There's an interesting piece in The Observer today by Paul Flynn and Matthew Todd.
A sub at The Observer has done it a disservice by giving it the cliched and inappropriate headline; '
Pride and Prejudice For Gay Men'.
It's about a book by Alan Down called
The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World.
Apparently, this book; "...is becoming a touchstone in gay culture just as Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin was in the 30s, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story in the 60s [Eh? It was published in 1982 - Fagburn] and Larry Kramer's Faggots in the 70s. But The Velvet Rage is not fiction..."
Fagburn thinks that over-hype is a fiction, but go on...
"It addresses the myth of gay pride and, after three decades of post-Aids concentration on gay men's physical health, turns inward to their mental wellbeing."
Which is hardly novel.
"Its snappy title is slipping, sometimes ironically, into the gay lexicon. Man orders fifth pint at the bar: "It's OK, it's just my velvet rage." Boyfriend finds partner trawling through the thousands of profiles on sex-on-demand website Gaydar: "But it's my velvet rage."
Umm, no, now you're just making stuff up.
"Downs coined the phrase to refer to a very specific anger he encountered in his gay patients – whether it was manifested in drug abuse, promiscuity or alcoholism – and whose roots, the book argues, are found in childhood shame and parental rejection. "Velvet rage is the deep and abiding anger that results from growing up in an environment when I learn that who I am as a gay person is unacceptable, perhaps even unlovable," he explains. "This anger pushes me at times to overcompensate and try to earn love and acceptance by being more, better, beautiful, more sexy – in short, to become something I believe will make me more acceptable and loved."
Hmmm...
Fagburn often wishes he was better, more beautiful, more sexy, acceptable and loved - who doesn't?
And I agree I do have a very specific anger that I like to blame on my childhood, and Daddy not loving me and all that.
And I know i'm unlovable.
So what's new?
40 years on, Fagburn thinks these lines from The Boys In The Band still ring painfully true;
"Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse."
"If only we could just not hate ourselves quite so very much…”
I really don't think we've moved on that much, so I agree with the book's general premise; their point, I guess, is that this has endured.
But again, none of this is new; show me a gay magazine from the last 20 or 40 years that doesn't have an article about gay misery, our
unjoy.
It's a lie and a stupid cliche to pretend that the gay press - for all its faults - is "happy-clappy".
Trusting Paul Flynn and Matthew Todd's judgment - I admire them both - I have ordered the book from Amazon.
As it is a self-help book, it will probably end up in a pile with all the other self-help books, near all the ones promising that I can; 'Learn Spanish The Easy Way'.
I still can't count up to five.
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