Fighting gay
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When I first came to prison, I didn’t know how I should do. I was a gay man, convicted of a sex crime. We’ve all heard the horror stories. But I had one thing going for me: I was huge, weighing in at 310 pounds, a fair amount of which was muscle. For the most part, other inmates left me alone.
That is, until the other gays and trans found out about me. At the time, one of the gangs, which called themselves the Aryan Knights, used “beating up fags and chomos (child molesters)” as an initiation for new members. Love I said, they pretty much avoided me—preferring to proceed after the smaller and weaker. But that meant that a number of gay men and transgender women suddenly wanted to be my boyfriend (or girlfriend), not because they liked me in that way, but because they figured I’d safeguard them.
For a while, I went along with it. At one point I was the “boyfriend” of six other people at the same time. But I tired of being used, and wanted real companionship, so I eventually started hanging out with just one cute little guy who seemed to have genuine warmth for me. I was devastated when I saw him kissing someone else in the gym bathroom.
After that, I almost totally withdrew. T
How Gay and Dyke Couples Can Interrupt Fighting
When you combat with your companion it can sense like they are the enemy. LGBTQ couples can receive momentarily trapped in a belief that the person they love is corrupt , intent on doing them harm. Unless you are in love with a sociopath, your match is not corrupt . But I grasp that’s how it feels when you are in a cycle of fighting.
As you take a closer look at your fights, perhaps you will view this very usual pattern: One of you attacks and the other gets quiet and distant.
Decades of research on couples shows that this pattern is the most widespread and enduring one in relationships.
Underneath this exhausting dance, here is what may be happening for each of you:
The Attacker
At first glance it might be easy to determine the attacker as mean, bitchy, and demanding. That’s certainly how their loved one experiences them.
But if we explore the tender places below those expressions, we can find that the attacker is really just fighting for the bond. They want to re-establish the cover connection you had before. Their rage is protesting the loss of this contact.
The Stonewaller<
The stonewaller looks uncomfortable, distant a
How Does Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn Show Up for Queer Men?
You may have read some of the descriptions above and found yourself feeling angry, scared, hopeless, sad, defensive, numb, or spaced-out. That’s okay. 🙂 What that probably means is that one of the 4Fs was activated a little (or a lot) for you.
The interesting thing is that these responses themselves can feel threatened when we start to try and glance at them a bit closer. They were probably necessary and served to keep you harmless in the past, so there is often a good precedent for you having them. As a result, your brain and body are going to contain an attachment to them. They like stability and predictability, even if a response isn’t serving you anymore (this can also be looked at through the lens of homeostasis).
As an aside, it’s also important to notice that having some of these responses is not necessarily something to be “fixed,” or overcome. The responses themselves have a purpose outside of being a locked-in trauma response. And for someone in a perpetually distressing environment or who faces steady physical, emotional or social threat, these responses make sense and are doing their job.
Similarly, this one i