Somehow, the life we are living isn't leading us to a better, more fulfilled psychological and emotional place. While I could relate to many of the author's points on gay shame and how it affects us, I struggled with the position from which the author was writing.

While I started reading this book believing it was telling me exactly what I needed to hear, the effect quickly wore off as the book progressed to be obviously addressed to a slightly different audience. As a 76-year-old straight woman, for the first time I feel I have a better understanding of the gay life. It is becoming a touchstone in gay culture just as Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin was in the 30s, Larry Kramer’s Faggots in the 70s and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story in the 80s. 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. Despite a surprising number of typos and a fair amount of repetition, The Velvet Rage appears to be a helpful guide for gay men looking to acquire self-confidence and healthy relationships, and it effectively raises awareness and understanding in straight readers.I won't go into the positives here, since I'm sure other reviews have praised them better than I ever will. It is a controversial theory, but for a book whose only marketing campaign has been word of mouth, it is having a profound impact. I see where he is going and I can see from the reviews how helpful it has been to some people but I speed-read the last half because there is simply too much of a generational and cultural gap for me to persist, and that's just a difference of worlds I guess.

I’m a tough butch guy, a geeza I suppose, and with the guys I was hanging around with, watching football, I couldn’t accept that I could be with a fella. I knew that was where London’s gay bars were and, as I’d had a few drinks, I went for a walk to try and find one of them. That’s about the extent of the positive things that I have to say, though, and I don’t think it salvages this book. I felt disenfranchised by the assumption that I must like to party, that I live a promiscuous lifestyle, that I’m obsessive about my body and my appearance. Don't we all face a moment in which we have to look for things and activities that are inexplicably, powerfully meaningful for us, not because everyone else in our community feels that way, but because of who we are?

It is in this experience of differentness, being the one who doesn't fit in, that shame takes root in our lives.

I 'saw' a couple people I know, but the promiscuity of the men in this book is not the crowd I hang around. Therapist David Smallwood, who is the former head of addiction treatment at the Priory, and a blunt-speaking recovering alcoholic, goes one step further. The learning and practice of passion, love, and integrity is what creates meaningful contentment in our lives. The author states that he draws his sweeping conclusions about The Gay Experience from his clients — all of whom happen to live in Beverly Hills, California, and can afford regular therapy sessions with an elite counselor. 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.The next phase of gay history, I believe, is for us to come to terms with creating a culture that is livable and comfortable. 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?

And that is only marginally less true of gay men, a group that has lots in common but, by virtue of our diaspora, so very much that sets our microunits apart from one another.So I had trouble with this book at times, because it treats gay men as if we fall into one to three archetypes for any given complex problem: things like emotional unavailability, disparities in sex drive, substance abuse, etc. Also, some of the skills that the author presented felt irresponsible, specially because not all gay man are cis, from a white middle class background and live comfortable lives (although the point of the book is not at all the intersection of all these realities). If Downs seems to penetrate to the centre of the modern gay condition with almost preternatural ease, it is because he’s writing from confessional as well as professional perspective. First, I find that I often learn best through stories that help me to develop a mental picture of a complex issue.