fixed. Most people will recognise themselves in both at different points, sometimes even within the same relationship. What seems to determine which position gets taken up has to do with the level of anxiety they are dealing with: how much intimacy is being asked for, how in touch with their femininity they are (remember, the gang polices manhood so femininity has to be rejected), and how threatening it all feels.

When desire from another man shuts down desire

There’s another layer to all this worth holding in mind.

Many gay men absorb (whether from fathers or broader culture) that male desire should not be directed towards another man. That basic message doesn’t just disappear in adulthood. It becomes a foundation for the personality. It gets internalised through repeated experiences of feeling like same-gender desire is dangerous. Over time, the boy comes to incorporate the rejecting figure as an internal presence which regulates his self-experience from the inside. The gang’s logic which regulates gender becomes indistinguishable from his own. And because of this, it shapes the experience of being wanted by another man.

At the core, desire get organised around a paradox: the very thing he most wants (to be desired by a man) becomes the thing that feels most threatening, because wanting it means betraying the internal gang he is identified with. It’s like being desperately thirsty but having internalised a voice that says water is poison. The moment someone offers you a drink, your body recoils before your lips can reach it.

The result in the real world? A man shows genuine interest but the recipient struggles to receive it. Not because it is unwanted, but because the internal gang associates male desire with something to be rejected. The experience of being wanted by another man has not been practised. Intimacy between men is often fraught since the get-go, so when one’s sexual orientation is of the homo variety, then the situation becomes that much more complex.

This is also why eagerness is so often punished in gay dating culture. Through a round of unconscious associations, eagerness is construed as neediness, which is associated with weakness. Through a misogynist logic, weakness is then tied into femininity which the internal gang repudiates. The man who shows genuine (emotional) interest is at risk of being labelled too much (and potentially too feminine) which becomes off-putting. This doesn’t happen because the eager one has done anything wrong. On the contrary, it happens because being the eager one triggers something that the other person has not yet been able to tolerate: explicitly wanting another man which means standing up to the internal gang.

The effect on adult relationships is substantial. You end up with a set of people who actively screen out anyone perceived as feminine, therefore keeping the homophobic logic alive. This is where the tragedy truly lies, and is also a good showcase of how trauma gets replayed within socially traumatised communities. What intimacy requires (need, vulnerability and receptivity) is precisely what the gang has made threatening, keeping the community in a state of hypervigilance.

Love, under these conditions, is not only difficult. It is structurally undermined. Love becomes more possible when the internal homophobic figure in the form of an internal gang regulating one’s sense of masculinity is dis-identified with. This requires seeing it as separate from the self, a download of sorts which has shaped the internal world in ways that have not yet been understood. That being said, there are also important limitations to what can be shifted internally that need to be grappled with. For some, these are permanent facets of the personality, even among those who have ‘done the work’. A good outcome in these circumstances is awareness of what gets triggered and enough motivation to choose differently, to that one’s relationship goals can be achieved.

A word of caution

This line of thinking is not a claim that all gay men had rejecting fathers, nor that these patterns are universal. The focus on gay men here has also meant that other sexualities has been set aside. This was primarily done because each community faces its own challenges, and I did not want to conflate experiences. That being said, the gang’s logic is arguably relevant to bisexual men as well, and may be relevant to other sexualities too. Closer consideration for how these dynamics shift depending on people’s sexual and gender identifications is something I will consider at a later stage.